My golf game stinks

I played 9 holes this morning before coming to work.  It is hard to find time to play 18 – it is rare that I have 5 hours straight but I can usually find a couple hours to play 9.  Lately the weather has been crappy when I have some time so I haven’t been out in a while.

I usually play at MacGregor Downs in Cary, NC.  The front 9 has a tough first hole – about 400 yards with part of Lake MacGregror right in front of the green.  Since I don’t usually hit the ball a mile, I tend to have a long approach over the water and today was no exception.  After chunking my second shot, I chipped into the lake and then did it again!  Nothing like starting your round with a 9 on the first hole.  Chipping is my nemesis – I tend to get tentative which causes me to decelerate which results in short or chunked chip shots.  Need to work on that.  I trippled the second so I was +8 after two holes.  Played the other 7 at +6 including pars on the 8 and 9 for a 54.  Lovely.  The weather was nice and it was good to get out and hit the ball.

I really like the new Golf Pride grips I had put on all my clubs.  I started with just my wedges but did the rest recently and I think they help a lot.  As shown by my score, I could use all the help I can get.

VU – the definition of the bubble!

Villanova UniversityAfter an awesome game against Syracuse yesterday, Villanova lost to Georgetown today.  Man do I hate losing to Georgetown.  Had VU won, they were pretty much a lock for the tournament but now – I don’t know.  They truly are the definition of the  bubble.  We’ll have to wait until Sunday to find out but I will be on a plane to Tokyo so I won’t know until much later.  Ahhhg.

Bad thing about the Big East (or any conference tournament) during work is it is hard to watch it.  We can’t get CATV or sattelite here at work and I couldn’t find it on the Internet so I was left to monitor the ESPN gamecast.  Not quite the same as watching it.  Today I found a new source – http://letsgonova.com/ was running a live blog essentially transcripting the game.  Between the live blog and the gamecast, it was about as good as I could have hoped.  Would have been nice to find it on Internet radio somewhere.  Hoping there aren’t any more conference bids stollen!

Not looking good for VU!

Villanova UniversityNot looking to good for my Wildcats.  With Gonzaga and South Alabama losing, – at least one but pronanly two more bubble slots are gone.  Villanova must win tomorrow against Syracuse to have any chance.  I would like to think that a win vs SU would get them in but two wins, the second being against Georgetown, would be a lock IMHO.  Too bad I am not on the comittee!  I am supposed to play golf tomorrow with ny buddy Ronnie – hopefully I’ll be done by the 2nd half.

March Madness to include Villanova?

VillanovaIt has been an up and down year for my Villanova Wildcats.  They started the season strong against an admittedly weak schedule and suffered through a rough streak where they lost to St. Joe’s, Rutgers, and DePaul.  They have played well lately but couldn’t get a much needed win over Louisville (a stretch) or Marquette (they should have stayed in the zone against MU).  Their NCAA tournament hopes pretty much come down to how they do in the Big East Tournament.  They play Syracuse on Wednesday – if they win they have a chance to get in, lose and they are out.

Finished Rock Band Guitar Solo Tour on Easy!

Rock BandI have been playing Rock Band here an there for a couple of months since I split the purchase of it with my son.  We have an Xbox 360 in our house but until we got Rock Band, I didn’t play it much other than some of the Xbox Live Arcade games (Pinball FX being my current favorite).

I don’t have the time or the interest to invest in many of these big video games (e.g. Halo) so the XBLA games which are short and don’t have a long involved story to follow have been more to my liking.  Rock Band has been different though.  My son had purchased Guitar Hero II and I played it a couple of times but even that didn’t do much for me but one day when my son and I were in Best Buy, we played Rock Band together and  had a blast.  So when he asked a few weeks later if he could buy it (one of his friends had received it for Christmas), I offered to split it with him instead of trading in a whole bunch of games for which he would get nominal credit.

Since we got it, he and I have played together here and there, usually not more than 2-3 songs at a time so we are progressing through the World Tour slowly.  After starting on Easy and playing Bass, I now usually play on Medium but I am still the Bass player when I play with him.  I fully expected him to be the drummer since he plays the drums at school but he prefers to play the guitar in Rock Band.

I was interested in playing all of the songs so decided to try go back and work through them on the Solo Tour on Guitar on the Easy level.  Since I don’t have much time to do this, it has taken a while.  This weekend my son was away at a Church Youth Group retreat so the Xbox was available so I finished the last 5-6 songs of the 43available on the Easy level.

Now on to Medium where with the addition of the 4th button and the faster speed of the notes presented, it will take me a while to complete this.  Although I’d like to play at Hard or Expert, I am somewhat realistic in my expectations – I can’t move my old fingers that fast nor do I have the time to invest in getting that good.  As longs as I can hold my own on Medium I am content.  I suspect I’ll do the Bass tour on Medium or the Drums on Easy (I find the drums really hard) before I do Guitar on Hard.

180 degrees out of phase with Leo Laporte

I enjoy listening to the TWIT podcast but I have come to the conclusion that I am 180 degrees out of phase with Leo Laporte when it comes to technology.  I don’t have a Mac but I wouldn’t mind having one – I have an HP running Vista and I am reasonably happy with it.  I love WindowsMobile and wouldn’t think of getting a phone that doesn’t have it, and I have an Xbox 360 (actually two of them) and although I haven’t heard him say it directly, but in several episodes the way he has referenced the PS3 platform certainly implies that he thinks it is better than the Xbox 360.  Am I worried about this?  Nope – just find it interesting that in several key areas, I am 180 degrees out of phase with the guy who leads a podcast I enjoy listening to.

Sony-Ericsson Xperia X1

I want this phone!

Sony-Ericsson Xperia X1

I am a huge fan of WindowsMobile phones – I have owned a bunch over the years going all the way back to the Motorola MPx220.  WindowsMobile gets a lot of criticism but I find it works well – the fact that you can find a contact by first name, last name, or phone numbers simply by pressing the numeric keys is by far better than any of the competing solutions.

I am currently using a Pantech Duo right now which is ok but the dual hinging is a little sloppy and the audio sometimes cuts in and out.  It is however, the first phone I have had with a full keyboard which I like a lot.  I wasn’t sure I would but I find it pretty useful.  My friends at Sony-Ericsson tell me this phone should be available soon – hopefully AT&T Wireless (my carrier) will carry it.

Generating SDIF

Last night I completed the initial PHP include file for SDIF support.  As I mentioned previously, I thought it would take a while and it did.  The upside is taking the time to go through the specification to create all the PHP constants has made me more familiar with SDIF.  I don’t think it will be too hard to generate SDIF from the registration information the plugin already collects however, there are parts of the plugin which will need some additions.  For example – the SDIF team records (there are two of them) require detail which wasn’t collected previously and the swimmer records prefer to have the middle name because the USA Swimming Id is constructed from portions of the swimmer’s first, middle, and last names along with their birthdate.  Looks like to me like you can still end up with conflicts but that is  what the specification outlines.  So now off to enhance the team and swimmer forms.

SDIF, SDIF, SDIF ….

This evening I have been working on generating SDIF but before I can generate it, I need to define all of the constants necessary to constuct the records.  I won’t get it done tonight but I made a big dent in it.  To define all of the possible record types I will probably end up with about 750 constants.  This is incredibly tedious work – necessary, but tedious.

Silver Light 0.1 theme installed

As I was sitting here noodling on how to implement SDIF, I kept staring at the default WordPress theme on this site and it became a distraction.  So I took five minutes and found a theme to load – Silver Light 0.1.  It’s ok, I don’t particularly care for the footer but it is better than the default and now this site looks a little better.