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.

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.

I've got Tivo!

[RSS readers, click through for embedded video]

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

At around 10:00pm Jonathan took the stage. A bunch of us crowded up front, because we frankly have a bit of a man crush on him, and watched him run through his setlist. Right towards the end he announced he had only one left...

"I'd like to invite a couple of my friends up here to help me with my last song."

That is when we jumped on-stage and pulled out our Rock Band equipment piece by piece. Dan Teasdale (one of our senior designers) started picking a three person band with Jonathan and Alex Rigopulos (co-founder of Harmonix and head honcho). When they got to the song list they scrolled through an almost infinite amount of DLC until eventually they stopped on one-

"Still Alive" by GLaDOS

http://www.rockband.com/rockers_blog_entry/hmxsean/216671

In honor of last night's full lunar eclipse, I finally got myself one of these:

Also, I took some pictures of the eclipse last night. Didn't get anything terribly good.

We are bored.

During this year's MLB All Star break, Billy Joel is playing the last concert at Shea Stadium before it gets knocked down after the season. Tickets went on (general public) sale 15 minutes ago. I got some.

Section B8... row ONE! w00t!

(Yes, I just said w00t. With zeros. Deal with it.)

Monday night, I started a game with 9 strikes, then left an 8 count. Finished with a 278.

Tonight, I put together 12 strikes in a row, but it was 8 at the end of one game (260) and 4 to start the next one (236).

Hopefully soon I'll get 12 in a row in the same game. Dammit.