This past weekend was being rolled out as one of the top weekends of Penn State football in years – in fact, they have been selling ‘Beat Notre Dame’ shirts since last spring. So, it was just a bit of a disappointment that Notre Dame wasn’t going to be the powerhouse that they were last year when they came to the House that JoePa Built this year. Continue reading
A few years ago, over a friendly game of poker at one of my fraternity brother’s houses, an idea was spawned. All of agreed that we were having a good time getting together with a number of people that we hadn’t seen in a while, and thought, “what if we could expand on this idea?” In that moment, the beginnings of Summer Extravaganza were born. Continue reading
This morning, I received a phone call from one of my pledge brothers. It’s always good to talk to Gil, but there’s never a good time to get this type of call. “Marty, I don’t know if you’ve heard yet, but I got an email from Earl Adamy. Mark Brooks died this weekend.” I sat in silence for a second before I asked the obligatory, “How?” “I’m not sure yet, but I wanted to let you know. When I hear something, I’ll give you a call.”
It was just after 8 in the morning – the start of the day, the end of a life all in the span of a phone call. We chit-chatted for a bit, but you could tell that neither of us knew really how to grasp the news. Mark was a fraternity brother of ours, a few classes older but close enough that we were in the house with him for a bit. He was my roommates big brother and so I got to know him pretty well during the whole pledging thing. He was a quiet guy, with a soft, dry humor that came out of nowhere when you least expected it.
I’d only seen him once in the last few years, and for the life of me I can’t remember if it was at a party someone through, or at the house for Homecoming or even at last year’s poker tournament. Strange that you never think those moments might be the last time you see someone. There’s never any reason to think that it is – and even if you stopped to consider, and thought that you’d never see that person again, it was happenstance, that you just never connected over time and distance and family obligations and such. Never that one of you would die before the opportunity passed.
I still don’t know what happened, but in many ways it doesn’t matter. It’s a brother who’s passed far before his time, and the circumstances may add a touch of tragedy or solemnity or a shake of the head, but in the end it’s the fact that he has gone that really matters. His family is probably in shock; his pledge brothers likewise in their own ways; even the rest of us are surely wondering about our own mortality even as we try to remember the moments we shared with this man in and after college. For some, those memories will be painful to bear, while others will remember them as hallmarks of a good life. Either way, it’s the memories that remain in stories told over a cold beer, anecdotes at a summer barbecue and toasts given at the next home football game.
Until then, godspeed Mark. We’ll toast the old lady when next we meet.
A friend of mine from college had a small poker tourney yesterday – 15 people showed up, and I had a great time (except for the drive in along Alleghany and Germantown Aves. – scary places in Philly). I played really well until the end when I started to panic. I ended up becoming short stack and decided to make my move.
I’ve got a pair of 4′s on the draw and I’m to the right of the dealer, so I’m nearly last to decide whether I’m in or out. There are six still playing, and two before me stay in on the deal by matching the blind ($2000). I’m deciding whether to go strong (all in with $5,200) or just call. I called – and that was my downfall.
The flop gave us an Ace, 8 clubs and a 3. Both other players checked and I went all in – $3,200. Player 1 folded, but player 2 called me – and when we flipped, showed an 8 and Q – giving him a pair of 8′s to my 4′s. The rest of the deal was trash, but he said later that had I gone strong from the deal, he would have folded. I KNOW the rule is to go hard to avoid the flop when fortunes can change dramatically, and I didn’t do it and it cost me. In the end, I probably was just holding off the inevitable, but at least I could have played a few more hands if I had played right – and who knows what can happen with the right cards.
Well, Penn State has finally regained some prominence – although we’ll have to see where that leads. If they play the way that they did against Minnesota, I think they can actually beat Ohio State who really hasn’t looked that good so far this season. If they play the haphazard game they’ve played other times, it’s going to be a long day. Still, I am enjoying having a team that actually wins for once.
Go State!
This past weekend I got to combine three of my favorite things – well, four if you want to be exact. I went up to Penn State, enjoyed myself at a beer festival and then played in a poker tournament. The fourth thing? I got to play around with my camera a bit, too.
The weekend began with the trip up to Penn State – a much shorter and faster trip than I remembered, thanks to the tons of new construction. When we got there, we were met by a large group of other Theta Delts at the Cafe. We made quite a ruckus there before heading over to an old favorite – Zeno’s. It was there that I got into trouble, switching from Yuengling Lager to Chimay and Young’s Double Chocolate Stout. Both were delicious but added to my light-headedness.
It was a cool place to be, though, since they were sponsoring the BrewFest the next day – and there were a lot of brewers and beer afficianados in attendance to drink from Zeno’s 29 taps and over 200 different beers (and you’d be hard pressed to find anything brewed by the Big 3. Along the way, I met Matt from Stoudt’s Brewery, a good guy to talk beer with. We reviewed our favorites, talked about his work and he gave me a bit of a lesson on some of the styles that I’m less familiar with, as well as inviting me to stop by the next day.
As the night went on, I realized that I just can’t drink like I used to – but I can still kick butt in darts, winning 3 of 4 games. After the performance (and much trash-talking), everyone then headed back to the house where I quickly found my long work week catching up to me. Continue reading
I really like poker. I mean, I REALLY like playing – and I’m not really that good. My poker face sucks and I tend to be too cautious so when I do have a good hand, I end up winning far less than I should because everyone KNOWS I have a good hand and bails. But last night, I had a streak that just wouldn’t quit.
Sometimes, you can do nothing wrong. I started off the night with the following:
Then Steve sat down and muddied my mojo a bit, but I was still doing pretty well (2 more flushes, another full house along the way). All in all, a pretty good night at our mid-stakes ($40 a person, average) dealer’s choice game.
On the other hand, Darius must have pissed off Lady Luck something fierce. He could have had five-of-a-kind Kings and someone would have had five-of-a-kind Aces. It was that kind of night, typified by his luck at High-Low. For those of you who don’t know it, this game involves betting whether you can get a 3rd card between the first two that were dealt. For example, if you are dealt a four and a jack, you’d be betting that the card turned up between them will be a 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10. If not, you pay the pot your bet – in our case somewhere between 50 cents and the whole pot.
Darius, had at least SIX different combinations of 4-J or better, and lost them all. The cards would show up in his favor, but invariably would give him a losing deal. It started becoming a bane to get those cards because you KNEW that you were going to get screwed. But he kept hesitating and then making the fateful bets – and sweetening the pot. And his bad luck didn’t abate after that – he kept hemorraghing cash game after game, giving up a full house to a better full house, losing a straight to a flush, pulling 21 only to have the dealer also get 21 – resulting in a push. It was tragic. I haven’t seen luck that bad since a friend drafted Rob Moore in the 4th round in fantasy football – about 30 seconds before the announcement of his season-ending injury (of course, pundits would say drafting Rob Moore up that high deserved that stroke of luck).
Of course, I came out $35 ahead, so I walked away snickering.
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When I went to the Mummers Parade on New Year’s Day, I had the opportunity to get some other great shots as well. Now I’m not a fan of Mayor Street by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that the Philly mural program has to be called a great success. Numerous buildings have been greatly beautified by magnificent murals, some of them in less-than-wonderful areas. Here are some of the ones I saw on our walk through the city.
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It’s a tale of two PC’s.My new system is pretty sweet, although I definitely need to upgrade the monitor and the video card. I’m using an old triniton CRT monitor which is doing well if taking up a lot of space. I want a 19″ LCD, but that’s just me. As for the card, I could the minimum they were offering, a Radeon 300XT, which isn’t bad although I haven’t really tried to tap it out. I want to get an nVidia GeForce 5200 or better, though – so I can try to keep up with my son.
Speaking of which, the kid came this close to getting himself squashed by his mother yesterday. After installing some new RAM for him (we put him up to 1GB), she restarted his computer – and was immediately assualted by 110 different pop-ups, programs, etc. She was miffed, to be bland about it, until she ran an Adaware and Norton Anti-virus scan. The tally – over 1,000! various programs that were classified as adware or worse.
I’m extremely anal about my system, making sure that I don’t download all sorts of ‘neat’ programs because I just know that they are laden with spyware, adware and even malware. We all have Norton Internet Security 2004 on our systems to prevent attacks, but it seems that the boy has either a) turned it off at times or b) been slack in getting updates. Considering some of the spamware has been fixed since May by Norton, I’m assuming a combination. Of course, he claims that he doesn’t know how it got onto his computer, but the 20+ programs we found on his system kind of answer that.
The worst part – I don’t think he really knows how much danger he has put the rest of us in. Since we are a home LAN, anything he gets could potentially get to our systems, although the NIS2004 should catch most of it on our machines. Still, it kind of peeves me that he was so laissez faire about it when he mom was about to blow a gasket. So, last night we spent 4 hours trying (semi-successfully) to clean his system. It will take another few hours today to get all of the crap purged – and he had the gall to blow up because we wouldn’t let him use the computer last night when he got home. C’mon, kid – you aren’t that naive – help us out, okay?
Anyone have any suggestions of a really good Spyware program that we can install? Like I said, he has NIS2004 installed (AND updated), and we just installed the latest version of adaware. But I want to make sure that we prevent him from doing this again. We’ve tried the abstinence talk, but I doubt it will take hold – I want to therefore innoculate the best that I can…
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I’m going to be beta testing the new StyleMaster software from WestCiv, and I’m psyched to be able to finally make an impact on some of the products that I use. Sure, I’ve posted comments to the Mozilla boards about things, but this will be my first opportunity to really get into the nitty-gritty of a good program to see if I can help make it a little better. I liked Style Master 3.5, but there were some quirks that it had that made it a little less useful (see my review). Already it looks as though they have thought through a lot of the redesign of the product. I don’t know how much I can tell at this point (need to read the beta testing documents again), but if anyone out there wants to put out some suggestions, feel free. If anyone is even reading this, that is…
In the spirit of Halloween, I thought I would dredge up this image from my past. It’s me and 3 college buddies enjoying the chance to relive some of our youth. I haven’t seen most of these guys in years, but I know for a fact that ‘Paul Stanley’ has this same picture up in his house. And now to come up with something for this year…
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