Fantasy Football

Well, a few friends and I just held our online draft for our fantasy football league and I am happy with my results. Even though I missed out on my two preferred picks: Larry Johnson and LaDainian Tomlinson.

My results:

QB Carson Palmer Jake Delhomme

RB Tiki Barber Ronnie Brown
LaMont Jordan Reuben Droughns Reggie Bush

WR Larry Fitzgerald Donte Stallworth
Chris Chambers
Reggie Wayne

TE Todd Heap Chris Cooley

K Shayne Graham

Def Carolina

Cooking and Engineers

Hey Engineers in the blog-o-sphere!

Ever have problems cooking or understanding a recipe? Well, fear the kitchen not, thanks to a friend I now know of "Cooking for Engineers" A great site designed to simplify (or is it complicate) recipes to help engineers understand them! Check it out!

And thankfully it says Cooking for Engineers and not "To Serve Engineers" ;)

PotM Cruise

Well, I just got a waterproof case for my camera so I don't have to be paranoid and overprotective when I take it out kayaking anymore! I also took out the seadog today so I included some pics of him.

Well, there is this large sandbar that the Discovery Center calls Discovery Island, well the PotM have laid claim to it!How festive! A Christmas tree in August!
Here we are approaching Discovery Island from the opposite side than before and lo and behold we come across a duck. Well, the seadog was very upset at this blatant trespassing...

But the duck vacated before we even hit the shore! Whew, alwasy nice when you can scare your "targets" into submission instead of spilling blood ;)

And here we are scaring off three more ducks that were swimming in the shallows around Discovery Island.

What a day, I am beat... time for a rest:

Last Night

Last night was a very good night. The Carolina Panthers won their third preseason game over the Miami Dolphins. The offense didn't look too sharp, but the defense and special teams looked terrific! The defense line played great, stopping Dolphins running back Ronnie Brown for losses a number of times. The linebackers and secondary got some great hits/tackles in too.


ANd to top everything thing off, DeAngelo Williams had a 98 yd kickoff return for a TD and Efrem Hill made good decisons (fair catch-wise) as the punt returner. H e even made a nice punt return of 22yds.

A few pics of DeAngelo Williams or as I have started calling him, Little D!




I also slept on my new sheets last night. I never w as a person that cared or even knew much about thread count, but I had just purchased some 300 thread count sheets and MY, THEY WERE AMAZING! I now understand the big deal, I am preaching that the 300 thread count is worth the extra cost.

Grand Tour

I have decided to give my readership the grand tour of my apartment; few have seen it, so consider yourselves lucky!

We'll start with my bedroom, as you can see, I also keep my ancient bike (~10 years old) in there too. For those curious, it is a Diamond Back Topanga 21 speed mountain bike.

Another shot of my bedroom, upon inspection, one will notice the literature at my bedside: Captain Johnson's A General History of Pirates and Stevenson's Treasure Island.
My kitchen, including my electric grill (next to the papertowels).
My kitchen, including my coffeepot, coffee bean grinder, and dirty dishes!

My dining area. I blocked about 2/3 of the bar-type table with on of my folding tables (the other is behind the couch). I am currently using a folding/camping chair as my dining chair, but soon my current office type chair will be demoted to ding purposes as soon as I find a replacement for it (maybe over labor day weekend in Sioux Falls?).

The living room/office:

This couch is older than I am by a number of months, but it is THE MOST COMFORTABLE COUCH KNOWN TO MAN! And yes, it puts the comfy chair to shame!

I love my new desk! $200 at officemax and worth every penny of it.

The LCD monitor is hooked to my newest PC while the CRT is hooked to my older PC (which spends its time off and gathering dust).

My TV/second monitor

Pirates of the Missouri Strike Again!

As usual, I went kayaking today... instead of taking my dog I brought along a friend. He doesn't have a blog for me to link to but I am pronouncing him a pirate of the missouri anyway though. Together we battled through the wind and tossing of the river... there were actual white caps this afternoon!

Along the way we found a perfect little inlet for stashing treasure and swag, but I cannot reveal the location on my blog to keep cowardly landlubbers from discovering it.... that and I am seriously considering starting into the geocaching fad and using this location to hide a cache!

We also patroled the Ft Pierre coast and made incursions into Marion Gardens (a residential development with it's own marina) and up the Bad River. We had to retreat from the Bad river because the smell of Ft Pierre became to strong ;)

I went into the wrong career field...

from Tuesday Morning Quarterback... yes he is back for the the football season already!

Big Plus: Parking Cannot Be Outsourced To India: Parking -- not the kind you did as a teenager -- is now a $500 billion industry worldwide. That sum is larger than the United States' defense budget, and represented about 2 percent of the global GDP in 2004. This means the world now spends on parking roughly what it spends on environmental protection, and considerably more than it spends on all books and libraries combined. If parking has become a major industry, there must be a trade association for parking. And there is: the International Parking Institute. Click here for info on its educational seminars, annual conferences, awards for excellence and trade magazine, Parking Professional. Awards for parking excellence? Parking is a leading hassle of modern life -- society has an interest in encouraging well-planned and well-operated parking facilities. Click here for the story of Mark Schtul, a parking expert who was late to speak at an urban-planning conference because he couldn't find a parking space.

SI Article

A great article by one of my favorite columnists, no not TMQB, but SIs Rick Reilly:

A Fairy Tale

This ios a skit/comedy act that I saw Gaelic Storm perform at the Anchor Inn in Omaha, NE. I haven't shared this in a long time so I decided to post it tonight.

Still More 2006 MIF

Yesterday, I posted a link to some pics from the 2006 Minnesota Irish Fair that I found online, well today (this morning before work) I decided to post the pics directly to my blog.

We begin with the enbtrance to Harriet Park, which sits on the Mississippi River in downtaown Saint Paul.
Next up is 5 Mile Chase, a small instrumental band from SD (the Brookings area I believe).

Some of the dancers:
Even a shot of a couple of dancers warming up:Security... oh I mean an Irish Wolfhound
A friend might need one of these large dogs to protect his house from former roommates ;)

This particular photographer (GS fan, I found her pics on the GS forum) even caught a pic of me getting my cd signed!Closeups of the members of GS:

Pat Murphy

Steve Twigger

Ryan Lacey

The radient Ellery Klein! (notice how I give her complimentary adjectives! ;) )

And Pete Purvis, the band's shortest tenured member. He is the bands piper (bagpipes and various whistles) and when he first joined the band fans kept bringing him pickled peppers as a joke!

The spirit of the Minnesota Irish Fair! ;) LOL

The Fuschia Band

And the beautiful skyline of Saint Paul, MN!
Again, here is the link where I found these pics and more!

Monitor Madness

Just had to brag a little about my new monitor:

A Samsung 204B; it is a 20.1" LCD montior with 5ms response time. I just love this monitor and it blows my old samsung 700ift (crt) out of the water! It isn't the best LCD out there but it is very good and was a great deal from newegg.com.

So I guess I am recomending this monitor to anyone interested in a large lcd monitor :)

Also, I found some more pics from the Minnesota Irish Fair online, check them out!

Bigfoot @ SDSMT

This website claims that a bigfoot was shot on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and taken to South Dakota School of Mines and Technology for study. Well, the claim was debunked after a press release from SDSMT claiming to not have a bigfoot...

"A School of Mines official says it has 14 (m) million dollars in research projects under way, but none of them have anything to do with Bigfoot."

Rapid City Journal
KTIV
ZWIRE

More 2006 Minnesota Irish Fair

As promised I have a few more things about the 2006 Minnesota Irish Fair! For starters, on saturday a daily attendence record was set; 50,000+!

A video of GS with help from other performers

The band (GS) had problems hearing themselves... listen to Murphy at the end of this video clip.

A few pics from my mom's camera:

Including a shot very near the moment that this packer fan got reminded that he was in Viking fan territory! LOL

Foolhardy? I DON'T THINK SO!

Well, it appears that Minnesota is now a dry state. All the beer in the state was consumed down at Harriet Island at the Minnesota Irish Fair! ;)

This weekend I drove up to Saint Paul, MN for the Minnesota Irish Fair. I spent all day saturday at the fair, including the Gaelic Storm concert. This was my third fair, the second with Gaelic Storm at it and it was by far the best one. The crowd for the GS concert was HUGE, the band just fed off of our energy and put on a great show.

Here is the band (GS) at a cd signing early in the afternoon. Apparently, the event organizers didn't want too much chaos after their performance ;)

Some fans even followed the directions of the new albulm, "Bring You're Wellies"!
I had a friend along with me and he decided to where green to fit in with the "theme"... so he wore his Green Bay Packer tshirt and took gruff from the many Minnesota Viking fans that were around... but that isn't all, Gaelic Storm's Pat Murphy even dissed him! As you can see, the viking fans were out that saturday night.

One of the better pics of the whole band (GS) playing that I took.

Gaelic Storm enlisted some help from other performers at the Fair.

Gaelic Storm's Pat Murphy with what he once called "a sexy instrument" (accordion).

My friend found a new beer that he likes. Apparently, the profits are all donated to charity!
Well, I not only took pics, I also recorded a few vid clips. Here is one with the lovely Ellery Klein in the center, Steve Twigger to the far left, Pete Purvis to the left, and Pat Murphy to the right on the bohdran. Sorry, buy Ryan Lacey is blocked by Ellery. You might need to wait a few seconds to see the link show up on the page, some sort of delay from the server so you read or accidently click on the ads.

I will try to post more pics, vids, and turnout information tomorrow or at least later this week. Keep checking back!

If anyone is interested, I do plan on returning to the fair next year (this will be an annual trip for me) so if anyone wants to go I would love to get a larger group of friends together than I did this year (including me: 2.5, one friend didn't stay very long and left before GS).

Pierre

ah, the internet...

Why should a person live in Pierre, SD? It is just the 8th best small town in the nation!

Best Small Cities in the U.S.

Tourists' Guide To Pierre

PotM Recruitment

Another weekend, another successful tour along the shores of Pierre, SD. My loyal navigator and I put fear into the hearts of waterfowl, fish, beachgoers, and jetskiers alike. But it is not an easy task. And we can only cover so much territory in a weekend... So I am pleased to announce that I am shanghaiing the Daring into THE PIRATES OF THE MISSOURI!

This new influx of crew members will be able to cover most major "ports" (and the official one) in SD. We are also lucky enough to have a buccaneer of great navigation ability down in the Kansas City area. This will allow THE REAL SEADOG to spend more time assaulting vessels and ports.