Michael Jackson turns 50

Wow! Michael Jackson is turning 50! Don't really know why, but this just struck me as odd. He looks kind of ageless in a weird sort of way, and even though I know he's been around for decades, I was surprised to find out that he's 50.

I'm afraid to imagine what sort of mid-life crisis he's going to have!

NCSU Football: 0-1

Tough game last night for the Wolfpack. Tough for me to go to sleep after staying up and watching the whole thing. I was spitting nails by the end of the game after watching those Cocks run up the score in the 4th quarter.

I was very impressed with how our defense played. That's a good sign. But our offensive line doesn't seem to be improving much. True, Andre Brown had over 100 yards rushing and the line did a pretty good job of running that little trap play. But pass protection and even snapping the ball really hurt us.

Poor Russell Wilson got killed last night. I'm very glad that he just has a concussion because I thought he might have broken his neck. Watching on TV it looked like he got knocked out cold.

The designed runs for Wilson did keep USC off balance, but also got Wilson hit a lot. I thought Wilson got hit late twice (one on a pass and one when he slid after a run) but they weren't called. I'm afraid Wilson really will get hurt this year if we can't block better. And USC just pinned their ears back and went after Evans because they knew he wasn't mobile enough to run away.

Turning points in the game...the last possession of the first half where the shotgun snap is about 2 yards wide of Evans and South Carolina recovers the fumble inside our own 10 yard line. Our defense holds to a field goal which was a huge boost. But we receive the kickoff to start the second half and throw a quick interception deep in our own territory. USC scores a TD and NC State deflates.

I'm going to have a son!

Liz went to an appointment with the OB/GYN yesterday and they were able to tell the gender of our baby. We thought it would be another couple of weeks before we would be able to tell, but it turns out we were wrong! It's a boy!

Now we've got to pick out a name. Mark informed me today that Droopy apparently had a son named Dripple.


Since my nickname is Droopy it fits perfectly, right? Somehow I think this would be like calling him Sue. He'd grow up tough or die.

Around the world in 80 beers

So I got a semi-spam email from a travel site earlier today and the title was "Around the World in 80 Beers". Effective and catchy because it made me read the email. It walked about trips to Munich for Oktoberfest, to Brussels to drink a nice Lambic, or to Prague where apparently a good pilsner is easy on the purse strings.

Remember back in the day when you would measure distances by the number of beers you drank while riding there? For instance, Ramseur is 3 beers away from Raleigh. The beach or Charlotte may be 6 beers away. Of course, this depends greatly on your rate of consumption because sometimes Ramseur is a 12 pack away and you can get lost trying to get out of a McDonalds after you've peed in the bathroom sink.

It's Mythos time!

Another good weekend has come and gone and now we're back in the work week. When will the 5 day weekend actually become a reality? In the meantime, I've got a good thing going where I get every other Friday off. I work 9 hours per day from Monday to Thursday and 8 hours one Friday. The other Friday I have off. This past weekend I had my Friday off and a nice 3 day weekend. Friday I did all my yard work so I could enjoy the rest of the weekend.

5 of the Malaysian developers from our KL office are visiting the US and Liz and I took them shopping Saturday morning. We went up to the Streets at Southpoint and turned them loose for about 3 hours. First stop, the Apple store. I played w/ an iPod Touch and damn those things are cool!

After dropping the Malaysians back off at their hotel in Cary, Liz and I went on a date! We went to the movies and saw "The Dark Knight". A very good movie! Darker and grittier than I thought it would be and I thought I had set my expectations based on what I had heard and read from others. After the movie, we went to a Greek restaurant. And they had Mythos! Yes, I had an "authentic Hellenic lager beer" for the first time since leaving Greece. Good stuff. And my souvlaki was very good as well. Liz's moussaka was all right, but not great.

Sunday afternoon we went to my company's annual picnic. That was a pretty good time. Got to eat some good BBQ and meet Imaginary Girlfriend 1.0 or IG1.0 (pronounced igloo). This was a running joke in Greece about Danny claiming he had a girlfriend. Turns out she is real!

All in all, a good weekend with the discovery of Mythos the shining moment!

Blue Brew #25

About 6 months ago I had a Red Oak for the first time in a long time and it tasted very sweet. Adrian thought that it had honey in it and from that point on I've had in the back of my mind to try brewing a honey amber beer.

So that's what I tried to do last weekend. I did some research and made up my own recipe so we'll see how it turns out. I used ~ 1.6 pounds of Dad's honey and I'm also going to use honey as the priming sugar. This should give the beer a nice sweet finish. Original gravity was pretty big (1.0612) but that was probably boosted by the honey. We'll see how it finishes up, but it has the potential to be a nice big beer. The honey amber should be ready to bottle in a about another week. I'll probably bottle it on the 30th.

So this means that I have two fermentations going at the same time in my guest bathroom between my mead and this beer! First time that's ever happened. Never thought I'd use 2 carboys at the same time.

By the way, #23 (the grapefruit juice or Rudd Beer III) is mellowing out over time. I'll bring some to the football draft for anybody who would like to try it. It's gone from barely drinkable to barely adequate! What a slogan that would be! "Blue Brew: It's barely adequate!" I think the explosion in your mouth slogan is still the best, though.

Strong like a Barbie fishing reel

A North Carolina man recently caught a state record channel catfish using his granddaughter's Barbie fishing reel. The fish weighed 21 pounds and at 32 inches long was 2 inches longer than the fishing rod! It was caught on 6 pound test line.

The little girl asked him to hold her pole while she went to the bathroom. The fish hit and he fought it for 25 minutes! Amazing!

I shouldn't be allowed to drive in the morning...

Sometimes I think it's a wonder I actually make it to work in the mornings. Today I drove off with my coffee thermos still on top of the car. Didn't notice it until it fell off. I got lucky this time and not all the coffee spilled out of it. Notice I said this time. This is the 3rd time I've done this in the past 3 weeks. Soon the roof of my white car will be coffee colored from all the spills.

However, I can say that Thermos makes one hell of a travel mug! That thing has fallen from the roof my my car at least 6 times and still works like a champ. A little scratched up but it still keeps coffee hot.

The game of Wall

Last Christmas I bought each of my co-workers a Nerf N-Strike Maverick dart gun which has provided hours of fun and stress relief. Since we're huge dorks, we like to make up little games to play with our dart guns. We can't be satisfied just wandering the hallways and shooting each other like normal people. That gets boring. Unless of course we did something like this...



In honor of Scrubs (remember "Steak", the competition between Turk and J.D. to eat a steak the fastest), we've given all our games simple names. The most popular game by far is the game of Wall. To play, you stand in the hallway at my door frame and shoot at the wall at the end of the hallway about 50 feet away. The object is to hit as high up on the wall as possible. Each player alternates a shot until their 6 darts have been fired. This is harder than it sounds since the wall is out of effective range of the gun. You have to swing or push the gun to provide enough momentum for a dart to reach the wall. Sounds easy, right? But there is nothing more emasculating than when you try too hard and end up with a "dart of shame", where the dart either dribbles out of the gun or misfires and doesn't make it out of the barrel.

Other fun games to play include Sign (hit the sign hanging from the ceiling), Trash Can (shoot darts into a trash can), Name Plate (hit a name plate as many times as possible), Fire Extinguisher (hit a fire extinguisher and the dart must stick), and Coaster (hit a leather coaster in the air after it's been thrown by another).

Weekend et al.

Besides the dishwasher crapping out, I had a pretty good weekend. As usual for me, I measure things by the meals I eat. Friday was homemade pizza w/ peppers, onions, and pepperoni. Very good! Then I watched the Olympics until I was falling asleep in my chair.

Saturday I got to eat at Chick-fil-a in the mall while shopping for a dishwasher. Anytime I get Chick-fil-a is good! Saturday afternoon Liz had church choir practice. They've started practicing their Christmas cantata. I tried the Christmas in July joke before I realized it was August already. Saturday night one of the choir members had a cookout where I got to eat lots of hamburgers, hot dogs, and deserts! Then it was more Olympics, playing Civ 4, and falling asleep in my chair.

Sunday afternoon I went down to Mom and Dad's to visit. Liz had a medallion ceremony at Campbell she had to attend so she couldn't come. I got to go swimming and then eat some steak! And some very good pound cake from a Paula Dean recipe. That probably means the cake coagulates in your arteries, but it very well may be worth it!

And now the work week begins (although I finished writing this around 5:00 on Monday afternoon)...

I loathe my diswasher...

There. I've said it. And I'll say it again. I loathe my dishwasher!

You may think that's a harsh sentiment for such a helpful appliance. After all, is there anything worse than having to hand wash all your dishes? Well, my dishwasher is a piece of poo. There is a temperature sensor that keeps crapping out in it. I've replaced that sensor at least 6 times and one time I replaced the whole control board thinking there was a problem with it. I've poured more money in parts into that thing than it would cost to buy a cheap dishwasher.

Last Monday, when I got home Liz told me that the dishwasher had crapped out again. I told her that I wasn't going to fix it again, but she looked and I had one more spare temperature sensor. So I pulled out my multimeter, took off the dishwasher door to expose the control board, and started searching for the short. Sure enough, it was at the damn temperature sensor. So I replaced it and said that it was the last time I was going to work on the dishwasher. Well, Friday I get home from work and the dishwasher is broken again.

So Liz and I went dishwasher shopping on Saturday. The new one is supposed to come in Tuesday. I loathe my old dishwasher and hope the new one is better. As long as this new one doesn't sound like a jet taking off and runs without breaking for more than 2 years it will be the clear cut winner!

Space Ghost and the Macho Man

So on the way back from lunch last week, Danny (one of my co-workers) tells me that there was an episode of Space Ghost where Randy Savage plays Space Ghost's grandpa. I couldn't remember ever seeing that episode, and it sounded awesome, so I went a searchin'.

I present one of the funniest episodes of SGC2C I've ever seen. My favorite quote..."You're pet monkey hit me with a folding chair."



And this just makes me think about driving down Hwy 40 in a big ol' pickup truck!

This took a lot of time!

This is pretty darn cool (and nerdy)! Especially at the end when the Superman theme kicks off and the DC guys start showing up.

Stop action with action figures has got to be grueling. Limited mobility and all. Just think of the time involved...
Assume it's 10 "frames" (pictures) per second
Movie is 8:42 = 522 seconds
522 * 10 = 5220 pictures
30 seconds to take each picture = 156,600 seconds = 2610 hours
If you worked 8 hours a day we're talking about 326.25 days!

At 8 frames per second you're still talking 261 days!

More Olympics coverage

Apparently Olympic athletes are horny. 100,000 condoms are being provided to Olympic athletes in Beijing. There are 10,500 athletes at the games which gives a break down of ~ 9.5 condoms per person. Wow!

In Sydney the athletes went through 70,000 and another 20,000 had to be brought in. I guess for the Beijing Olympics they didn't want to take any chances.

New Olympic slogan...
Wrap it before you tap it or you may bring home something other than gold!

Team Handball

I've really enjoyed watching the Olympics so far this summer. I think NBC is doing a good job with their combination of television and on-line coverage. You can watch highlights (and sometimes live coverage) of just about anything you want to online.

And that brings me to handball...
Earlier I talked about watching some of the women's handball games. I've started watching some of the highlights over the last couple of days (because I'm strangely fascinated) and I got tired of not understanding what in the hell was going on. So I looked up the rules. Not sure I really understand the game better after reading those!

And check out the Wikipedia article on handball. Who know the game had origins in Ancient Greece and Rome?

A weekend in review

Weekends are usually good and this one was no exception. I had my first Friday off (from my alternate work schedule) in about 2 months. 3 day weekends are definitely better than the 2 day variety!

Friday morning I helped Liz move into her new office down at Campbell. The guy who had the office before her still hasn't moved all his stuff out so we pretty much put the boxes in a storage room for the time being. Then we went to Melvin's for lunch and I got a couple of hot dogs because that Homewrecker hot dog got me hungry for hot dogs all last week!

Friday afternoon we drove up to Marion so we'd be closer to Jeremy and Staci's for Evie's birthday party Saturday afternoon. The funny thing was that Liz's parents were up in Chesapeake visiting Liz's brother and sister-in-law. So we stayed by ourselves in her parents house Friday which felt a little weird.

Saturday morning we got up and assed around the house. Watched a little of the Olympics coverage. Saw some women's volleyball and handball. That handball is some weird stuff! I'm not sure what's weirder, curling in the Winter Olympics or handball in the Summer games.

Saturday afternoon we drove to Jeremy's parents for Evie's birthday. That was a good time. Little Evie really enjoyed her birthday cake. And by enjoy I mean she face planted into the sucker! I also got to meet a porn movie reviewer (technically she was a PR rep for Adam and Eve) which was pretty interesting. Apparently you can get paid $0.40/minute to review movies. Who knew?

Sunday I ate a crap load of fried chicken at the New Member's luncheon at church, and then I worked around the house mowing grass and stuff. I also started my first batch of mead Sunday afternoon! I used honey (17.5 pounds) that Dad had given me so this may be the cheapest batch of alcohol I've made to this point. I decided to make a ginger mead so we'll see how it turns out. It was fermenting in the guest bathroom when I left the house this morning. Starting specific gravity was 1.126 (biggest by far of anything I've done) and the finishing is expected to be between 1.020 and 1.035. For context, most of my beers have a starting specific gravity around 1.040. This mead will turn out to be 12%-14% if all goes well. It will take 3-4 months for fermentation to complete so hopefully by the new year we'll have something new to try.

So how about Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes passing away over the weekend?! I must say that I was shocked by both of these deaths. Bernie Mac sure didn't look 50! I also didn't know that Isaac Hayes had a stroke in 2006 and that was the main reason he left South Park instead of the lampooning of Scientology. Both actors will appear in a movie, "Soul Men", that ironically enough has a plot revolving around death. Sometimes real life is stranger than fiction.

Is it sad the picture makes me hungry?

Speaking of food, Kevin sent me this yesterday and it's too good not to share.

I give you, what has to be the world's largest hot dog!

Check out the full story and make sure to watch the YouTube video at the bottom where the place is featured in an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.

So where to you get a 15 inch hot dog that weighs a pound? Is there a company out there that actually makes such a thing? I can't imagine that demand is particularly high!

Gotta start somewhere!

Well, you've got to start somewhere so here we go...

After eating a combo plate of fried chicken and BBQ (w/ collards and boiled potatoes on the side) from Cooper's for lunch, this just seemed appropriate. I present to you, the BBQ song!





Some of you may recognize these guys from the Cornhole song.