Woo, Texas has made it to the Final 4. Steve listed a bunch of possible scenarios as to “if x team wins, then y person wins” etc. I only win if Texas wins the Championship. I have to wait like a week until the next game though. Grr!

I called my grandma today to see how she was doing. She seems to be doing great—she went to the doctor last week and they told her that she can drive again. She’s had a great recovery from the hip surgery—there were absolutely no complications. She is able to get around pretty well on her own and is in significantly less pain that before. If only she had known it would be this easy, I’m sure she would’ve done this years ago. As always, she was glad to hear from me, asked when I was coming home, and gave a little guilt trip about how she doesn’t hear from me and my sister much. :)

I told her I’d be coming home Thursday night because I am going to Vegas with my parents while they compete in a bowling tournament. I got the impression from our conversation that either my parents hadn’t told her about my dad losing his job, or she didn’t mention it because I didn’t let on that I knew. I’m guessing the former, because she’d probably give them a lecture about going to Vegas under the circumstances.

Have you seen that Sprint PCS commercial with the two sisters sharing a phone? I swear that was me and my sister growing up, only you would have to substitute the phone with a remote control. I remember one time Lisa wanted to watch 90210 and I wanted to watch like Scooby Doo or something. 90210 was a repeat (again) and Lisa got to watch her stuff EVERY DAY, so I decided to turn it. Well, she freaked out, so I covered the cable box so she couldn’t turn it. She then resorted to kicking and hitting me while screaming at the top of her lungs. I still didn’t change it though, which irritated her. Anyway, Steve was kind enough to point out that when he saw this commercial, it reminded him of this story that I told him. Since he has hung out with both of us a few times and knows me pretty well, he can definitely see how there are some similarities between us and the commercial. I told Vince about it and he concurred, except that he doesn’t really know my sister as well so he wasn’t quite sure. He was sure though that I found it funny, and that I have enough of an aggressive quality to have something like that be entirely plausible.

Well, the games today didn’t matter so much to me in terms of moving up in the ranks, because I didn’t have any of the teams that played today moving on to the Final 4. However, there were a couple of upsets for people, so that now only another guy and I have a team winning the Finals that is actually still in the running (so far….we will see if Texas wins tomorrow). The loss of Arizona to Kansas means that A LOT of people lose their Finals winner, and many more lose a team they had making it to the Final 4 and even the Finals. I really hope Texas wins, because they are my ONLY team still in the running.

On some good news though, there was also a side bet made called a Survivor Pick. To play, you picked one team per day of competition that you thought would win (not TOO hard in the beginning when you had 8 games a day). If you win you get to keep going the next day, but if you lose just once, you are out of the running. The other catch to the Pick is that you may only choose a team once, which could screw you later on if you already picked all the teams that are playing. Anyway, it got down to just me and Steve, and yesterday we both lost our Survivor Picks—he picked Kentucky and I picked Arizona. As a result, we both get to split the winnings—not bad considering that now means that it cost me nothing to enter this pool. That is ESPECIALLY good when you consider how poorly I’ve been performing. I think that in the future I will make sure to actually do some research and actually pick teams I think will win it, and not rely on a coin toss. :)

On sadder, non-NCAA news, my mom told me my dad got laid off from work today. This came as a bit of a surprise, because even though they were doing some layoffs, he had been told that his job was OK for awhile. Apparently not.

As if they didn’t have enough financial obligations to meet with two incomes, now they have to get by with just one paycheck. Truly sad. I don’t know what my family is going to do yet. :(

Well, I’m still in last place for the tournament. I only got one team today that goes on to the Final 4—Texas. Of the 2 picks I have that are going on, I only have Texas making it to the Finals, and they had me worried for a bit in this last game. I almost had 3 teams in the Final 4 because Auburn played great in the 2nd half and almost won it, losing by only 1 point. Well, if Texas wins, I can still take it!

Well, the competition to the Elite 8 isn’t looking so good. Out of 4 games that were played today, I only won one—Arizona. It’s POSSIBLE I could win up to 3 games tomorrow, but I doubt it. Two of them are LOOOONG shots, although the other is Texas, who I have winning the tournament. With these losses, I have now moved to the prestigious rank of…..Last Place! Can it get much worse? :)

On a lighter note, I have been getting some interesting hits to my site, such as “My hands are always cold”
I also discovered that I am the #4 hit on MSN for Annoying Coworker.
Kick ass. :)

Today didn’t change my ranking any, but it did give me a few long-shot wins, which kicked ass. The Butler game was especially exciting for me to watch, as I was the only person to pick them. One of my Finalists got eliminated, which majorly sucks, but if Texas wins it all, it may not matter.

My picks that move on are:

1. Butler
2. Auburn
3. Texas
4. Kentucky

Hmm, it seems that I have 8 teams—I am exactly 50% for teams entering the Sweet 16. I hope my picks advance farther—or at least the ones that matter, like Texas, Butler, and Auburn. Butler looked pretty decent, so we shall see. Texas has me a bit worried to take it, but I still have hope!

Well, I have moved back down to next to last. The teams I have moving on to the Sweet 16 are as follows:

1. Arizona
2. Oklahoma
3. Duke
4. Marquette

Here was where I had some of my LOOONG shots that didn’t make it. We shall see how tomorrow fares for the rest of my picks.

Today I was saved a bit by choosing Butler to beat Mississippi State. Only one other person chose Butler to win the First Round. This now moved me up a rank, to 7 out of 12—not a great score, but there are two scores lower than my own, so it could be worse!

Here are my wins from today that will advance to the Second Round:

1. Auburn
2. Kentucky
3. Texas
4. Oklahoma State
5. Wake Forest
6. Purdue
7. Pittsburgh
8. Michigan State
9. Louisville
10. Florida
11. Indiana
12. Butler
13. Maryland

It seems I fared slightly better today than yesterday. We shall see how things hold up for Round Two. Unfortunately some of my Round Two picks have already been eliminated, so I am not sure how that will affect me.

Well, as they say, you can’t pick them all. The coin toss method didn’t fare TOO badly yet, as I am not in last place. I am in a 3-way tie for 2nd to last place, woohoo. Admittedly, some of my picks were long-shots and I was hesitant to write them down. But, if I wanted to stay true to my coin toss method, I couldn’t deviate. We shall see how the rest of the Round 1 Teams fare.

So far, my picks that are advancing to the Second Round are:
1. Wisconsin
2. Tulsa
3. Missouri
4. Marquette
5. Arizona
6. Illinois
7. Duke
8. Arizona State
9. Stanford
10. Oklahoma
11. California

Hey, I got quite a bit more than half, so I guess I can’t complain. That on top of the fact that somehow I didn’t end up last for the day means that maybe there is hope for me yet…

I am special!

Last week at work, the systems guys installed service packs on all of our computers, which run Windows 2000. Unfortunately, for some of us in the Serials Department, the update didn’t go smoothly.

We didn’t know the update was going to take place, so as a result, most of us turned our systems off. This meant that the installation didn’t take place until we turned our computers on in the morning, and we were treated to over an hour and a half of waiting.

Once the install completed we attempted to log in. It was then that most of us noticed problems. First explorer.exe crashed, to which we responded by rebooting. After the reboot, the login screen failed and so the computer reboot itself, failed, rebooted, failed, rebooted, you get the idea.

The systems guys fixed this, but the end result is that some things just didn’t work quite right. Search boxes, pull-down menus, and the screens that pop up when you print or save stuff just didn’t appear most of the time; Netscape appeared a giant grey box. They would think they had it fixed, but then it would do it again, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. So, after spending hours trying to fix it, they decided to try another solution.

They gave those of us with problem systems Windows XP. This seems to have fixed our problems, but more importantly, we are cooler than all the other people in the entire building. Almost no one else has XP yet, because at the moment we only hold 50 licenses—definitely not enough to install it on every system. So, we are special, hehe.

On another note, I entered Steve’s pool for the NCAA basketball tournament. I figure I don’t really have a chance at winning, since I don’t watch the games and have no idea how the teams played or anything. In light of this predicament, I decided to have fun with my picks, and maybe even win it just by being different. Most of the guys will probably go with who they like or who they feel has done well.

Not me.

I couldn’t get a monkey at such late notice, so I decided to choose via the coin flip method. Heads I pick the first team, tails the second. Some of the picks are “interesting” to say the least, but ya never know, the underdog wins some of the time. I’d laugh if I won; that would kick so much ass. :)

Welcome to the release of my new layout! Mostly it’s just new colors, but I was trying to experiment with some other stuff as well. Basically I got tired of the old colors; I felt they were too dark. While I’m not a really bubbly person by nature, I’m not really dark either. These new colors are a little more fun, and also represent the fact that I spent the time picking them all myself, instead of relying on some template.

As always, any comments and/or suggestions for my site are much appreciated.

Hmm it seems like forever since I’ve done an update. Maybe because it’s been over a week, or perhaps because I know some people check half a dozen times a day. I’ve been lazy, not writing about interesting things I’ve done, and instead focusing on, well, the banal, which I suppose might not be inappropriate considering the title of my site.

Anyway in WLI Travel Values news, a guy named JD contacted me and let me know that he has compiled a website documenting the websites practices and privacy policies, along with the steps he has taken to contact them and express his displeasure. I am including the link here, as well as on the side link section of my site, so go check it out if you want the info: Go to JD’s Travel Values site.

Thursday was Steve’s 24th birthday. He went to dinner with some track people and was planning on getting a group together to go bowling, but that didn’t wind up happening. Apparently no one but me wanted to go, and the dinner ran so long that it would’ve been too late to bowl anyway. Perhaps we will go another time. I hope he had a good day nonetheless. This weekend he is in SD and is, among other activities, looking for a place to live down there. He plans to move down there at the end of the month and I will be VERY sad to see him go. There’s a slight chance he might change his mind, but who knows. Maybe it’s selfish of me, but I kinda hope he does….

I would just like to end this entry by saying that Yanni is da man! (And no, I don’t own any of his albums) ;)