Match Grip?

Match Grip is slang for Matched Grip, which is a way of holding drumsticks. I've had a few people wonder what it means... so that's it. It's kind of a geeky drummer term, but not so dorky like if I had "flamdrags.blogspot.com" or "cheesadiddle.blogspot.com".

It's beginning to look a lot like March

Well as you've all read over the last few months, the weather has been nuts in Oklahoma. Starting last weekend the temperatures dropped and it rained all weekend. The this morning I woke up to snow on the ground. I would guess maybe 2.5 inches around our house. The roads weren't too bad, but the traffic reports on NPR reported quite a few accidents around the Oklahoma City area.

The wife is good. The kid is good. Work is good.

The new Prince album came out this week. As most of you know I'm a big Prince fan. I've only listened to the new one a few times. It seems okay. Quite a few of the songs he gets all the performance credit (All instruments and vox : Prince). So he's still gettin' it done as a senior citizen.

The yo-yo fad is in full effect at work. We all recently did a group buy from an online yo-yo store. I'm not sure why it has spread like bird flu here, but it has. You'll frequently see us developer types in some serious design discussions while throwing our 'yo's'. I purchased the Avenger, and so far as I can tell it goes up and down just fine. I hope to one day be as good as El Guapo.

J

Strike a pose

The Big Dance. March Madness. Road To The Final Four. Day When Everyone Sneaks Off To The Cafeteria Every 15 Minutes To Check Scores.

Today is the first day of the NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament. This year I have watched roughly no college basketball, which is not much different than previous years. But still when the tournament comes around in March it's always a fun time. Everyone is filling out their brackets and pretending they know anything at all about college hoops. People gather at lunch in the cafeteria to watch games. Heather always prints out our brackets and hilights them with her own color coding scheme to keep track of who's beating who. I setup a Yahoo league every year with some of my buddies (I invite a bunch but only a few manage to find the 2.5 minutes it takes to register and participate). This year is no different. My picks are submitted and I'm ready for the action. I'm sure we'll have CBS on at the house all through the weekend keeping tabs on the scores and watching the exciting finishes and upsets.

The Sports Pickle had a funny story (they write fake humorous sports stories) about a guy who fortunatly was diagnosed with cancer. He was veyr excited because it meant he would be home Thursday and Friday for the opening rounds. Obviously that's exagerated, but the point is valid... this country goes apecrap for March Madness.

With that, I'm off to the cafeteria

J

A year or two ago . . .

in Oklahoma City, no so far away.... I cared about Star Wars. We were buzzing about it around the office and the Valtech guys that were knew to the office had stumbled upon a great video. After one Friday evening at The Big Chief's cube, we discovered a whole world of laughter at the expense of the kid. This phenemon probably isn't news to most of the folks reading this blog... but if it is, take a look at the video and then Google "Star Wars Kid". You will find a spazillion results and any amateur kid with a pc and some video editing software took a crack at using the original footage to make their own funny version. Some of them are pretty hilarious and some are lame. It's the Internet.

So tonight I found another Star Wars video. This one isn't so much funny as it's pretty impressive. It's a couple of young kids (maybe late high school/early college age) that put together a 5 minute light sabre fight. The whole thing is choreographed and edited pretty nicely for amateurs just having fun.

Anyway, it just made me remember when I used to care about Star Wars.

For the non Oklahoman's reading... Oklahoma spread some of it's abundance of wildfires to our neighbors in Texas this past weekend. Basically 700,000... SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND acres burned up.

How to get updates from my blog

This is for my friends/family that don't know about RSS feeds. I was digging around trying to find a simple way that you guys could get updated via email whenever I made a new post on my blog. I found a service and tested it with Heather's email and it works pretty well. One thing I noticed is it doesn't handle pictures that I've embedded into my posts, so you'll still probably want to click the link you get in the email to actually go to my blog and read my latest posts.

1. Go to Squeet
2. In the feed URL field enter : http://matchgrip.blogspot.com/atom.xml?bsuser=matchgrip
3. Supply the email address where you'd like to receive emails when my blog is updated
4. Enter the code on the page

At this point you'll be set to receive emails from this service whenever I updated my blog. You should be able to setup a free account at Squeet and do the same thing for any other site that does RSS feeds. If you really get into the RSS feeds for your news and updates from the sites you visit regularly, then I'd suggest going with a real RSS Feed aggregator like Bloglines. There are tons of sites that do RSS feeds and it's a great way to keep up with all the sites you like.

You can do a similar thing for my flickr page and be notified when I post new pictures. (The feed URL for my flickr page is http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=79723644@N00&format=rss_200)

Happy reading.

The Fabulous Five!

So we took Brooke to her first "show" yesterday. We took her to see Sesame Street Live . The show is called "Super Grover! Ready for Action". Basically Grover loses his 'superness' and with the help of The Fabulous Five (Elmo, Rosita, Telly, Zoe, and Rock Rock) sets out to find his superness and return to being Super Grover. It was actually pretty fun. It was neat to see all the kids participating by yelling things out and cheering for their favorite characters. The music was pretty good too, considering. Brooke seemed to really have a good time. She stood up for the second half and would clap and dance. And like all dumb parents, we ended up buying a bunch of overpriced stuff. A T-shrit (of course), a Zoe purse with jewelry, and a program. Looking back the program was probably a stupid buy.

Afterwards we walked around the outside of the Botanical Gardens. We took a few pictures and Brooke got to see the ducks and geese. We had a pretty great day!

Last night Heather shampoo'd the carpets in the living room. They were pretty dirty.

I was listening to Radio Wazee last night and heard a pretty cool band I hadn't heard of. It's kind of a mix of grunge sounding stuff with sort of straight up rock. They're called Slave To The System. Their myspace page has 3 tunes you can listen to. It has members of Brother Kane (they had a big hit in the early 90's with 'Got No Shame') and Queensryche. I think it's neat to see some 80's hard rock/hair metal type guys do something current that doesn't suck! So it is possible.

First day of March... and summer!

What the crap is with the weather this winter. Today was HOT. No, not nice, warm, not quite as a normal March 1st day... it was freakin' hot. 92 degrees hot. Brooke and Heaher wore shorts to go shopping today. Crazy stuff.

Not much else is going down in OKC. The state of course is basically burning up from all the ridiculous heat, wind, and lack of rain.

I just got the Arctic Monkeys CD. It's the BIG hype right now. They're getting the kind of buzz The Strokes got a few years back when they were breaking in. I like it and would recommend it to my buddies that like to rock their faces off! (Grammy you wouldn't like it).

OUT!

J