FIFA World Cup Murals by ESPN | CreativeRoots – Art and design inspiration from around the world.

I’ve seen a number of these around the subway stations, and always thought that they were pretty cool — this link displays all of them, which is nice, as I haven’t seen a number of them (there are like 33 total).

Days like today reinforce nicely my belief that I can can sleep in and still have a productive day. I was up until around 3:30 AM last night, revisiting the glory that is “Pyschonauts,” and so this morning decided that I didn’t need to get out of bed until around 1 PM. And it was great. When I did get up and start moving around, I swung into action like a summer blockbuster hero:

• Caught up with some emails
• Did my 30 minutes step aerobics
• Played through another level of “Bikini Samurai Squad” during that 30 minutes (the game is a good one for that, because it really doesn’t require a lot of concentration)
• Got my car’s oil changed (by the way, I have 8,500 miles on my 3-year old Escape; this is so odd for someone who used to put on close to 20,000 miles a year)
• Got a much-needed haircut; the poof is gone… for now
• Picked up groceries
• Walked over to CostCo for a few items
• Dropped off my rent check in the mail
• Finished up the laundry
• Sorted through the heap of papers in my bedroom

And it’s still pretty early. This will be spiffy, as it means that now is a good time to go ahead and start working more on the computer, but I won’t feel like I should have been outside.

Incidentally, I think the two main reasons why everything seemed to click today was because with football season over, I have much more time on the weekends, and since I had been waiting to take care of a few things, I had a nice string of things to do in all one trip. Efficient, my friends!

More is on the plate for tonight:

• Make pasta for dinner
• Wash dishes
• Chop veggies for the upcoming week
• Wash off grapes and get them in a snack-ready bowl
• Play some more Pyschonauts
• Reply to some more emails
• And so much more!!!

Also, while at the Oil Change spot, I started resorting the tasks I have listed in my Blackberry. Doing so has made it much easier for me to scroll through and see what it is that i want to tackle, still. I have to admit, doing this now has shown just how many other projects I want to knock off. I should be able to do some work on one or two of them tonight, although I suspect that actually wrapping one up may be a bit too much.

As long as I maintain some momentum, though, heck, I’ll call it a success.

In the game (so to speak) of WiiFit, there is what’s called a time piggy bank, or a time bank, or whatever. This keeps track of how much time you’ve put into the game, and by extension, your exercise. When you first start out, it begins as this rather bland brownish color, although shiny. But, a while back, I noticed that when I topped 20 total hours, it shifted to a silver — ah! The brown was actually a Bronze!

I guessed that if I topped 40 hours it would turn gold, and last night, I was finally able to confirm it. This was quite spiffy, although I’m wondering if I get to 60 if it shifts into platinum, or diamond, or something. If not, well, then, I guess we might as well give up now, right? Can’t get any better.

The sad part is that 40 hours over the past 325+ days that I’ve had the game is not all that impressive. In fact, it sticks. Basically, it means that I’ve been using it much, much less that the lovely golden piggy bank would have me believe. True, there have often been times when I have not recorded in the WiiFit (via the Activity Log) my exercise for the day, such as the various rec league sports I partake in, but the reality is just that I tend to swing back and forth in spurts of activity. The past week, I have gotten back into it, and hopefully I can keep it up for a while. If nothing else, just doing something outside and then recording it in yonder Activity Book would be good. After all, I have managed that in the past, and it was quite cool to look over my month history and see some work happening every day.

Beach volleyball is supposed to start up, so I’ll be continuing to hammer away at WiiFit, I think, both to stay moving, as well as to try to make a last ditch effort to get myself “beach ready.” Personally, I would need a personal trainer, personal chef, and an act of God to shape up within the week or so that we have, but every little bit helps, right?

So, some of you may remember my reaction to an online game that was going by the name of Empire Craft. Well, I had meaning to try a somewhat dramatic reading of that “intro” blurb that they had on their site for a while (looks like it’s down by now). A quick reading followed by some classic background music, and taa-da!

…don’t be surprised if people throw up in your bed.

We’re Turning Off Our Comments Because You’re Not Cool Anymore.

I read HolyTaco on a regular basis, but never bothered with the comments — that would require more attention than my ADHD brain could handle. Still, I find this deliciously ironic that they have felt that commentors have gone too far.

Consider this quote from the post:

Holy Taco’s comments section is intended to be an environment where people are free to insult eachother’s mothers, brag about boning eachother’s mothers, and battle eachother to come up with the most creative household objects to say you shoved up someone else’s mom’s ass. Instead, it’s becoming a bastion for comedically constipated assholes desperately attempting to improve their self-image by shitting on any and all available targets, including this site’s editors, other commenters, guest columnists, and even the completely passive readers who visit our site on a daily basis.

Now, maybe it’s just me, or the fact that I am a mere couple of weeks away from falling out of the “cool” age range of 18-35, but it seems that the effort required to go from insulting people’s moms to insulting passive readers (who, you know, could totally be the aforementioned moms) is about as trivial as it is for Rush Limbaugh to go from criticizing Bill Clinton to criticizing Barack Obama. One just naturally leads to the other.

Did the editors of the site honestly think that this was not going to happen? This is the Internet, after all, the chief export of which is drama, emboldened by the sense of anonymity and delusions of grandeur. The number of people that have tried to gain a following and ‘Net stardom through nasty, bile-filled “humor” (if you want to call it that) is probably so high that Stephan Hawking would have a hard time figuring it out. Surely the editors at HolyTaco realized this?

Well, I’m thinking that it there’s a bit more to it, than that:

These types of comments are uninformative, unentertaining, and completely unacceptable. More importantly, they negatively affect our business, and once you begin infringing on our ability to run this site, you’re no longer welcome here.

Looks like this is less about offending the editors than the advertisers, and hey, I back the editors in this case. Trust me,  not getting paid is a pretty crummy situation, especially when it’s something that you weren’t really expecting.

Still, I think it’s worth pointing out that this whole situation is, to me, far more amusing than the (apparently) informative, entertaining, and acceptable jokes about other people’s moms. A website that takes pride in the comment pages being filled with “dirty, tasteless, and incredibly inappropriate” jokes are now upset because the comment pages are getting, well, “dirty, tasteless, and incredibly inappropriate.”

Oh, and “not funny.” In the world of Internet snark, that may be the biggest crime of all.

Last night the team went 3-1 again, but I admit I wasn’t as jazzed as I should have been, and I think it’s because the way we lost the last game. It was a close one, but we bugged me was that the team we played was very physical, and at one point the guy ran right into me and no foul was called. I’ve never been too comfortable playing against teams like that just because it means that slowly turns into sort of a “what can I get away with” contest. And those never end well. Also, I think I’m starting to take the game a little too seriously, but to be fair, we had a shot to go 4-0, which would have been really spiffy. Ah well, the most important thing is that nobody got hurt. Oh! And I made a free throw at the line! Woo!

Also, to be fair, the first game we played we were scary good. I don’t know if the other team scored at all (I think they did) but I know that we snagged 20 points, and since our average is around 8 or so, it was really quite impressive. We had everything working on that game — lots of moving around, good passes, cut-ins, and it certainly helped that the other team was out of gas from the game they had just played previously.

According to Jack, we should solidly be in the playoff hunt now. Naturally, the next game night our best player and easily the top scorer will be out, so I suspect it’ll be a tough set of games.

I’m currently out of cereal at home, and given that I’m forgoing eating out/getting take out, this morning looked like I would be skipping breakfast (aside from water and the last packet of hot chocolate I have by my desk), but then I ran across a package of breadsticks in my backpack. This was from last Thursday, when I had the (sometimes) weekly meeting about my side game project over at a trusty diner. I got one of those side packets of breadsticks, and not being hungry enough to eat them, but also not liking to waste food, I put them in my backpack. And here we are now, where this handy foresight will provide me with something to nom-nom-nom on. Yay!

My decision to avoid eating out is two-fold: First, to just save some more money, as it’s very easy to wind up eating out in the city, and the second reason is to also control my food intake a bit more. Even though I have been active in rec leagues, I’m not as active as I could be/should be. Some Wii Fit should help, but before I started packing away huge plates of pasta again, I need to get the body moving, so that I can counter-balance the calories coming in. I’ve been looking into gyms, but am pretty sure that unless I find a really cheap deal, I won’t be deciding anything for a few months. Besides my own desire to move, my actual workplace may be moving, as well. So, if I can’t base my gym on the location of my home or my work, it’s not worth it to make a selection just yet. And besides, I can do home workouts — I just have to up my dedication. And it’s not like I don’t already have a fair amount of gear at home that I can use; sure, the rebounder keeps breaking springs, but hey, can I help it if I’m that intense?

[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]

The goal for this week is to maintain some productivity, both at work, as well as home. Things have been moving forward fairly well at work, although I still don’t feel like I’m getting as much done as I would like. At home, it’s a mixed bag — there are always chores and errands to do, so that takes up some time. There are also the various video games I’m working on, so that, too, takes up some time. But I also admit that there have been other things that I tend to slack off on, usually in favor of — to use my mother’s term — froofraing around on the Internet. I know, it’s so unusual — someone being distracted by the Internet! Shock! Horror!

I keep thinking I should try actually blocking out time for a project each night, as if I was in a college course again. Set aside 3 hours or so to putter away on one project or another. I never wind up doing this, largely because I like keeping things free. But hey, now that I think about it, it’s not like I can do any worse than I already am, right?

Hmm. We’ll have to see how that works… I’ll get back to you on that….

To be honest, I haven’t really be spending as much time on the online dating sites as I planned. This isn’t exactly a bad thing, as the main reason is due to things like taking care of things around the house, playing outside, and otherwise spending a little more time away from the computer. That, and there are days when I just don’t feel like dealing with the amount of time and effort that it takes to write up proper emails. Oh sure, I could just use the good ol’ copy-and-paste method, but trust me, it’s like being enthused about making a girl’s parents: she can tell when you’re faking.

Still, my time back on the sites thus far has reminded me of a couple of issues I’ve had with them in the past; in this case, one each, that is unique to the particular site.

On OKCupid, the problem lies in the defaults they use when you search for matches. Even if you set the presets during a previous visit, the defaults snap back into place. Three of these are very noteworthy:

1. Distance: Set to “Within 100 miles.”
2. Last online: Set to “Within the last decade” (mind you, OKCupid has not been around for a decade yet, so this is really “Anyone who ever made an account that has not been erased.”
3. Age: Set to 24 to 56 (this, I assume, is based on your own age)

What bugs me about this is that it’s a pretty blatant attempt to pad their results as much as possible. It’s not going to be as noticeable for someone like me, who’s living in a major metro area. But, if I was been back in Dayton, then OKC would have had to pull this trick, as it’s far fewer pickings back there. You have to basically cast a very wide net in terms of miles if you hope to actually find someone that you’re interested in dating.

But even then, the Last Online setting is completely whacked. Why would I want to see a profile of someone who hasn’t been on in over a month? Let alone a year or more? The whole point of a dating site is to meet someone “today.” Writing to an abandoned profile is about as useful as a carpool lane for Segways.

Match does not have this problem; their search page remembers the last settings you entered; and to be frank, they do have many more users than OKCupid does, so padding isn’t that big as of a need (although I’m sure that they don’t mind when it happens). Also, when they display results, they always show the most recent users first, unless you’ve entered some strict criteria that severely limits the number of results.

The problem that Match does have, however, is in their profile review service. Best I can tell, what happens is that it is sent to a computer program that scans through it for a variety of naughty words, email addresses, or other types of personal information. While this is faster than having to wait for some underpaid, overworked intern to read through a slog of submissions, this process is deeply annoying for two reasons:

First off, it limits your “voice” a bit, because a number of things can set off the filter triggers, some of which are so obscure that you might not even have thought about them as a “bad word.” This can include just a mention that you like a particular website, like hulu.com, because the filters seem to treat any use of the “.com” as some sort of attempt to get around the need to use the in-site mail system.

But it’s the second reason that is really, really grating, and I found this out the hard way:

I made a minor change in my profile a while back, noting that I was working as a Game Designer. One line was changed, and even then it was just a change from “have been working as” to “am now working as.” I sent it in for review, and was quite puzzled when it returned stating that it had been rejected because some “questionable content” was contained within. Questionable? Really? I changed, like, 4 words, all of which were prepositions. They gave a list of possible causes as part of this form letter, but did not say what the exact thing was in the profile that set off their rejection stamp. And that’s what snowballed things in an epic fail of customer service.

Since the only change I had made was one line about working as a Game Designer, I could not figure out for the life of me what was the problem. I surmised that they must have updated something in their filters that snagged on a part of my profile that had originally been deemed worthy. I tried a number of different takes on the profile (all minor, as I have gotten a number of compliments on it, even from those with no interest in dating me), but each time it got pushed back. I tried writing letters to their customer service email, explaining the problem: I couldn’t “fix” my profile because I had no idea what the problem was — the lack of any feedback meant that I was just firing my shotgun randomly in the dark, hoping to get a headshot on an approaching zombie. When their “official” customer service reply arrived, it was just another @%$# soulless form letter, with basically a direct copy and paste of the exact same rejection notice I had already been getting. It was starting to look like Kafka was the Director of Customer Service.

Finally, after some careful dissection on my own, I figured out what the issue was: in my profile, I make a reference that I felt all keyboards should come equipped with a “WTF key.” I re-spelled it as “W T F,” and sure enough, the profile was then approved. So, apparently, Match had updated their filters and determined that WTF was a bad, bad word. Or, acronym, anyway. Now I’m tempted to try and work in FUBAR and see if they catch that one or not.

Whatever the case, I never should have had to figure that on my own. Instead, what should have happened was that I should have gotten a rejection notice, explaining exactly which word or phrase was the one the tripped up the alarm. After all, if you can detect it, can’t you just make a note of what it is from the list and include that on the email?

Ironically, it could be worse — I remember back in Dayton I had a profile rejected because there actually was someone reading it, and did not get the concept of sarcasm, which I had peppered throughout the writing. I think I eventually convinced the person to let it through anyway, but still: this isn’t an English paper with only one proper form and structure. If I want to do it in iambic pentameter, well, then, I should be allowed. I’m paying for the site, after all.

For the record, OKCupid doesn’t even bother trying to police the profiles. Rather, they follow the web 2.0 approach and the the customers do it for them. Same with photos. Now, I do think that OKCupid has some filters of their own in place, but maybe not. What they do have is a button on every page and for every photo that allows the users to “flag” something that they find objectionable. When a user flags something, then OKC checks it out and determines if a deletion/removal is warranted.

I first found out about Terry Pluto when I was looking at writers talking about the Browns; later, I was surprised (floored, even) to read that a writer from ESPN (Scoop Jackson, as I recall) remarked in a column that Terry Pluto was his favorite basketball writer. I later continued to discover that Pluto’s background in the ABA had given him something of a legendary status among basketball sportswriters. What continously amazes me about this is just that someone/something from Cleveland is actually being admired from people outside of Ohio. And from the East Coast-centric ESPN, no less. If you doubt the scorn that ESPN (and the nation, in general) has for Cleveland, just look at any random sports column these days; the recent Cavs playoff collapse has generated an exceptional amount of gut-kicking, all of which seem to start out with, “I hate to kick Cleveland when its down, but… oh, just kidding! I love kicking Cleveland when its down! Woo!”

Anyway.

The point is that in these current dark days when Cleveland is being pantsed and dragged around the high school track, it’s a time when my fellow Clevelanders pull together against the outside world (which includes anything past state borders), so it’s good to see that Pluto has proceeded to just skip over the LeBron drama and address the Browns OTAs.

And he asks himself, why would football OTAs be exciting enough to write about? To which he writes probably one of the best lines I’ve read this year:

In Northeast Ohio, you can put an empty orange helmet on the 50-yard line at Browns Stadium and 50,000 fans will show up to stare at it.

Spoken like a true Browns fan.

via Cleveland Browns OTAs provide a break from LeBron and the Indians – Terry Pluto column | cleveland.com.

Last night was another romp on the basketball court, and this time, our team managed to go 3-1 in our games. It helped that we had pretty a full team for a chance, and everyone played pretty well. However, since I always mention my favorite plays of the night, I feel that I should mention two plays in which I was schooled:

1. Early in the first game, I guy I was guarding, who was about a foot shorter than me, took advantage of the height difference by actually passing the ball between my legs to an open teammate who made an easy lay-up. Fittingly, my team called me out so a shorter guy could cover the opponent.
2. In the third game, the guy at the top of the key was talking about what play he wanted to run, and thinking that the ball hadn’t been passed in yet, I didn’t react fast enough when he then passed the ball in to the guy I should have been guarding who then made an easy lay-up.

I also missed more than a few wide-open shots, including a lay-up that I should not have missed. Still, I made other shots, including one that was just past the free throw line (which is a shot I tend to miss often), and also managed to get in some steals. Overall, I felt fairly good about my play, but it was really those aforementioned plays that have me feeling a bit sheepish.

Oh, but I did manage to grab a few rebounds from my own shots, which is always nifty.

The two teams we played were also very good, so it was a good match-up across the board. One team had a couple of players get hurt; one came back later in the games and played well, but the other had the misfortune of landing on my foot, and thus rolled his ankle. Having had that happen to me before, I know how much it sucks. And hurts.

With the surge from last night, I think we are now at 8-11 or so. Still within striking distance to sneak in the playoffs if we continue to play well, but it will be tough. We don’t have a lot of room for losing, and it certainly would help if other teams lost more, as well. Whatever the case, though, it’s nice to at least have an outside chance right now.

It looks like I’ll be part of a beach volleyball team this summer; might be a bit of a hassle getting out there, but I think it’ll be worth it in terms of playing outside, as well as checking out attractive women in skimpy swimwear. However, I’m looking into other sporting leagues as well, to see if I can’t get a second summer sport lined up.

I have also started to research some gyms again, although my biggest problem is not knowing where I’ll be over the next few months, and when you sign a contract with these places, it’s pretty much set for at least a year. Fittingly, it might be best to go back to NYSC, although I’d like to explore all options before making a final choice. And hey, in the meantime, I can always get back into WiiFit, right?