A friend of mine is running a squares pool* to raise money for HIV/AIDS services. Details below:


For only $20.00 you can buy a square in our "RIDE TO END AIDS" Super Bowl pool. Half of the money raised will go directly to our fund raising.

• The cost per square is $20.00 each. All money is due Friday Feb. 4th, 2011 by noon.

• Payments are being handled through PayPal. If you're interested, I'll give you the email address you need to send the money to. Your name will not be added to the grid until your money is received.

• Once all money is received, the #'s will be randomly assigned to the grid and emailed out.

• Since no one knows what #'s each square will be, the odds are the same for everyone (i.e. you don't actually have to know anything about probable scores to participate).

• Half the pot will go to AIDS Lifecycle and the other half split between the 4 winners. (If all 100 squares are filled, the winning square at the end of each quarter wins $250.00.)

• If the winning square at the end of a quarter is blank, money will be pushed to the next quarter.

* - If you're unfamiliar with how squares pools work, each buy-in gets you one square on a grid that might look something like this. At the end of each quarter of the football game, the winning square is determined by looking at the 1's digit of each team's current score and locating the corresponding spot on the grid.

So in the linked grid, if the score at the end of the first quarter was Nebraska 13, Iowa State 7, the winning square for that quarter would be on the bottom row, two spaces from the right.

Every time they release a new video for this, I nerd-gasm just a little harder.

So...yeah. I've been meaning to post here more often, but it seems like I just don't have much to say that can't be adequately communicated on Twitter. Life's pretty stable at the moment...by which I pretty much mean "stagnant." Not much changes from day to day, so there's not much worth writing about.

That's not to say things are bad. I'm definitely comfortable where I am right now, for the most part. Looking to make some changes in a few areas, but they're not worth mentioning at this point.

My other blog is still going strong. I'm averaging a post every other day and last month I broke the 3K page load mark for the third month in a row, so I'm getting good traffic.



It's more or less serving as my outlet for writing large amounts of text about ultimately unimportant things, which is the other reason why my LJ has pretty much died over the last year. But I'm still here and I'm still reading all my friends' posts on a daily basis.

Dammit, Blizzard. Why must your writers and animators be so freaking awesome?

Coworker not named Hal [8:19 AM]:
hello Dave
Me, Dave [8:19 AM]:
hello, Hal
CnnH [8:20 AM]:
as in Shallow Hal needs a Gal?
Me, Dave [8:20 AM]:
as in Hal from 2001
CnnH [8:20 AM]:
I'm not sure what that is
Me, Dave [8:20 AM]:
wow

The guy's older than me, incidentally...

You know what would be really awesome? One LJ group for actual announcements regarding AC from staff members or other qualified individuals and another for the shit-flood of "looking for roommate/crash space", "my con report", and "plz post pictures of my murrsuit" posts that surround either side of the con.

Life is returning to normal after my extended stay back east.

NYC - Chelsea Challenge
I spent just under 48 hours in NYC after all was said and done, and played 4 games of hockey in that stretch. I ended up playing with a team from Boston (since the Chicagoans I was going with couldn't pull enough people together for their own team). Most of the guys were cool, but a few were jerks. Not so much directly to me...just in general. And especially when things weren't going our way. Just taking it a little too seriously, you know.

We ended up going 1-0-2 in the round-robin stage. The win was 4-3. Both ties were 0-0. In our semi-final game we lost 2-1 right at the end. It was a tight game and one tiny mistake ended up costing us.

I don't feel I personally did that great. I don't know if it was because of the travel, the schedule, or playing with people I'm not familiar with. Probably a combination of all 3. Regardless, I was pretty much a non-factor the whole way through. At least that's how it felt to me. But I still had a good time and would definitely do it again. Hopefully with more people that I know next time...

New Haven, CT
After losing out of the tourney and grabbing some lunch with invncble I boarded a train from Grand Central (very cool) out to CT. The next four days were spent hanging out a Louie Furrywolfy's place.

I was looking forward to this portion of the trip. I was excited to hang out a little, see what goes on up there, see Yale (how often do you get to visit an Ivy League campus?), and such. Instead I ended up getting sick Sunday morning (the last day of the tourney) and didn't really recover until Tuesday night. Monday was brutal.

As a result I ended up spending all 4 days out there on Lou's couch, keeping everyone at arm's length and doing everything I could not to infect them before AC. (Which I managed to do, thankfully.) I guess it beats being sick alone in a hotel somewhere, but it really put a damper on the middle of the vacation. I felt like a really shitty house-guest.

But mad thanks to Lou and Bios for putting up with me and understanding.

Pittsburgh - AC
Every con I go to gets more and more low-key. This time around was no exception. I didn't even spend time at any room parties this time around. It felt like they just weren't happening.

But it was good times with good friends, as always. Highlights included watching the US/Ghana game at August Henry's, Tek's bitchin' set, and dinner at Sonoma Grill. I didn't get to spend as much time as I would have liked with everyone I could have. But that seems to be how things go at cons.

Also, it sucks being the only early riser in your group of friends. :-P

I took yesterday off of work after getting home Monday, and now I'm back to the grind. Lots of stuff to catch up on after being gone for 10 days.

Always reassuring how life just piles up while it waits for you to get back, isn't it?

Unreal...

If you've never played the original Deus Ex...well...you're missing out on one of those gaming classics. While I've never owned it, I have gone through it, and it's still one of the more memorable games I've ever played.

The E3 trailer for the third DE was released over the weekend. Now that Eidos is owned by Sqare, they get use of Square's CG department (which is second only to Blizzard's, I believe). They hit a home run with this one.



E3 is still over a week away, but a lot of companies have already started releasing their trailers and teasers for those show. It's going to be a crazy 10 days...

http://www.cracked.com/blog/fastfood-meals-for-failures/



I haven't laughed like this since...well...since I found Hyperbole and a Half a few weeks ago. But still...

So I've been thinking about picking this up. It looks like it has the potential to be a lot of fun, but mostly in the multi-player sense. Is there anyone on my f-list that's bought/is planning to buy this?

Oh hai.

So hockey tonight was some kind of bullshit. Lemme set the situation.

Heading into the 3rd period we're up 5-2. We sat back, played sloppy and let them climb back into the game. The score was 5-4 near the end of the period when they shot one on our net. Our goalie blocked it, but didn't freeze it. It was rolling around on top of his pads. At this time, the ref blew the whistle. (Bad call.)

Our team stopped with the whistle. The puck rolled off our goalie, into the crease, and was knocked in by one of their players. This whole sequence probably took a second. Maybe two. But it was clearly after the whistle had blown.

The refs counted the goal. (Worse call and blatant violation of the rules they're supposed to uphold.)

Ultimately we lost in OT and are now out of the playoffs.

When pressed about the bad call the refs' explanation was that he blew the whistle because "the puck was going into the net" and that's why the goal counted.

So what now? If I hear a whistle blown when the opposing goalie stops the puck, am I supposed to keep whacking at it in case I can knock it in and hope the refs reverse their call?

Fuck that shit. I don't care what your intention was. I still get called for tripping even when I'm in the process of getting my stick out of the way of the other guy's feet. I still get called for roughing if I'm in the process of stopping when I run a guy over.

I understand bad calls (and no-calls) are made. It happens in every league in every country, from rec leagues all the way up to the NHL. But when the refs blow a call, they have to stick by it. It's the only way to protect the integrity of the game, the league, and the position of the official. They can own up to it and admit they made a mistake later, but they still have to live with their mistake, the same as we do.

I'm furious right now, but there's nothing I can do. There's no good solution here. If the league were to do something like reverse the result of the game, that would be just as unfair to the other team as this whole debacle is to ours at this moment. Then that would further open the door to questioning the refs, which is not healthy for the game.

What I want to see is the league publicly own up to the mistake. I want them to acknowledge that this situation is wrong and fucked up and contributed in no small way to one team being done for the season while the other continues on. I want them to assure us that something is being done to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future. And then I want to see, by the time the next Winter season starts, USA Hockey certified refs on the ice for our games.

You might wanna run a quick virus check.

Just sayin...

They're not exactly bringing sexy back...but it's still damn funny.

When the world ends, this is how I want it to happen: