travis johnson

I was talking to Cameron tonight and he pointed me to a couple of video responses to Lazy Sunday. Check out the West Coast’s Lazy Monday and the Midwest’s Lazy Muncie. They are both pretty good, but not quite as good the original.

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For only the second time this year we won. Our opponent tonight was pretty good, but one ref wasn’t. I think he had it out for me. He would call anything in my favor, seriously. As an example, in one play toward the end of the game, a guy on the other team and I got tangled up and I think he literally tried to pull my arm off. For a few seconds I was in a lot of pain. Somehow, that was a foul on me. It was my fourth of the game with three others called under about the same premise. Oh well, we won.

So about the game, in general. We were down by 10 after the first quarter and stayed at that difference going into the shortest halftime ever. We had eight players, which was good because the tuna sandwich I had for lunch wasn’t sitting too well. Anyways, I think by the end of the third quarter we were tied, if not tied, it was really close. We stayed pretty close for the first half of the last quarter, then the other team started making a run getting out to an eight point lead with only 3:30 left in the game. We made a couple of clutch threes and a few close shots and with about 40 seconds left made the go-ahead basket. I don’t think it was our only lead of the game, but it couldn’t have come at a better time. Brad then stole the ball and we converted on the other end to take a comfortable three point lead with about 10 seconds left. Their final attempt to tie it wasn’t a good one and bounced off the rim. We won!

I played okay tonight. Not as well as our last two games, but as a team we played well and got the victory. I had somewhere in the 15-20 point range and only about 6 or 7 rebounds. They were a very good rebounding team, both offensively and defensively. Oh and I had four fouls.

We just have one game left. We are playing the team that we played and beat in our exhibition game. Also, the team we beat tonight beat Papa’s Pizza last week by about 10 points. Tonight Papa’s Pizza beat the team we play next week by three points. We actually lost to Papa’s Pizza when we played them, but I find these indirect reasons for our victory next week more convincing.

3 Comments » Categories: Sports

I signed up yesterday for TextDrive’s Mixed Grill hosting. A one-time fee gets me three great Joyent services for as long as they are around, one of which is a nice web hosting package.

Since they sign people up manually, and it is the weekend, I haven’t gotten my account information for Strongspace or Joyent, both of which I am looking forward to using.

I first heard about TextDrive when I got into Ruby on Rails development. I have since moved away from Rails in favor of PHP5, but find TD’s services the best around. I like how easy it is to set up SVN on their servers.

I am quite excited to start using Strongspace. Currently, Rachel and I don’t do anything to back our files and important documents up. Strongspace should provide a good hosted service for our needs.

Finally, Joyent looks like it might be kind of nice for us to use. I have been looking for a good web-based mail client to use while away from my computer and also a good shared calendaring system. We started using 30Boxes the other day, but will probably switch to Joyent soon.

No Comments » Categories: Internet

I was listening to the Ray Davis Show this morning, a three-hour bluegrass show out of American University in Washington D.C, and heard a version of Down in the Willow Garden performed by the Lonesome River Band.

I don’t know any of the history of Down in the Willow Garden, but I really like the song. I first heard a recording of it a couple years ago played by the K-Settes (you know, the best band that will never get signed) at a small concert in Chicago (which definitely refutes that they never even played a show).

It is a bit of a gruesome song, so I won’t link to the song, but if you must hear it, you can find quite a few versions of this traditional song on the iTunes Music Store.

No Comments » Categories: Music

For anyone interested in the second season of Deadwood on DVD, we found out today it has been delayed until sometime in May. As recent as two weeks ago, it was supposed to be released next Tuesday. The people at Suncoast weren’t sure why it had been delayed.

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The one thing I hate on the web more than anything is when the webpage resizes the current window. It is unbearable for two reasons. First, when using tabbed browsing, all the tabs now take on this shrunken window’s size. Also, any new window you open is the size of this smaller window, until you resize your window.

So web developers, if you feel you must resize my window, please don’t do it after I come to your page. Please just pop a new presized window (at least then my popup blocker can catch and I can leave with only a minor annoyance).

2 Comments » Categories: Internet

Yahoo! added a PHP section to their impressive developer network. The PHP Developer Center has some good content already, focusing heavily on web services and XML.

There aren’t too many things that are new for me, but the web service caching looks pretty interesting. I also really like that Yahoo! makes many of their web service responses available in XML, JSON, and Serialized PHP.

XML is the obvious response format for a web service. Any language can easily parse XML. JSON is also becoming a pretty good choice for a response format. As ajax gains popularity, javascript is going to start making more and more web service requests. The serialized PHP response format threw me for a loop when I first saw it. I had never before thought of using serialized content in a web service. It makes so much sense and it is great that Yahoo! is supporting it. Basically, by serializing the data for PHP, Yahoo! is putting the information in the closest format possible for your PHP script to use with minimal work. Not that SimpleXML is hard to use, but unserialize() is even easier (and it’s available in PHP4 and PHP3, for that matter) and faster.

No Comments » Categories: Programming

I used my day off from work (happy birthday presidents) to move most of the domains I host over to my new host. I have a few sites left to transfer over, but so far everything has gone well.

I also played around with the Flickr API a little and set up mechroboticon to display my most recent 100 photos.

5 Comments » Categories: General

The life of Lazy Sunday, that SNL digital short from a few months ago, has been an interesting one to watch. When I first saw it (I still watch it a couple times a week, actually), I thought it was amazing. I didn’t think it was going to be as popular as it is.

I am a little surprised when I read in the current issue of GQ that the publication thought Lazy Sunday and Chris Farley were the only two bright spots for SNL in the last 15 years. I’ve only been watching the show for about the last 10 years, but can’t imagine that it is any less funny than the early years with greats like Jim Belushi, Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. I hope I never get to a point where I say that SNL used to be good when Adam Sandler, David Spade, Tracy Morgan (that one’s mainly for Rachel, but Brian Fellow Safari Planet is classic), Will Farrell, Chris Kattan, Amy Poehler, Horatio Sanz, Jimmy Fallon and, of course, Tina Fey where on.

Cam sent me a link that started all my SNL thoughts about NBC lawyers forcing YouTube to pull Lazy Sunday from their site.

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Red Giant snapped our one-game winning streak tonight. We only had five players again for tonight’s game and even hung in the game through the first quarter. But ended up being no match for our opponent.

This was by far the best offense we played all year. They didn’t score the most points on us (they scored 87, someone once scored 97 on us), but they moved the ball well and almost never took a bad shot. Our offense wasn’t quite as good as it was last week and our defense wasn’t quite as good, either. We ended up losing by about 30, but only because of a few bad streaks.

I think I had about 25 points in tonight’s game. It’s hard for me to keep track. Things like addition become overly complex when I am tired from running up and down the court without much rest. I took and made my second three-point shot of the year and had a couple of blocks. I am most pleased with my performance from the line. After an 0/4 outing last week, I was about 8/9 this week.

We only have two more games this year. Hopefully we can get a few more guys for our last few games and keep playing well.

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