A 'lil HooHaa

In front of me is my DVD collection. As I look it over I see all these DVDs just sitting there. Ones I bought because they were classics in my eyes, others I bought because they were good movies and others I got from friends, relatives or just because they were a good deal.

One thing, however, is for sure.

I don’t watch them enough. And I wonder what the hell I did with all of these.

Certain ones, such as Friday Night Lights, I’ve never watched. Even more — I’ve never seen the movie at all. It just sits there.

Actually, I’m willing to bet a large amount of my DVDs I’ve never even watched. I need to change that, somehow.

I’ve been debating getting a new laptop. Mine is 3-4-5 years old (can’t remember) and I could use it. It wouldn’t be used for my main computing as I have the PC and I really like that.

But, it would be nice to have a pretty sweet laptop for other things. One for a couple of writing projects I’d like to work on. I could write at night before going to bed, or bring it to softball tournaments and write then, or wherever else. But, it wouldn’t feel like it was forced. I wouldn’t use it for internet at all, except when I’m on the road for work or vacation. Outside of that, it would be a computer for me to do my own work on or something along those lines.

Of course Phat Matt told me the laptop he has, I drooled a little and was like… yeah, hook up the Dell account.

Thankfully, I didn’t pull the trigger yet. Maybe in a couple of weeks. We’ll see.

But the better part of it would be having something where when I travel for work, or on vacation or something along those lines, I could watch DVDs. These new laptops come with great screens and play DVD movies. That would be fantastic. Buy an adapter for the car so I could plug it in and it would be like having a DVD player when traveling.

That would make it worth having all these DVDs OR getting a subscription to Netflix.

It’s an awful expensive toy to get to play DVDs, but I’ve really been trying to get myself into the frame of mind to work on these writing projects come this spring. Something like this might help me.

Of course, I need to start following through on things. Maybe this is a start.

Well, I hope anyway. We’ll see.

I googled myself today.

It had been a while since I googled myself to see what the hell was out there about me. Maybe someone ripping me or maybe just stuff I had worked on.

So, after putting my name in quotes, it came back with “about” 1,710 hits. Not too shabby, I thought. However, I find, a lot of these are search engines that found a specific word in an article — and usually has nothing to do with anything I wrote about.

The best, however, are those town sites. You know, the ones that fish out there for certain town names. But it’s for a town, say in Indiana with the same name as a town I cover. So all of my stuff shows up there. Good times!

I did find an interesting thing, though. An article I did about a baseball player from my area was used on baseball-almanac.com. His quote is at the top of the page with the attribute to the paper as well as my name after it. That’s pretty cool considering it’s a site I actually use at times.

Apparently I’m also a doctor. Maybe I should open a practice in town.

I switched over to images and found a lot of photos that I’ve taken over the years that were in newspapers. That’s kind of cool to see that, actually. Or, photos associated with stories I’ve done more recently.

The groups was rather funny, as it brought me back to the days of when I was younger on the Internet and got into several different groups as a good discussion thing. Fantasy sports and whatnot. Pretty interesting. Now, thankfully, we have message boards and blogs!!!

News is, well, duh, news. Mostly things I’ve written recently. This is a nice tool because in the past I’ve been able to see where other papers have lifted things and given attribution. It’s always interesting to see if your work is ever picked up by a small newspaper somewhere that just needed a nugget of info about the things we’ve covered. At least they give attribution!

And, nothing on Froogle, which is good. If I was on there, it would mean I was for sale. And that wouldn’t be good to find out!

And so ends another day of being googled. If you’ve never done it, you should. You might find some funny things out there with your name on it. Could be funny. Or not so funny!

It’s funny as I’ve gone through this whole myspace thing. I’ve found some old college friends and other people who I’ve slightly lost touch with. It’s a pretty cool way to get back in touch with people, meet new people or keep in touch with friends.

If I had this in college, it would have been golden.

The one thing I’ve noticed, however, is people listing high schools on their profiles. Now given, if they are just in college or whatever, I understand. But hey, maybe some of these people are proud of the high school they went to or maybe they still feel connected. Heck, some people probably love reliving those memories.

So all that got me to thinking back to high school. Memories of walking down the halls, playing some sports and anything else. Then it really hit me and I realized something.

I fucking hated high school. I really did. I had several teachers and coaches I really liked. Even some administrators. The classes, for the most part, were pretty solid. But everything else? Bah. Fuck that, I hate the memories, which is probably why I never think about it.

I got picked on in high school (as most did) and I wasn’t in the “A crowd.” Sure, I hung out with some of the “A” people as well as the “tweeners” and the “bottom.” I wasn’t one who looked down on people or was jealous of people. I had crushes on girls just like others, I was shy (what a difference time makes!), and I was a bit of a person who didn’t like conflict. Therefore, when I was picked on, I usually walked away. Looking back now, I’m shocked I didn’t do something more extreme.

It’s also why I’m probably more apt to be an asshole to someone now rather than not if put into a situation of conflict. I just refuse to back down anymore.

Seriously though, I graduated high school in 1991. Thankfully, our class wasn’t close so reunions aren’t those every five year bullshit things. We had one at 10 years, which wasn’t too bad. Last I heard, there were plans for a 20-year reunion, which would be still a bunch of years away.

There are a handful of people from my class I do keep in touch with and chat with on a regular basis. There’s others I see and I have no problem speaking with. However, then there’s the fakes. You know — the ones who claim they are so happy to see you, but back in high school, they looked down on you like you were a piece of shit on the bottom of their shoes.

I just hope I’m in a good situation come 20 years. Hell, even if I’m not, I’d like to go back there and piss on most of them.

Man I hated high school. I might hate growing old, but one thing is for sure — every year I age is another year away from that fucking shitty point in my life.

College was a different story. And a different blog entry.

Unless you’ve lived in a hole on this website, you’ve noticed several of us have jumped on the myspace.com bandwagon.

For those that have lived in a shell and have no clue what it is, myspace is basically a homepage for people. You can create your own page, friends add you and can leave comments etc. If you really want to be creative, you can do a lot of things with the page, which is neat.

Celebs, most notably musicians, seem to have official pages on there as well, as a way to interact with fans — which from a marketing standpoint is super smart, even if someone is doing the work for the celebs.

Anyway, I’ve found something out about myspace.

It’s freakin’ addicting.

Seriously, it’s crazy. I find myself searching for old friends; checking to see if any of the requests I’ve sent have been accepted and anything else. I search the music people looking for good new tunes or go parading around and looking at friend’s pages.

It’s nuts how cool it actually is.

Now I haven’t done a ton with my page. I’ve added a couple of photos and a song and that’s about it. For photos, I use the gallery here. Same with the blog. But, it’s pretty interesting.

I actually wish I had it when I was in college. It would have been pretty killer back then. No worries about the site or anything like that.

I’m just wondering if I’m the only one who is getting addicted to it? I’m not always on it, but when I’m home and online, I’ll have it up in one of the firefox tabs. I can check it when I want or go searching. Maybe it’s just because it’s new to me. But it’s pretty cool.

If you want to see some of the pages members here have made, check out the thread: HooHaa myspace thread.

Or heck, you could just join us: My Space

There’s a saying in Central New York about the weather.

Blink. It’ll change.

I can deal with most types of weather. Rain, snow, hot, freezing rain, sleet, whatever. Just as long as it’s consistent and in the forecast. You can plan.

Last night was just wacked.

When I went to work, it was fine. When I went to dinner, it was fine. The forecast called for snow showers and all. But there was a warning about the dreaded lake effect snow. However, we don’t usually get it as far down as we are. But, it will sometimes hit.

At about, eh, 9:30-9:45, we started hearing about minor accidents on the scanner in the office. They were all on this one mountain I have to go over to go home. Like three cars and a bus went off the road. Cops radioed in that they couldn’t get to one of the cars because it was so icy and couldn’t even walk over to them.

Goodie.

However, with two or more hours before I leave to go home, I knew super DOT would be on the spot salting and all that to make sure I’d be able to get home. No biggie. Been there done that.

At about 10:45, one of the news reporters leaves and informs me that “You shouldn’t look outside.” So, of course, I do. And now? There’s about an inch of snow on the ground and it’s coming doewn hard.

Snow showers my ass.

I don’t know if this was classified as lake effect snow or not. But being I’ve driven in the Syracuse area when they got the lake effect, this seemed like the same damn crap.

Deadline came and went, the paper was put to bed and I got out of there as quick as I could. On my car? About two inches. And when I got done sweeping the car, there was already a dusting on it again. So it was coming down pretty decently.

Needless to say, the ride home was just great! [/sarcasm]

First, let me say this: The Jetta is a champ in the weather. I didn’t make it much out of third gear most of the ride and went down to second several times, but man, that thing is killer in the snow. Now, on with the story.

I got lucky enough to get behind a truck for the ride home. Well, most of the ride. So I had tail lights to follow. Only problem was that there were times when the truck slowed down too much and it scared the hell out of me.

The snow was crappy. It was slightly windy and the road was completly covered. When I hit mountain No. 2 on the ride home, I knew what to expect. At the top is a flat and there are always drifts and the wind blows them hardcore onto the road and makes it hard to see.

We reached the top and bingo — just what I figured. The truck, you could tell, was scared. He ended up turning on a back road and I was all alone in the white. I got a mile down the road and it started to clear up. As I drove closer to sweet Delhi, it became clear. Flurries and a clean road. Unreal.

It’s like last year when I was covering three events in the Syracuse area. I left Oswego and things were fine. Got outside Syracuse and there was like seven inches of snow and it was hard as hell to drive. Lake effect at its finest.

Needless to say, I was happy last night when I got to shift to fourth gear. A 20-25 minute ride took me 40-45, so not too bad. And I made it home safe.

And I have today off, so that’s a bonus.