I guess I really suck at this whole “posting more often” thing. I haven’t had much to say lately. Well, until this week. But I don’t feel like talking about any of that here, anyway. So, all you get is this lame post letting you know that I’m still here.
Oh, I did throw a 279 on Monday. So there’s that. Enjoy.
I’ve been trying to post more often lately. Really. I’m not going to commit to anything crazy, like a post every day (like both of my brothers are trying to do), but I just want to get something up here more regularly than I have been.
Tuesday night, I finally had a good night of bowling again. I’ve been struggling a bit lately, and my average has dropped a few pins in all my leagues. One of them ended last week, and the other two have a couple of weeks left. Then the summer leagues start. Anyway, Tuesday I shot 194-215-258 for a 667 series. Not bad. In the 258, I put together eight strikes in a row from the second frame through the 9th frame.
Yesterday, I got a color calibrator for my monitor(s) at home. I chose this one despite mixed reviews at Amazon (and elsewhere), because the positive reviewers were all very happy with it. I ran through the setup, and it seems to have worked nicely. The color on my monitor looks much nicer, and at the very least it at least did something. The real test will be when I try to print at Costco, soft-proofing with their custom printer profile. The whole idea behind it is to be able to see on the screen exactly what the print will look like.
After calibrating, I was going back through some old images, and some of them looked quite a bit better. Here’s one I found from a year ago that I apparently didn’t think much of the first time through, but I like it now:
Tomorrow night, I fly out to Phoenix to visit my brother and his wife. I’m going to get to two Mets@Dbacks games while I’m there. Hopefully, they’ll play better than they did in their 13-1 loss to the Pirates last night.
The hardest part of posting more often is coming up with good post titles. It tends to get very repetitive.
I went to the Santa Barbara Fair & Expo tonight to do some photography. It was fun, and I got a few good shots.
You can see a few more in the flickr set: http://flickr.com/photos/penner42/sets/72157604773705543/.
A few years ago, I took a photography trip to Europe (you can see pictures from that trip in the flickr set). One of the images from the trip that I really liked was this one, from Venice:
Today, I was in Aaron Brothers looking for a frame for some of my photos from my recent trip, when I saw a picture of Venice that looked awfully familiar. I pulled out my iTouch, to look at the above picture on it and compare. Sure enough, they were the same canal. When I got home, I looked through my other pictures from there, and found one that’s a little closer to the same perspective, though still different. I also overexposed it in Lightroom so the building in the background can be seen better. Here’s the picture in the frame (taken by my BlackBerry Pearl) side by side with the other shot I got in Venice:
You can click though the image and view bigger sizes at flickr.
Obviously, mine was taken at night, while the picture in the frame wasn’t. The part I find really amazing about this is where the picture was taken. It wasn’t in a very high traffic, famous part of the city. I found it wandering around different streets and canals, just looking for places to get good pictures. It’s probably not in one of the most remote parts of the city, but it’s not one of the ridiculously popular ones, either. It really is just a random canal in Venice, that I took some photographs in. And that also ended up being in a stock photo in a framing store. I wish I had my GPS and geotagging setup back then, because I probably couldn’t find this place again if I go back.
Here’s a link to the same canal from the other side. It was taken on the the bridge in the pictures above, facing back to where those pictures were taken from.
I took a much needed vacation last week. My father drove in from New York, and we spent a week on the road doing photography. We went to Death Valley, Valley of Fire, Antelope Canyons (near Page, AZ), and Monument Valley. Then we spent the weekend in Tucson with family for Passover. The whole trip was nice and relaxing, and I got a few good pictures out of it.
The whole set from the trip can be found here. I’ll post a few of the highlights below.
Artist’s Palette, Death Valley
Hikers at Zabriskie Point (they’re in the bottom left corner)
Valley of Fire
Upper Antelope Canyon
Lower Antelope Canyon
Monument Valley
You can check out all the pictures in the Flickr set.
The Mets got themselves back up to .500 (4-4) last night, though there’s some question as to whether or not Reyes actually scored. Either way, the run counts.
Here’s an interesting post on why there are more 20-game winners than there are 19-game winners. Surprising, and probably mostly just random luck. Still interesting.
Well, interesting unless you’re Joe Armstrong, I suppose. No need to click through that link. Just read the annotated version over at Fire Joe Morgan. Ken Tremendous is a genius.
There’s another interesting post up at Baseball Toaster about the Tigers’ awful start to the season. They’re certainly a better team than the start of the season shows, but they have some work ahead of them to catch up and make the playoffs. Still, if the Mets can blow a 7 game lead in September, the Tigers can come back from a 7 game deficit in April. Anyway, the post is here, about teams that have made the playoffs in seasons they’ve had 7-game losing streaks. None of them were to start the season, but when it happens really doesn’t matter too much.
Sports Authority has a 25% off any single item coupon. It’s not good on a lot of name brands, but it does work for authentic MLB jerseys. My Santana jersey is finally on the way.
Another great post at FJM, by Junior. I guess I shouldn’t link every single post there. If you’re a baseball fan VORPie, you should just subscribe to the feed yourself.
Why aren’t there afternoon games every day, dammit? I need at least one game to follow while I’m sitting here at work…
I haven’t had any sort of real post here for quite a while, though I’m sure no one really noticed.
Most of my time lately has been spent watching Stargate SG-1. I bought the DVDs for all but the last season a year and a half ago, and finally started watching them a week and a half ago. I should be done by the end of the week. That’s a whole lot of TV, but it’s a good show. The weekend before I started, the Stargate movie was on Universal HD, and watching it pushed me into wanting to watch the whole series.
I actually managed to get some poker in this weekend, too, at a pretty good home game Saturday night. It’s the second time I’ve been there. I didn’t cash the first time, but this time I won. It was a two table tournament, ten handed. $20 buyin, $200 for first place. It’s very well run, and has a good structure with 25 minute levels. I didn’t win my first hand until the middle of the third level, over an hour in. I didn’t get a single pocket pair until we were already in the money, with four players left. It was pocket kings. I got kings again, and then aces to knock out the third place finisher, within the next 20 minutes. I finally won when all the money went in on a 653 flop, and I had J5. My opponent had Q8, and turned an 8. The river was a J. The really big hand for me was quite a bit earlier, when I won a four-way all-in (with a good amount of other dead money in the pot, too) with AJ. I was against QJ, K8, and A6. I flopped trip jacks, and no queen came out to bust me. That hand finally put me in decent position after I had been limping along all night. It was a fun tournament, and I expect I’ll continue to play in it. Perhaps even venturing into the realm of online poker at ประสบการณ์บริการที่ดีที่สุดของ ยูฟ่าเบท for added practice and thrills.
Yesterday was an attempt at a fantasy baseball draft, and it didn’t go well. There were a bunch of issues with the draft, specifically the keepers. After the first round, almost half of which were supposed to be keepers, took almost an hour and a half, I just gave up and left. I wasn’t in the greatest mood when it started, and it was way too frustrating to figure out my picks given the problems we were having, so it was better for my sanity to just leave. I won the league last year, but don’t expect to do much of anything this year. I don’t know that I’ll even pay attention to it at all. In my other fantasy league, which drafts Wednesday, I pretty much have no shot because the keeper rules are weighted to give the better teams a huge advantage. Given my team, I don’t see any way I can have a player worthy of a first round pick, possibly ever again. Any time I spent preparing for the drafts seems like such a waste. I may just let that other league auto-draft as well, instead of trying to draft from the bowling alley. I don’t really care about it anymore, and really should have left that league this year.
I’m not really into the whole model kit building thing, but this looks kinda awesome. I doubt I’ll get it, though.
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