Welcome, Sarah.  My sister Amye popped out #3 a couple of weeks ago and between that and the eldest niece’s birthday, our not-quite-monthly trip down to Richmond took place last weekend.  Sarah is a little young to hold my interest — they’re much more entertaining once they learn how to talk — but Abigail and Samantha are endlessly amusing.

Christina and I made it down just in time to catch the latter half of each of their soccer games.  There is a dramatic difference in their approach to the game: Abigail is a non-stop motor, devoted to the game, and a true athlete in training.  Samantha has a much more lackadaisical interest in the game and is much more focused on being subbed out so she can get more juice boxes and snacks.  After they came off the field, Abigail was more interested in playing laser tag and basketball while her sister kept cornering people so that she could play “pretend”.  Samantha does a great kitten impression and seems to find no limit to the scenarios she can dream up.

There was one more birthday for which I was asked to visit Richmond for and that was my own.  Living up to his reputation, my uncle Steve showed up at Texas de Brazil ready to embarass me.  Texas de Brazil is not exactly a “low brow” restaurant and I’m sure the wait staff appreciated stepping over the inflatable walker extolling my new age and numerous infirmities.  It was good for a laugh, though.  I did snag a copy of Spore as a present so I’ll probably be writing about that in the near future… that is, as soon as I have a free bit of time to play it.

After having a discussion with one of my friends where I randomly started tossing out made-up ratios of Obama to McCain signs in the nearby areas, I decided to perform an experiment on my drive home today.  Other than some cities in the Hampton Roads area, parts of Richmond, and small communities around various colleges in the state, the vast majority of the rest of Virginia is traditionally Republican.  A generally rural state with a strong military presence, this has played to the Republican party and Virginia hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since LBJ in 1964.

I live in northern Virginia (Nova), an extremely dense metro area outside of Washington DC.  Northern Virginia is heavily populated by basically two types of people: those who work for the government and those in the high tech industry.  Not surprisingly, as both of these typically Democrat-leaning groups have grown (quite dramatically), the area has become more and more Democrat-leaning in general.  Four of the counties in the Northern Virginia area have been in the top 15 fastest growing counties each year for the past 5-10 years.  Since the growth in this area greatly exceeds the growth in the rest of Virginia, the state in turn has also turned more and more Democratic.  Five of the last seven governors have been Democrats and Mark Warner, a former Governor looks set to beat another former Governor, Jim Gilmore, for the Senate seat.  That would put both Senate seats in the Democrats hands.

That said, even though Virginia still hasn’t gone Republican for so long in the presidential race, many pundits are predicting Virginia to go for Obama.  This is highly dependent on how strongly he wins in Northern Virginia.  From this, I decided to perform my highly scientific and foolproof research experiment: I would simply count the number of signs, bumper stickers, etc, on my way home from work today to pick up Christina at the VRE, on my way out to dinner, and finally on the way home.

I only had one rule:  A single home only counts as one vote, regardless of how many signs they have out front.  One person, one vote.  I had a few interesting observations: Neighbors seemed to clump together and support a certain candidate.   One corner would have all McCain, the next all Obama.  Do these people move around together?  In McCain’s favor, I came across a house that had signs for all Democratic candidates for the state positions but surprisingly, a McCain For President sign.  He’s obviously convinced one Democrat to vote for him.  More humorously, Obama has at least one support who decided their whole house needed to be decorated in Obamania.  Banners hung out of every window while signs littered the lawn — that’s the kind of enthusiasm Obama has to love.  And the neighbors probably hate.  

All in all, I was actually a bit surprised at the results.  With all the talk about how Obama looks set to “turn Virginia blue”, the signs favored him by only 45 to 35.  I’ll be curious to see how my results stack up with the actual results from the election.

When I first signed on to the NCAA online dynasty, I threw my lot in with the expectation of being 0-fer against my friends.  Starting the season off 0-4, my Fresno State team looked set to match those pitiful expectations.  Since that time, I finally started to turn my steady improvement into wins.  Starting with the win against Chris’s Hawaii team, I knocked off five straight victories including a monumental victory over Mike’s Nevada team, the WAC leader at the time.

At 5-4, my rush looked set to come to an end as Dan brought New Mexico State to Fresno last week.  Dan had been pivotal in helping me figure out how to learn the game though I do wonder about his suggestion that “zone” defenses are good when playing humans because they have a hard time reading the coverage;  My defensive schemes were not particularly effective at shutting down his pass-happy offense.  From the get-go, I was extremely nervous about playing the resident NCAA expert even during the relatively calm first few quarters.  When the game turned into a action-packed shootout in the fourth quarter, I figured that not only would I lose the game for sure but I would probably also have a heart attack before it ended.  Against all odds, my crazy streak of upsets continued when I eked out a 38-35 victory in OT.  Recap follows.

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My NCAA dynasty continued with the Fresno State Bulldogs welcoming the Nevada Wolfpack to Fresno for a big-time game against two undefeated-in-the-conference foes for a pivotal game to determine the front-runner for the WAC championship. Nevada entered the game as the favorite with only two losses by 3 points each to top 15 teams. Optimistic, Nevada looked ready to stake claim to the WAC title and a top 25 ranking. Fresno State was riding high after a 4 game winning streak and an upset of then #16 La Tech. Saturday night would leave the Wolfpack players scratching their heads trying to figure out convoluted schemes that would allow them to win the WAC title after losing 17-14 to the Fresno State Bulldogs. Game recap follows.

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I’ve finally started to make progress on building a media center along the lines of what I want. My ideal solution always revolved around a media center that could handle Live TV and DVR duties as well as play music and video from a variety of sources on my home network but I finally decided to take a first step and ignore the Live TV/DVR aspect for now. I do have a TiVo after all. Plus, the solution I found can be updated later on when I do take that next step.

Apple released the AppleTV awhile back and while the interface and ease of use make it a great little device, the limited scope of functions that Apple provides greatly hampers its usefulness. It essentially has to sync to an iTunes library for video and music while integration with online video is essentially limited to just YouTube. Boring… especially for $200-$300. However, one interesting observation was the ease with which the AppleTV could be hacked and modified.

In the meantime, XMBC came along and decided to shift their development from the (original) XBox only to a general solution that can run on any platform including Linux and OS X. That instantly converted them from pointless to intriguing and I’ve been following them as they’ve developed the software. I also started watching for updates to Boxee, a platform built on top of XBMC specifically for OS X. There is also a working MythTV “front-end” solution for down the road when I start incorporating LiveTV & DVR functionality into the mix.

Recently a convergence occurred that sparked my first real step to getting the media center I want. XMBC and Boxee were ported to run on a hacked AppleTV (it runs OSX after all) and someone created an all-in one AppleTV hack + XBMC/Boxee installer. After some research, I took the plunge and picked up an AppleTV shortly before I left for Vegas last week. A couple of incompatible USB thumbdrives later and I had a hacked AppleTV ready to go.

After messing with it for a couple of days, the hacked AppleTV has lived up to its billing. Despite it’s alpha status, Boxee has really impressed. All of my media sources are brought in over the network and it uses IMDB to generate a pretty slick presentation of my video collection. I can still stream via iTunes as it doesn’t replace the AppleTV interface, just adds on to it. I can now pull media from any number of sources around the internet, not just YouTube. I also tried out PlayOn to stream my Netflix queue to my AppleTV over UPnP with some promising success. Forthcoming Hulu integration in XBMC and working Netflix and I’ll be set!

My NCAA 09 Dynasty had a key game last night as I took my Fresno State Bulldogs into #16 undefeated La Tech and promptly abused them 28-10 for a stunning upset win. After a 0-4 start, I’ve brought the FSU Bulldogs back to .500 by winning the last 4, including my first win in the upset of Chris’s Hawaii team.

As unfortunate as it is that the sports genre has long been monopolized by EA, they do (slowly) add the occasional new feature that rocks. As with Spore, they incorporated a way of uploading photos and videos from your game to their website and it really adds something to the discussion when you can actually show someone the play, like this huge pass I had against Idaho.

Christina and I are back to work today after our Vegas trip. Jason & Adrianne joined us in Vegas for the last 2 days and we mostly wandered the strip, stopping for drinks and the occasional craps session. Jason was a big proponent of playing craps while we were out there and it worked out pretty well for us. Christina was “rolling bullets” and we walked away a solid winner — enough to cover the poker tournament buy-in from the first day out.

You would have no idea the economy was in the dumps by the amount of construction out in Vegas. CityCenter, in particular, was ridiculous. The Venetian is still my favorite casino — I’m sure the excellent poker room there has nothing to do with it. They expanded the Venetian to add the Palazzo and the Wynn had added the Encore since I had visited last. I guess there are always people willing to go out and gamble though I don’t know how people can afford to stay at some of these casinos.

The last time Christina and I were in Vegas, we did a television screening where we rated tv shows using a little dial. You don’t know what show(s) you’re going to see until you’re in there but we ended up watching clips from 3 primetime comedy shows. The only one I remember was “How I Met Your Mother” with Doogie Howser but overall, it was actually kind of fun and interesting. Anyway, as we walked through MGM on Saturday, we talked it up a bit and so the 5 of us decided to do it again. As luck would have it, we ended up screening “Wellington” — some reality show Animal Planet is developing. I thought for sure it was another reality show MTV was creating and was a bit stunned that Animal Planet was the channel behind it. Imagine The Hills or Laguna Beach merged with horse shows… if you can imagine such an abomination. I dialed up “0″ from the get-go and rode it until the very end of the 40 minutes of my life that I will never get back.

Our overnight flight back was fairly uneventful and we got in about 5am on Sunday morning. After a nap, the rest of the day was spent doing yard work and watching football. Early to bed last night and now I’m back to the daily grind.

Brian and I played in a 140-person poker tournament at the Venetian. I haven’t played too much in the past several months and there were probably a few hands I could have played differently but didn’t due to my rusty abilities. More troublesome was a dire lack of playable hands (Brian claimed similar issues). As it was, I really only played four hands: pocket aces for no action, AQ for a split pot, all-in A8 that was called and sucked out on by QT. My final hand was shortly after that last one and saw me take my AJ up against AT, A3, and 54. As is typical, the 54 took out my “best of the bunch” hand when the flop came A54. I finished around 60th, besting Brian but not much else.

Christina and I have arrived in Vegas for a 4-day vacation. Yesterday started out rough as we had to get up to at 5am to make our Jetblue flight. This was my first Jetblue flight and I would recommend everyone try and fly them if given the opportunity. Other than being routed through Long Beach for some reason, the inflight DirecTV, XM, and extra space are definitely selling points that Jetblue should focus on as much as they can. That said, why they send you through Long Beach, I have no idea. Two trailers and a vending machine do not make an airport. Several hour layovers there are not fun. On the way from Long Beach to Las Vegas, we were accompanied by a wooden-legged chatterbox. The guy talked non-stop from airport to airport. Thankfully we were on the opposite side of the aisle.

Once we arrived in Vegas, we did a quick once around parts of the strip to check out what had changed. Despite the economy, Vegas continues to expand the excess that it is so well known for. Afterwards we returned to the timeshare where I promptly managed to dump Christina’s sunglasses into the pool. Whoops!

Update: Finally got around to linking to this photo:

From Las Vegas Oct 2008

In college, I was almost universally referred to simply as “gergi”.  Since then, there have been numberous times I’ve come across an old college friend where they can’t recall my real name but can usually pull “gergi” without a problem.  No complaints from me - I like my nickname.

On the other hand, Christina acquired the nickname “killer” at her previous job.  When she quit there last year, she thought she had finally outlived down the nickname.  Unfortunately, at her new job there are many Christinas, Kristins, etc so they mentioned that they’d have to give her a nickname.  Christina foolishly told them about her previous nickname, they readily took it up, and now she’s stuck with it again.

At the wedding this past weekend, her friends family has referred to Christina as “peanut” as long as they’ve known her.  I’m sure it has nothing to do with her dimunitive size.

Most likely, the two of us will be known as gergi and the killer peanut for many years to come.