Sean is just some guy who lives in the Twin Cities. Updates to this blog are at random intervals. Other Pages

30 December 2006 - No typo after all, in the Insight Bowl last night, the Golden Gophers made college football history by allowing Texas Tech to come back and win from the biggest bowl deficit ever (31 points). I've copied and pasted a partial transcripts of KFAN.com's Gopher fans' Insight Bowl thread from last night. It's kind of interesting to watch the tone of the thread go from arrogance, to confusion, to horror: 7:10 pm: it's an interesting game already. Maybe we can do some play by play for you. 7:32 pm: wow 13-0 Gophers 7:50 pm: Hey Texas Tech... WELCOME TO THE BIG TEN BITCH! 7:55 pm: Haha i love it, everyone calling the big ten so weak, well what now? 8:04 pm: Looks like the Gophers came out ready to play. 8:39 pm: Wow, 35 - 7 at the half. I thought the Goofs would score, but I thought Texas Tech would score too. Is T. Tech making mistakes on O or is the Goofer D actually playing well? 8:46 pm: Flat out, love Mason or hate him, the Gophers are outplaying and outcoaching Tech to no end. 9:13 pm: Sounds like T. Tech self-destructing on O and their D is terrible. 9:15 pm: Their d is terrible but it's not so much self-destructing on O. The Gopher are actually doing a great job of rushing three down lineman and not allowing Tech's QB to find the open receiver. Solid effort really. 9:29 pm: WE ARE WINNING i WISH I WOULD HAVE GOTTEN DOWN WITH A BOOKIE FOR THIS GAME.....ALTHOUGH THERE IS SOME TIME LEFT. HOW ABOPUT THOSE GOPHERS 9:30 to 10:15 pm: <Long pause of no posts at all> 10:16 pm: Glen and club are attempting to add to the all time list of goofer collapses. Starting to look a lot like Michigan, Wisconsin, etc... 10:20 pm: WTF is going on? I was out running errands and heard they were up 38-7 halfway through the 3rd Q, and now it's a 10 point game w/ TTU knocking on the door! Are Mase and Lockwood struggling to coach with both hands wrapped around their throat or what? 10:22 pm: OMG! 3 point game with 2:39 left. Gophers doing every thing to become the laughing stock of CFV. 10:32 pm: TT has the ball. They recovered the onside kick. Although we laugh at the ineptitude of the goofers program this is beyond belief that this is even close. Wow. I am trying to find the list of the all time mason collapses, it appears we will need to update it. 10:33 pm: Gophers were up by 31 with 7:47 in the 3rd. TT is driving up to midfield. 30 sec. 10:34 pm: I'm kind of pulling for TT. Go for the TD guys. Watching this is hilarious. 10:35 pm: TT ties it with a FG...overtime. 10:36 pm: Biggest choke today: Saddam Hussein or Glen Mason? 10:41 pm: Gophers get the FG...and it's up to the defense...gasp. 10:42 pm: Typical Glen Mason Gopher Football, I knew with that lead going into the half that they would blow it, only a field goal in the entire second half wtf.......Show the metality of Mason and his teams, give half an effort....I can hear the excuses now....they measure for too many first downs, they didn't start the clock fast enough on the third to last play, etc etc etc.......HOW ABOUT DON'T BLOW THE F#$KING LEAD 10:43 pm: Ballgame here. Minnesota can't stop the pass. I'd be fuming if I were a Gopher fan. 100% unacceptable with that lead. Man they had them all but beat. 10:46 pm: TT Wins 44-41. Congrats Mason. 29 December 2006 - Another typo in the Star-Tribune's web site just now? The Star-Tribune is reporting that the Minnesota Golden Gophers just lost the Insight Bowl (a bowl game one step above the PapaJohns.com Bowl but one step below the Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl presented by Bridgestone) to Texas Tech. But this can't possibly be true, because a couple of hours ago when I last checked the web site, it was the third quarter and the Gophers were winning 38-7. Funny typo! Heh. 27 December 2006 - So it's early in the morning, and I'm walking out of my workplace into the parking lot, looking for my Honda CR-V, and I can't find it. At first I'm having trouble remembering exactly where I parked it, and I'm just looking vaguely around not seeing it, and I'm starting to panic. Finally, I remember exactly where I left the car, and I go the spot, and the car isn't there. Instead, on the ground next to where the driver's side would've been, is a bunch of broken glass on the ground! My car's been broken into and stolen! My heart is pounding. What the hell am I going to do?! Then, abruptly, I find myself in my bed. It actually takes me a few seconds to realize that everything's fine, it didn't really happen, I still have my car. Thank God, it was all just a dream. Especially so, because I happened to have the Ark of the Covenant stored in the back, and it would've really sucked to have lost that. 21 December 2006 - Pet peeve alert. Right now, as I type this, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, supposedly a major metropolitan newspaper, has a spelling error in the primary headline at the top of their web site: "Denver airport closed til Friday" I just checked dictionary.com, and I am pretty sure that "til" is not a word. At least, it's not a word unless you mean "sesame plant". The "til" doesn't have an prepending apostrophe, but even if it did ('til), that would be wrong, too. Directly quoting Bill Walsh's Lapsing Into A Comma, a book that I have on the shelf right next to me right now: Till is a perfectly good word meaning "until". (In fact, till existed before until.) 'Til is a bastard child created through confusion—people heard till and assumed it was a contraction of until. Use until in most cases and till when an informal touch is called for; never use 'til. I refuse to watch that new Fox show " 'Til Death" until they fix the title. (That said, I probably won't watch it then, either.) Update: It's a few hours later and the Star-Tribune has since changed their headline to something else...but now USA Today has the same exact error. 12 December 2006 - So I just found out that a guy who sits just a couple of cubes away from me at work (or actually, used to sit...he's moved recently) is the brother of the star of a new mini-series on the Sci-Fi Channel. I didn't care that much at first, becuase I don't really watch the Sci-Fi Channel. Until I found out that he was talking about Peter Krause! Peter Krause was one of the lead characters on one of my all-time favorite shows, "Sports Night". According to the bio on IMDb, he's from Alexandria, Minnesota, so it's logical that his brother could work here. The brother of Casey McCall used to sit right next to me, and I never knew it? Wow! I was pretty excited for awhile. Until I realized that this isn't really going to affect my life at all. It's not as if I'm going to have him give his brother my "Sports Night" DVDs to have them autograph them or anything...that would be a lot of trouble. However, having his brother autograph them wouldn't be much trouble, would it? Genetically, the autograph would be 50% accurate... 5 December 2006 - So the Minnesota Vikings are in a bit of a spot this week, as they have no one to take the QB helm. Former starter Brad Johnson got pulled after losing Sunday's game pretty much singlehandedly, especially since it seemed to be a game that the Bears were desperately trying to throw away themselves. Backup Brooks Bollinger replaced him and played for awhile, but got hurt. Third-string QB Tavaris Jackson played the final offensive series of the game, ending his NFL debut with a turnover fumble. And then in a post-game interview, when asked about the possibility of being the starter next week, Jackson said (and I am not making this up), "I don't think I'm ready to play." I'm looking forward to reading the Vikings injury report this week: "QB Bollinger (shoulder), QB Jackson (scared), QB Johnson (sucks)." My prediction? The triumphant return of Jeff George! 25 November 2006 - So I played singles tennis with my brother Chad yesterday. We've been playing a lot lately. I've been playing tennis for more than a decade, while Chad has only picked up the game within the last couple of years. But Chad's been getting better and better. He's been looking forward to the day that he finally beats me in a set. That day has not yet come. It didn't go all bad for Chad, though. He did the win the game of Don't Get Hit By A Tennis Ball In The Testicles.* * It turns out that this game is much more important to win. 8 November 2006 -     31 October 2006 - This weekend's results: Ohio State Buckeyes 44, Minnesota Golden Gophers 0 New England Patriots 31, Minnesota Vikings 7 I decided that for Halloween this year I would be: "Minnesota Football Fan". 27 October 2006 - North Dakota! Every time I get a new state quarter for the first time, adding to my collection, I should announce it on my blog! I should have though of this years ago! Fortunately, I don't consider it too late to start now.* So, apparently North Dakota decided to just go with a buffalo. I think that's what was on the Kansas one, too. That's just wrong; no one state should be allowed to steal another state's idea. As my brother pointed out, Ohio and North Carolina are both "birthplace of aviation" or something like that. Ohio should've been required to pick something else. That said, Kansas and North Dakota don't have a lot going for them; maybe they deserve an exemption. Though, come to think of it, couldn't North Dakota have put the Peace Garden on it? Or is that too "un-American" for a U.S. coin? (Can't have anything involving Canada, now. Or peace.) I wonder what South Dakota is going to put on theirs? * Yes, I am officially starting to run out of ideas. 25 October 2006 - So I played in a poker tournament on Monday, and I won it again. Since the first time I played in January of this year, I think I've played in about twenty Chippy Poker tournaments. I've won outright three times, and I came in second once. Since usually about thirty people (plus or minus five) play any given week, I definitely do better than average. (I can't say I'm a great poker player. I really should bet more aggressively than I usually do, and I definitely ought to bluff more, but I know general strategy, and think I have the math and odds down pretty well, so I can often beat the set of people that I usually play.) Though I can't even really explain how I won this time. I had exactly one good hand (a hand where I stayed in with 6-7 suited, and flopped 8-5-4. I checked, and a guy with A-K bet a lot of chips, I re-raised him all-in, and took all his chips when he called). Other than that, I don't ever recall having a hand as good as three-of-a-kind. I know I won a lot of hands in one-on-one showdowns with nothing better than a higher pair. I think maybe what happened was that too many of my competitors stayed in on too many hands. I observed a lot of hands where more than half the table was in, often everybody just calling the big blind. I see where the temptation of playing that way is. A week ago I played a hand where my hole cards were Q-J offsuit. That's not bad, but I think you're supposed to fold that when there are nine guys at the table (and being out of position, too), so I did, and then the flop ended up Q-Q-J. Damn. After that, I played pretty much almost every hand, just to see what the flop was before folding, and then I ran out of money and lost in short order. But anyway, when I won on Monday, most of the guys I was playing with seemed to be going ahead and playing every hand, and folding after the flop when anybody raised, and soon many of them ran short on money, were forced to go all-in on a weak hand, and then lost to one of my pairs. So I think that goes to show that you really ought to stick to premium hands. Which is what I usually do. Aggression definitely helps, too. Once I had eliminated all but one last guy, I decided my strategy would be to go all-in on pretty much almost any hand when I was dealer. The other guy really didn't know what to do with that; he ended up folding hand after hand to me. (And when he was dealer he tended to either only call the big blind, or make small raises that I could easily afford to call, so I was able to see a lot of flops.) I think eventually the other guy realized that I couldn't possibly have a great hand every time I was raising all-in, so he ended up calling me when he had J-8 and the flop was 10-8-6. Unfortunately for him I had A-8 this time, so I had him dominated, and I won. Cindy never comes with and plays. She really ought to. She's good at games, and she's good at math, and I think she'd be pretty good at playing if she'd just be willing to try it. Mostly I think it would be nice to double our chances of winning, having two players playing. (Espcially since they've upped the first-place prize from $25 to $50.) But she doesn't seem inclined. Oh, well. In other news, this weekend I remember looking at the tree in our front yard and wondering why it hadn't lost any of its leaves yet. I wanted to get the job of raking over with, and it's starting to get kind of late in the year. (I hate raking and I'll be damned if I'm going to do it more than once.) Well, yesterday I was pulling out of the driveway and I suddenly noticed all of the leaves had fallen off. Apparently the tree decided to drop all of its leaves, simultaneously. Weird. 15 October 2006 - I don't know whose idea it was to combine the Star Wars movies, Legos, and the Nintendo Gamecube, but whoever it is, he or she is brilliant. You play through most of the principal scenes of the prequel trilogy. It's an action game and it's a puzzle game, but it's a kid's game, too, so the puzzles are pretty easy. I don't mind. I just want to get through the game so I can play every scene. Many of the scenes are pretty funny. It's amusing to see the trilogy play, where everything is completely Lego. I've just gotten to the opening scene of Episode III, where you make your way to Count Dooku's ship where he's holding Chancellor Palpatine. Right after I killed Dooku, I freed Chancellor Palpatine. Then I took my lightsaber and chopped his evil-Sith-bastard Lego-head off, too. Too bad, it didn't work--he just re-spawned. Unfortunately it appears that you can't go against the actual plot of the movie. Oh, well. 14 October 2006 - Wisconsin 48, Minnesota 12 The game was not as close as the score indicates. At one point the Badgers led 41-3. My favorite part of the game was right after the touchdown that put Wisconsin up by 38. The Badgers muffed the extra point snap, so the holder had to try throw it, and Minnesota intercepted it and ran it all the way back for 2 points. And then the Minnesota player celebrated in the end zone. I wonder what he was thinking. "Hooray! Now we're only down by 36! If I do that 19 more times, we win!" Though actually if that had happened, now that I think about it, then Wisconsin would have won 155-43... 12 October 2006 - Republican on Foley scandal: At least no one died Congratulations, Republicans! You've set a new record for "stupidest thing said by anybody this year". With Bush as president, that's a pretty difficult task to accomplish. And, to follow up on my last post, I'm thinking that maybe Twins fans were right the first time--it wasn't such a good thing for Twins fans that they faced the A's. After getting swept by them in three games. I think the problem might have been the day-long celebration the Twins had after the game that won them the division. (Not the final game where they played against the White Sox, rather, the game where they sat in the clubhouse and watched the Royals beat the Tigers.) They were already in the playoffs--winning the division accomplished them exactly nothing. What were they celebrating, exactly? Hopefully next year they'll tone down the party somewhat. Like maybe at least until they win a game in the postseason. In the World Series I'd pretty much almost always root for any NL team over any AL, but this year if the Tigers make it, I'll probably root for them. They're the ones playing like true champions right now. (Anyone who beats the Yankees, I'll be a fan of.) 2 October 2006 - Twins win AL Central title. My favorite team in the Brewers, but now that they're in the National League (playing true baseball), there's no reason I can't root for the Twins, and I'm happy for them. Still, interestingly, all of last week, when it appeared that Minnesota wasn't going to catch up to Detroit and would instead get the wild-card, I heard the same thing from many different people: "I'm glad we're not winning the division. We're much better off playing the Yankees in the five-game divisional series." And now, from the exact same set of people, "Hooray, Twins! Hooray, we won the division!" 1 October 2006 - So I played singles tennis with my brother Chad today, again. We've been playing a lot lately. I've been playing tennis for more than a decade, while Chad has only picked up the game within the last couple of years. But Chad's been getting better and better. He's been looking forward to the day that he finally beats me in a set. That day has not yet come. Note: Hey, I'm not being cruel here. We're training. We may end up playing together in a doubles tournament at the beginning of November, and if he's not at least as good as me by then, we don't have a chance. (We probably don't have a chance anyway.) 23 September 2006 - Michigan 27, Wisconsin 13 Bleh. Chad came over to watch the game, since we have ESPN but he doesn't. Wisconsin kept it close during the first half (it was tied 10-10 at halftime), but the Wolverines completely dominated us in the second half. Michigan were two touchdown favorites, but I was still hoping that the Badgers could pull it off. Guess the national championship will have to wait for next year. You may have noticed that I've been writing about my brother Chad a lot more lately; he started working at the same company that I do about six months ago, so as a result, I've been seeing a lot more of him. We happen to work in the same department, so it turns out that he works with a lot of the same people who already know me. When he first started I got a lot of comments from people saying whether or not they thought we resembled each other, but interestingly enough, the opinions were pretty divided. Some people thought we look a lot like each other, whereas other people told me that we didn't look like each other at all. Actually, I'm in the latter group; I don't think I look much like him, but here's a picture. You be the judge. 22 September 2006 - The link at the end of this entry brings to mind something my brother said to me the other day while he was asking me something about the question mark-colon operator ("?:") in Java. "Question mark-colon?! That's my favorite operator!" "That you have a favorite operator says a lot about you," he replied. It's like I'm looking into a mirror. 21 September 2006 - Democrats object to Venezulean President Chavez calling Bush 'the devil'. We prefer "the idiot". In an unrelated note, if you sent me (or Cindy) an e-mail any time this morning or this afternoon, we probably didn't get it. Comcast Cable decided to inactivate our account at midnight last night, for no particular reason. I contacted them and it should be working again now. Apparently they were just seeing if I was paying attention. Epilogue: This evening, on the same day they took away our e-mail service for 16 hours, Comcast calls us asking if we want to upgrade our cable service to Digital Plus. No, thanks... 18 September 2006 - So I watched the pilot episode of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" tonight. It's Aaron Sorkin's new show. It'll probably be the only regular network show that I watch this year. All of my favorite shows have slowly been cancelled over the course of the past few years--"NYPD Blue", "Arrested Development", "The West Wing". And I haven't found anything to replace them. I've pretty much got nothing left. It was okay, and it's clearly got potential, but I didn't like it as much as I liked the first episodes I ever saw of Sorkin's other two shows, "Sports Night" and "The West Wing". Those are pretty high acts to follow--I'm not sure I'll ever like another show as much as I liked "The West Wing". But Brad Whitford and Matthew Perry should be pretty good leads. Amanda Peet, too. I've got high hopes. One thing, though, the network "bug" that appeared in the lower left of the screen for much of the beginning of the show was a little obtrusive. It was especially distracting because it wasn't even tucked away into the far corner. It was really far toward the middle of the TV screen. Also, it didn't make any sense. I see they were advertising a web site, but I don't know how to type "" 11 September 2006 - Congratulations to my brother-in-law Paul and my [new] sister-in-law Monica who got married yesterday. Sunday afternoon. On NFL opening weekend. During the Bears-Packers game. (Kickoff was at 3:15, the ceremony began at 3:30.) Obviously, when picking the date, a Packers schedule was not consulted. Neither was I. But it ended up okay after all. It turned out that I saw as many Packers scoring at the actual ceremony as there was anywhere else. 8 September 2006 - I just read Lore Sjoberg's weekly Alt Text column, and it appears that he has the same opinion of blogs (such as this one) as I do. "Blog" itself is short for "weblog," which is short for "we blog because we weren't very popular in high school and we're trying to gain respect and admiration without actually having to be around people." ...you'd be surprised how many people are fascinated to hear you have a blog and want to know more, especially if you were expecting the number to be greater than zero. Yep, I'd say that's pretty accurate. 4 September 2006 - So I played singles tennis with my brother Chad today, again. We've been playing a lot lately. I've been playing tennis for more than a decade, while Chad has only picked up the game within the last couple of years. But Chad's been getting better and better. He's been looking forward to the day that he finally beats me in a set. That day has not yet come. 27 August 2006 - The last word on Pluto here (really!)...I can't decide if this letter to the editors of the Star-Tribune is a joke, or actually serious. Apparently I'm a Eurocentric, Yankee-hating jerk. At least he didn't accuse me of being a liberal. 26 August 2006 - As of today, we've outed ourselves to the neighbors as Democrats. I now have a Bev Scalze for Representative lawn sign in my yard. Two signs, actually. We live on a corner, and one of the roads is relatively busy, so it's an advantageous location for political lawn signs. I'm not actually a big fan of lawn signs; at least in Minnesota they tend to be a little too ubiquitous, and they don't really do anything to persuade a voter (other than to getting them to remember the name). But I changed my mind in this case for a couple of reasons. First of all, Ms. Scalze actually personally came by our house to ask about putting up a sign (it wasn't a volunteer, it was actually her). And secondly, I've become particularly irked by her opponent (whom, if I recall correctly, she managed to narrowly defeat last election). As Ms. Scalze is the Democrat, I was pretty inclined to vote for her anyway, but just to make sure I decided to do some research on their political positions. I found a "voter guide" web site (run by a conservative political action committee, which it ironically turned out) that asked both candidates half a dozen questions about about their opinions on certain issues, related to business, education, transportation, and taxes. Scalze's responses to each of the individual questions was well-reasoned, thoughtful, and comprehensive, and I pretty much agreed with all of her opinions. Her opponent, however, answered each question much more tersely, much less substantively, and in fact each of his six answers was essentially identical to this one: "Local officials should reduce and/or prioritize local spending." In other words, "I'm for cutting your taxes. Other than remembering that, keep your brain turned off." So, obviously, Scalze's opponent is a typical Republican. What gets me even more, though, is I checked her opponent's web site, and you can see that he is very careful to conceal the fact that he is a Republican. Nowhere does his site say that he's a Republican. He lists no endorsements from or associations with any conservative-sounding organizations. Plus, he goes out of his way to mention that he comes from a blue-collar, working-class background. Now, I can't blame him for being embarrassed to be a Republican. It's 2006, and in this day and age, if I were a Republican I'd be pretty embarrassed about it, too. But if you can't even bring yourself to admit to being a Republican, then you probably shouldn't be running for office as one. 24 August 2006 - Sanity prevails. The solar system isn't thrown into chaos. We're not going to get stuck with fifty planets, "no iceball left behind." Now we just have the eight. Exactly the way I thought it should be. Note that even way back in 1983, the makers of the game Gyruss (a classic) anticipated this event. You start out just outside the solar system and fight your way inward through the outer planets, all the way to Earth. And Neptune is the first planet you get to. They didn't put Pluto into the game at all. In the meantime, today I've seen some ridiculous news headlines: Pluto: 1930-2006 Okay, you know it's still there, right? No one has sent it a Death Star and blown it out of the sky. Here's a paragraph I've read in a couple of different articles: It is unclear if Pluto's downgrade would affect NASA's recent $700 million New Horizons spacecraft mission, which this year began a 9 1/2-year journey to the oddball object to unearth more of its secrets. "Yeah, NASA, we have to turn it around. I know it's already 100 million miles away, but Pluto's not a planet anymore. Bring it on home." Pluto got its fifteen minutes of fame, but now it's basically over. There won't be any more news cycles about it. What it all really boils down to is something my brother told me a few months ago: "You know, you don't really have to know a lot about the solar system in order to live in it." 23 August 2006 - So I'm driving home from work today on I-35E and, as usual, I see the electronic signboard which I pass by every day. But now, I notice, it says "2,200 sf"! "2,200 sf", instead of "2,200 ft". The "sf", of course, stands for "square feet", which is what it should have been all along. They read my blog! 21 August 2006 - So I played singles tennis with my brother Chad today. We've been playing a lot lately. I've been playing tennis for more than a decade, while Chad has only picked up the game within the last couple of years. But Chad's been getting better and better. He's been looking forward to the day that he finally beats me in a set. That day has not yet come. 18 August 2006 - Okay, here's the deal. This new definition of "planet" that I'm hearing about is a mess. Pluto should not be considered a planet. It's 2274 kilometers in diameter; the smallest true planet in the solar system is Mercury with a diameter of 4878 kilometers. So linearly Mercury is more than twice as large; volume-wise it's ten times as large. When first discovered in 1930, it was thought to be about the same size as Earth, and therefore deserved planet status, but we know better now. Astronomically, it's tiny. Had Pluto been found now instead of 76 years ago, they'd immediately have called it merely an asteroid, or a Kuiper Belt object, or something else. It's only still being called a planet now due to social inertia. Obviously, if Pluto shouldn't be a planet, then the much smaller asteroid Ceres (950 km) certainly shouldn't be, either. Ceres was actually considered to be a planet for a short while after it was discovered in 1801, but was rightly downgraded when more information became available to astronomers (all kinds of other asteroids in the same area were discovered). Far better to consider Ceres to be the largest asteroid, rather than some freakish miniscule planet in the middle of the asteroid belt. And don't even get me started about considering Charon to be a planet. Charon! I couldn't believe my eyes when I first read that. I get the idea, they call it a "double planet" because Charon doesn't revolve around Pluto, technically. (They each revolve about a common center of gravity.) But as small as Pluto is, Charon is even smaller (1172 km) than Pluto is. It'd be silly to consider it to be a planet, for more than one reason. Charon is Pluto's satellite, clear and simple. (You don't have to be a planet to have a satellite.) This new object that brought on all this fuss, nicknamed "Xena", is larger than Pluto, but not by much. It doesn't deserve planetary status any more than Pluto does. What's also bothering me is that I've been seeing news headlines that read "Nine planets may soon become twelve". Well, this is wrong, because it's not just twelve. If Ceres and Charon and Xena all become "planets", then there's no reason that a whole mess of other objects shouldn't be included, either. Sedna, Quaoar, Orcus, and a bunch of other objects that don't even have names yet are all out there. They're all larger than Ceres, so they should be "planets" too. It's getting to be a quite a mishmash here. If I were in charge*, this is what we'd do. Anything the size of Mercury or larger, inside the orbit of Neptune, would be considered a planet. Anything smaller than Mercury inside Neptune is an asteroid. So we have exactly eight planets. Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are the terrestrial planets. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are the gas giant planets. (It's possible we may discover a fifth gas giant planet some day, but probably not.) Outside Neptune, call every Pluto-like object a "plutino", plutinos being basically large asteroids, except for made mostly of ice instead of rock. Pluto and Charon are the innermost, and among the largest, of the plutinos. But don't call them "planets". What could be simpler? I think that's all I have to say about this. Except that, a few days ago, I first heard about these developments when I clicked a news article headline that read: "Pluto status attacked". At the time I remember thinking, how much more exciting a story it would've been if the headline had instead read: "Pluto attacked!" * Just wait. My day will come. 17 August 2006 - Dear NASA, The solar system has too many planets nowadays. Please eliminate three. P.S.: I am not a crackpot. Sean 13 August 2006 - Last night I went to a Minnesota Fringe Festival show, Calculus: The Musical. Going into it, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. It turns out that it was actually really about calculus. There were songs and everything. Isaac Newton was the main character. It was pretty funny. What impressed me the most, though, was the audience. They actually laughed at all of the calculus jokes, in all the right places. In fact, based on the audience laughter, I think there were a couple of jokes in there that even I didn't get. We went to the show because my wife Cindy (a math teacher) was recommended to the show by another math teacher. That makes me wonder if maybe most of the audience consisted of math teachers. I can't think of any other set of people that would pay $15 apiece to see a 45-minute show about advanced math. All I know is that I was in the unusual situation that, when I entered the room, the overall geekiness quotient actually seemed to go down. 11 August 2006 - So I discovered a new site the other day, LibraryThing. I think I'm in love. It's like they made this web site for me. Twenty seconds after I found it, I remember thinking to myself, "Gosh, I hope they're not charging too much for this, because no matter what it is, I'm going to be paying it." (It's free for the first 200 books, then after that it's $10 per year, $25 lifetime.) Basically, it's a personal library catalog for bibliophiles. What you do is enter your book collection into it. With just a few clicks you can organize your collection, by author, copyright date, series, or actually anything, because book identifiers are customizable. You can display all of the book covers. You can connect with other users with similar book collections. You can even set up a web script on your blog so you can display books at random from your collection. (Left, see!) Or, you can display your "author cloud"; it shows, by size, whom your favorite authors are. I love LibraryThing. 8 August 2006 - Today, I'm basically copying from a recent entry of Paul Lukas's blog, but I don't mind writing the same thing here. It bears repeating. I am not a hockey guy. I don't follow the NHL at all, so you'd think that I would care even less (if possible) about a minor hockey league. But a minor league team in my home state, the Milwaukee Admirals, changed its logo and uniform this year, and I'm pretty appalled. Because trust me, I'm not engaging in hyperbole when I say, it's the most horrible logo in the history of team sports. Here is the old logo. Now, it's not that interesting, I grant you; it's pretty bland and forgettable. I can see why they wanted to make a change. But, look what they changed it to! THIS! (Click here only if you dare! Not for the faint of heart!) It's hideous! And it's not a joke! It's real! 6 August 2006 - So Cindy and I are back from our trip to Ontario. To an American (or at least, to me), going to Canada is like going to a parallel universe; one that is almost like your own. But not quite. TEN WAYS THAT CANADA IS DIFFERENT FROM THE U.S. Digital cameras mysteriously fail just when you cross the border. (Admittedly, it's possible that this is not a general phenomenon but instead was just my digital camera, which is old, and sucks.) Random people that you encounter speak French natively instead of English. Never heard of Tim Horton before. But in Canada, he's huge! When you're driving, you get to the cities a lot quicker than subconsciously you think you're going to. The "Hamilton 60" sign means you'll get there in around half-an-hour. Not an hour. The apostrophe in "Wendy's" is not a regular apostrophe, but instead is a little maple leaf. You can't get free refills of the pop that you ordered. The cable channels are all named differently, even though they are clearly the same channels. "ESPN" is "TSN", even though it has the exact same shows with the same graphics and theme music. Likewise "The Weather Channel" is called "The Weather Network". "Comedy Central" is just "Comedy". (At first I wondered why this was done; since TSN is clearly just ESPN with a Canadian focus, why not just call it "ESPN Canada"? Then after a while I realized that if I were Canadian and all fifty of my channels were "ESPN Canada", "Weather Channel Canada", "Comedy Central Canada", this would be the definition of "ad nauseam." The weather guy on TV stands in front of a map of Canada instead of the United States. Which is understandable, of course, except that this is kind of a large waste of space since nobody actually lives in the top 90% of the map. They end up just waving their hands in front of the tiny Ontario triangle at the bottom of the screen. When you see words written down, even when they're not in French, they're spelled wrong. Like "colour". And "defence". And "SportsCentre" (which is on TSN). Speaking of SportsCentre, most of the show was devoted to hockey coverage. Which felt kind of odd considering that it's the middle of the offseason. 20 July 2006 - Cindy and I are planning a road trip to Niagara Falls and Toronto. We're excited. Canada will only be the second foreign country that I've visited; the first was the U.K. two years ago. (I only like to visit other countries who bother to show the common courtesy of speaking the same language natively that I do.) I'm also excited because I'll get to fill in a new state on my "States I Have Been To" map. 17 July 2006 - To my arborescent readers out there... Don't let this happen to you! 5 July 2006 - You know, if I stole ten zillion dollars from my employees and investors, and then was going to jail for it, then faking my own death just before sentencing is exactly what I'd do. 4 July 2006 - I hate my new alarm clock. Cindy gave it to me as a gift. It's not her fault. She didn't know it was a crappy alarm clock when she bought it. But I hate it. Here it is. It's got a lot of features that my old alarm clock didn't. On this one you can set two alarms (though I don't need a second one so I never use it). It can automatically adjust for daylight saving time (which won't work starting in 2007 because DST will begin and end on different days starting then). It's got a lot more buttons (like, 18 or 19 of them, so it's impossible to tell by feel among them which is the one which switches from AM to FM, or turns off the radio entirely). Don't even get me started on the radio volume control wheel. (You can turn the wheel about an entire semicircle; however, 179 degrees of that semicircle are completely useless. There's only about a one degree range where it goes from "completely unhearable" to "unbearably loud". I can't remember the number of times the volume must've gotten budged or something, and then the radio didn't wake me up when it went off in the morning, silently.) It gets even worse. This is what it looks like at night. At least, to a normal person who's not nearsighted. This is what it looks like, to me: This is my old clock. I liked it a lot better. It basically has one button (the snooze), and one switch, which goes from "off" to "AM" to "FM". That's really all I need. I used this clock for almost twenty years, no problem. But Cindy didn't like it, because it was starting to get kind of dusty and dirty (probably because I had been using it for two decades). So that's why she got me the new one. This is what my old clock looked like at night, to me. See, I can still actually tell what time it is! I miss my old clock. 27 June 2006 - Minnesota Democrat Mark Dayton voted for the flag-burning amendment! He's voluntarily leaving office after his first term. Good riddance. I don't want to have to vote for a Democrat for whom I have no respect. Sorry, call me crazy, but I've always been big on the first amendment. I don't particularly care for the idea of repealing it. On a more positive note, I'm proud to see that both Democrats from my home state voted "No"... 23 June 2006 - OK, we're more than five years into the twenty-first century. I've finally broken down and gotten broadband access to the Internet. That means the URL of this web page will be changing. I'll be moving to http://home.comcast.net/~seansand/. I'll be setting up a redirect, but since I'll be cancelling my subscription to Earthlink, I'm not sure how long the old page will exist. You'll probably just get a 404 error message before long. So if anybody actually is bookmarked or linked to this page, you probably want to change the URL now. Also, here is my new e-mail address, munged. I'm going to see if I can avoid so much SPAM with this new one. Though we may have gotten a cable modem, I'm still keeping my vintage cell phone, though. That may have to be pried from my cold, dead fingers. 4 May 2006 - I put one dollar into the machine, and I actually got two Vault Zeroes*. I don't know how that happened. Hey, today's starting to look out to be a good day after all. Still, two Zeroes is still just Zero. * Not sure if it's that or "Vaults Zero". Like "attorneys-general" and "passersby". 1 May 2006 - Just discovered, three miles from my house: 23 April 2006 - Right on schedule, it's still a week before the annual NFL draft, and the local sports radio stations and fans have reached a consensus: Why are we even going to bother have a football season? The Minnesota Vikings have Super Bowl XLI pretty much locked up already. These poor oddsmakers apparently don't know any better and had better be prepared to take a beating. They still have the Vikings at only 25-to-1 on winning it all! So come next February, expect whole hordes of Vikings fans, after having cashed out their 401(k) plans, to become very, very rich. Meanwhile, when it comes to the Packers, this Onion article pretty much says it all. 22 April 2006 - So at work I just found out that there's a project that I'm scheduled to work on, and they've been having weekly status meetings that I haven't been going to. For the past two months. At one point I had just remembered that there was some work on this that I needed to do, so I was asking the project leader about the details, and he said, "Well, why don't you come to this week's meeting, and we'll discuss it?" What meeting, I asked him. There wasn't one on my calendar. It wasn't my fault, it turned out. Apparently the project leader had set up the weekly meeting but forgot to invite me to it. "I thought that you had just been continually blowing us off," he admitted. This has happened to me several times in the past, actually. However, whenever it happened before, it wasn't a work meeting, it was a math class, and I didn't find out about it until just before the final exam. Also, before it always turned out to be a dream. 8 April 2006 - Here's something that, ten years ago, I thought could never happen. I was filling out some form or other, and, having to write down my age, I forgot what it was. I knew I was thirty-three or thirty-four, one of them, but I couldn't remember which. Finally, I ended up having to do the math. It's 2006 now, I was born in 1972, so, 2006 - 1972 = 34, but that's off by one if you haven't had your birthday yet, and I haven't, so that means I'm thirty-three. Yep, thirty-three, that's it. Nobody forgets what their age is when they are fifteen or sixteen. I don't think anybody forgets what their age is in their twenties, either. But once you're past thirty, apparently it can start to become a problem. I'm so old. 7 April 2006 - From CNN.com... The names Dennis, Katrina, Rita, Stan and Wilma will never grace a hurricane again, according to a committee of the World Meteorological Organization, which retires storm names out of sensitivity to the victims, and for historical, scientific and legal purposes as well. Hurricane names are recycled every six years. Replacing Katrina and the other retirees in 2011 will be Don, Katia, Rina, Sean and Whitney, according to an NOAA news release. Hooray! I think. 31 March 2006 So I was randomly reading some of the entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and here's something that I noticed: Actual word count of Wikipedia entry on Oliver Cromwell: 5,438 Actual word count of Wikipedia entry on Skeletor: 6,498 29 March 2006 - The carpet of my work cubicle: Why I am not allowed to eat popcorn in my cube any more. 27 March 2006 - So this has been bothering me almost every single day for the last six months. I'm driving home from work on I-35E and there's a new electronic signboard. For the first couple of weeks it always says "5:53pm" or "6:15pm" or, alternatively, "55°" or "67°", something like that. Then, one day, the sign says "5,500 ft". Wow, I think to myself, their new sign is broken. It's displaying some nonsense test message, and whoever is in charge of the sign message hasn't noticed it and fixed it yet. The next day, the message doesn't change, it still says "5,500 ft". I'm wondering if this is a new kind of weather message. Including the time and the temperature, now it's saying how high the clouds are. Except, on this day there's not a cloud in the sky, and, even if there were, pretty much everybody on I-35E is driving a car and not an airplane, so the current cloud height would be relatively irrelevant knowledge. After a week or two, the message finally changes, but it's another message like "4,200 ft" and not the time or temperature. So now, I've figured out, it's not a mistake, they must be doing this on purpose. Except that, I have no idea what "4,200 ft" could possibly mean. Why put up an expensive electronic sign on a busy interstate and then send messages that no one understands? Perhaps it's some sinister plot by the Illuminati. Weeks go by. The mysterious units of measure remain. Sometimes more than one...it'll alternate between "7,000 ft" and "2,200 ft", but it never goes back to the time and temperature. Now, mind you, this is not a major problem. It's not as if I'm up nights worrying about it. It's just, every single day, when the sign comes into view, it bothers me that I can't figure out what it's saying. One minute after I drive by the sign, I've already completely forgotten about it. But then, same time next evening, there the sign is again. Six months later, I'm driving by the sign yet again, and suddenly in a flash I realize what it is. The sign is run by a business center that rents out office space. And the measurements that they are flashing is the area of the office units that they have available. Of course! Except, I have a gripe with whomever writes the messages for that sign. "5,500 ft" is a measure of distance, not area. "5,500 ft" is just wrong. On the very first day, if the sign had said "5,500 sq ft" the way it's supposed to, I would have guessed what it meant immediately, and I would have been spared all these moments of confusion. Nevertheless, I've been flooded by a sense of relief. The universe makes sense again. It's one less thing that I have to worry about. 17 March 2006 - Yesterday I got a vaguely threatening letter from the Dakota County Library because of an overdue book. The Tenacity of the Cockroach had been due on February 27, and I was accumulating a lot of late fees. The book was not overdue. I remember returning it. I didn't return it late, either; I specifically remember bringing it back, only a few days after I checked it out, because I hadn't liked it very much. (The book consists of a whole bunch of celebrity interviews, some humorous, but it turned out most of the celebrities were music stars whom I had either never heard of or didn't care about, so I only read a few of them before bringing it back.) After doing some research and figuring out the secret Dakota County Library phone number that actually will potentially connect you to a real person and not their computer, I got a hold of a receptionist, explained the problem, and she said she would flag the book as "Claimed returned" and they would do a search for it in the case they actually had it. Then I had to hope that I wouldn't be one of those people who gets an overdue notice, remembers returning it, makes an angry phone call, and then a week later finds the book in the living room under some newspapers and then looks like an idiot. I shouldn't be one of these cases, though; I was absolutely, positively, almost sure that I returned it more than a month ago. It turns out that I'm not an idiot.* I checked the Dakota County Library's web site later that evening and the overdue notice was no longer on my account, and the book itself had a location of "Shelving Cart". They must've found it. I'm glad. For awhile there I thought I might have to go on the lam. * At least, not for that reason. 15 March 2006 - I may not be that great at poker, but I am pretty good at NTN Trivia. The half hour before playing poker on Monday I played Countdown, and once again I beat the entire bar, as I often do. Though last weekend when I played Cindy was irate at me because she knew the answer to the fifteenth and final question, which I got wrong and dropped me to second place. Apparently "thinly sliced" vegetables are "julienned", not "scalloped". Alternatively, "scalloped" just means that they are "circle-segmented", and not necessarily thin. I usually win, though. If you ever go into the Maplewood BW3, and see "EVIL" on the list of top ten scores, that's me. The last couple of times I've played, though, I've observed something. There are clearly a lot of people who have not figured out that, of the three clues that they give you before time runs out, the third clue tells you what the answer is. For example, if the question is, what is the second largest country in the world in area, and the first clue is "FOOLS RUSH IN" (that means that of the five multiple choice options, it's not RUSSIA), and the second clue is "DON'T PLAY CHINESE CHECKERS" (that means it's not CHINA), and the third clue is "CAN DO"), that means the answer is CANADA. And then the list of people's answers comes up, and about of third of them have picked something other than CANADA as the answer. Either they are new to the game and don't realize how the clues work, or, they aren't able to decipher that "CAN DO" means CANADA and not UNITED STATES. Or BRAZIL. 14 March 2006 - So I was playing poker again at BW3, and on the big screen was a game from the World Baseball Classic. (It's "Classic" even though this is its inaugural year.) Puerto Rico was playing Venezuela. You know what, I'm pretty sure that Puerto Rico is part of the United States. Why do they get their own team? Also, that World Baseball Classic web site needs to update their image of the Venezulan flag. Venezuela just got a new star. Perhaps I'm just griping because I lost at poker again. I've played about five times since that first time, and every time since then I haven't even made it to the final table. Not that I wasn't pretty sure then, but it's even more obvious now that I had had a huge case of beginner's luck. The problem is, having won once, now I'm annoyed every time I'm eliminated. Since there are usually about 30 people playing, that's going to be about 97% of the time, probably more. Some of the guys that show up Mondays clearly play quite a lot. I had one interesting hand, though. I had been folding almost all of my hands, slowly losing money from the blinds, when, dealing, I finally got A-Q offsuit. All of the callers had just called the big blind, so I raised to three times the big blind. Everybody folded, except for one guy opposite me who re-raised me all-in. Before the flop A-Q was by far the best hand I had seen all evening, and since even if A-Q wasn't already the best hand, it probably would have a pretty good chance against anything else, I went ahead and called, putting all of my chips into the pot. Unfortunately, the guy flipped over A-A as his hole cards, and I was pretty much doomed. The flop turned out to be K-7-4 or something like that, so I was drawing almost completely dead. The turn, fortunately for me, was a J, so that kept me alive because a 10 could save me, and then the river was the ten of spades! I was incredibly fortunate. For the next ten minutes the guy with A-A kept reliving out loud his bad beat. Doubling up kept me alive for another half hour, but I ended up losing anyway, the last player not to make it to the final table. Oh, well. I'll probably be there again next week. 10 March 2006 - Wow, it's been a very bad day for two companies that I previously had a very good regard for. First of all, from Digg, a report of Google totally blowing off a user who lost all of his e-mail that he had stored in his Gmail account. If anyone reading this uses Gmail, here's a warning that you can't rely on it. Keep anything important in a real e-mail account. So much for not being evil. And, on the same day, I find out that TiVo has announced that they are ending new lifetime subscriptions. This is a big deal, because for the past six years, I've been urging everybody I know to get a TiVo. Cindy and I have two ourselves. But if they're ending lifetime subscriptions (going to purely monthly-based subscriptions), I may have bought my last TiVo. I'm happy to pay for a lifetime service fee, even a relatively hefty one. It's very well worth it. But I'd have second thoughts about buying something non-terminating. I used to be the biggest TiVo evangelist out there. Granted, the company exists to make money, but if they choose a market strategy that could piss off even me, it may well signal the imminent death of TiVo. I'd hate for that to happen...all other DVRs out there are far inferior. 24 February 2006 - Here's Virginia.edu's "How things work" page. Which I discovered when it linked from Digg, which is a great directory site I just found out about. The Virginia page is a good site for people who have basic science questions. Why can't you go faster than the speed of light, why can't you have perpetual motion machines, etc. However, the most interesting thing that I learned from the page is, there sure are a lot of people who want to get their microwave ovens to work with the door open. 23 February 2006 - On my way to work today, I passed a school bus. On the side of the bus it said "Safe-Way Bus Company". I'll bet they do better than their competition, the Flaming Death Bus Company. 22 February 2006 - Today is Washington's birthday. Coincidentally, late last week the Dakota County Library had a used book sale, and one of the books that I bought (for one dollar) was A More Perfect Union by William Peters. (It took me awhile to identify the correct hyperlink, by the way. "A More Perfect Union" sure is a popular title for books about the Constitution.) This book describes the events of the original Constitutional Convention in 1787. For a history book, it wasn't at all a bad read. Actually what it's done is prompted me to look for and read a good biography of George Washington. The former general's esteem was such that he was unanimously voted to preside over the convention. And when the founders were writing Article II, creating powers of the chief executive, they unquestionably had Washington in mind for the job. And they hoped he would serve as the model for future presidents. (No such luck.) The book isn't exactly a barrel of laughs. But my favorite part of the book was when the delegates were arguing over the presence of a standing army. Mindful of the numbers of British troops in the colonies before the war, one delegate made a motion that the size of the U.S. Army, during peacetime, be limited to no more than 3,000 troops. At this, Washington (who normally remained silent during deliberations) leaned over to whomever was sitting next to him, and whispered (though loud enough to everyone to hear) the suggestion of another motion limiting the size of any foreign invading army to 3,000 troops. Needless to say, the original motion was then defeated unanimously. 21 February 2006 - My streak makes it onto another web site. (I didn't even know there was some "Seinfeld" episode about it until today. I've never watched that stupid show. Never understood it's popularity when it was on.) I am not emetophobic, by the way. I don't get any irrational terror about the idea of vomiting. It's just that, between vomiting and not vomiting, I just prefer the latter, that's all. Doesn't everyone? 16 February 2006 - Interesting. All my life, I always just assumed that in print, "(sic)" stood for "spelling incorrect". As in: The House of Representatives shall chuse [sic] their Speaker... When something is being quoted, and the original contains an error that is deliberately not corrected. But today I just learned that sic is actually a Latin word that means "in that place". So that's its actual etymology; it doesn't necessarily mean "spelling incorrect" at all. That makes sense, because sometimes I've seen "(sic)" after a grammatical error, instead of a spelling error. Now that I think about it, I even knew that sic was a Latin word already. As in sic transit gloria mundis. OK, maybe it's not that interesting. 15 February 2006 - So I was talking to a guy that I work with, he's younger than me, and I was talking about having played "Dig Dug" for an hour on an emulator last night. "What's that?" he asked. "You know, 'Dig Dug'. The video game. You know, 'Dig Dug.'" "I've never heard of it. What do you do in it? Dig something?" He's never heard of Dig Dug! I can hardly believe it. "Well, yeah, you're this little guy who digs, and..." I suddenly realize that Dig Dug is kind of hard to explain. At least, hard to explain in a way that makes much sense. "...well, it's a lot like 'Mr. Do!' actually. You've played 'Mr. Do!', right?" Long pause. I'm so old. (Note: Here! And here!) 14 February 2006 - The cartoon animal that's on the front of the bag of "Cheetos" is a chee-tah. I just got that. 13 February 2006 - Ugh! I was just reading a news web page, and I ran into the word "supercede" again. This is a pet peeve of mine. It's "supersede", not "supercede"! "Supersede" has got to be the most misspelled word in the English language. Whenever I've run across it, I've literally seen it wrong more often than not. "Judgment" is a distant second. (The movie actually got it right.) I remember a professor that I had my freshman or sophomore year in college. He said that, on Judgment Day, when you're at the gates of heaven, they ask you how to spell "judgment". If you put the extra "e" in there, you go to hell. 11 February 2006 - While you were watching the opening ceremonies to the Winter Olympics, I was watching the season finale of "Arrested Development". The finale was as brilliant as the rest of the series was. And now it's over; the season finale was probably the series finale. There's a chance that the show will be picked up by ABC or Showtime, but last night was probably it. As much as I'd like to, it's hard to blame Fox. They gave the show every chance, but they just never got enough people to watch. In one of the last episodes, the show parodied its own situation by cramming, in one single episode, pretty much every known gimmick that every other show has ever desperately tried in picking up an audience. They had scenes that were in 3-D. They had celebrity cameoes. They announced before the show that one of the characters would die. They even had the last part of the show filmed live. Meanwhile, I've started to watch another show, "Deal or No Deal", on the other end of the television spectrum. It's a game show on NBC, with horribly overreacting contestants, horribly overreacting audience members, former stand-up Howie Mandel hamming it up as the host, and over-the-top set lighting and sound. It's basically completely mathematical; users select one of a couple dozen briefcases with an unknown amount of money in it, and the contestant has to try figure out how much money is in their case by opening up all the other cases. Mandel inserts artificial drama by deliberately slowing down the pace of the show when the stakes get high. I have discovered that the show is just as easily followed by skipping commercials with the TiVo, and also running it at three times normal speed, without sound. Every single show is exactly like every single other one. I love it. If you haven't seen it, it's worth an hour of your time. 20 minutes if you have a TiVo. 6 February 2006 - I just had a great week. First of all, I won that poker tournament last week. Then, I had a doctor's appointment and my a1c results were 4.9%, which is phenomenally good for a diabetic. I did our taxes this weekend, and found that we've been doing much a much better job sheltering our income properly, as we're getting a refund on our federal return this year (last year we had to pay in). And finally, I did win my fantasy football league this year*, for the first time in eleven years. I had the lead going into Super Bowl XL, and to keep it, I kind of needed the game to turn out to be a defensive struggle rather than a shootout. And it was. I even won a free pop at work today because I had correctly guessed the Super Bowl score. I predicted that Pittsburgh would win with 21 points. The trouble is, that's a lot of good karma to have thrown at you, all at once. I'm a little concerned. For the next couple months I'll be constantly watching for an anvil to drop on my head. * I should add that it wasn't all just me. My good friend Rajiv helps me with my fantasy football team a lot. In fact, it was his suggestion of trading Patriot QB Tom Brady and Giant TE Jeremy Shockey for the Panthers' WR Steve Smith that turned out to be the key to final victory. In the playoffs neither Brady nor Shockey ended up doing hardly anything, while Panthers Smith and QB Jake Delhomme (whom I kept in place of Brady) combined for 74 points. 31 January 2006 - For the last couple of weeks my brother Chad and I were thinking about trying to play in a Texas Hold'em tournament. We found out about a free tournament at a nearby bar in Maplewood. Since neither of us had ever played in a tournament before, we figured that a free one would be the best place to start, so yesterday night we went over there and gave it a try. And hey, guess what, I won it! I probably peaked too early. Now I have the urge to go back and play every single week, and I'm guessing that I'll probably never come close to winning it again. It was much more fortune than skill that allowed me to win. There were around 30 players; four tables of eight or so players each. We started with approximately $5000 in chips. I won a hand or two at first, and I thought that I was doing reasonably okay, staying about even. (Chad, by contrast, I think was the second player eliminated overall.) But then one hand an opponent sucked out a higher pair then me on the river (I had stayed in with K-9 and the flop's highest card had been a 9), and I ended up having only $800 left. The big blind at this point was $600, so I decided to go all-in with a 10-5. Two other players were also all-in, and the three of us turned over our cards. Each of the other players had an ace or a king, if I recall correctly, and the flop was something like 3-3-9. Since I would have the lowest kicker I figured I was pretty much doomed, especially when the turn was another 3. But then the river was a 5, so suddenly I had the a winning full house. So I immediately tripled to $2400. However, even though two of the players had been eliminated, the remaining players all had a lot more chips than I did, so I was still the shortest stack. The very next hand I ended up with A-10, so I immediately went all-in again, hoping to just steal the blinds. But one other player stayed in, and he flipped over K-Q. So at that point I had to hope to avoid a king or a queen on the flop. No such luck...in fact, worse, the flop was K-Q-7. So he had two pair and I had nothing. I was getting ready to stand up from the table, when the river card turned out to be a J, and abruptly I had the high hand--an ace-high straight. I hung in there and made it to the final table, though with the least amount of chips. But like I said, I was extremely lucky, because a total of five times during the entire night I ended up going all-in against another player with the same amount or more chips than me, and all five times it was the other player who came up short. The odds of that are 32-to-one...actually less, because one of them was a three-way pot. Nevertheless, I think I can honestly say that I didn't make any huge blunders during the whole night. Mathematically, I believe I always made the correct decision. Win or lose, it was a lot of fun. But it was more fun to win, especially after collecting the $25.00 prize for winning the tournament. (Peanuts, but hey, it was free to enter.) I learned quite a bit in those few hours. The vast majority of the Hold-em that I've played has just been practicing against my computer software, and real people don't play anything like the computer at all. (At least, people who play in free tournaments in Maplewood bars don't play anything like my computer.) For example, I noticed that lots of the players would frequently bet a lot on what turned out to be not-particularly-powerful hands. So just because someone goes all-in, or makes a large bet, is no guarantee that they have pocket aces or A-K or anything like that. Plus, there's a lot more interest in poker out there than I ever expected. The turnout of 30-plus guys (it was mostly men, younger than me, though there were a couple of women) was quite a bit more than the nine or ten that I imagined would show. And most of them sure seemed to know a lot about poker. I was very lucky to do as well as I did. It'll probably never happen again. But even so, I'm pretty sure I'll be back... 26 January 2006 - Today at work our team leads bought our whole group an "Appreciation" lunch. According to the e-mail: We are doing this because we "appreciate" all of the contributions you have made in 2005. Hey, "thanks". 25 January 2006 - So I just came back from UW-Madison on a job recruiting trip. The recruiting trip went fine. Wisconsin always produces a lot of good software engineer candidates, though I think the school doesn't advertise the Engineering Job Fair to computer science students well enough, probably because the Computer Science is actually in the College of Letters and Science, and not the College of Engineering. Not that I think this is a bad thing. I actually really enjoyed being able to take a lot of breadth knowledge classes when I was in college (like Classical Mythology, U.S. History, History of Science, etc.). But it's not everyone's cup of tea, though. We always have giveaways at our booth, and one of them was a little tin of mints. I was looking at the "Nutrition Facts" table on the back, trying to find out the carb content, but the table was shrunk down so tiny (so that it fit on the tin) as to be virtually unreadable. I showed the tin to my group lead, who is ten years older than me, and he couldn't read the table at all. One of the ingredients on there could just as easily have been "Cancer", and no one would even have known the difference. But it was a good trip. Also, Samkon Gado went through airport security at Madison just about a minute before I did. 23 January 2006 - I've been joking about it all year, but it actually happened: the NFC is so bad that there are two AFC teams playing each other in the Super Bowl. What was that? The Seahawks are in the NFC now? Okay, but still... Meanwhile, my fantasy football team has been doing pretty well, at least up until yesterday. I still have first place, with just one game to go. But unfortunately my lead is pretty tenuous. It really would've been a lot better for me if Denver and Carolina had won. But I shouldn't complain. I'm fortunate enough that the Panthers got as far as they did. I think I still have about a 50-50 chance to win after the Super Bowl. It really comes down to how RB Shaun Alexander for Seattle does (hopefully very bad) and how RB Jerome Bettis for Pittsburgh does (hopefully very good). 2 January 2006 - Final score: Wisconsin 24, Auburn 10 My brother and I went to a Badger bar in Minneapolis to watch the game. While there we were talking about college football, UW-Madison, and college in general. My brother said, "I know a girl; she went to the University of Minnesota. She doesn't like people who went to Wisconsin. She says that Wisconsin people are all real arrogant." "I don't know", I said. "I guess it's hard to help that when the college you went to is way better than everybody else's."