• SEA @ BUF
• TB @ NO
• NYJ @ MIA
• HOU @ PIT
• JAC @ TEN
• DET @ ATL
• KC @ NE
• CIN @ BAL
• STL @ PHI
• ARI @ SF
• CAR @ SD
• DAL @ CLE
• CHI @ IND
• MIN @ GB
• DEN @ OAK

Random pictures from this summer.

• PBL
• Rock the Bells
• Bowling
• Some good ass cheese
• DDR

I was putting this off until I had time to write something long, but it seemed like I’d probably never get around to it, so I’m going to write something short. I texted myself an e-mail to remember all the things we did. Here’s what that sort of looked like (I added names of days).

Thursday: Moondoggies, Pacific Beach Bar & Grill, Adalberto’s; 7-11, Friday: Six Flags, El Pollo Loco, Dave and Buster’s, Carl’s Jr.; Saturday: Coronado Beach, Phil’s BBQ, mini-mart, Stingaree, pizza place; Sunday: Curry House, In-N-Out, Cortez Gourmet Mart, Dan’s steps, House of Blues, 7-11, Santana’s; Monday: Rio de Gallo, Yogurtland, San Diego International.

Thursday

Curt scooped me up and we went straight to Moondoggies in Pacific Beach. Beasted on calamari then we decided to go to PB Bar & Grill next door. Which is sort of a weird place, because the restaurant/bar area is connected to a small club that reminds me of a warehouse theme. Reminded me of the Foot Clan’s hideout. Adalberto’s is a Mexican joint open late. It hits the spot.

Friday

Six flags. For my opinions of the ride, check out my post from a couple months ago. I can’t believe it’s been that long. Every time I told someone I was going to Six Flags, they’d say “again?”, but I was the only one of the group that was going again.

Same rides, same all-day sweat, same bad performance at the 3-point shootout, but it was a fun, fun time. We bought Flash Passes to skip the lines. You can only use it four times, which would suck except we only had to use it once. No lines. Except for X2, and surprise, you can’t use the pass there. Dumb.

We pitched in for a souvenir cup to share, because you get free refills throughout the park. Looking back, it sounds a little ghetto to pitch in, but it was a good idea. And we made it count. We were sucking down Diet Coke like our lives depended on it. And mine did once.

See, Wally bought this turkey leg the last time I was at Six Flags. And he let me have a bite. And ever since I found out I was going to Six Flags again, I’d been thinking of the turkey leg I was going to get. So this is at least a month thinking about this stupid thing. So I buy it, and about seven bites into it, it finally tries to kill me.

A piece of tendon went straight into my windpipe. Here’s the thing about choking. You dismiss any thoughts of staying civilized or looking cool. I did probably what 90% of people choking do: not talking, I looked to my left then looked to my right. And I went in. I tried to pull the piece out, but it slides away and it just goes down my throat. That’s when you panic for a little bit and try to breathe a little, hoping it went down the right pipe. And it did.

I guess three paragraphs ago I sort of made it sound like the Diet Coke saved my life, and it actually had nothing to do with helping me get the food out of my throat. Please accept my apology, I’m sorry for lying. After the ordeal, I drank my Diet Coke and finished my turkey leg.

Oh yeah, that night Curt tried to ollie the median with his car to impress a cop. The cop was more impressed that none of us were drunk, so he just said be careful.

Saturday

We went to the beach at Coronado. It was hot. We rode the waves for about an hour, which amounts to us standing chest deep in the water, waiting for a few minutes until a big one is about to break, me saying something like “Look at the time fellas, I gotta catch a wave”, all of us turning around and trying to swim with the wave but mostly just being pulled under and being twisted like you’re inside a washing machine. Then you stand up, make sure you didn’t hurt yourself, look around to see who made it the farthest, laugh, turn around, and you do it again. It’s a good time.

We ate at Phil’s BBQ, which I only have good things to say about. Three weeks ago I had their beef ribs. This time I had their pork ribs. I wrote this down somewhere, it might’ve been on Twitter or something, but some reviewers say its average compared to BBQ from one of the power BBQ regions. But the whole point is that it’s not there, it’s in San Diego. And it’s fantastic.

Stingaree was cool.

Sunday and Monday

Tired, tired, tired. Sunday morning I thought my jaw was injured from the beach adventure. Then I thought it was my orbital bone. Then I thought it was some kind of ocular migraine. Finally, a few hours into the day, Paul said hey hunch over and look at the ground, do you feel it? Ok it’s your sinuses. Curry House serves meat, rice, and curry sauce. It’s good stuff. Me, Dan, and Paul basically swallowed our meals whole. Then me, Curt, and Wally went to Target to get some sinus medication. That’s where we saw this nasal pot. If it doesn’t make you smile at least, well, you’re more mature than I am.

Percy told us House of Blues has the nickname House of Brown. He ain’t never lie. And one room smelled like they had a fish fry competition that day, straight up. Still doesn’t make sense to me. If you have a girlfriend, you should bring her there then mean mug everyone. You’ll fit right in! At one point, the MC on stage called for all the fly females to come forward and he pulled them on stage. So it was just mad dudes and alleged uggos on the dance floor for half an hour. Good times.

Monday we ate at Rio de Gallo. One of my top five favorite places on earth. Check the ‘Sunday’ heading in this post for my previous thoughts about the place. What puts you in a conflict is that they bring the meat rods around, but they also have a buffet-style area. And the food there is pretty good also. But I usually do a good job of sticking to the meat.

We got dessert at Yogurtland. I’ve been to yogurt places, but this was more a yogurt-bar style. I described it to someone as one of those soft serve stations at a buffet, except it’s flavored yogurt instead of ice cream. And there’s more than two choices. And the toppings are like you’re standing on the other side of the counter at Cold Stone. You pay by weight, and it’s real cheap. Hopefully they have one of these in Seattle. Then we tried to figure out how to fill a Zippo. Like it was a cryptex or something.

And we napped and I flew back. I hate flying back.

Pictures

This is the only one that wasn’t blurry, so I’ll just post it here. (Not that I was shooting the entire weekend, I only brought it out once.) Stupid manual focus. After owning it for a couple years, it’s probably my fault for not knowing how to use it.

Red band trailer for Zack and Miri make a Porno. Seth Rogen’s playing himself. Appearances by actors from Kevin Smith’s universe. And Craig Robinson looks like he has a big part. (His scene as the doorman in Knocked Up never gets old to me.) Count me in.

Born to use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic.

Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai have brought together the brightest minds to reflect upon and engage one of the most incisive sets of songs ever laid down on wax.

I’m trying to read more, so I’m definitely looking forward to this. (Via Nah Right.)

Me, the bad luck charm. I live in Seattle, and the basketball team gets stolen. I move to the bay area for a while, and their mascot gets stolen.

On a related note, the OKC logo looks awful. And I don’t think that’s me being biased (while I cared about how the team was doing, my friends were far and away much better Sonics fans than I’ve ever been). Just take a look at the other NBA logos.

And it’s not just because it’s something new you have to get used to, the Bobcats and redone Hawks logo looked fine from the start. The Thunder logo fits in better with the NBDL logos. The main problem is that it doesn’t make you think of Thunder or Oklahoma at all, and it doesn’t have the excuse of being steeped in tradition like the Lakers or Knicks logos. I understand the omission of lightning shapes to differentiate yourselves from the Warriors, but then they really should’ve just picked a better name.

Killer Crossover Basketball Drill. Gets good at 1:15. Gets really good at 2:00.

Google Chrome. Google’s browser. First impressions:

• It loads pages really fast. Facebook is a good site to check out to see the speed for yourself. Wired has a really interesting article about the development of Chrome. The speed difference will be most noticeable on sites that use JavaScript heavily, due to an engine written in-house:

  They were also pretty good at writing a JavaScript engine. “We just did some benchmark runs today,” Bak says a couple of weeks before the launch. Indeed, V8 processes JavaScript 10 times faster than Firefox or Safari. And how does it compare in those same benchmarks to the market-share leader, Microsoft’s IE 7? Fifty-six times faster. “We sort of underestimated what we could do,” Bak says.

• No bookmark manager. Not a huge deal because I barely use my bookmarks. But I chose to import all my Firefox bookmarks and it reminded me how disorganized they were. So I want to delete them all but there doesn’t seem to be a good way to do this without re-installing.
• It’s really nice to be able to drag tabs out to become their own window instead of copying the address, opening a new window, and pasting the address in.
• There’s an option to create an application shortcut out of a website. The most obvious example is to use it on Gmail, giving you a shortcut to open Gmail alone to act as its own application—stripping the window of navigation bars and opening external links in a Chrome window. Right now, I see no reason to use it over keeping a separate browser window open loaded with, say, Gmail.
• I’ve always hated when applications ditch the typical Windows UI for custom buttons in title bars (see: iTunes and Safari), but not this time. Google replaced the space that’s normally filled with the application title and stuck its tabs there. If you’re reading this in Firefox, hit F11 and that’s a decent representation of the Chrome UI.

I’m going to summarize what’s been going on with me, like I used to do before I started to just post links 90% of the time.

Google Reader

What’s been happening is I’ve been using Google Reader to try and have the news come to me. So I try to read headlines and star the ones that seem interesting, hopefully to share them here with a few of my own thoughts. Seemed like a good idea. But I ran into the same problem that I ran into the last time I used an RSS reader. It’s crack.

I’ll star articles, and at the end of the day I’ll come back to write about them, but then it says I have new unread articles. And I’ll star them and come back to write about them, but then it says I have new unread articles. And I’m mild-OCD about reading everything. It was sophomore year in college when I last used a feed reader, and I went cold turkey because it made studying less appealing than it already was. If you check your e-mail all the time, it’s basically the same feeling except if the e-mails were longer, came in more frequently, and were actually interesting. You’d never stop reading your e-mail, and I can’t stop reading these feeds.

You could say I’m hungry, and they can’t “feed” me enough. HAAH

The countdown begins

My last day of work in San Jose is September 19. I know I barely talk about work here. And that probably won’t change. But the one-month-left countdown began this week. So I’ll be searching for a giant cardboard box to ship as much home as I can. I’ll also be trying to sell my desk and mattress.

IBM Watson Softball League B Division Championship

I’ve been playing in the company league for the past couple months. There’s the A division and the B division. The B division only has three teams, Blue (us), White, Red. White won every regular season game. By at least four runs each time. Red lost every regular season game. By at least four runs each time. Making our regular season was a split. (Not counting every third week when a B team plays an A team and takes the Greyhound for a ride through Beatdown Mountain.)

Last week we played Red for a chance to advance to the final. It was a close one, but we edged them out. So we made it to the best-of-three finals against White. And game 1 was right then, no rest for us. Oh that’s right, it’s softball, we burnt about 75 calories. But it was one of those muggy eighty-degree afternoons. Uncomfortable.

Game 1 was as bad as we expected. They were up 10-2 at one point, but then we decided no, we ain’t going down like that. And we rallied to 10-8 with two innings left, but it got too dark (read: the umps got too hungry for dinner). So the rally was put on hold for a week. Yesterday we were looking at the possibility of 16 total innings (2 to finish the first, then a couple of 7 inning games if the series went the distance). I’m not gonna lie, that didn’t excite me.

Somehow we managed to keep the momentum going and beat them by three. We ran to the dugout, then realized we were starting on defense for game 2 and ran back out. Deja vu. We got up 8-2, but they came back so it was 8-6 with three innings to go. Top of the 5th, three up, three down. Bottom of the 5th, we can’t score. Top of the 6th, they get two runners on base. Then Hollywood steps to the plate.

Let me tell you about Hollywood. He doesn’t belong in the IBM Watson Softball League B Division. Actually, here’s a picture I found of him. My theory is that the first week he got the wrong directions to his triple A game and didn’t realize it was the wrong field so he just kept coming back every week. He wears a baseball uniform and shades that he never takes off. Before, during, or after games. I think he sleeps in this uniform similar to The Little Giants before they play their big game. After our first game against White, he was the last one in his dugout, standing there waiting for post-game interviewers. And this combination of things is why he’s Hollywood.

And he also had 3 or 4 home runs against us in the span of three games. And there’s no back fence so they’re all infield bombs. But throughout the course of getting slaughtered three times, you learn a few things. So our outfielders basically back it up a few hundred yards and wait for him to bomb it. And he does, but it’s an easy play when you’re that far out. All he has to do is take a little something off it. But a big ego will keep anyone from doing that.

So he bombs it, and we get the out. Bottom of the 6th, we can’t score. Top of the last inning. Hold them off and we win. Grounder, easy play at first. One out. Single, runner on base. Grounder, easy play at second. Two outs. We can taste it. Pop fly. And it tastes so, so good.

I’m not gonna lie, I really didn’t expect to win. It was a giant upset similar to the Giants upset. Except instead of the NFL it’s a three-team company softball league. And I didn’t expect to be all the excited. But all I could do was smile when I saw my teammates tossing their mitts in the air mobbing each other.

They were missing their stocky Asian guy who I swear is Bolo Yeung. He can bomb it, but the best thing is he’s usually their third base coach. And his English is as good as Bolo’s. So if I’m switched out and sitting on defense, I mostly just watch him, especially when they get a hit with someone on base. He’ll do the arm rotation to signal a runner home and then he’ll shout instructions to the other runners which sound something like, “mumblemumble mumblemumblemumble THIRD!” Him not being there was the only sad part of the whole thing.

Fin (almost)

I got a dumb haircut today.