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Oct282011

Phoadtography: Visiting Our Friends to the North Pt 2

Greetings everyone!  This month saw the rare appearance of the back to back posts of a series with the Halloween decorations (link here).  Generally I try and avoid that in order to give adequate variety for my millions of readers (I am obligated to say that to keep from having to hear how many Peeps Linda has on that crappy Fadbook site of hers).  The reason for this is October’s posts were all done from the road. This has limited my post coverage to whatever I managed to bring along with me and could get done before shutting the lights out in the hotel room.   Today I am actually writing from the car with our trusty Verizon stick.  The light is too harsh to really post process pictures so instead I’m going to double up my series posts again with the second part of the North journey Phoadtography set.  For the curious, I’ve scheduled this release to coincide with when we expect to be back home – I didn’t want to advertise that our home was vacant so kept that out of my posts up to now.  So here we go with a post from the road about being on the road which can be viewed while you are on the road.

Let’s start with congratulations to Milwaukee for a a great baseball season!  All those predictions and high expectations we were subjected to by local radio and TV announcers made me think for a moment my Cardinals never had a chance.  Their pitching was better than my Cardinals, their hitting was better than my Cardinals and their fielding well that might have been better than my Cardinals as well.  But all that doesn’t matter to a Cardinal fan now does it? .. and why is that?  … cause my Cardinals are still playing !!!!

Did I mention I was a Cardinal fan?  oh.. well then for the record I’m a Cardinal fan!  Enough gloating, there is still one more game to get through.  Now on to a staple in the Phoadtography world.  The water tower.  I have seen pumpkins, golfballs and a giant smiley face, but this is the first time for a basketball.  This town must be in a sports dry spell if it takes this much pride in something that happened back in 1952.  Whatever keeps the faith I guess.

hit the jump to see the rest of the pictures in the great trip up North series.

Continue Reading…

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Oct052008

Mathematically Eliminated.. or Yeah for the Goat!

Let’s start this quick post by saying I am a St. Louis Cardinal’s baseball fan.  This was not so much selected as opposed to handed down from my father.  As a result of this affiliation, I am also an anti-Cub fan.  No surprise there since it also goes along with my distaste for the Beatles probably based entirely on being a fan of the Rolling Stones.  I wonder just how much of our likes and dislikes are really based on contrasting scenarios?  I like the Illini, I dislike Michigan – I like Physics, I dislike Chemistry…. sounds like a future post topic, but the point of this one is to pick at the wound we like to call “Cub’s Post Season Dysfunction”

So I had the opportunity to go up to Wrigley field for a game in the final series of the season between the Cards and the Cubs.  So I grabbed my Cards hat and headed up with my Cub friends (and another Cardinal fan that was apparently too worried to actually wear the RED).  It ended up being a fairly pleasant day, probably due to the fact we hit their star pitcher out of the park for an early exit and rode a nice 12 run outing to the win.  Only twice that day did I hear the taunt of Mathematically Eliminated tossed my way in light of the Redbirds inability to make the playoffs this year.   Then on the way back to the car and SUV drives by with a similar disparaging remark on my team.  Yes, they got us this year, but noted to myself to see just how far they make it in their Cinderella year.   Last night I got the answer to that question… EXACTLY 3 GAMES.  Nice going Cubbies – a stellar year full of highly paid players who choke when it matters.  So… we concede we didn’t make it to the playoffs, and we admit your season was longer than ours…  a whopping 1.9% more.

Here’s your broom… see ya next year!

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Sep212008

One Computer + One Capture Card = 35+ Hours Found

Quick one today folks mainly because it actually hurts to type.  I mainly wanted to relay a revelation I had today.  First a confession, I am a Chicago Bears fan.  Before jumping to conclusions, I am NOT a fan of the Chicago Cubs and yes, I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in Wrigley Friday afternoon seeing my Cardinals put a spanking on.  Unfortunately, being a football fan means I am potentially subject to about 3 hours in front of the TV once a week.  Unfortunately, I had to split firewood today and really did not have the time to waste.  Remembering that I had acquired a TV capture card from a friend (who I am sure will comment on the Cubs clinching the playoff spot) so I ran up and set the recorder in hopes of catching the game later tonight.  For the next 6 hours I worked on the woodpile until my fingers were too sore to pick up another piece of wood.  When things settled down a bit I decided to go watch the game being careful not to see any highlights or score tickers as I was heading to the viewing area.

I fired up the components and sat back to enjoy the game. I think I’ll hold off on explaining the components involved in playing the game back due to some required modifications on one of the items I stream the feed through.  Although I was upset at the final score, I was pleasantly surprised when I stood up and noticed only 35 minutes had passed since starting the feed.  I had basically crunched a 3 hour game into a very satisfying 35 or so minutes by skipping all commercials, injury timeouts, team line changes, game timeouts (team and TV), the half time show and all reviewed plays – all with a simple click of a predefined duration skip button on the remote.  Not only did I not miss a play, I didn’t have to listen to ex-NFL players ramble as if I actually cared about their analysis or opinion of a given play (especially Dierdorff).  Clearly this is the best way to watch a game if you are already maxing the available hours in a week.  There are some disadvantages of course, one having to be cautious you don’t ruin the element of surprise by seeing the score ahead of time and you have to do a little bit of planning to get the capture setup…. but this seems a small price to pay for the convenience this affords.  Now with the assumptions there are 14 or so weeks in the football year, quick math gives me about 35 new hours in the year.

Note, I’ve always done this for my weekly shows since a 30 minute sitcom really only has about 16-20 minutes of real content.  And for those brainwashed commercial zealots out there complaining about loss of revenue and stealing the shows funded by commercials… spare me the drama, I’m paying a subscription fee and if that isn’t enough to cover it… then consider raising my fee (of course, I’ll just cancel it and then we all lose … actually not me since I will have even more time to spend doing more constructive things.

Now Mr. Smith … what are you going to do about those stupid penalties?

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