Diary of Monday Night Football

Actually, this is only about the battle for first place in the CMA FFL League. The Dwight Shrute Bears and the PPG Warriors are both undefeated at 7-0-0. The two heavyweights of the league play this week, and Tom Brady handed the Bears a 43 point performance, but none of the other players showed up this week. For the Warriors, Antionio Gates scored 21 and TJ Whos your daddy scored 14. After Sunday - Bears were up by six points, and they have no further players. The Warriors have DeShawn Wynn going tonight, so as soon as Wynn scores that 11 yard touchdown, the Warriors, against all expectations, will take the week and continue undefeated. Unfortunately, Green Bay has the worst running game in the league, but the Broncos have the worst running defense in the league. Winn is being handed the reins, and most importantly the bulk of the carries, so hopefully I have a chance.

I will watch the game and write about what's going on.

8:40 PM - Packers kick off, so who cares? I only care about the Packers on offense see you then.

First play - one of the ugliest shovel passes ever.

8:42 PM - I am not sure I like the trade by the Tigers today - seems like a lot of the future to give up, and why can't we trade for anyone else but the Braves. Renterria will probably be good for the Tigers though.

8:44 PM - Broncos moving ball pretty well. Couldn't the Lions have drafted Cutler a few years ago? Instead of Williams I think.

8:46 PM - KGB with pressure, Packers about to get the ball. Here we go. Woodson to receive, but over his head into end zone.

8:49 PM - first play , let's see. I don't even know Wynn's number. I just picked him up this week. Stupid pass. I want to go to bed early knowing I won. Get the ball to Wynn. Now a dropped pass on 2nd down, see what happens. That's why you need to run the ball. 3rd down. Hits the running back out of the backfield, but some guy I don't know. Some other guy I don't know I should say. Punt. Jerks.

9:03 PM - Finally, Denver scored on a nifty play by Cutler. I really like the running back or tight end coming back to make that block for Cutler to have another second or two. Get the Pack back on the attack!

9:08 PM - First down. Changed channels, watching about 8 women wrestling on USA. Football in a while. And I keep changing back to ABC, stupid ESPN. I come back and
Farve throws a big touchdown. I assume there was no run play. Jerks. Hell of a play though. What is that graphic where they track the entire path of the receiver? That looks pretty cool. I assume it is from Madden or something.

9:10 PM - going back to wrestling. Now some muscle bound screaming thug. Women are gone. Stupid USA.

9:17 PM - this looks the makings of a great game, or neither team plays defense, but very watchable. End of first quarter, Wynn stats - NOTHING. Hasn't even been looked at yet. Must have not sung his school fight song well enough during camp and Farve hates him.

9:21 PM - Cutler fumbles, will Wynn get the back to give Favre a little breathing room? Probably not. Wynn got a carry, he got a carry! No yards, but they are trying to establish the run all right.

9:26 PM - Favre play action, I think he did that just to tease me.

9:27 PM - Yards - 7 yards. on the Ground - Who the hell is that? Why is Wynn on the sideline? Why do the Packers hate me. Who is Grant?

9:29 PM - I am going to cry.

9:36 PM - Really, my last hope for victory is standing on the sideline. Did I mention my quarterback, on the biggest matchup of the season, got me 2 points. VY - who killed M in the Rose Bowl, 6/14 for 42 yards. 2 stupid points.

9:45 PM - More runs to super man Grant - oooh isn't he awesome? He is sooo cool. I hate football. Sorry, can't watch Deanna.

9:47 PM - I thought the man crush on Favre was limited to Madden. Apparently it is part of the Monday Night Football contract with the NFL.

9:57 PM - Ok, closing this, since I don't think Wynn is playing anymore, so I am going to bed.

Good day, great movie, scary politics

I would have to say that today has been a pretty good day. I got up and made it to work on time for an 8:30 meeting, that I handled quite well, the only problem was not making breakfast or lunch. That will have to be corrected for tomorrow. I then worked until 7:00 pm, since I kept plugging away at a program that I had been preparing to write for a few weeks, and finally got around to putting code to code editor. That sounds so much worse than pen to paper. Anyway, I made some real progress on that and headed home.
On the ride home, I tuned into WDTW, Detroit's Progressive Talk and was listening to Randi Rhoades show where her guest was Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, a frightening look at the type of government we actually have, one where everything is outsourced (such as 70% of intelligence gathering, blackwater) and there is little oversight since these are private companies and not government agencies. I only heard part of the interview, but one item that grabbed my attention and really scared me was her connection between CIA interrogation techniques and the way theneo -cons used Sept 11 to push their social agenda (never-ending war on terror, invade Iraq, domestic spying, silencing dissent), by taking the subject (interrogee or our society) and putting them into such a state of shock that they start to look for a father figure, and the neo-cons took full advantage. She also talked about the massive privatization efforts that have shifted billions of dollars from the public and government to private companies, a move that is usually attributed totyrannical dictatorships we say we are against (ahem Saddam Hussein?). One of the things I have frequently noted about outsourcing arrangements is that you tend to give up some control, especially in the way things are done as long as the terms of the contract are not affected, and it can be very hard to get out of them. I wonder what would happen if some of the private armies decided they wanted to be in control. I wonder how many different services some like Prince (the owner of blackwater, now a billionaire) would have to control to be able to bring the society to it's knees, maybe a private army like he has now, control of one of the major ports, control of one or two of the major intelligence companies, one of the networks, maybe one of the large payment processors and a major internet backbone - like UUnet that is still owned by Worldcom. If someone controlled a lot of these services (plus electrical control somehow), they could take the entire conutry hostage. It wouldn't take more than 3 or 4 of the major billionaires out there to get this together. These really only need the will to control and the thought they would be doing the country good. Sounds like neo-cons already.

Sometimes Randi is too far left for me, but I have enough of a brain to sort out the differences and agree or disagree. Anyway, this link to Randi's site has the interview. Look for Naomi Klein. This is another book I would like to read.

Once I got home, and had a little dinner, and watched Monday's Daily Show and Colbert Report, I watched a truly extraordinary movie, Stranger Than Fiction, with Will Ferrel, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson. This move is astounding, the main thrust of the movie - a character starts hearing the narration of his life - is something that many authors have probably imagined, but were not likely to pull off this effectively. I know I have used the old trick of having the characters read the script to find out what happens or to change what happens next, but the way it was achieved in this movie ... I should have more words for it, but I simply loved it. Wil Ferrel provides a great, subtle performance, and is a joy to watch. All the characters were. I really recommend it.

It's already midnight, I am going to get up tomorrow and have breakfast before I leave for work, so I need to go to bed now. Night.

My weekend and other thoughts

Hello, I wanted to tell you a few things about my weekend.

Somehow, I managed to get up at 6:30 am. I am going to stop right there for a moment so you can catch your breath. You feel better, ok. I participated in the Making Strides Against Cancer - Breast Cancer fund raiser on Belle Isle over the weekend. I was one of 10,000 walkers, and I completed the entire 5 mile route. (thank you). I did quite well in fundraising, considering that I did not even decide to walk until Friday morning, 8 days before the event. I still raised almost $500 for the cause. Of course, it is not hard to figure out why I walked. I love breasts and hate to see anything bad done to them. I walked with three other auditors and we had a good time. The weather stayed good enough to not be uncomfortable and we were done in less than 2 hours.

While we were standing around after the event, consuming the snacks that were provided, this seagull slammed into the cement right next to us. It was a disgusting sound, and we had no idea what to do. It lay there looking at us like "WTF?" and we could see the blood and life draining out of it. We stood around it for a while to make sure nobody stepped on it, tried to talk to the polices and security, and finally some of the event organizers found a box to cover the poor thing and called animal control. It was a terrible feeling that seemed to color the rest of the day, just watching it laying there, no way to help, I didn't have the guts to put it out of it's misery. I didn't go to lunch with my co-walkers and spent the rest of the day in a melencoly mood.

I think that had a little bit to do with my decision to actually stay at the office for a little while and get some work done. I was kind of surprised that I did not go home and go to bed, but I did some work, listened to the first half of the Michigan game, where they finally played a good game, and then went home. Even when I got home, I made some lunch and then did cleaning until around 4:30, when I finally took a nap.

I awoke around 7 to watch the parade of upsets. I went to bed around 12:30. Not that exciting, I know, but there are already so many things in this narrative that would not normally go on in my life that I thought I should throttle it back a little.

Woke up Sunday before the alarm I had set for 10 am. Again, I will give you time to let your heart stop racing. I cooked breakfast, cleaned the kitchen, took a walk, sorted pills for the week, until I went over to watch the Cowboys/Patriots game with my brother. I watched a few episodes of Heroes (just looks great, so many intriguing story lines) and then to bed. All in all, I completed a number of things, did some good, acted mostly like an acutal adult.

I did have some depressing thoughts, my computer may need to be replaced, and I can't afford that right now (unless 1000 people a day started reading this thing - email all your friends), I may try to roll back the operating system I installed a year ago, but I don't know if I want to take that kind of effort. The machine is over 5 years old, and just getting too slow to do all the things I want to do with it. For instance, I am not able to post on this blog, because typing gets so far behind it becomes unbearable. I would type something and have to wait 2-3 seconds to see what would appear on the screen. I went through a lot of the typical tune up things, including killing the dashboard, switching browsers, restarting, but this isn't the first time I have seen this. The machine is simply not powerful enough to use whatever cat operating system 10.4 is.

And then, after spending a hour or so determining my options, I thought my ipod had died. That scared me too, but was unfounded. Right now, my ideal ipod would be an ipod touch with 100 GB of space. I keep thinking about using Safari on the ipod touch in connection with a tool like blogger (this one) and google docs to do most of my writing, posting and reading the web.

I realize I hadn't posted about Lauren Graham for a long time, so I searched for her on imdb.com, and she is finishing up a movie (Flash of Genius) about Robert Kearns, who invented the intermittent windshield wiper that is standard in cars now. This is a big story around Detroit, since the legal battles took decades before the courts awarded him damages. It doesn't look like they filmed anything in Detroit (mostly Hamilton and Toronto), so that means she wasn't in town where I could have... well, lets' not call it stalking... maybe seen her around town or something.

Anyway, on that disturbing note, I am going to go back to work, have a good one.

Books I want to read.

So I have found more books I want to read. I have a lot of books, but nowhere near enough time or resources to purchase them. I think I should start a minature lending library to use my books that are just sitting here and borrow other people's. I know my local library should do this, I suppose I should check it out sometime.

Here are the books I would like to read:
Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors (Hardcover)
by Bill Cosby (Author), Alvin F. Poussaint (Author) - I saw the interview on Meet the Press with the two authors and they made a number of great points.

Linked: The New Science of Networks (Hardcover)
by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (Author) - I heard about this from the TWIT (This week in Tech) podcast, a book about networks of things from brain cells to humans and how they work. Very interesting.

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Hardcover)
by John J. Mearsheimer (Author), Stephen M. Walt (Author) - I saw one of the authors on The Colbert Report, and the message was quite interesting without resorting to anti-semetic thought.

There are several others, I will try to keep a list on the side.

Positive signs

As I write this, it is 7:25 am on Wednesday morning, 10/10/07. Why is that important? One, I am awake and clear enough to be able to open my browser. Two, I have made breakfast, (a tasty egg and cheese burrito) and made lunch. Now I am going to jump in the shower, almost like a real adult. This after staying at work until after 9 last night. I like this new me, if I can make him stay around.

Later.

A new me

I have made many bad decisions ins my life, mainly indulging myself instead of doing what I should do, whether it is gambling, watching tv, playing video games, going to strip clubs, oversleeping, goofing off instead of working, I have done to much of that, and the situation has affected my job, my relationships with friends, potential mates, myself, coworkers, it has affected my finances. By indulging every little whim, I have made it impossible to enjoy larger things in life, I have bound myself into patterns that cannot generate a positive outcome.

I have spent much time in whining "Why can't I make the right decisions?" After going to the casino on Monday and losing $350 (when I planned on only playing $200), I started a blog post that stated how I have proven incapable of caring for myself as a decent human being. After discussions with my therapist, I have decided to amend that to "Why have I not made the effort to make the right decisions and made the desicsion to be a happier person who does more what I need to do." I know that is a little bit long, so here is what I am going to live by, "I am going to make the right decisions. I am going to be happy." Making this change in my attitude will make positive changes in my life.

Other changes - I will not go do the bad things by myself. I will not go the casino by myself, I will not go the strip clubs by myself, I will not go the bar by myself, I will not eat out by myself.
Also, I will not buy fast food to eat by myself. I will only eat out with friends or family. When I am by myself, I will do more things right, eat better and prepare my own meals, will accomplish more things.

Today is an example of what I am going to do. I woke up later than I wanted, but once I got up, I ate some food from yesterday, then wrote a shopping list and task list, and have been doing all the things on that list - and only the things on that list. Writing this blog post was on the list.

For some reason, I have thought I could live the life of a millionaire (quote from Nobody knows you when you are down and out) or a life of leisure without having done anything to support it. That has got to stop. If I want to live a high life, I am going to have to work at it. I want to live that life, so I am going to work for it. I am going to live the life I want, make the mark I want and be the person I want. That will get me the person I want (as soon as I find them). All of this is what is going to happen.

Have a good one.