Some minor tweaks and improvements

As you may have noticed, the site looks a little different. We cleaned up some sidebar links and added some new ones and generally made everything look nicer over there. If you have anything you think should make an appearance on ye olde sidebar, please, let me know.
Most noticeably, we now have a Victoria Times background that lightens things up and gets rid of the dirty brown flowers. If nothing else, we made it more sanitary.
I was going to completely blow things up, but I think the changes Steve and I have made this evening look pretty good, and I'm not sure what else could be done. If you do have any suggestions, please send me an e-mail. We do want to get those archives tidied up, but other than that, I think we will mostly be good to go. But like I said, let me know if you have any ideas.

A word of Warning

Next weekend, starting on Friday, I'm headed out of town. In case you couldn't tell by the image above this text, I am going to Anaheim to catch the Twins season opener as part of a big birthday weekend for myself. It's going to be awesome. Usually, you would see a reemergence of Steve when I am on vacation, but this time, I'm meeting him out there. So, the last you will see of me for a week will be on Wednesday. Then you will get your typical weekly allowance of Beth, followed by some guest posters. I can;t tell you exactly who it will be, but I can give you a hint.

Minor announcement

In a little over a week, I will be leaving the country. Don't worry, I'll be coming back. While I'm out of the country, from the 7th through the 20th, maybe the 21st as well, the Times will not be updated quite as much as you are used to. Steve and Beth will still be in town, and a few posts may be made, but no promises. You see, both are in the process of moving to new digs. It's the perfect storm of not getting a blog updated regularly. Don't worry, I'll get something nice for you while I'm on vacation.

Kind of a big announcement

As many of you know, I do a little bloggin' over at Barry Melrose Rocks as well. Not much, a little here and there. It's a good time, and I mostly write about drinking. Kevin, the proprietor of that site is the real driving force and has entertained the hockey literate masses for the past couple of years.
Fortunately for Kevin, his interest in hockey is potentially turning into a career. Unfortunately for us, this means he will have to suspend his blogging indefinitely. Enter me. During Kevin's absense, I will be taking a more involved role at BMR. I hesitate to say I'm taking over, because there will be a couple of brilliant writers also joining the staff, and here's hoping Kevin can find his way back eventually. The fact of the matter is, at the very least, I will be the senior writer at BMR.
Hopefully, this won't affect how much or little I write here. Perhaps it will cut down on my hockey posts at the Times.
I'm not going anywhere, but Kevin is, so let's all wish him luck.

That is all. Happy New Year.

Going up north

Sad news, everyone. I have to go to Fargo this afternoon for my brother's graduation tomorrow. Good that I'm graduating, sad that I'm going to Fargo. I may be back tomorrow evening, in which case, great. But there is over a half a foot of snow in the forecast along my route between now and then, so maybe not.
Some things to discuss between now and then:
- The Twins may be interested in a couple Japanese pitchers.
- 4 Bowl Games tomorrow. How did magicJack already earn enough to sponsor a bowl?
- Dave Letterman's sneezing monkey. Does it fart at the end?

Read Me!

As I may have mentioned a little while ago, I've got a new gig. I'm going to be contributing at Barry Melrose Rocks on Thursdays while Beth takes care of things here. Kevin, head honcho at BMR will in turn be coaching the Edmonton Oilers on Thursdays while Craig MacTavish runs the African nation of Gabon for one day a week. Meanwhile, Gabonese president Omar Bongo will fill in as chief zoologist at the zoo in Vienna, Austria. Meanwhile, regular zoologist Harald Schwammer will tend to Thomas Q. Crabtree's humidor on Thursday's so Mr. Crabtree can work for Beth at Real Job Inc. It's all very circuitous.
My duties at BMR include writing something hockeyesque on Thursdays, and never, ever using Microsoft Paint to copy and paste a blog hetter ever again. So come and read me! READ ME!

An Announcement

Barry Melrose Rocks has issued the following statement.

A familiar face to all of you, Ryan Henning from the Victoria Times will be joining us on a regular basis beginning on the 21st. Ryan will be filing reports from his parents' basement in Minnesota every Thursday. We can only hope that he will also be unshaven and in only his underwear, so as to dutifully live up to the blogger stereotype.

Yes, it's true. On Thursday's, when Beth is here, providing insight and spelling-error free posts, I'll be bringing down the collective quality of BMR. And for the record, I do not live in my parents' basement. I have a room above their garage.

New Stuff on Is It Sports?

Originally posted on "Is It Sports" by Steve. I'm making an attempt to inform that 2 or 3 people that still check the rarely updated site that we made some changes, and more posts were on the way. As far as the future posts go, I don't think I ever wrote about Dwyane Wade, the White Sox World Series title was hard to describe (I'm really not that good of a writer), and I did evenutally post on the Bang for the Buck ratings, on August 3, 2008. Also, this is the first time I mentioned my wife on the site, and ironically, she commented on my Bang for the Buck ratings when I finally posted them here almost 3 years later.

Hey Everyone. It’s Steve back again actually posting something new on Is It Sports? The last month has been pretty busy for me with work, 3 trips to Purdue, watching hours of White Sox World Series coverage, getting a great new girlfriend, and driving for 2 and a half hours from just outside Detroit to just outside Ann Arbor in a snowstorm on the busiest travel day of the year, just to turn around and spend Thanksgiving away from my family.

But now I have more time to work on the site, and we have a lot planned for our upcoming first anniversary. First, as you probably saw on the index, we added a “blog” (even though I hate that word) where we basically go back to the basics of why we created this site: to post entertaining online conversations we have about sports for people to read. Now instead of saving the conversation and using it to write a long post 2 weeks later, only to have me finally put it online 3 weeks after it’s finished, we can put it up right away, as is. We also added a Quote of the Week where we’ll dig through the archives for something either insightful or witty that was written in the past year, which will be updated every Sunday (hopefully).

As far as new full-length posts go, we have plenty planned. Ryan has already completed two, one recapping how well we picked in our baseball preview and another that I haven’t read yet but I was just told is “miscellaneous.” I will finally write my long awaited World Series post about the World Champion Chicago White Sox (doesn’t that look good?) because I think now it has finally sunk in with me. I’m also planning on writing about a statistical analysis I did (because I’m a dorky engineer) that I call the “Bang for the Buck” rating, which compares a baseball team’s salary to its expected win total based on the performance of the other teams. Also, due to popular request from some friends, I will write a post about my high school classmate Dwyane Wade and I was planning on doing my first non-sports post on the top 25 CD’s of the past 5 years, as soon as 2005 comes to an end. We may even have an e-mail or two to answer in a mailbag. We have plenty planned ahead, so keep checking the site for updates! - Steve

Improvements to Is It Sports? And Other Random Stuff

Originally posted on "Is It Sports?" by Steve. We had 500 hits on the old site! It's nice to see how far we've come. I think you can add about 2 zeros onto that number for the Victoria Times. Another Ironic thing about this post is that I mention having a greater selection of girls in the real world, and then I went on to meet my wife at Purdue of all places 6 months later when I came back to school for a visit with my some of my friends still there.

As you can see we made some changes to the Is It Sports? page to celebrate its 4 month anniversary today. We did the unthinkable and actually have so many posts on this site now that the main page has gotten overloaded and hard to find what you are looking for. To remedy this, we now have only the 5 most recent posts on the main page and the rest are archived by category below. We also have our nifty new internal search engine, which took me hours to figure out, courtesy of FreeFind.com. This way you can find a particular article on the site just by searching for any word that appears in it. You can also find out things like how many times we’ve said things like “in the junk” (3 times). The search engine gets a visit from the indexing spider every Sunday morning, so it will automatically stay up to date with the new posts. Enjoy and thanks for the support! Over 500 hits 4 months is pretty good for a modest geocities site.

On to the random stuff...

How ‘bout them White Sox?!? The wins just keep piling up and as of right now they have a 21-7 record and by far the best record in the majors. Wow. It makes my crazy homer pick in the season preview look pretty good right now. As Ryan said in his last post about baseball, sure, the pitching is pitching out of its mind right now, but they are also winning with almost nothing happening in the hitting category. Despite his 7 home runs, Paul Konerko is batting under .200 and Jermaine Dye hasn’t gotten it together at all this season. Tadahito Iguchi is leading the team in average, so hopefully he can keep it up. The Sox have been very good, however, at grinding out runs when it counts. Carl Everett and Juan Uribe lead the majors in sacrifice flies and the hit and runs and stolen bases they frequently use are producing runs despite the lack of singles. If you look at the White Sox history though, all of their best teams besides the 2000 division champs have played this way, so maybe history is repeating itself. The 1906 team wasn’t called the Hitless Wonders, the 1959 team wasn’t called the Go-Go Sox, and the 1983 team wasn’t called the Winning Ugly White Sox for nothing.

Da Bulls!...are on the brink of elimination, and I really regret not talking about them more on here during the remarkable season they had. It’s amazing how a team so young and with so much raw talent was able to put it all together after a rough start to the season and grab the 4th seed in the playoffs. That’s all I’ll say about them for now, but expect a 2004-2005 season tribute to the Baby Bulls from me after the playoffs are over.

My time here at Purdue has come to an end, and I don’t really know what to think of it yet. I took my last final on Tuesday, and now I just have to wait to get my grades and then later my diploma next week, making me a full fledged Mechanical Engineer. Now I have to go out in the real world and start working…which led me to think…what’s better? Purdue or the Real World? Here are the pros and cons of both:

Purdue
Pros: 1. Only a few hours of class a day 2. Surrounded by lots of good friends your age 3. Using reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger on TV as an excuse to get drunk 4.Being able to walk pretty much anywhere at any time safely 5. All of the fun parties, inside jokes, and traditions 6. Purdue’s Football team
Cons: 1. Lots of homework 2. Tests that make you feel like you haven’t learned anything 3. Bad Girl to Guy ratio, mostly only crazy girls left to pick from 4. Having to walk pretty much everywhere because parking sucks 5. Lafayette Drivers 6. Purdue’s Basketball team

Real World
Pros: 1. You get paid 2. No homework 3. 50-50 ratio, possibly decent girls available 4. Ample parking 5. New work friends and fellow apartment residents to meet 6. In my case, since I’m moving to Detroit, pro sports
Cons: 1. You have to work 8 hours a day 2. No summer vacation 3. All of your college friends are still in school or spread out across the country 4. More responsibilities to worry about 5. You could be half the age of your coworkers 6. The pro sports are Detroit pro sports.

So when it comes down to it, it’s kind of a wash. In college you have less responsibility and you can have more fun, but it has to come to an end sometime. For a goal driven person like me, I’m looking forward to the opportunity to get paid for my work and to find at least a half sane woman to start a family with one day, but I’ll always look back fondly at my days at Purdue. It was an experience that I wouldn't have traded for anything. Boiler Up! - Steve