GO VT!

The Rockies are going to the NLCS. But you probably knew that. It’s still weird to comprehend.

Further, the VT game was quite a surprise – but I will say our offense lived up to every expectation I had of it. Even with a 23 point halftime lead and a dominating defense – the Hokies find a way to make you squirm.

And this is what Anna got me for Columbus Day:

This is my new study chair, from which I will dispatch death in Halo 3, shank drives in Tiger Woods, or rock out in Guitar Hero X, where X is 1, 2, or 3.

This article was written by stupidhead jerkfaces.  Hey, we can’t all be saints.

I suppose the irony is that the Rockies are in Philly right now – a city notorious for being complete assholes to any sports team that sets foot in their city.  I think that also includes losing Philly teams.

Just got the e-mail from the VT Alumni. We’ve wisely tucked tail and moved to another location. While I’m not thrilled with the destination, CB & Potts is a place that at least has good beer. Not that I ever drank good beer during the games, with the $6 pitchers of Coors Light.

CB&P is a place that Anna and I went to as an attempt to try something new when we first moved here. What drew me to it was that it had a giant cistern outside which to me meant “beer”, so I was sold almost immediately. Our first time there was great – they had a ridiculously large menu (we even said, how can they possibly offer this much stuff and make money!) with lots of options, and the food was good. They also had a Mile-High Burger (link goes to an image Google found for me when I searched for Mile-High Burger).

When Craig and Jen first moved out here, we treated them to dinner at CB&P, and I ordered a Mile-High Burger for Craig and I, without letting him know what it was. It’s a one pound burger on a giant sourdough bun, with extra trimmin’s! They have a “challenge” there, if you finish two of them in one hour, you get free dinner and a $50 gift card. Angioplasties are extra.

Apparently one high school kid is the only person to ever pull it off – I imagine he’s probably something like Bautz was in his prime. It was either Bautz or Mulcahy that said: “the thing is to not think, when you’re halfway done – ‘I have a half-pound burger left to eat.’”

The menu and quality has consistently gone downhill since those early days. Guess they couldn’t really make money! The things we liked aren’t even on the menu anymore. We went once or twice with other visiting friends after that, and it was never as good as the first and second time. I’ve been back for lunches with co-workers at a different location, and it hasn’t been so bad.

The beer is good, though! And really, during a football game in which we will likely lose, isn’t that what’s important?

On Saturday, VT plays Clemson at 4pm Mountain Time. This means that we usually go to a bar in Denver, hang out with the alumni, drink some beers, and watch some football. This is how it is – this is how it has been since I have been here, with very little deviation. This weekend will be … interesting.

For starters, check this picture out. That’s the patio of the bar that we usually go to – Jackson’s in downtown Denver. For another idea of proximity, check this out. On Saturday, the first baseball playoff game since 1995 will be played at 7pm MST. VT plays Clemson at 4pm MST. I would try to describe the chaos that will be downtown Denver, with the scalpers, the fans who didn’t get tickets, the parking, traffic, and light rail problems – but really, I’ll let your imaginations run free!

Contrast this with Sunday’s schedule: the Broncos play at 2:15pm MST, and this is first and foremost a Bronco town. Invesco Field @ Mile High Stadium is literally a hop-skip-and-jump from Coors Field. Bronco games on their own cause crippling traffic. There is light-rail transportation, but the same line serves both fields. There’s a chance that there will be a fourth playoff game on Sunday at 8pm MST in Denver. You say to yourself – ah, but there’s hours between the starts of both games, all shall be well!

If you look at this map again you will note a dome-like structure roughly directly between Mile High Stadium and Coors Field. Here in Denver, that dome is known as the Pepsi Center. People in Colorado love their hockey – in fact it’s the number two draw behind the Broncos! Their home opener is at 5pm MST (now, anyway).

So to summarize – at 2:15, Bronco game with traffic and population draw that routinely shuts down the city. At 5, Avs game that does a lot of the same. At 8pm, a possible playoff baseball game that – based on Monday’s game – will completely threaten humanity! All three are within walking distance of each other!

On one hand, great for the city’s bars and businesses. On the other hand – on Sunday Anna and I will be comfortably seated at our or a neighbor’s house sipping cocktails and avoiding the madness that will be Denver. But I have to say – it’s kind of a cool thing to be near and a small part of.

If I could get tickets to all three? I’d go. But I wouldn’t make it to twenty-nine.

Saturday? I don’t know. Usually we have a very large reserved room for the VT folks – but I would think that obscene numbers of money-waving, rabid baseball fans would probably trump their desire to have that relatively small VT/Clemson (we’re co-watching, a brother of a VT head alum heads the Clemson alum group) contingent, even though we consistently provide them with a steady stream of income regardless of what the Rockies do. The bar aside – parking prices have gone to free-market or gouging levels – $40 as opposed to $5 or free in times prior and it’s going to be a giant bitch to get in and out of the city.

The mayor, who is a real-estate broker/mogul for city property – assures me that this is incredibly good for the city and the businesses surrounding each of these parks. This is what they had in mind when they bulldozed this old, run down warehouse district of Denver to build these parks. But maybe they didn’t have it in mind that it could all happen at the same time. Should be fun!

EDIT:  I also forgot to mention the annual Columbus Day Protest where all the indigenous peoples dance and chant at the exact same intersection of the first map and spill fake blood for a few hours.  This literally happens right in front of Jackson’s and Coors Field.  Hooray!

The Hokies suck.  I am probably not the only one who thinks that our team isn’t good enough to even be in the top 25.  The offense seemed to have things going, but I guess the OC didn’t like running the ball consistently – instead opting to do time stopping plays and high-risk plays.  It was an ugly game against a team that isn’t as good as we made them look.  I think we’re going to get killed at Clemson next weekend – but then again, who knows!

About baseball:  the Rox lost Friday night, ending the streak of consecutive wins at eleven.  It was kind of disappointing because it meant that any chances at the postseason lay in other teams’ hands.  Saturday night they won 11-1, and today when Anna, my father-in-law, and I were at the game, they won 4-3.  We needed the Padres to lose two games, and then a funny thing happened – they did.  Saturday night they lost in extra innings, and today they got killed.  So now there’s a 163rd game – a playoff at Coors Field, and the winner will go off to play Philadelphia in the divisional series.

After the game, I tried to get tickets to the tiebreaker game.  As you can see in the pictures, King Soopers was a place advertised to get tickets.  I went to the nearest King Soopers to the ballpark, and waited in line for an hour (with ~150 others) for them to tell us that their system had crashed, and they wouldn’t be able to sell any tickets.  And by the time everyone in that store had scrambled to find other tickets – they were all gone.  So we’re not going.  I’m not terribly sad because that means we don’t have to go downtown for the fourth consecutive day!

So it’s been fun.  Even if they don’t win tomorrow – it was a fun thing to follow.  I’m more excited about the baseball team than the prospects of VT football – I just don’t see good things happening for the rest of the season as the competition gets harder.  The ACC is weird though – Duke kept a game with Miami close – so maybe VT can limp through the season and eventually get killed by a good football team in a bowl.  I’m just not that excited about them – and you can thank the offensive line for that.

It was a good weekend!

So our company has decided that the reason they have a lot of problems hiring new talent is because… they don’t recruit or try to hire new talent.  As a result, there’s a new dictum – twelve universities have been identified as top-tier sources of talent, and will be openly recruited from this day forth!

Virginia Tech made the list!  And when this dictum was passed down, names got attached to it – and somebody somewhere attached my name to Virginia Tech!  So I might get to be the “official” recruiter for my company at VT!

Unfortunately, the Engineering Expo is this week at Tech, so I won’t be going to that one.  And really, living in Colorado probably isn’t going to help me get selected either.  But my name is currently attached to it, and that was even before my immediate manager had a chance to ask me if I wanted to do it or not.  Sweet!

Through my normal web perusing, I came across this article:

How should administrators handle student-sponsored events that feature alcohol? Or, for that matter, half-naked partygoers dressed in caution tape?

This is a tricky one, which I have no problem attributing an opinion to. On one hand, I think that you’ve got to treat the students like adults – nobody is making them do the things that the administration opposes. If they choose to go to “anything but clothes” parties, or drink while underage, or drink excessively, that’s their choice. They should have to pay the penalty for any negative associations.

However, what really happens is that these people that are treated like adults will get into trouble somehow and then blame the university. Like the girl at VT who drank too much and then “fell” out of her dorm window. Her family sued the university for not doing anything to a) prevent underage drinking and b) having the windows be large enough for someont to “fall” out of them.

If college girls want to get mostly naked and go to a party and binge drink, that’s their totally sweet right. But they have to understand that bad things can happen in those types of situations. A bunch of guys and girls in their genetically programmed peak reproduction time drinking large amounts of alcohol can lead to trouble. Maybe that’s hindsight as I approach thirty – but let the kids make their choices.

So I get that the schools are cracking down on some of these awful (read: wickedly awesome) parties that never happened when I was in school. They’re trying to protect the students. Maybe they should make students sign waivers upon arriving saying that they’ll be treated like adults and can make their own decisions, but they waive their right to sue. It would never happen, but you can dream!

Been busy!

I’m in a grad class right now that has an emphasis on Program Management, and I’ve had to assemble an entire project plan and all the little pieces and communications.  The problem is that the majority of it is made up – not like, I made it up, but I have to make up names of employees, skill matrices, and other PM style crap that gets used in any kind of manufacturing industry.  So we have to do it, and we have the generate the information that drives what we’re delivering.  So it was a lot of work, because I had to do it in five weeks, and because of a technical error on the school’s part, I had to start late.

Luckily, it’s about done.  I submit my project today, and then cease to think about anything school related until October 8th.

There’s a bit of an issue, however – or it appears that way right now.  I need two courses to graduate and get my MS in Systems Engineering.  One of the courses doesn’t appear to be offered in the next two quarters!  I’m hoping that the schedule just isn’t finalized, because honestly, I want so bad to just be done with it all.

I see I have checked the VT box on the right, so I should say something on that.  I expected to lose to LSU, just not so badly.  So really I’m not, nor have I been, in anything that would resemble mourning.  I think Anna will back me up on that.  The part that sucked is that our entire team looked like they expected to lose as well.  They just weren’t into it.  Even Beamer didn’t seem to be into it.  Glennon tried to be into it, but he sucks, and failed at that too.  So good riddance to him.  I’m not convinced we can beat Ohio next weekend, but I will say that I feel like we have the better chance with Taylor.

I’m 1-0 in fantasy football!  I hope that Tony Romo makes a tradition out of scoring five TD’s a game.  It would help me win some money.

So Vick plead, as I’m sure you’ve heard. The lines of press and people chastizing him are long, and the droves of fans abandoning him are large. And they probably should, as it’s the “big thing” right now in summer’s dead spot for sports.

ESPN’s article has a funny quote:

In a reader forum on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s website, one post maintained, “This is about race no matter how we put it. White folks can shoot ducks all day, but when you fight pit bull against pit bull it is a crime.”

That sounds like an argument grounded in reality. Although, racism in the south is an entirely different animal, so what the hell do I know?

The fact is, I’m willing to bet that something like 75% of all Virginia Tech merchandise features the big number seven. The beauty of college football is that anyone can use it as a Glennon jersey! Vick put our school on the map, and now whatever happens will be tainted with that. I still don’t think we should abandon him as VT folks. I don’t think VT should rename Vick hall and I don’t think they should pull down the Vick flag. Looks like at least a few people at VT agree.

I don’t think bad decisions he made in the years past what he did for our school should affect us much at all. It isn’t any reflection of the character of VT that he was involved in those activities – if anything, it sends a message to any other college football talent. Who knows what he could’ve learned if he stayed in school a few more years and matured up a bit.

Granted, he’s not very smart, so it may not have mattered.

I think it’s sad, that’s about it.  Sad and funny – the record speed at which his homies rolled on him was amazing!

What’s going to suck is that now this story will be lumped in with reflection stories of “triumph over adversity” and “emotional healing”. What an embattled school! Heck, with this spring and summer’s activities alone we probably have at least an hour of the first ESPN Gameday all to ourselves!