Quote of the Day

"Britney Spears' lawyers will argue in her child-custody case that Brit's reported mental crackup is attributable to poor recruiting by Ty Willingham."

--Pat Forde, ESPN

My Problem With Halo 3

There's a big event happening tonight -- tomorrow morning, officially at 12:01 -- in GeekTown.  (I split time living in two places, GeekTown and SportsFanLand, occasionally vacationing in normalcy, usually in that hour from 9pm to 10pm when Holly and I are home together, and on the weekends not in football season).  Halo 3 is coming out.  I feel like I should be excited by this, even though I've never played Halo or Halo 2.  Here's my problem with it: It's best feature is "massive multiplayer" online play.  The "massive multiplayer" part of this is the problem, for me anyway.  Basically, as I understand it, you line up 11 of your friends (with Xbox 360's), split into teams of six and go play against each other (I made up the numbers there, it might be six on six, four on four, whatever, I don't know, but that doesn't really hurt my point).  The point is, I don't have enough friends that have 360's, will get Halo 3, and are so devoid of other things to do that we can all set aside a few hours at the same to time to log onto a network and play.  A modern gaming system is an expensive investment.  How many people can afford, or at least justify, playing a glorified game of capture the flag on a 50 inch plasma with a $400 360 and a $60 game?  Certainly, most of my friends chose not to do so.  In fact, I can think of only one person I know (other that myself) who owns a 360.  He lives in Oklahoma City.  Maybe we'll hunt each other tomorrow with 10 of his friends I've yet to meet.  Somehow, I doubt it. 

Biking the Grand Rounds

Today was probably the last nice, warm weekend day in Minneapolis (at least for both of us, as I'll be out of town the next two). We decided to spend the day taking advantage of one the great positives of the Twin Cities -- an expansive network of bike trails, bike lanes, and commuter trails -- which are just what they sound like: trails designed for the purpose of bike commuting. There's even a "bike freeway", which is a spit path. This one, the Cedar Lake Trail, has three lanes, one for pedestrians, and one for each direction of bike traffic. We started with a plan to explore the Grand Rounds National Scenic Byway (or at least, a lot of it) on our bikes. The Grand Rounds is basically a large loop of pathways that goes around Minneapolis.

We started downtown, biked up along the river, mostly in St. Paul on the East Bank, up to the old Ford Plant. We had lunch at a -- big surprise -- Chipotle there.

After that, we continued across the bridge to the Minnehaha Falls. That park was packed. We apparently weren't the only people out to enjoy the weather. From there we drove down Minnehaha Parkway, past Lake Hiawatha, Lake Nokomis, and Lake Harriet (yes, there's a ton of lakes in "The City of Lakes". After reaching Lake Calhoun, we went into Uptown, and then took the Midtown Greenway to the Cedar Lake Trail back downtown past the construction site of the new Twins Ballpark.

All in all, it was quite the long ride, but a good day.

Miserable day in Minneapolis

Here's a quick shot I took while stopped at a red light on my commute home. Yuck.
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I'm back

So I've decided to go back to this blog. Vox was nice, but this one is easier to post to and keep up with. Now we'll see if I can keep up with up it ;)

Pics from the Vikes home opener

It feels weird tailgating on Sunday.
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