Weekend tidbits.

Yet another weekend has came and gone. Seems like they are getting shorter and shorter, but they are getting interesting to say the least.

Saturday was the WVU vs Rutgers game, WVU won, but there seems to be a little discipline problem with out game breaking wide receiver. I think coach Rich Rodriguez needs to address it, it has already gotten out of hand. Anyways Mountaineers win making my teams 2-0 on the weekend.

Saturday was Trick or Treat with a lot of funky looking people being let out. If you see either one of these two run and hide.



I did actually get a chance to see and talk to Jane over the weekend. I always enjoy talking to her and catching up on old times. I did manage to get a picture of Her, Chris, Sydney, Lucas and Ian in exchange for a few Reeses Cups. I think I got the better end of the deal.



We sat up and talked talked for a few hours about old friends, politics, Family, what its like to raise triplets and about any other thing that we could think of.

Sunday comes along, and I would have to say it's been pretty eventful. A family feud seems to be fueling up over some old and worn out issues. I'll just offer a simple bit of advice to all, anytime you post something over the internet, remember that it can be read by nearly anyone online and innocent people can get hurt. I have my own opinion over the entire feud, but choose not to specifically address it electronically. It's honestly not that high on my life's list of priorities.


Sunday does have a few happy stories, two of my nieces have decided to become Bloggers and I think Terri would like to get into it. If she does do one I'll link it for all of us to share. She is a very beautiful, articulate and intelligent person, I look foreword to reading her thoughts.

Weekend closes out with the Pittsburgh Steelers beating the New England Patriots ending their NFL record 21 game winning streak. Morgantown Wins, WVU Wins and the Steelers win. Another 3-0 weekend for me. This is a good year for me in football.

HACKED

I should have know better than to use my regular generic password when I created this account, seems someone went in and played around a little with the template and even managed to go into the HTML code and delete a specific part of it. Not the whole thing, but only the part that had to do with links.

Could it be a computer glitch? Maybe, but no one else's BLOG's were affected by this potential glitch. It must have been specific to me for some reason.

It's a good thing that I actually know how to write HTML. No matter, I went in and rewrote what needed to be there and replaced the links that were originally there. I guess the hacker wasn't experianced enough to know that most of the links were in a previous post.

My Blog is obviously back up and running, so enjoy. Oh yeah, to the hacker.

MoHawk Bowl

Every year about this time, my High School Alma Mater lines up to play some football against cross town rival University High. The game has been traditionally played at Mountaineer Field for a few years now, because usually these two teams are the top two teams in the state. The 1999 game drew an unheard of 20,000 fans easily the largest crowd to ever watch a High School football game in West Virginia.

Last night, Morgantown came into the game 9-0 and ranked #1 again, but University High, which is in the middle of a rebuilding year, came into the game 5-4 and ranked #14.

The game was scheduled to start at 7:30, but mother nature decided to drop an inch and a half of rain upon us yesterday afternoon. That and we were having thunderstorms so the game was pushed back first till 8:10, and then once again until 9:00. We game finally got under way at 9:00.

Once the game started it was a tough fought contest until halftime with Morgantown taking an 11-3 lead. A few Morgantown miscues within the 5 yard line and a dropped sure interception for touchdown by the Mohigans was the difference between a close game and a first half blowout.

After the teams came out at halftime, Morgantown showed why they are the #1 ranked team in the state and ran the margin to 38-3, probably knocking the crosstown Hawks out of the playoffs. Spencer Farley rushed for 156 yards and 3 touchdowns in leading the Mohigans to their 10th win of the regular season.

10 down, 4 to go to be the 2004 WV State Champions.

Survivor Night

Do you believe it, my favorite show on television and I have missed the last not one, but two shows. Oh the Humanity, I haven't missed that many shows of survivor since I started watching it.

Two weeks ago we had a Presidential Debate and I didn't watch. I felt it was my duty as a Moderate to watch the debates and see who I liked. Travis Sampson was voted off. He gave me the impression of someone who was no threat to win the game, but those are the kind of players who sneak into the money like Clay Jordan managed to do in Survivor Thailand.

Last week WVU played Syracuse at home and I'm not missing the Mountaineers on television. Lisa Keiffer managed to be the next one voted off. Can't say much about it because I missed not one, but two weeks in a row.

I will be watching it tonight and trying to catch up on what I had missed over the past two weeks. My first week favorite Chad Crittenden is actually #1 in this weeks viewer popularity poll. I'm looking foreward to getting back into watching Survivor.

Daily Show with Jon Stewart

What can be said about the man. During this crazy 2004 Presidential election, one man has seemed to be the real man of reason. How ironic is it that it comes from a half hour daily news show on comedy central.



A man who just a year ago I would have called a B movie actor, and honestly the only movie I can think of with him in it is Big Daddy other than Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, one of my favorites I might add.

Stewart and his crew has managed to take a news story, break it down to just the bare facts, and then turn around and satirically make you look at it in a different perspective. The man's popularity has grown immensely over the past few months. Everyone in my office either watches it daily, on repeat or they TIVO it.

OK, I'm a Yeti Geek

I know you have all seen them or played them once or twice, Yeti games are somewhat addictive. I actually have them all downloaded on my jump drive so I can play them if their site ever goes down. So far there are 8 Yeti games that are already officially out and I have seen numerous versions of the games altered in one way or another.

There are even some Yeti games that appear to be Yeti games, but are not part of the official site. Games like Stagedive appear to be yeti games, but obviously they're not. I do have to hand it to them though, when I fisrt saw it I thought it was one of their games.

Not much else to say today, it's kind of a blah weekend so far. WVU has already played and won Thursday Night, MHS won last night and the Pittsburgh Steelers have a bye week this week, so not much going on in the way of football.

Baseball starts its World Series tonight, the Boston Red Sox coming off what could arguably be the greatest comback in the history of sport in the ALCS will be taking on the St. Louis Cardinals. Should be a good series, but I think I'm pulling for the Red Sox to win this game, just so we can stop hearing about Babe Ruth's Curse.

New BLOGers

Hey, what do you know, I know have a Mother, a Brother, a Sister and a Neice who are now all BLOGers. Seems like everyone is wanting to get into the 21st century, hopefully I can convince all my siblings to do a BLOG.

On a professional note, this week has been very hectic for me. Doing a lot of running around for the
US-China Clean Energy Workshop. I did a little bit of work last year on the Coal Liquification plant that China wants to install near Mongolia. I went to the Pittsburgh Airport to pick up Ms. Hu Yuhong from the China Coal Association.

It was a hectic couple days, but they are now over with and life is back to normal.

Steelers win again!!!!!!

What a good weekend of football for me. It started out with my Alma Mater, WVU, beating UConn 31-19 wed night.

Next came my High School Alma Mater Morgantown High beat Woodrow Wilson 45-12.

It was a nice start to a weekend, two of my favorite teams both won and it would be up to the Pittsburgh Steelers to beat their arch rival Dallas Cowboys 24-20 with a late game Vinnie Testeverde fumble and Jerome Bettis 1 yard touchdown run. It was a great game, probably one of the better ones that I've seen so far this year, but my Steelers prevailed and moved to 5-1 on the season.

They are off next week and face the defending Champion New England Patriots in two weeks. New England currently has an NFL record 20 game winning streak. I hope they win next week so the Steelers can stop their streak.

I finally got them

I finally did it. I managed to get the only two pictures of all my siblings finally scanned and on the internet. I never could understand why there aren't any more of them, thee are pictures with a lot of us, but we never seemed to get all of of us in the picture except for twice.

A little history, there are five of us. Me, Kim, Terri, Pam and Gary. I was raised by my paternal grandparents here in Morganotwn. Kim was raised by my maternal grandmother in McClellandtown PA. Terri was raised by my mother. Pam and Gary were raised with my dad and Jean. So, with a family feud here and there, the five of us rarely managed to get into the same picture.

There were two incidences when the pictures occured, the first was a few years ago at my grandmother's house during a summer cookout and BBQ. Kim had came in from PA for the week to stay with my mom and Terri for a week during the summer. My Dad had a BBQ at my grandmothers and both Kim and Terri came to visit me for a couple days for the first photo opportunity.



There were numerous times when we could have had another picture taken, unfortunately it was my father's funeral before the five of us managed to get in front of the camera together again.



It was a challenge to find copies of these pictures and actually get scanned and uploaded.

Mom's 1st Multi-Media File

Would you believe that it's Thursday night and I of all people missed my favorite television show? How did I miss survivor? Oh well.

Actually I went over to my mother's place tonight and gave her a quick little tutorial on how to do Window Media Files. She liked the It's a Wonderful World that I did and wanted to do one of her own. It's actually a pretty esy process so I walked her through it. Give her a little time and I think she's going to master this, especially now she knows this is pretty easy.

We sorted through some pictures that she wanted to use, and I think we finished with about 20 or so that she wanted to add in. She also wanted to add the music, so that was a tough decision, but she finally came up with I will Always Love You, and she chose the original Dolly Parton version of the song. She had a CD of the recording so I ripped it into an mp3 for her and rounded up the pictures to help her get started with her first file.

So, in it's world internet debut for your viewing pleasure, this is my mom's first media file I Will Always Love You. Great Job Mom.

It's Survivor Night!!!!!

Woo Hoo, the on show that I actually look foreward to watching. I really didn't get much of a chance to post because of the Presidential debate last week. Last week was a unique one, for the first time in Survivor History, two castaways were eliminated instead of just one.

John Palyok was eliminated by the men. Which is kind of ironic because the men basically won the immunity challege as a team, but then followed up with an individual immunity challenge.

On the women's side, they also had to take a trip to tribal council. I think the women are in a lot of disarray right now. Mia Galeotalanza was voted out. There is alliance trouble in the womens camp, so I think their unity is in serious trouble.

It's a little early to really garner an opinion about any of the survivor castaways yet. I still am cheering for Chad as my personal favorite in the early going, but the game is full of changes and surprises so that could possibly be subjected to change. Although historically when I pick an early favorite, they are usually around till near the end.

On to tonights show. So much for my preshow premise, Yasur, the women won the reward challenge and also won the immunity challenge. During the reward challenge the Yasur was the first to match up five like symbols in the memory game. Their reward for the day was a 24 hour time period with one of the islands natives. He managed to show them that food was all around them, they had just not recognized it. He helped them gain a few of the luxuries from home that they had been missing. It's amazing what you can do with Bamboo.

On to the Immunity challenge and the puzzle game. The women were very organized and beat the men quite handidly. Rory Freeman sat at the head of the board and was the eyes for everyone for the men. He was extremely disorganized and possibly cost the men a victory. When it came to tribal council though, Rory's five man alliance stayed strong as the men solidly voted out Brady Finta .

The Weekend

Here it is Sunday evening already and the weekend is gone. There was so much going on around town I never really got a chance to to everthing that I wanted to do. Seems like everything was happening Saturday evening or during the day.

Early Saturday I wnt to my sister Terri's house to watch the WVU-VT football game. We were trying to will the Mountaineers to victory, but we just came up a little bit short. I had a blast going to my sister's house, she is one of the best hostesses you could ever imagine. There was a small group of us trying to cheer the 'eers to victory, but we came up a little short. I have have high expectations for them this year.

Saturday evening there were a lot of things going on, but I couldn't be everywhere at once. Kelly had a party that I really wanted to make it out to, but never quite made it to Canyon.

I was planning on going to Morgantown High Game with a couple of friends, but ended up going alone and met up with Chris to get a couple Multi-media files of the game.
MHS won, so that made my teams 1-1 for the weekend.

The Morgantown Balloon festival was supposed to have light up night on Saturday evening, but I didn't make it out for that photo opportunity.

Sunday was a chores and NFL day. I love waking up early and going grocery shopping in the wee hours of the morning. I've started going to a remote store just so I can take a nice relaxing Country drive on my way there.

Sunday afternoon, my Pittsburgh Steelers put a little ass whoopin on the Bengals. So, my teams ended up 2-1 for the weekend. I would have rather have had a 3-0 for the weekend, but I can't complain.

I also got a chance to talk to my brother Gary a little tonight. Gary is just one of those people that are natural at playing the guitar. My grandfather had the gift, but I didn't get that gift, and neither did about anyone else in our family other than my brother Gary and my sister Pam's oldest son Moke. Those two have just with the natural musical talent.

I have given Gary a Challenge that he's going to try to do by Christmas eve. I'm going to record it and publish it on my website, but I don't want to say what is is as of right now. It'll be a nice little pleasant surprise if he can manage to learn what he needs to learn and I can capture it. Stay tuned...

WOW

On a little side note I just checked my websites statistics and I was basically about knocked out of my chair. Total number of hits since I started this site on June 26, 2004...100,440. I'm completely stunned and had no idea I was getting that many hits. I was thinking maybe 1,000 hits if I was lucky, but 100,000?

My High School Alma Mater

I went out tonight and watched my Morgantown Mohigans crush Preston High School 70-6. Moragntown is very deep and talented this year, they look like they could quite easily run the slate and win the State Chmapionship again. Since 1997 they have complied a 89-9 record, which is really quite impressive.

I will have to thank Hector from The Eric McGuire radio Network for inviting me for a second week in a row to get a birds eyes view with the Voice of the Mohigans. Even though last week he called me the worst color commentator in the history of broadcasting. I get called that from a guy in a Pink Batman cape. Thanks once again to Hector allowing me to take some great pics from a unique view.




On a less happy side, my Mountaineers dropped a game rival Virginia Tech. This means we lose the Black Diamond trophy, but I think we'll get it back next year.

Mount Saint Helens

On May 8, 1980 at 8:32 AM North America witnessed what I would call the biggest geological event that any of us ever had or ever will see in our lifetimes. A beautiful majestic mountain.

We were able to witness probably one of the most significant nature induced topographical change of a landscape that could be observed and recorded in many, many years.


We were fortunate for the first time to be able to record an event of this magnatude. There are a lot of multi media files that will allow us to relive that day in 1980 at Mount Saint Helensthat was pretty remarkable.

Now today, we are now having a series of small Earthquakes in the area that has some scientists concerned. It's most likely going to turn out to be nothing, but we did have an Earthquake in California thats also garnering our attention.

In the title I have posted a internet cam from Mount Saint Helens that refreshes every 5 mins just in case something does happen. It's going to be something to pay attention to and watch over the next week or so.

Smitty

A few weeks ago I went to PigStock here in Morgantown. It was the first official WVU Pep Rally here in Morgantown. Coach Rich Rodrigeuz was there and they did the statewide sportsline.

As I was standing in line to get my Hot Sausage BBQ I saw a guy who I used to hang around with a lot a few years ago. I saw my old drinking buddy Smitty. I really hadn't had a much of a chance to talk to him in the past few years, so it was a pleasure sitting down and shooting the shit for a couple of hours.

I did manage to get the on picture of him and got his e-mail address. I sent him a message to the address he gave me and it came back undeliverable. Talk about being disappointed, I even wrote the address down on a piece of paper and it so as to make sure I didn't get it wrong.

Well, span ahead a few weeks till today when I check my e-mail and who do I get one from? Yep, Smitty managed to find my e-mail address and sent me one from his adelphia account. I managed to replay to that account and BCC'd it to his Yahoo, one way or another I'll have an active e-mail account from him.

Seems that the picture that I took of him at Pigstock was the link that reconnected us. He said a friend he tailgates with was surfing the web and found it. Talk about a small world. Anyways great to hear from him and I hope we can make it to a football game or two together this fall.

Survivor Vanuatu

Years ago when there were only a small handful of TV stations available, television programming was something that was taken very seriously arounf the big 3 networks. Programming was viwer oriented and first class all the way. Everyone had their favorite show and looked foreward to that one day of the week that their show was broadcast. Tuesday nights were ABC for me with Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley and Three's Company. Thursdays were dominated by NBC and Bill Cosby with the Cosby show, a different World, Cheers and Night court. Oh how I long for the programming of yesterday.

In today's age, their is but one show other than WVU Football that I looke foreward to. Thursday nights at 8:00 is the one time of the week you will find me paying attention to the television. I'm a nut. Survivor nut. The only show that I will actually say I look foreward to. I'm sure in days to come that you will see that it's the one show that I love. This is in a day when the networks saturate the airwaves with crazy reality television shows.

I love the show and have had my favorites for the show. I have two all time favorites from the show Tom Buchanan from Survivor Africa and I think everyone's favorite survivor Rupert from Survivor Pearl Islands . I was fortunate enough to get to see both of them play a second round in Survivor All Stars.

This round of Survivor is a little too early for me to pick a favorite, but stay tuned I'm sure I'll start posting my opinion about a few select players before the round is over with.

Maybe I'll dedicaye Thursdays to Survivor in my Blog. If I did have to pick an early favorite in my opinion, it's going to have to be Chad Crittenden . He's an amputee that seems full of life.

Good Luck Josh

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have been known to play a game or two of softball in my life. It's the one thing that I truely look foreward to every summer.

A few years ago we picked up this 14 year old kid to play softball for us. Tall lanky shit who had a pretty decent arm and was the son of our third baseman. His name was Josh Judy.

Josh was a kid who I watched grow from a wetback men's sotball player to someone you dared people to run on. In a few short years this "Kid" as I previously called him grew into a man with a 90 + MPH fastball at age 18. He had a couple worthwhile events over the summer, for one he eliminated the Jefferson Jinx for University High school. A great tribute for a kid who less than a year earlier saw his HS football career ended with a torn ACL. He did manage to top that game though by pitching Morgantown's Post 2 to a State Championship. Not to bad for a 14 year old son of a third baseman that we picked up.

Well, Josh has moved on, he's now playing baseball at Indiana Tech. I've posted the link in the title so it will be a little easier to follow his progress. It's been a real pleassure watching him develop as a player ofver the past few years. I'm wishing him the best of luck and success in his career.

Go Kick ass Josh.

Six degrees of Separation, Kevin Bacon Edition.

I saw this site a couple days ago and I had to laugh. I'm sure all of have tried it at least once. You name any actor from any movie and you have to link them to Kevin Bacon in no more than six moves.

I used to play it with a guy at work a few years ago, and we would try our best to come up with some strange ones for link together. I seemed to like to tie everything back to "A Few Good Men" where he costarred with Tom Cruise, Demi Moore and Jack Nicholson. To me those three opened up a connection to a wide array of actors to link to Kevin Bacon. This site takes all the fun out of it and finds the quickest link to Bacon.

Interestingly you can alsom find the Oracle of Baseball and connect any two players also according to Oracle of Baseball.

Family Multi Media Files

I got a chance to capture my brother gary playing a little bit of guitar tonight at my nephew Calvin's birthday party. I mananged to get three small movies that I took with my new Camera. I had a chance to break it in a little tonight and decided to try a movie file or two. I was really surprised with the quality that I managed to get out of it.

The link in the header is a link to my PHP Bulletin Board. I started a thread called Multi Media and posted a few things there. I also did a little Windows Media file of It's a Wonderful World with a few older pictures I have form the past year and a half or so.