Month: April 2007

Posted on

Draft Eve

I just wanted to do a quick post about the upcoming NFL draft tomorrow.

First off, thank god there will be some football related talk going on in this sea of early season baseball (boring) and NBA Playoffs (I couldn’t care less). Football is a year round gig now, and I love it.

Second, everyone around here is talking about which former Boise State Broncos might get drafted, to which teams, in what round, etc. I don’t worry to much about things like that, as my ultimate love is BSU. What they do after is great, but not the end-all for me.

But, I do just have to get down a huge “WHAT THE HELL??” when I read about which players the scouts and pundits are saying have their stock rising. Particularly in the case of Nevada quarterback Jeff Rowe.

Now, I watched him play against Boise State multiple times. In person. The scouts are saying that he has pro size (6’5″) and a good arm and comes from a passing offense. That may be. But to anyone who has watched him will know this.

First, for some reason, his coach had him playing in that bastardized “pistol” formation for 2 years. Basically, he never lined up under center. Uh, not exactly how the NFL is played there, chief. I can only assume that they used such an unusual offense to hide some major flaw that was in his game. Maybe he has a problem taking the snap. Maybe his footwork is bad dropping back. Maybe he’s slow and needs that extra time. Who knows? One thing is certain… he has not played a “pro style” offense at all.

Second, and more egregious in my opinion is this. In his team’s home finale, in front of his own fans, on senior day, and on national TV, his team could have knocked off the 4 time WAC champion, sealed a nice bowl game and spoiled everything for the Broncos. I was there to see the game and was legitimatley frightened that we might lose. And you know what he did in that game? He crapped the bed. It was one of the worst performances I have ever seen. They were riding a 5 game winning streak (including back to back 42 point games) and could have secured a share of the WAC title. He ended that game an absolutely atrocious 6-15 for 35 total yards. He did not make a single play all game. Not one.

How you can be concidered a pro prospect when you can tank the biggest game of the season, and possibly your college career, like that is beyond me.

Maybe it’s because he’s still got Nevadatude.

Posted on

Random Thoughts – Fiesta Bowl Follow Up Edition

BoiseStateI know its April and 3 months since the gloriousness that was the Fiesta Bowl, but since today is the Blue and Orange game, I thought I might wrap up a few random thoughts I’ve had in my head since the bowl.

First and foremost, this is an amazing time for me. Seeing Boise State mentioned all over, in every news outlet, every website, every sports fan was talking about my favorite team, all at the same time. And it lasted for a month solid. Hell it is still going.

This is difficult to explain to a lot of sports fans. Anyone that is a die hard fan of any pro team or major college team just can’t understand what this is like. They are used to seeing references to their teams everywhere. Those teams are included in every season preview. Those teams are covered in every news outlet. You will see them on every SportsCenter.

But growing up a Boise State fan, or of any smaller school for that mater, is a different deal. I was the guy 15 years ago who would rush home from an amazing game hoping to see the Boise State score on the ESPN “crawl” of scores that the bottom of the screen. I would see that and get a jolt of excitement. We were on the map! Granted, no one else in the country gave a damn about a Boise State vs. Weber State score, but dammit, we were included.

Fast forward to now. Being at the game, you didn’t get a feeling for how huge it really is. You didn’t have access to all the talking heads discussing your team. Praising your team. Comparing this game to the greatest football games of all time. By the time we made it back to the hotel and turned on ESPN, we had missed all the college specific stuff, but Boise State was a big part of SportsCenter that night. I knew it was a huge deal when in the airport the next morning ABC World News did 40 seconds on the game and of couse, the proposal. Wow.

Then, all the resulting hullabaloo was just icing on the cake.

Boise State has a seat at the table now. For example, a few weeks ago, USA Today published their college football recruiting round up. Boise State was one of the 15 teams they talked about. I’ve had to totally change the way I search for BSU info now. It used to be, you could pretty much avoid any national publications/broadcasts simply because they wouldn’t talk about you EVER. You had local coverage, and that was it. Six or seven years ago, FoxSports.com used to rank all D-1 football teams 1-115. I read that list religiously every Monday, checking to see the Broncos move from 67th to 64th or something. Or getting pissed if we dropped 2 spots after a win. I know full well, they spent a total of about 30 seconds ranking those bottom teams, but dammit it meant something to me!

But now, ESPN, USA Today, New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Fox, ABC, you name it, they are talking Broncos. When I stop to think about it, it blows my mind.

Just today, the Dan Patrick Show on ESPN Radio spent time talking about the story about Ian & Chrissy’s wedding and how the NCAA is monitoring gifts the couple might get. (The same story was on SportsCenter yesterday).

I’ve heard and read a lot of discussion about college football finally getting a playoff system. Lots of people think that game shows why we need a playoff. Frankly, after thinking about it a lot, I’m in favor of the current system. I mean, suppose we won that huge game with OU, but the very next week we had to go play Florida. They would have kicked our heads in. Instead of ending the season on the immense high that we did, it would have ended in just another loss. The only advantage we had in the Fiesta Bowl was that OU was maybe a little overconfident, and our tremendous coaching staff had a full month to game plan. Both of those advantages would go out the window the next week. And we all saw how Florida made the wire to wire number 1 team in the country Ohio State look like a high school team. I’m ok with Boise State not getting a shot at the National Championship. We’ve only been D-1 for 10 years. Now, would I have turned the offer down? Of course not. But, so long as they give underdogs like us a shot at the big bowls, I say that is just fine with me.

I heard an interview with a kid the Broncos had recruited and signed before the bowl game, who lives in Florida. This kid said that his whole school was rooting for the Broncos in the game, and when we won, he got about 40 phone calls from friends and family congratulating him. He said a bunch of friends in his school bought Boise State gear and started wearing it around. Can you imagine that? Deep in the heart of SEC country, kids are wearing Boise State clothing?

Speaking of SEC, we never have to hear the word “Georgia” ever again. That loss 2 years ago undid about 10 years of work building this program. When the pundits would talk Boise State it was always, “Yeah, but look what happened at Georgia”. No more.

On my recent Oregon Coast trip, people recognized my BSU hat and mentioned the game. I’ve heard stories about people all over the country, and the world for that matter, having their Boise State clothing noticed and mentioned about. That was unimaginable just a few short years ago.

Jared Zabransky on the cover of EA Sports NCAA Football 2008 is huge. It’s something that not a lot of people who aren’t video gamers might not think about, but the amount of free advertising that gives the school is huge! I have last years which had Reggie Bush on the cover, and you see him and USC all over the place. This may describe just how much of a geek I am, but after the bowl was over, and we were driving to the hotel, in my head I honestly thought, “They need to put Z on the cover of the game!”… sad but true.

fiesta-bowl-trip057 I’m so glad that game happened against Oklahoma. They are one of college footballs giants. OU, Michigan, USC, Georgia, Ohio State, Texas… those are the royalty. Oklahoma has SEVEN national championships. They were the Big 12 champs. This wasn’t a down and out Kansas State team. Or a bad Iowa State team that got lucky and made it to the bowl. This was the big dog. Makes the game that much sweeter.

I have watched the game dozens of times. When the end comes, and Z throws that interception, I have never been more conflicted about a play in my life. When it happened, I thought the world was going to end. Game over for sure. I hate interceptions anyway, but that one was the worst of all time. Yet, without it, we would have never had the finish we did. Just an odd juxtaposition it puts me in.

fiesta-bowl-trip086This is getting a little long, but I will end it with this.

I used to have this discussion with people… If you could go back in time for any sporting event to view in person, but not have any knowledge of how the game would turn out (like you were watching it live) which game would you choose? My answer was always easy. The 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team Miracle on Ice vs. the USSR. Now, while I still feel that would be a huge one to be at, I have realized that my answer has finally changed. I would choose the 2007 Fiesta Bowl. The amazing thing is, I WAS ACTUALLY AT THAT GAME. I can think of fiesta-bowl-trip081nothing better than being in that place at that time with 30,000 fellow orange clad Bronco fans cheering our guts out for 3 hours. Sometimes I still can’t believe it actually happened.

I will take that memory with me to my grave. And cherish it every single day.

Posted on

Grindhouse: Magnificently Horrible

GrindhouseGeorge and I went to see Grindhouse last night, and I gotta tell you… It is not just a movie. It’s an event. Basically, this movie is made up of 2 feature length movies melded into one sitting. More bang for your buck, for sure.

Now, I’m a little young to remember seeing grindhouse pictures since I was born in the 70’s when they were in their heyday. But, John and I use to spend many nights in the 80’s watching the next best thing to grindhouse movies… the horrible schlock served up on late night HBO. We watched so many bad movies back then, I do have an affinity for them. Back then HBO only had so many first run type movies, so to fill the late night slots when John and I were still up watching, they had some of the worst movies ever. (John, does “Ninja 3: Domination” ring any bells?)

I knew going in to this that these would be so over the top that I had very low expectations. Which was a good thing, since I could just sit back and enjoy the ride. These movies were so outrageous in every single aspect, that they really came across as something that you and your buddies might think up just sitting around and trying to ‘out gross’ the next guy. For example, the zombie who pops a gigantic red boil on his neck and wipes the resulting slime on the doctor to infect him. Of course, in text that sounds absolutely horrible… and it is… but when you see it, you just laugh out loud.

There were a ton of laughs in these movies, but you were not laughing at comedic bits. You are laughing at things that are so crazy and so bizarre you can’t help but laugh. In fact, I was chuckling pretty much during the whole show.

So, the first movie was directed by Robert Rodriquez and was called Planet Terror. Basically a “zombies invade a small Texas town” flick. This was the one that was delightfully insane. Absolutely unlike any “studio” movie you have seen. It is really not that scary in a traditional horror sense. There are a few ‘jump’ scenes, but mainly it is so unreal you just can’t take it seriously. And that is the fun. There was just non-stop shooting of zombies with GALLONS of fountainous watery blood.  Tremendous!

The other movie was Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof” which is a slasher meets muscle cars movie. Kurt Russell plays Stuntman Mike who is a deranged stalker of young girls (of course) but instead of using a knife, he uses his car to kill them. I enjoyed this movie better… it was a bit more reserved and realistic. Plus, Kurt Russell is awesome. The scene in the bar when he is watching the girls and using charm to chat them up is great. He has that charisma that you’ve seen so many times before, but you know that there is a creepiness to it behind the scenes. You want him to be a good guy, but you know he’s not. This film is also packed with some serious stunt work that was quite impressive to watch.

I also love how the directors deliberately “damaged” the film itself to look and sound authentic. There were skips and pops and burns and scratches and dirt and dust. It really lent an air of authenticity to the whole production. Almost takes you back in time from the pristine digital images we’re now seeing in theaters.

Perhaps the best part of this whole double-feature was the previews before and in between. Movies called “Machete” which is a 70’s style assassination flick, to “Werewolf Women of the SS” to a holiday slasher called “Thanksgiving”. These things were right in line with the theme of the night and really a lot of fun. Not to mention, that the use of 70’s style movie ‘feature presentation’ stock was just icing on the cake.

When you combine everything, you get a total movie going experience unlike anything you’ve had for a long time. It absolutely is an event. I can’t adequately describe it in words. The end product is far more than the sum of it’s parts and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Set aside 3 hours, go to the theater and turn your brain off and enjoy the ride. You won’t regret it.

Posted on

Out of My Mind

Office SpaceI’m on the verge of losing it. I’m discombobulated. I’m disgruntled. I am frustrated and saddened.

Why?

You might think it could have something to do with the fact that the first time I ran through my taxes, I ended up OWING the government $950. (I’ve got someone looking at them for me). It could be the whole recent anniversary thing. It could be that the most annoying person in the world, Joakim Noah, won another national title and we had to endure seeing him nonstop on TV. Hell, it could even be that my sandwich at lunch today had muffaleta spread on it which makes me gag. (my burps taste like olives and it’s killing me)

But no. I could handle all those things if it wasn’t for this. I STILL HAVE NO DAMN PC. You have to realize… I use my PC for everything. Work. Entertainment. Information. Relaxation. EVERYTHING!

Here’s the story. If you’re not a ‘computer’ person, you might want to skip this one.

A couple weeks ago I started getting random reboot problems. The machine would shut down, just never when I was using it. I would come back to my machine and see a “Windows has recovered from a severe error” message. I did some investigating and could never find any definitive reason as to why this would happen. I tried various fixes, but things just kept getting worse.

Soon, it was crashing as I was using it. I didn’t want to wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows, but it was readily apparent that there was no other option. As you might imagine, that is quite an undertaking, mainly in finding all of my software to reinstall. A gigantic pain in the ass. Little did I know…

I backed everything up, and started the install process. I started to reformat my hard drive which normally takes a while. But this one was taking an inordinate amount of time. I ended up going to bed, while it still tried to format. When I got up in the morning, I saw a “windows was unable to format the drive” error. Frustrated, I went to work. When I got home again, I tried the whole routine again. After several attempts, I was able to get the drive formatted, or so I thought. When Windows tried to copy files to the hard drive to install, I kept getting driver errors (such and such file was unable to be copied errors). Finally, the thing just crapped out. Great.

I figured, it must be a hard drive thing. This was an old 80 gig drive and maybe it was just done for. So, I spring the 85 bucks for a new 160 gig hard drive (I had to buy retail in a store to get it quickly). Get home and start the whole process over again. Guess what… I started getting the EXACT SAME ERRORS. Ugh.

Now, out of ideas, I called my buddy Chris to come by. He’s a regular tech head and had a bunch of old spare computer parts.

We decided to swap out the motherboard since maybe that was causing the problems. To those that don’t know, everything plugs into the motherboard. So, you gotta completely disassemble the machine to do this. After swapping out my motherboard and reseating the processor and all that jazz, we tried to fire it up. Well, for some reason, this motherboard would refuse to power up with my video card connected. Nothing we could do could get it to work. Well, shit. It was nearing the end of the night and I was leaving for Oregon the next day, we decided to go get a beer instead.

Fast forward to next week. I had an old video card in my storage unit so I stopped to get it after work. Plugged that bad boy in, and lo and behold, we could power on! That is a good sign. After checking the bios and making sure we’re good to go, I attempted to boot to the cd/dvd drive, which you have to do to install windows.

Not so fast there, hot shot. For some reason, no matter what I try, I am unable to boot to the cd. The pc starts up fine, and goes through the regular things. It gives me the message “press any key to boot to the cd”. I can mash my palm into the keyboard, press every single key on there, and it NEVER boots to the cd. It just errors out saying that NTLDR is missing (which is what would start windows). I’ve tried 2 different windows CD’s. No dice.

So, Chris thinks that maybe its my processor that is fubar. Thus, I take the processor that he brought with the motherboard, and mount that one instead. Still no go.

Now, I have basically a totally different PC (different motherboard, processor and ram with a brand new hard drive) and still can’t get up and running. Do I want to physically hurt something? Yes. Do I want to chuck that thing out the window? Yes. Do I want to take that machine out to field somewhere and go medieval on it with a bat while “Damn it feels good to be a gansta” plays in the background a la Office Space? ABSOLUTELY.

I have no money for a new machine. At least, not the machine I want to build. This PC is about 6 years old, which in computer years is ancient. I was planning on trying to build a new PC this summer perhaps. However, with Uncle Sam (potentially) taking a gigantic chunk out of my ass, who knows when I might have the funds to put something together. In the mean time, I’M STILL WITHOUT A PC WITH NO END IN SIGHT.

At the current rate, I could be without a pc for MONTHS. Which, to a guy like me, is a fate worse than death. Well, if not death, at least grievous bodily harm.

So, when you log on today and check your email, get the weather forecast, check movie times, read the news, do your shopping, listen to your mp3s, look at your pictures, watch a dvd, and read this blog, remember me.

Poor, sad, uncle-sam-owing, muffaleta-tasting, PC-less me.

Posted on

This Day In History

Many things have happened over the years on April 3rd. You may remember this as the day the Pony Express was created. Or perhaps the day the US Coast Guard was created (then the Revenue Marine Service). Today is also the birthday of both Wayne Newton and Tony Orlando (how frightening is that?), as well as Marlon Brando, Eddie Murphy, and Alec Baldwin.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot… one year ago today was the day. I usually refer to it as ‘Black Monday‘.

Frankly, I had almost forgotten. About a month ago, I knew it was coming up and was kinda dreading it. But not that it’s here, it is almost a non event.

Granted, that day, and the following month was just about as bad as anything I’ve ever experienced. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. I think I’m still feeling the aftershocks from that evening. Of course, I can remember it like it was yesterday, and in many ways, it feels much closer than a year ago.

However, that being said, I’m not near as down today as I thought I would be. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that I’m in a relationship with Jess and we’re doing good. I feel like myself around her. It’s kinda amazing that my goofiness has come back. I didn’t realize that was kinda whipped out of me near the end. But now, I’m back to making sarcastic remarks, making fun of myself, laughing, singing. I’m sure Jess could tell you just how dumb I can be.

So, I guess I felt like I should put something in this space about this day, since that day was the impetus for starting this whole thing. I do love having a blog. I love writing. I love having you folks out there, all 6 of you, read what I write.

And since I don’t have much more to say about that, I’ll just leave it now. I feel good. I still regret what happened and wish it hadn’t, but there ain’t a damn thing I can do about that now. Onward and upward.

And, just because, behold the Meatcake…

Posted on

Slow Updates

Hi Gang.

Just wanted to update you as to where I’ve been and why this hasn’t been updated in a while.

First, my PC has gone tits up. It is a long tragic story that I may have to recount here, if only for the therapeutic value. I think that has raised my blood pressure about 20 points.

Then, I just got back from the Oregon Coast. I think that lowered my blood pressure by 15 points… so I’m not doing too badly. I’ll tell you all about that. I took a bunch of pictures that I will get on here as soon as I get everything back up and running.

So, keep checking back. I’ll have more for you soon!