Half-Life and Times

I'll lay this on ya before I run up to the mountains for a few days of watching basketball with family...

Thursday - I'm pulling for Clemson over Maryland but I think the Terps will win fairly easily. NCState will beat FSU if only so they get another shot at at Wake and Miami shouldn't have any trouble with UVa in what should be Gillen's last game as coach of the Wahoos.

Friday - We'll have trouble with Maryland in the first game Friday, but pull away in the last 8 minutes or so. Tech vs. Tech will be a tough, tough game - VT obviously isn't intimidated in their first year in the ACC, but I think GT will win a close one. The next game's the interesting one and I think Chris Paul's nutjab at Hodge last weekend and subsequent one-game suspension is going to cost Wake Forest the game. Dook should win handily over the Canes.

Saturday - The semis should be a couple of great games - the Ramblin' Wreck matches up well with us with Schenscher vs. May, Jack vs. Felton and BJ Elder back (with McCants playing scant minutes at most). I think this one goes down to the wire before the Heels win it. The Dookies beat State in their only previous meeting (insert your grumble about Big Four schools not all playing each other twice every year here) but both Hodge and Redick had bad games - hard to say. I'm going with State because they've clearly got more to play for and the win over Dook ensures that Sendek is around for another 5 years at least, which means that the Wolfies continue to be Carolina's punching bag for at least that long (I still think Herb is a lousy coach - hope he stays there forever).

So there ya go - don't give me a hard time Sunday when Wake Forest is playing Maryland for the title - I'll be too drunk to care! And yes, jw, I AM talking about the Stanley Cup!

Posted by Tony @ 8:10:00 am |

I'm speechless. No, really, I am - I can type a little although my hands are a little sore from pounding the floor (and the coffee table and the arm of the sofa and my leg and the floor some more) but I really don't have much voice left. I did manage to call Dad and scream into the phone and confirm that he hadn't had a heart attack. While I was on with him my mother-in-law was trying to ring through to scream and confirm that I hadn't had a heart attack. It was a near thing. I watched the game at home - I won't deny that I'd been tempted to try to get a space at the bar at Woody's, but I actually did get some work done this afternoon so I decided that I'd have to get down there too early.

Sean May has had the best run the last few weeks of any Carolina player I can remember in a long, long time. How many rebounds this afternoon - 23? 24? Unbelievable. And a really nice effort from all three scholarship seniors - those guys have meant more to the program than any class since maybe Jamison, Carter and McInnis. Jawad Williams has been one of my favorite players for some time and his efforts this year, both on and off the court, have been stellar.

I'll be catching the tourney at Dad's next week - the Heels have their best chance in awhile to go deep so if nothing else I at least hope they're still playing next Sunday.

Posted by Tony @ 8:50:00 pm |

Losses

Gave away a motorcycle yesterday. A 1982 Suzuki GS650 shaft drive - a classic. It had unfortunately been sitting in our driveway only partially covered for the last few years, having been forced out of the garage by other stuff. It had been a sweet bike and I'd known it pretty much all its life. In the mid-80s, in anticipation of the feds imposing a tariff on imported bikes in an attempt to save Harley-Davidson (back when they needed saving), Suzuki and others filled their warehouses in California with 1982 model bikes. In the winter of '84, I got my friend Dirk to go over to the now-defunct Motorcycle Supply on Graham Street in Chapel Hill while I picked up a "new" 1982 Suzuki GS450L. While we were there, he got hooked on a black 1982 Suzuki GS650G shaft-drive, despite the fact that he'd never ridden a motorcycle in his life. So I rode the 450 home and he drove me back in to take his 650 back to his place and my girlfriend and I taught him to ride. That bike didn't last more the a couple of months before he put it into the trees on a curve of Damascus Church Road - I managed to ride it in to the shop for him at about 15 mph with the front fork pushed back and bent at a 45 degree angle. The shop declared it a total write-off, so he replaced it with an identical bike which I eventually bought from him years later.

It was a great commuter bike after Dirk added a mini-faring and a luggage rack to the back for a briefcase and I rode it to work 2-3 days a week for a couple of years before pretty much going to full-time telecommuting. But bikes need to be ridden and as I got more interested in running and mountain biking and kayaking and such, it sat and eventually needed more work than I had time to put into it. So it sat some more.

The 450 I had given to JennySlash's cousin who fixed it up and had a good time with it and in the hopes for the same fate for the 650, I've now found it a good home as well. One of my neighbors has a couple of teenage boys and the three of them and their friends usually have 3 or 4 cars in various stages of rebuilding and customization. Found out that my neighbor's also an old KZ400 man (another classic!) so I offered the Suzi to him for the boys and they rolled it away Saturday and I'm guessing had it stripped by noon today. I hope so anyway. As I said, bikes need to be ridden and if I can look out this summer and see one of the boys shooting by on her, I'll be happy. I'll have another bike one day when money and time aren't both so tight - in the meantime, I'm happy thinking that the old gal is in good hands.

Posted by Tony @ 8:30:00 pm |

Gains

Finally broke down and bought a new digital camera yesterday. The one we've had for years is pretty ancient (in digital camera years) and I'd pretty much stopped using it. As the prices have come down on the prosumer models I gave them a serious look, particularly the Canon Powershot Pro1 which is down in the $700 range now and got stellar reviews when it first came out. But after doing some digging I started seeing some consistent gripes about picture quality at higher ISO settings and in the end decided that an almost-good-enough camera wasn't worth that much money. Better to save some bread for a pro-level DSLR and go ahead and get something cheaper now for snapshots, reference shots, family photos, etc. So I went for the Fuji Finepix S5100 - it was half the price of the prosumer models, has a 10x optical zoom and has gotten pretty good reviews all around. I haven't had much of a chance to play with it so far as I had to work some this afternoon, but it was so damn nice out today that I quit early and ran over to Bolin Creek behind Chapel Hill High School and took a few shots before picking up beer for the Carolina-Dook game and I really like what I've seen so far. I'm hoping to have some results to post after running up to the mountains next weekend.

Posted by Tony @ 8:15:00 pm |