Author: Joe

Categories
Sports

Dodgeball Winter 2014 Week 1

Last night was the opening night of our winter dodgeball season. So I was pretty excited as I normally am to see all the familiar faces and meet the new ones too.

However, this start was a bit different in that we had seven of our players not show up for the game! Seven missing Badgers. I wasn’t surprised that we had a few unable to play as it was literally a record cold day last night, but seven was insane! We only had 3 girls.

While we traditionally have fared well against our opponents the Banzai Executioners, the Badgers really stunk it up last night. We just plain old got beat down, and I’m really not certain exactly why. It wasn’t so much due to our lack of girls (though that was a great disadvantage), our guys just didn’t play well.

We pretty much underachieved all night and it showed. I’m hoping that it was just a fluke night and once we get our other players back we’ll start to play a bit better.

All in all it was still a great deal of fun and another exciting opening night to a season.

Categories
Books

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

The Everything StoreI’ve always enjoyed my experiences using Amazon, whether it was buying a book, gift, using their AWS services and more. So when I saw The Everything Store, deciding to read it was a pretty simple call.

While I’ve always had a great deal of respect for what Amazon has been able to grow and offer as a business, I really didn’t know too much about it’s growth and their founder other than a few interviews on 60 Minutes or 20/20 that I caught bits of.

As it turns out, while I’m still as impressed as I was by their accomplishments I’m a bit bummed to learn just how they were accomplished. While it’s natural to become sort of a “villain” once you dominant an industry, some of the examples of just how ruthless and cold Amazon’s business tactics are a bit of a turn off to read about.

Granted no successful mega corporation is all sunshine and rainbows, but I still like to think in a foolish way that they might be. Oh well, I still am very pleased with Amazon’s customer service and would continue to do business with them, specially now that they are offering coupon codes on websites like Raise.

Categories
Adventure

New Years 2014

I received a very rare phone call from the relatively silent Dustin inviting me over to a festive New Year’s celebration. While I was pretty much leaning towards simply sleeping and doing nothing, if he did make the effort to call I really felt like I should go.

Unfortunately the Shepherd didn’t intend to go, but we thought I would be able to drag him out. I decided to attempt to persuade him to come along in person. It’s always tougher to say no in person after all. So after defeating him in darts and losing by 1 lone point in a pretty intense game of Scrabble he was adamant to not join us. I had failed in my mission.

I still headed over though, and was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of Badgers there as well too. I’d have plenty to chat with after all.

We played a board game called Smart Ass that I pretty much dominated at to the humorous complaints of all in the room. It was a trivia based game, and I do tend to do well with the trivia after all. Fun stuff.

I really wasn’t paying much attention to the actual ball drop on TV, but apparently the banging of pots and pans is a tradition in Somers Point as many would partake in the excursion outdoors. It was rather funny and loud at the same time. Beautiful.

All in all a rather fun night with a rather different crew for me. Good times ringing in the new year.

Categories
Adventure Sports

2013 Honey Badger Holiday Party

The much heralded Honey Badgers franchise had their 2nd annual holiday party. Invites went out to current and past Honey Badgers greats. It’s a very exciting time.

The turn out was pretty solid, around 10 people or so. Unfortunately we did have a bunch of last minute declines, but realistically as we get older that no longer surprises me. People just seem to have more things going on.

Once again hosting veteran Fierce served as the generous host and did another fantastic job. This year we decided to hold a tournament of holiday themed games. I made a scoreboard all by myself with no help, and we would use that to keep official score of the various game’s outcomes.

Here were some of the amazing games that we played:

  • Cotton Ball Race
  • Toothpick Marshmallow Towers (the only failure)
  • Jingle in the Trunk
  • Merry Fishmas
  • Hannukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa (rock, paper, scissors)
  • Holiday Song Lyrics
  • Sudoku
  • Christmas Ball

I was very glad to see just how much fun everyone had participating. We had some very impressive and fun moments. Congrats to Caitlin and Dustin on their team victory! It was a true Christmas miracle!

The was also a gift exchange, where you could trade, open, or draw a swap from a hat. I’m not sure I can fully explain it as I’m not sure I fully understood it, but it worked and everyone walked away happy. There were high heels of lotion, a strange baby from San Diego, and countless other amazing goodness. Another Christmas miracle for all!

Another very fun and successful Honey Badger Holiday Party!

 

Categories
Books

Jim Henson: The Biography

Jim HensonWhen I saw the cover for Jim Henson, I knew right away I had to read it. Not only did I grow up idolizing the various Muppets, but more importantly the photo of Ernie on the cover of the book sold me. Ernie looks so serious I just had to read it.

I really didn’t know too much about Jim Henson the guy, besides the fact that he unfortunately passed away much too young. I think I was in the 7th grade when he did.

So reading up on his life and his amazing work was very interesting. Not only was he extremely creative but he also grew a very successful business as well. It was cool to follow.

While I pretty much saw every film he made growing up, I didn’t realize how big of a deal each one was at the time. Like the Dark Crystal, Muppet Movies and Labyrinth. I hadn’t realized their successes and failures at the time.

I found this very interesting and it really is a shame he had to leave the world so soon. You do wonder what other great ideas he had to share.

Ernie is still pretty awesome too, and the book does delve into his background as well.

Categories
Uncategorized

Christmas 2013

While Christmas isn’t nearly what it was to me growing up, it’s still a pretty fun time of year. While the presents received doesn’t live up to the days of old, getting people really cool and thoughtful stuff is a lot of fun to me.

Apparently I really hit a home run with the Marvel Unlimited subscription I got my younger brother. He now has one year unlimited access to over 13,000+ issues of Marvel comics on his iPad. While I knew he would appreciate this a great deal, I was surprised at just how excited he was to receive it.

I did notice my Dad complaining to my Mom a few weeks back that these things he uses on the stove burners were well past broken. My Mom thought that the things were no longer made, as she hasn’t seen them in ages. Using the power of the internet I found out that they were called heat diffusers and in fact can still be bought. God bless the internet and a very glad father.

As for my older brother, he tends to be a really worrisome about his dog (Lady) when he has to leave her at home alone. So I got him a Belkin NetCam HD that he can setup wirelessly at home and check in on Lady when he is at work in full HD from his iPad (or any internet connected device). I was glad to be able to put him at ease and he was very thankful for the gift.

While my Mom’s wasn’t quite as exciting to me to think of, I did get her a fine gift card to Macy’s so she can go out and spend a day shopping and frankly getting away from the above mentioned guys in my family for a bit of sanity. She really likes to do that, and giving her a gift card to use up means that she will surely put aside time for a day to get away from those guys.

All in all a pretty successful gift giving for my family.

I was also the recipient of some cool stuff from them too:

  • The Wonderful 101 for the Wii U
  • a talking plush Honey Badger (very cool!)
  • some rare Guardians of the Galaxy comic (I’ll have to look that one up)
  • a re-gifted sweater that I immediately recognized, but acted like I hadn’t realized just to be nice
  • Sports Authority gift card so I can be sporty
  • and and assortment of other fine stuff too

While not at fun as it was many years ago, still a pretty cool time and nice to be around everyone in relative peace.