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Painting

I am slowly painting my bedroom. Sunday night I did the wall prep, taping, and a coat of primer. Last night I painted half of the walls. That is, two entire walls, not the top or bottom half of four walls. The silvery blue color looks pretty good dried, and most importantly, it covers the lovely heart-laced border. In the meantime, I’m sleeping in the guest bedroom. It’s fun: like going on vacation without really going on vacation and still having to go to work.

After one official night of play in the tournament, my bracket is sad. Including the play-in, I am 10-8 (one loss next round for Pitt). One 5-12 was already an upset; the other three games happen today including the all-important GW-GT. Should be exciting. I’ll be updating my earlier post to reflect missed guesses, not that it really matters since I’m not in any pools.

Yesterday was St. Patrick’s day. My people appreciate your drunken perpetuation of stereotypes.

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Geekery

What do you do when your college plays at 2pm and you are stuck at work with no TV around? You write a CGI to grab screenshots from your TV so you can watch it on a webpage, of course.

#! /bin/sh
echo Content-type: image/jpeg
echo

mplayer -frames 1 -vo jpeg -nosound /dev/video >/dev/null 2>&1
cat 00000001.jpg

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ACC Party

The ACC party at Dream last night was lots of fun. In attendance were: the mayor (allegedly), ex-Terp Juan Dixon (tall), FSU cheerleaders (whom I will marry one day), Smashmouth (…), and Buzz! Smashmouth is not my favorite band, to say the least. In fact it was pretty telling that their best songs were the two Van Halen covers — “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” and “Runnin’ With The Devil” — and the seminal party favorite House O’ Pain jumping song. But hey, we all had a good time.

Here is the equivalent of 17000 words: pictures.

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Lately

Last night I had dinner with Joe, Jessica, and Jerome. This alliterative bunch was nice enough to treat me to dinner for getting older. Good food, good times. I only mention it because Jerome told me I had to blog it. I think that is now the standard price of admission.

In other news, SounDriver might be over for good now. Bass player extraordinaire Paul “Two Hands” C. has announced today that he will be taking a hiatus with all of the looming business and marriage commitments he is facing. He will be sorely missed. We haven’t officially decided what to do next.

And tonight is the mayor’s ACC party at Dream. I don’t have any idea how dressy the affair is supposed to be, so I think I’m pretty close to the average of casual and suit: fashionable monotone sweater with exposed collar and slacks (Scorpio-style jeans and sportcoat also acceptable). Anyway it should be good: Smashmouth, that’s the band with the “rockstar” song (according to the organizer), will be providing music along with DJ Rob Or Some Other Bland First Name, and drinks are free…ly obtained by plunking down lots of money at the cash bar.

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AC

So this weekend I made my first trip to Atlantic City, aka “The Bank,” with some other GT alums. This was my first visit to a real casino, and the good news is that I still have my house. In fact, I walked away from the $15 tables with $50 extra, so my hours spent Friday night cramming on Blackjack basic strategy seems to have worked out (also, I got lucky). What is remarkable to me is how many people were playing by superstition rather than by statistics, and how prevalent is the spectre of gambling addiction. How anyone can enjoy feeding quarters into the one arm bandit for hours is beyond me.

Anyway, we spent most of the time at Trump Plaza but also walked up the boardwalk a bit. I can’t say that the gleam of golden buildings and electronic symphonies of the slots has filled me with any more desire to spend the rest of my weekends working out a flawed system to beat the house, but now I am at least slightly more inclined to visit the tacky wasteland of neon that is Vegas someday.

Saturday afternoon we went to see the Boardwalk Bullies take on some other unknown regional hockey team. It was a great game as minor league hockey goes, except in the defensive arena as the final was 5-4 in overtime. There was only one fight, no blood, but plenty of good checks against the glass.

Congratulations to Wake for managing to not lose to NC State and giving Tech the first round bye. The tournament is up here this week; I don’t think I’ll be able to secure a ticket but I am going to a party at Dream on Wednesday for ACC fans. It should not be on the hook.