TITLE?!?

More Press

2009-01-26T02:12:15Z

Did you pick up your copy of The Daily Freeman today? If not, then you would have missed this.

Music

2008-12-21T23:38:51Z

So, in honor of MySpace wiping out everybody's Project Playlist player, this seems to be the most appropriate time to direct everybody to Blip.fm, a great way to share your own favorite tunes with everybody else.

Be sure to add Gargos and aksarah to your lists of DJ's and start posting.

Potent Potables for $1,000, Alex

2008-11-22T17:30:29Z

Late to the party as usual. Gotta get better about updating these things more.

-- Last Friday's Dir en grey show was fucking incredible. Best of the 3 times I've seen them live. This is also now in my possession.

-- Got to referee for the Albany vs. Utica bout in the Washington Ave. Armory up in Albany. That was the largest crowd I've ever been in front of and it was a hell of a good time.

-- It's good to know that I'm not nearly the only one that thinks these could be the worst possible advertisements ever... and that they get played WAY too much.

-- And a big FUCK YOU goes out to ABC for essentially canning Pushing Daisies, the only thing worth watching on network television. Guess I'll have another free hour on Wednesday nights now.

Briefest of brief updates

2008-10-05T03:59:15Z

In honor of this awesome past weekend, and the Hudson Valley Horrors improving to 4-1 for the season, here's a whole bunch of stuff that's out there for everybody to see:

Vs. Pocono HighRollers back on 8/24
Vs. Long Island Roller Rebels on 6/7
Vs. Morristown on 9/27

Only 2 matches remain for the season. The last home match in Hyde Park on October 26th (this is going to be one hell of a match), and then the final match just announced with Suburbia (Westchester) on 11/1 down in Yonkers.

Monday marks the first official day in my new position. It'll be nice getting out of the classroom I've failed to fall asleep in for the last 8 weeks. Bowling resumed about 5 weeks ago, and every time I think I have a free weekend, some new party or event comes up, so hooray for no free time! I literally started posting this blog on the 29th and only just now got around to finishing it.

Whoa! This here's a blog!

2008-08-09T03:09:07Z

Damn, well over a month since I've last updated. Need to get better at this (and have more free time) since I've had way too much happening lately to remember it all.

I've been keeping up with my referee duties. A match at the end of June with Maine Roller Girls that was incredibly intense, suspenseful, and close in score the entire match. Hudson Valley won by a mere 3 points at the end. Yay! I was also asked to referee a match between Utica and Syracuse. This was Utica's debut match and they needed some extra help and it turned out to be a great night. No pressure at all that night since neither of the teams really knew me personally, just a night to go out, have fun and enjoy the match. In about 2 weeks time, the 24th, is the next home match against Pocono. That'll be a hell of a lot of fun with a bunch of our newer skaters getting their first shots in this match.

The only other thing to really note as of late is the promotion I just got from work! They announced the position well over a month ago, but were unable to post it awaiting approval. The approval had finally gone through I suppose and they wasted no time in asking for resumes a week ago today. Got mine out that night and then suddenly there was a surprise interview on Monday in house. Out of the 3 positions available, 2 of them were pretty much decided before it started considering the experience level of the others I knew were applying. It's was pretty much a fight for position #3. I didn't know of any others who were applying, but I guess it turns out a bunch of people did. By Thursday afternoon, they offered me and the 2 others I thought would get it the positions. Today was my last day in my current position and I'll be starting training on Monday. It was pretty cool to know that a bunch of people had put some good words in for me too there which didn't hurt matters. It's pretty amazing the change that's happened in the last year and half since leaving that old, poor excuse of a job I had prior to this.

Life is good.

Because there's no fancy picture this time...

2008-06-26T02:04:32Z

All you get is this link to the tickets:

Hudson Valley Horrors vs. Maine Roller Derby. June 28th @ 7PM

And if you haven't seen them yet, photos from May's bout are online

Hail

2008-06-16T22:12:40Z

This (among many others) just hit my house (and hopefully not my car). Unfortunately, the storm is still too intense outside to check for sure. It sounded like people were hammering on the roof, then bits of whatever broke apart would fall down from there. Pretty sure this could have been part of something larger before it landed.

Hudson Valley Horrors vs. Lehigh Valley (Recap)

2008-06-05T03:51:46Z

Better late than never. The first official bout I got to ref for was completely insane. The Horrors managed to take off to a 22 point lead going into halftime and kept most of it intact to finish ahead, 95 to 84, in their first win of the team's relatively short career so far. People in the crowd were going nuts, the team themselves were quite ecstatic rightfully so, and us refs had to be pleased that the game went without much incident, save for a few great spills by our outside pack refs!

Bout photos (will be updated as more people add their own photos to it)

Best thing about it all, we get to do it all again this weekend out in Bethpage when the Horrors take on the Long Island Roller Rebels. Sweet!

This Saturday

2008-05-29T01:09:36Z

Thanks to everybody for all the birthday shouts, now get out there and watch some hot rollergirl action Saturday night

Breaking a month long silence

2008-05-08T22:49:31Z

This just in:

Nightwish is still fucking incredible live.

Sonic Syndicate wasn't too shabby for the whole 30 minutes they played.

Opening the doors 2 hours after your scheduled time? Not cool.

1 hour for setup after a 30 minute opening act? Also not cool.

Fortunately, there's not much that a live act of Nightwish can't cure after the ridiculous amounts of wait that night.

Michael McDowell with one for the highlight reels

2008-04-05T00:29:20Z

Now this is some seriously amazing stuff. How in the hell he just crawls out of this car defies description.

Derby Media

2008-03-11T04:02:35Z

So as I sit here recovering from tonight's practice, there's a few articles that just came out on the team worth checking out:

This past Sunday's Poughkeepsie Journal Sports section

Roll Magazine, a local events publication has a feature towards the end of the new magazine. I don't think it's online as of yet, but it will be. The hard copies are around somewhere, and I need to get me a copy for myself whenever I do find them.

Nightwish coming to Poughkeepsie!

2008-03-05T03:59:50Z

If I didn't hear about this from somebody else and confirmed it on two different official websites, I'd never have believed it myself. Nightwish will be playing The Chance in Po-Town on May 7th! Ticket already ordered. Why don't you have yours yet?

I could only hope to live as long

2008-02-24T13:54:17Z

http://www.zwire.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=19324776&BRD=1769&PAG=461&dept_id=74969&rfi=8

Well, damn.

2008-02-12T04:25:46Z

The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated, but damn, has it really been a month since I last updated? If this calendar is to be believed, then yes.

I suppose the general reasons for this are that I'm either A) Too busy, or B) Too lazy

- Since my last update was about a car wreck, I suppose this update can start that by mentioning I got my car back only a week later and it looked great... for less than 24 hours.... then it snowed and looked like crap again.

- Bowling has been so-so for the last few weeks. Then this past Friday night my ball got stuck in the ball return in the back of the lane and the machine put a "skidmark" in my ball about an eighth of an inch thick, rendering my brand new ball of about a month now useless. The Pro-Shop there in Fishkill was supposed to take a look at it, but I haven't heard anything yet, nor do I think they can just fix that level of damage. It's too bad I was driving home Friday night. I would have loved to have gotten trashed at the Roller Derby party that night.

- Speaking of the roller derby gig, things are going great. It's certainly keeping me busy now that the team's back on a full-time practice schedule and always seems to have something going on during the weekends. I haven't been able to make it to an open skate night on the weekends in almost 2 months due to this. The skills are steadily improving I think, and the extra and more regular time on the track now will certainly help to build on that. And hey, I'm no longer the rookie on the team! We've got several new refs and in a few weeks could be looking out for several new team members at the team tryouts on the 25th.

- The rest of the weekends though are now goners thanks to the new Sprint Cup season starting up. Now I get to curse at Cablevision each and every week over not having the SPEED HDTV channel. They did at least ESPN2 HD to our lineup though, so that's a start. I remember Cablevision not even having SPEED for quite a bit of the time which is why I was a satellite subscriber for forever.

Back to being lazy though for the rest of the night. If things continue to go how they've been, I'll probably post another update a month from now. See you then!

w00t?

2008-01-12T06:46:58Z

So it started out to be a great weekend. Got my new ball drilled to replace the cracked one and had a very decent night with it personally, then the team swept all 3 games as well...

...then on the way home decided to cap it all off with clipping a deer in the middle of the road!

Front fender's cracked a bit and the hood is slightly bent in, I think I'm missing my front badge and the driver's side fog light. Who knows how much that'll be to fix, but the insurance should cover it. Tomorrow's task is to find out exactly how I'm going to get around for the next week or two it takes to repair it all.

And I was just short of the 10K milestone too.

The only really unfortunate part to all this was that the bitch got away. If a deer's gunna take out my car, the least it could do is die for me.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!

Goings

2007-12-31T04:27:12Z

Been awhile I see since last update. Nothing much of note to report though anyway. Christmas was good, food was good, presents are always good. Been doing a bunch of skating and continue to fall down lots. Each time though, I always manage to fall back down using the same injured wrist I've had for a month now. It'd probably be back to almost normal by now had I just not used that wrist to break every fall, but instincts work faster than reaction times.

Nonetheless, the alterations I've had to make in my bowling approach because of the strength in my wrist seems to have helped me out. I've been bowling pretty damn good these last few weeks. Speaking of bowling, a very late Christmas present came in the form of me getting picked for our league's strike pool. The way it works is that 1 name gets picked each week to bowl a strike in the 5th frame of game 2. If you do, you win the pot ($1 per team each week, $23 per week), and if not, it carries over to the next week. Thinking I had a chance at 2 weeks worth of money since the person last week missed I was quite surprised when I not only hit it, but was handed a huge wad of cash. Turns out nobody had won it in 5 weeks. I just netted myself $115 for throwing 1 ball! Not too shabby.

The only other notable thing I can think of is that I've been playing through Blue Dragon which I finally got for Christmas and have been quite impressed with what I've seen so far. Wish I had the time to play more tomorrow but I have to work all day, in addition to cleaning up my car early in the morning because we're getting pounded by a crapload of sleet right now. Fun! By the way, who decided that January 1st should be the holiday? Who the hell celebrates New Year's day at any point AFTER midnight. How about we make 12/31 the holiday so that our plans we might have had still can go through without having to be affected by a workday? Either that or have a half day on 12/31 and then a half day in the afternoon on 1/1. Seriously. Stop fucking with my plans!

w00t!!!

2007-12-03T06:00:54Z

A very nice weekend indeed it turned out to be.

Never mentioned it on here, but I fucked my right wrist up pretty good last Saturday while skating around. It was very weird since I didn't fall hard at all and just landed on my palms and rear end, nor did it hurt, but about 10 minutes later I realized I couldn't move my fingers or wrist around much. It made the drive home with a manual transmission car pretty "fun" too. Sunday was a little better, but not by much. Monday and then on was pretty good pain-wise with the exception of some swelling, but I was still limited in the amount of strength I had in my wrist. By Tuesday night or Wednesday, the bruises underneath the skin started showing as the swelling subsided. I had been pretty nervous about Friday night when it came time for bowling. By that time, I was almost at 100%, but I still had to alter my normal approach a bit to relieve some of the stress of holding a 16lbs ball with just the weight of the wrist. Despite all this, I still managed to throw an above-average series. Not too shabby.

Saturday night was the return to the rink and the attempt to not maim myself this time around. Not only did I succeed in that, but also ended up meeting a bunch of the derby team there included a few of the peeps I hadn't yet met in the earlier practice I was at. Not sure if it was the cold or the threat of inclement weather, but myself and the team must have comprised half the people there that night. Not that I'm complaining. The whole reason I ended up injuring myself last time was due to somebody else not watching where they were going. The less people, the less worries about somebody doing something that they're not supposed to.

And as an added bonus, I have a day off today (Monday) and with all this sleet and freezing rain we're getting tonight, damn am I glad I'm not driving in it first thing in the morning.

RotN

2007-11-29T03:19:45Z

Holy crap! A company finally does it right!

Random video game ramblings...

2007-11-26T01:46:16Z

I thought Rock Band was supposed to be in short supply? Then why at the Best Buy in Kingston did they have a stack of boxes as tall as me about 4 deep? Those are going nowhere fast.

Megaman turns 20 years old

I finally read through the article about the new Ghostbusters game. I was all hyped up about this since the entire cast (except Rick Moranis?) is returning, but now I'm not so much. While this game will probably kick ass as a game in itself they are billing this thing as Ghostbusters 3. Why is this so bad? Because it retells the ENTIRE 1st movie.... only this all happens in 1991.... about 7 years AFTER that movie. Yes, Slimer is back, and yes, he happens to go right back to the SAME EXACT HOTEL he was at in 1984. Oh yeah, he also happens to fly around the chandelier and hang out behind the bar as both get destroyed in the process... again. Oh yeah, the place was also set to host a banquet about 30 minutes later. Ugh. The public library is featured and they also show a shot of the same exact ghost that was reading the books from the movie's first scenes. Stay Puft also returns. I don't know how they're going to explain that. Stay Puft wasn't exactly an apparition like the others. He was literally a 10 story tall giant marshmallow... hence why he burns and explodes. Nevertheless, I cannot figure out why they didn't just try and rewrite the script to the first movie and add things they couldn't do to the first movie either because of time or technology constraints. The game would still have kicked just as much ass, maybe even more since they weren't trying to hide the fact that they wanted to incorporate EVERYTHING from the movie. Even better yet might be the fact that the person evaluating your job throughout this game is none other than the city's hired agent, Walter "this man has no dick" Peck. Yeah, it certainly makes perfect sense that the man solely responsible for the city's worst disaster 7 years ago is placed back in a job with the city evaluating the same people he took down then. Here's to hoping the gameplay itself is rock solid. I can look past the rest of it and at least pretend I'm playing a game based off the movie.

Trucks, Cars and Skates

2007-11-18T06:20:33Z

Well, nothing good will come of tomorrow's race at Homestead, but at least the rest of the weekend was pretty damn good. Came back from a decent night of bowling to see the finale of the truck race and watch Ron Hornaday Jr. win the Craftsman Truck Series championship for Kevin Harvick, Inc. This was followed up by an owner's championship today for Richard Childress Racing with the car Jeff Burton and Scott Wimmer drove during the year, and all with Jeff Burton winning the race as well.

After the race I headed out to the rink to finally give my new skates the much desired test run. What a difference not using those crappy rental skates. By the end of the night I had a pretty good hang of them once the floor finally emptied quite a bit and I could go in circles without colliding with people left and right (their fault though, not mine). All said and done, it wasn't a bad a night at all considering this was only the 2nd time I've been out on skates in years. Definitely looking forward to getting back out on them ASAP. That probably won't be until next weekend at the earliest though.

Raving Rabbids 2

2007-11-15T01:07:18Z

Is this quite possibly the best game ever? Oh, I believe so!

Whuzzup?

2007-11-08T00:25:45Z

Pretty sure I'm going to classify my lack of updates on just too many things to do from now on as opposed to "too lazy".

Not that I needed much convincing to begin with, but I still wanted to see it first hand before I made any decisions. I'll be jumping on as a referee for a local roller derby team. The skates have been ordered with hopes that I'll be receiving them by this weekend and taking them out for a test run at that point. Efforts have to get underway now as to learning all the rules, hand singles and fun things like that. Oh yeah... and learning how to skate again. Fortunately, the days they have as practices are about the only days of the week I DON'T have anything going on so... sayonara free time. The turnout for the event the weekend of Halloween turned out a good number of people and the team there is pretty insane, it'll be a lot of fun, if they don't kill me first.

Otherwise, work's been keeping me pretty busy and that's about it.

Nightwish and other things to make money disappear

2007-10-21T23:42:55Z

Thursday night was finally the Nightwish concert in the city, and awesome it was. The weather was pretty incredible, being something like in the mid-70's, even at almost 1 in the morning on the way back. But despite a late start to the show Paradise Lost kicked it off with quite a solid set featuring stuff largely from their most recent album with a few others such as 'One Second' and most importantly... 'Say Just Words'.

Nightwish kicked their set off with 'Bye Bye Beautiful' off their just released album. Many of the songs that followed were also off this as well, which is understandable since they've just started touring with a brand new lead singer. The worries of how Anette would hold up on songs previously done with the opera background of Tarja were quickly settled as Anette held her own quite well on songs such as 'Wishmaster' and 'I Wish I Had An Angel'. The group as a whole were solid and Jukka is arguably one of the best drummers in the business. No 'Kinslayer' or '7 Days To The Wolves' though... boo. Crappy cellphone pictures over at the MySpace page.

And what are the chances of going down south into a specific venue, cramming yourself into a group of people on a floor and getting stuck right behind somebody you know? Quite good, apparently, so I had company going back to Po-Town on the train while subsequently having nightmares about the electronic train announcements that piped through every 5 seconds.

The rest of the weekend... rather uneventful. Just enjoyed my day off Friday which turned out to be very good considering I got back around 3:30 in the morning. Everybody else it turned out seemed to have to tough it through that day. Smart move on my part I guess.

These next few weeks are going to suck for the bank account. 2 new Naruto games in 2 weeks, one for the Wii and one that looks incredibly good coming for the 360. There's a Dracula X remake (prequel to Symphony Of The Night) coming for the PSP. Dir en Grey's new single, 'Dozing Green', is this Tuesday and next week is the (re)release of Flyleaf's debut album with a bunch of new acoustic tracks included.

Cleveland. Good for something other than crime rates.

2007-10-09T04:01:31Z

All together now:

NA NA NA NA
NA NA NA NA
HEEEYY HEEEYY
GOODBYE!!!