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2012-366 Day 176 – Volleyball Game 3

A hard fought set of back and forth games (25-21, 30-32, 25-19) left us as the only undefeated team remaining (the other two fell today), with our only game loss coming on a 32-30 marathon. I’m very happy with my team and how we play together, and they seem to reflect my standard levelheadedness quite nicely. Personally, I’m fairly happy with my play, especially in a couple of areas. In serving, I’ve been extremely consistent and served the final seven points in our first (25-21) win. In hustle plays, I’ve gotten to three balls in two games (two week one, one today) that saved points and allowed us to come back from a deficit to eventually win the game.

Actually, I feel that my team pretty accurately reflects my volleyball skill set, with only a couple of hitters (probably the weakest part of my game), good passers, and excellent servers. There’s also a good amount of hustle and heart. I’m looking forward to the rest of the season, where we hopefully won’t duplicate last year’s results of getting first place in the regular season and bumped in the first round of playoffs.

Weight: 229 Loss: 11 lbs – Running Yearly Mileage: 183.5 miles
Volleyball Match Record: 3-0 (7-2 Game Record, +17 Point Differential)
Fitocracy Level: 22 ID: disciplev1

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By Matt
June 24, 2012

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2012-366 Day 175 – Weekend Wrap Up X

You know what’s an amazing thing? A Saturday without any scheduled activities except for karate. It’s been a long time since that happened, and we enjoyed it.

Sunday (6/17) – Volleyball Game 2: I ran the league last week and am running it this week while Brian is out of town, so I got the honor of picking up the shirts for the year. I posted a picture (below) on the Rocky Peak Sports Facebook page but only teased who got which color. So, of course, I’ll post the list here, as I highly doubt anyone will read it before tomorrow (and if they do, good for them): Orange – B. Kemmer, Scarlet – McDaniel, Royal – Rafeedy, Forest – Stamper, Gold – Steele, Kelly Green – Kemmer, Black – Tidemanson, White – Wierman, Purple – Wong, Silver – Worland.

Monday (6/18) – Published: Still proud of Jess!

Tuesday (6/19) – Work: This was my busiest week of work in a while due to the fact that we replaced all of our printer copiers at once with a different brand, so I had to get everyone’s printer switched over. It was pretty crazy, as I had to get the drivers installed, the scripts setup, and the groups for the various printers repaired, all for a hundred machines with the potential for multiple printers. Oh, and our fax machines print to them to.

Wednesday (6/20) – Work II: By the way, if you are graduating from CSUN this year, you can thank me for having our Graduation Evaluation office down while they are clearing all the diplomas for less than 15 minutes.

Thursday (6/21) – Rock of Ages: I did find myself singing songs from the movie for the last couple days (although I suppose that means I was just singing the original songs . . .), so I guess it had that going for it?

Friday (6/22) – Tags: I suppose I should set aside a day for blog maintenance to get those old tags setup, and maybe some links back to the original posts for these Weekend Wrap Ups.

Karate was a heck of a workout today, and I’m looking forward to Volleyball tomorrow. Gotta get back to resting now, though.

Weight: 229 Loss: 11 lbs – Running Yearly Mileage: 183.5 miles
Volleyball Match Record: 2-0 (5-1 Game Record, +9 Point Differential)
Fitocracy Level: 21 ID: disciplev1

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By Matt
June 23, 2012

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2012-366 Day 174 – Tags

I realize that I was lax when first writing these blog posts and not tagging them appropriately, but I’ve now been fairly consistent for 100 posts and accumulated a fair amount of tags. In fact, when I create my posts it gives me the option to choose from my most used tags in the tag section, and clicking the link presents me with the following list (with size being indicative of how often the tag is used):

The list actually lumps together all tags on the site, so posts written and tagged by Jess also show up (see: Epcot, Disney Firsts, and Walt Disney World), but the vast majority are from the current series of blogs. A couple of big winners stand out, the Weekend Wrap Up (which I’ve been doing fairly consistently for a few months now), Shepherd Sports attached to Soccer (at least eight posts between games and tryouts), and Vacation (probably mostly from the San Diego trip series I wrote). I imagine the tags Volleyball, Rocky Peak Sports, and Pictures will be jumping up there in the next couple months as I play more games and post more pictures, with a late run of Softball in the fall.

Funny, to me at least, are the one offs featured in a few specific posts, like Red Bull (a couple of pictures of people sticking wings and a Red Bull can on a crosswalk sign at both CSUN and Pepperdine), Double Take (which actually comes from the Red Bull series), and a very tiny Sign tag. Perhaps I should also be worried that Thoughts is such a tiny tag, although I suppose that might be appropriate.

I’ll try to post an updated tag cloud in another 50-100 posts or so, and also update the early posts so they have their appropriate tags to see how it changes.

Weight: 229 Loss: 11 lbs – Running Yearly Mileage: 183.5 miles
Volleyball Match Record: 2-0 (5-1 Game Record, +9 Point Differential)
Fitocracy Level: 21 ID: disciplev1

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By Matt
June 22, 2012

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2012-366 Day 173 – Rock of Ages

So I managed to make some time to go to the movies today and, as is my custom, did so by myself. I went and saw Rock of Ages because I actually heard and then went to see the original musical first and wanted to see how they adapted it. Rock of Ages shares a unique distinction with one other musical (Les Miserables) in that I saw it before Jess did and introduced her to it. Les Mis came about as a happy accident, a family channel surf landed on it when I was in high school and we watched and enjoyed it together. Rock of Ages was different, in that I heard about a musical featuring a bunch of classic rock and decided I had to go find it. I got the soundtrack and it was a lot of fun, so I made Jess listen to it and the rest was history. We went with a group to see it at the Pantages last year and had an absolute blast.

Expectations going into the movie were actually pretty low, as I was well informed on all the changes that were being made to the musical and not happy with most of them. The got rid of some good characters and storylines to streamline it for the film, and even bumped one of my favorite numbers (“Hate Myself for Loving You”/”Heat of the Moment”). Casting Tom Cruise as Jaxx wasn’t helping matters either, although he wound up doing better than I expected.

Now I’m going to keep out of discussing the story for the simple reason that most of you don’t care. I will say that the thing I was most disappointed with was how flat the music was. Now I don’t mean flat tonally (at least I don’t think I do, I’m no Music major), but it was just so processed and overproduced that it felt nothing like musical music. I don’t know if I’m being quite clear with that, but it just felt like everyone was going through the motions and lip-syncing away. It was that lack of heart for the most part that was my biggest disappointment. The notable exception was Cruise’s performance of “Wanted Dead or Alive,” to me that was probably the best part of the movie. I did enjoy one of the new additions with the “Jukebox Hero”/”I Love Rock and Roll” set.

In all, I can’t recommend going to see it, although if you are completely unfamiliar with the stage musical I’d be curious to see what you thought. I do, however, recommend the stage version highly (for mature audiences, there is a strip club majorly involved in the second half of the show, although it’s an 80’s strip club, so I guess it’s not that bad), especially if you love any of the classic rock songs they featured.

Oh, one last funny thing, the original musical actually made it a point to mention that while it is titled after a Def Leppard song, they couldn’t get the rights to use any of it. The movie, however, had a couple Def Leppard songs (including “Rock of Ages”) peppered throughout (although not performed), so I guess they learned?

Weight: 229 Loss: 11 lbs – Running Yearly Mileage: 183.5 miles
Volleyball Match Record: 2-0 (5-1 Game Record, +9 Point Differential)
Fitocracy Level: 21 ID: disciplev1

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By Matt
June 21, 2012

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2012-366 Day 172 – Work III

Despite the fact that I had to install the same number of printers today as yesterday (5), one could have expected that today’s set would take longer due to the fact that the previous day’s printers serviced about half the staff, while today’s installation covered the entire department. Thankfully I learned enough yesterday to make the entire process take about the same amount of time, although it certainly kept me busy.

That being said, I’m pretty wiped and having a hard time focusing on the blog, so we’ll try again tomorrow.

Weight: 229 Loss: 11 lbs – Running Yearly Mileage: 183.5 miles (+6 miles)
Volleyball Match Record: 2-0 (5-1 Game Record, +9 Point Differential)
Fitocracy Level: 21 ID: disciplev1

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By Matt
June 20, 2012

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2012-366 Day 171 – Work II

Ninety nine percent of my days at work are projects and putting out random fires around the office, which leaves me plenty of time to strategize, prioritize, and take my breaks and lunches when I please. Then there are days like today, which I got a bit of advanced warning of yesterday, where it is go non-stop, devise plans on the fly, and eat and break if you’re lucky. We’re getting new printers installed in the office, and, when everything is network based, that requires a lot of planning to implement. Planning time I did not have because the vendor was switching out the old ones with the new ones, so I had to get them online as fast as I could without having a backup safety net. I get to do the same thing tomorrow, but thankfully I figured out a process today which should minimize the pain. That being said, don’t expect much from the blog for the next couple of days, as I just now finished up and today was the smaller of the two.

Oh, I also put my volleyball team’s record in the footer (yes, I would have done the same thing even if we weren’t 2-0 so far). Wound up re-using my favorite name, so go team Dig Dug!

Weight: 229 Loss: 11 lbs – Running Yearly Mileage: 177.5 miles
Volleyball Match Record: 2-0 (5-1 Game Record, +9 Point Differential)
Fitocracy Level: 21 ID: disciplev1

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By Matt
June 19, 2012

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2012-366 Day 170 – Published

Wow, what a day, what a weekend, and I already have an e-mail from work telling me that tomorrow is going to be bad. Meanwhile I write 170 blog posts, but Jess writes one review and gets it published in the Orange County Register. No, seriously, she did an awesome job and got published on their website reviewing the new Cars Land expansion at Disneyland’s California Adventure. The Register was looking for people who had been to the preview days to fill out a questionnaire they might use. Jess did such a good job that they not only used her review online, but they also printed it in the Sunday edition (yes, we have copies):

Apparently she can be bothered to write things for major publications, but not our blog.

In all seriousness, she did a great job, so take a break from my blabbering and go read it!

Weight: 229 Loss: 11 lbs – Running Yearly Mileage: 177.5 miles
Fitocracy Level: 21 ID: disciplev1

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By Matt
June 18, 2012

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2012-366 Day 169 – Volleyball Game 2

Today has been absolutely nuts, starting with church, then lunch with friends, coming home to change really quick, running the volleyball league, come home, change again, head out to Disneyland, head back home around Burbank because I forgot my pass, get to Disneyland, go into California Adventure to see it at night (Cars Land looks great), go to Disneyland proper to eat dinner at the newly refurbished Carnation Cafe, then head back to the hotel and check in about 10 minutes ago. Much like that sentence, today has run on, but been a lot of fun.

A quick interlude before I hit the Volleyball part, I need to say this again: I love living the future. Currently blogging using my phone and a bluetooth keyboard, and it is working great.

The volleyball team (we’re using my classic name of Dig Dug) won the match and all three games today, although the team we were playing was slightly undermanned at five people (we had seven, with only one person having Father’s Day obligations – speaking of which, Happy Father’s Day Dad and Tony, since I know you both read this!), and we won all three fairly handily (25-21, 25-19, 25-16). One of our players is going to Europe, so we won’t have the whole team until a couple weeks after the Fourth of July. I really like my team, and am very much enjoying the season so far.

The footer will return tomorrow.

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By Matt
June 17, 2012

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2012-366 Day 168 – Weekend Wrap Up IX

Missed a Wrap Up last week due to the wedding, so let’s see what we’ve got.

Monday (6/4) – Volleyball Schedule: Not much more to say about this one, I’m still pretty proud of this set up. I also enjoy the fact that I can access it from my phone, so I can see the schedule at the games without bringing the paper version (which we haven’t actually printed for a while due to this system).

Tuesday (6/5) – Geographical Awareness: This was kind of a silly post then, and it is now, so we can just move on.

Wednesday (6/6) – Jessica: My wonderful wife has been burning the candles at both ends, but finished one of her last events today and hopefully will have things settle down soon. I’m proud of her for making it through such a busy season this well, and look forward to when we get some rest.

Thursday (6/7) – Volleyball Schedule II: If you scan down this list, you’ll see there sure were a lot of sequels in this time frame, huh?

Friday (6/8) – Rehearsal II: I did find it funny that between two entirely different wedding locations (my sister’s out on Sierra Highway in the middle of nowhere and Cathy’s right next to Dodger Stadium at the police academy) could both feel so isolated. The academy rock garden did a great job of shutting out the outside world, while the french restaurant was just removed from it by a long stretch of road.

Saturday (6/9) – Stupid Cat: The cat is fine. Annoying me right now, but fine.

Sunday (6/10) – Volleyball Game 1: Looking forward to game two tomorrow, was missing a couple people and am curious to see how they will integrate into the team.

Monday (6/11) – Kings: Still so nice. Sad that all those people were trying to profit off the free tickets to the celebration, sounded like it was a great time though.

Tuesday (6/12) – Wedding II: Hard to believe it’s already been a week. Congratulations again Keith and Cathy!

Wednesday (6/13) – Cars Land: The opening of the Land to the public really highlighted how fortunate we were to be able to attend the preview. The line for the Racers ride at one point was over five hours long and stretched out of Cars Land, through the wharf, and over the bridge back into the park. The fast passes for the ride were gone in an hour. The fact that we got to spend so much time there with so few people truly was a blessing. Going back on Monday with Jess’ family, we’ll see if the demand has lessened in anyway (I suspect not).

Thursday (6/14) – Pictures IV: Cleaned out all the pictures I had taken with my new phone in this batch, time to start collecting some more for the next installment.

Friday (6/15) – Office Changes: I was supposed to work today on a phone system upgrade, but the people in charge of the central system pulled the plug on it. That allowed me to get my Saturday back and I used it to it’s fullest, going to Karate, cleaning the entire house, and playing some DnD. A good day, but a long one, so it’s time to get some rest.

Weight: 229 Loss: 11 lbs – Running Yearly Mileage: 177.5 miles
Fitocracy Level: 21 ID: disciplev1

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By Matt
June 16, 2012

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2012-366 Day 167 – Office Changes

Just finishing packing up my office, as they are coming in this weekend to re-carpet it and the surrounding environs. This is an ongoing project that has seen 75% of the office done in the past month, with this weekend and next being the final two hurrahs. To add further excitement, after next weekend’s carpeting I will be moving to another slightly larger office down the hall after it’s current occupant moves to new digs which are also being carpeted that weekend. Get all that?

I’ve been looking forward to a potential move for a while as, while I am glad to have an office in general, my current location is quite noisy and kind of in the middle of everything. My new spot is in a nice corner and more conveniently located to the rest of the IT staff in offices (I’m currently between the director and HR and finance people).

Well, this computer has to get packed, so I’ll start the final touches and get ready for a busy weekend.

Weight: 229 Loss: 11 lbs – Running Yearly Mileage: 177.5 miles
Fitocracy Level: 21 ID: disciplev1

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By Matt
June 15, 2012

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