Rough Draft

Home Field Advantage: Eagles

The Eagles beat the Redskins 31-7 on Saturday and Detroit beat St. Louis today, meaning the Eagles get a bye week next week and home field advantage throughout the rest of the playoffs. After the Eagles lost to San Francisco last week in overtime, they needed to this week and have St. Louis lose in order to secure home field advantage. Thankfully Detroit pulled through with a 30-20 come from behind victory over St. Louis. Apparently there's something good in Michigan besides Lynn. ;) The other plus is the Eagles go into the playoffs after a big win over the Redskins, while St. Louis enters after a disappointing loss.

While I'm glad the Eagles got home field advantage, it isn't everything. They lost at home in the NFC Championship game last year to the Bucs. Overall though, I'm quite happy with the Eagles' prospects of making it to the Super Bowl this year. At the end of last season, I thought that was going to be their last really good chance for a couple seasons. They lost several key players defensively, including lineman Hugh Douglas who is one of the best in the league. There was also some doubt as to whether Duce Staley would be back, fortunately he was.

The one sore spot for the Eagles as they enter the playoffs is that they will probably be without key playmaker Brian Westbrook. The Eagles have been using 3 running backs all season, so they are still strong at that position, but throughout the season it seemed as though Westbrook was the one who came through with the most big plays in crucial situations.

Overall, the Eagles are a very strong team and they have as good a chance of making to the Super Bowl as they have the last 2 years. Hopefully this will be the year they finally make it to the Super Bowl, and if they do, I think they have an excellent chance of winning it.

Ohayocon

A group of us are going to Ohayocon, Jan. 23-25. I've been wanting to go to an anime convention for a while, but haven't had a chance too. Ohayocon looks to be a lot of fun. It looks like they're having an Anime Music Video contest, so I'll have to find out if Mike or Meri are having any entries in the contest.

Movies and other things to watch

I'm just making a quick list of movies and such that Lynn and I had talked about needing to watch next semester.

Movies showing at Strosacker:

Panther Install Fest

I've installed Panther on 3 machines since I've been home (original iMac, my brother's 12" Powerbook G4, and my Dad's G4 450 MHZ G4 tower). The Powerbook and G4 Tower installations were simple upgrades from 10.2. The iMac had still been running Mac OS 9, and I needed to reformat the hard drive so I could install OS X on a partition within the first 8 GB's of the hard drive. All installations went flawless just as expected. Panther runs surprisingly well on the original iMac, especially since it only has 288 MB of RAM. Before I got back to school I'll probably pick up another 256 MB stick to replace the one 32 MB stick in it now.

Unfortunately, I have to go to one of my relatives' houses to fix their computer running Windows 98 sometime over break. From the sounds of it I'm going to need to reinstall Windows, but I have a feeling it won't go anywhere near as smoothly as installing Panther.

Christmas Vacation

I think probably my favorite Christmas movie of all time is National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. So many funny, quotable lines. Lynn hasn't seen it, or at least doesn't really remember it, so we're going to watch it when we get back to Case.

The Gift List

I'm a dork, so I might as well list my Christmas gifts in my blog.

From Parents:

From Brother:

From Grandparents:

Other:

Dickey Lanes

A group of us wanted to go bowling last night and we found a quaint little place on W. 25th called Dickey Lanes. It only had about 8 lanes and after the leagues ended, we were the only ones there bowling. It only cost $5 a person for 3 games and show rental. I had a pretty average night, breaking 100 in 2 out of 3 games. I'm pretty sure Dickey Lanes will be our bowling alley of choice from now on.

Recent Tunes 2.0

Work continues on Recent Tunes 2.0. It's almost done though, save for some last minute bug fixing and finishing up the ReadMe. It's currently being used for the "Currently Playing" and "Recent Tunes" sections both here on my site and on Erik's site. It supports saving a file to disk, uploading to a server via ftp or ssh, and using HTTP GET to send information to a php script.

Eagles vs Cowboys

I'm a few days late in posting this, especially since the game was even on here in
Cleveland, but at any rate, the Eagles solidly beat the Cowboys last Sunday 36-10. With that the Eagles pretty well solidified their position at the top of the NFC East, and they also currently have home field advantage through the playoffs. The Eagles' offense continues to be successful using the 3 running back scheme of Staley, Westbrook, and Buckhalter. The weakest part of the Eagles' right now seems to be their run defense. With the other premier team in the NFC being St. Louis, with Marshal Faulk, that could be a problem come playoff time. However, the Browns were able to contain Faulk fairly well last Monday night, so hopefully the Eagles can do the same should they meet in the playoffs. The next game for the Eagles is against Miami on Monday night. That means I'll get to hear Madden's words of wisdom, woohoo!

New Amsterdams

I finally found and listened to The New Amsterdams' 2003 release, "Worse for the Wear". The New Amsterdams are a side project featuring Matt Pryor of The Get Up Kids as lead singer/songwriter. Fans of bands such as the Get Up Kids (obviously) and Straylight Run will definitely like The New Amsterdams. After just a couple listens tracks for me are "From California" and "All Our Vice". Lyrics can be found here and here respectively.

Pirates of the Caribbean

A group of us went to see Pirates of the Caribbean in Strosacker last night. I had wanted to see it over the summer, but never had time. I really enjoyed the movie. It wasn't anything spectacular, but it was just a really fun movie to sit back and enjoy. I also really enjoyed the Captain Jack Sparrow character. It was great the way he never looked like he knew what he was doing, but as it turned out he always had a plan. If you haven't seen this movie yet, I'd highly recommend checking it out.

Wonderful Days

Matt sent me this trailer (the site is really slow, but it's worth the wait) of one of the most beautifully animated pieces I have ever seen. The movie itself is available on the BitTorrent tracker Supernova.

Tagline

Finally added a tagline to my blog's title. They are lyrics from the amazing song Rough Draft by Yellowcard.

SMB3 in 11 minutes

It's somewhat old news, but I felt the need to link to the Super Mario Bros. 3 in 11 minutes video, or as Mike put it "our entire childhood in 11 minutes."

Eagles vs Panthers

The combination of the Eagles' 25-16 victory over the Panthers and a Cowboys' loss put the Eagles in first place in both the NFC East and in the conference. The Eagles played another solid game, both offensively and defensively. This week, they play the Cowboys, and a victory by the Eagles should ensure them the NFC East title. From the TV schedule it looks like the game will actually be televised here in Cleveland, so I'll actually get to watch my first Eagles game in several weeks.

Final Week of Classes

This was the last week of classes for this semester and as such I've been rather busy lately and have not had time to post to my blog. Fortunately, other than a few exams the only work I have left is a demo of our online Bomberman game (client written using Cocoa and Cocoa Sprite Kit and server written in Python) and a homework assignment for Intelligent Systems.