NY times article on the psychological allure of disc golf

John Tierny wrote an artile for the NY times that theorizes men like golf and disc golf because it appeals to basic male hunting urges. Packs of men strolling the kind of vistas that made for great hunting, all launching projectiles at a common target.

"The ideal is a vista from high ground overlooking open, rolling grassland dotted with low-branched trees and a body of water. It would have been a familiar and presumably pleasant view for ancient hunters: an open savanna where prey could be spotted as they grazed; a water hole to attract animals; trees offering safe hiding places for hunters."

(link to NY Times article)
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got a hole in one & a photo in the newspaper

i had a damn fine day yesterday.

got my third hole in one at disc golf, valley view no. 12. a blind, uphill shot maybe 200 ft or so. my first straight-in ace; the others were skip-aces. a friend also got an ace and we split the pool and i got 86$. i bought everyone pizza & beer and donated the rest to the nature center course fund.

played a little golden tee and got my first double eagle, which is apparantly harder than getting a hole in one at GT, because i've gotten three on that too. fuckin-a, the modem wasn't working so it doesn't go on my stats -_-

got home, opened my mail, and i got a standing rocks disc (i've hung one disc on my wall per tournament i've played this year, and standing rocks was my first, but i had lost the discs with that logo.)

just that morning i had grabbed a few extra push-pins to hang discs while i was mailing out a copy of a newspaper article that had pictured myself and another guy while we played the 'manitowoc in the park' tourney to the same dude. that was the tourney i lead the pack halway thru, then fell to 5th. in fact, here is that article:


the girl who walked with us and took our pictures was nice enough, but when i emailed the newspaper to ask if they had any photos to go with their online text-only article, they said no. only because i ran into another person i played with at manitowoc while playing glow in the dark leagues at UW parkside was i lucky enough to be given a copy, or even know about it.

so, i hung up my new ace (a 168 teebird), the disc for my first tourney, a ken climo autographed roc and a barry schultz autographed beast i won at the milwaukee open, and the toruney disc from this past weekend at the mad city open.

oh, and i get a phonecall saying i won three more discs in the raffle from the mad city open.

AND another package came: the complete peanuts 1955-56; the series with EVERY single strip. i'm in heavan, i have/remember books with strips from that era (my personal favorite, when the original alt chars were still involved, snoopy thought but was still on all fours..) but it's just top shit when it's absolutely unabridged. the intro is from matt groening and is really good too.

can't beat that kinda day ^^

so i'm on the waiting list for the next tourney at sandy point this weekend. if i don't get in, i'll go even further north and hit courses i never can, like highbridge.

...still waiting for my new computer to be put together. parts are in the mail. for being patient, they upgraded my grahics card to an asus geforce 7800GTX, which is as fast as TWO of the one i was getting, a 6800, plus it has many, many more features that are important to me, like dual dvi out, offloading dvd playback and video encoding, etcetc. all the reviews are coming up 'holy shit', it is the definitive best videocard out this instant. mmmmmmm. a short instant, but it'll be nice. ^^

laptop's dead--time to get a 4000$ computer.

so my laptop's been on its' "last legs" for a good while. finally, last night, the inner part of the power socket snapped off in the power plug. damn. didn't even get the chance to move private data off before i throw it to best buy's warantee people. a friend might be able to help with an external laptop harddrive adapter hopefully.

i'd seen this coming for a long time, the old girl'd gone through a lot and needed some physical repairs, but i knew best buy'll take a month+ to do what they do. so i started shopping for a new tower to replace my home computer. i'm spending too much, i could get it at 3k$ if i did it all myself, and though retail it'd be 5k$, i'm paying 4k$ to have a local computer shop put it together. i'd let my knowledge of the latest internals slip over the last few years, and didn't want to spend a month researching before i did this, so i'm paying for someone else's expertise.

I buy for the angle of trying to stay as close to top of the line for as long as possible. i do that by starting with the motherboard. get a QUALITY motherboard; i like ASUS. i get the latest chipset (in this case: 955x) and the cheapest chip that works on it (ITC: p4 2.7ghz - 150$). then years from now when the best chip (ITC: 3.7ghz dual core - 1.6k$) gets cheap, i jump on that. i'm getting 2gig of ram and a geforce 6800 ultra (second to latest vidcard for that manufac.) for gaming, which is a card that'll later let me add a second card and have them work together (sli). i read some real glowing reviews of hitachi 500gb SATA2 drives, so i got two. i'm grabbing a dual-layer dvd burner too, for later console gaming needs.. a good soundcard and speakers because in my small apartment it's gonna end up as the audio-hub for the tv et al. so all that, plus i'm buying a special liquid-cooled case and all the fixins for the cpu, gpu, & the 2 harddrives. then i'm having them overclock it for me (i'll be there) again, because my knowlege is a little old.

i use my 55" HDTV as my server's monitor, so i need to replace my broken wireless keyboard, but after that, i'm gonna enjoy some damn fine half-life2'ing!

when done, it should look something like this:


then, i beleive, i can wait patiently to get my laptop back ^_-

google maps updates yield infowindow rendering trouble - firefox not wrapping

google maps updated their code and it caused infowindow html rendering problems, especially in firefox, for my app.

to save anyone some time in the future:
i'm not sure why this is hard, but laying out a tabular infowindow is troublesome in both IE and firefox. Though code will work on it's own--not when it's given to the marker.openInfoWindowHtml(html). Differing results will be had depending on how you assign the width: on a containing div element, table element, td element; in or out of stylesheets.
The most common error I had was firefox refusing to wrap text.

so the solution, so it turns out, is to assign the width via stylesheets in a containing div. both browsers get that right. here's an example from mine: http://www.referential-integrity.com/DiscGolfCourseGmap/infoWindow.html

browser compatibility is such a loathsome subject...

conservative anti-liberal comic book!!

oh, man, this is HILARIOUS.

"It is 2021, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. America is under oppression by ultra-liberal extremists which have yielded governing authority to the United Nations. It is up to an underground conservative group (known as F.O.I.L.) led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North to thwart Ambassador Usama Bin Laden’s plans to nuke New York City."

(link to source)

(link to comic)

army procurement officer sacrifices career for integrity

I have a new hero to add to my list: Bunnatine Greenhouse.

An army procurement officer whistleblowing Halliburton's no-bid contracts. Her career is being ruined for doing so--please include her in your thoughts and prayers, maybe even write your representative and local media in support of her.

"I took an oath of office. I took those words that I was going to protect the interests of my government and my country. So help me God," she says. "And nobody. Has the right. To take away my privilege. To serve my government. Nobody."

"I simply believe that we have callings and purposes in this life. I walk through this life for a purpose. I wake up every day for a purpose. And every day I say, 'Here I am. Send me.' "

(article)

bar shampoo

ok, i'm not tye type to think too hard about bath crap, but this stuff's worked pretty damn good for me. i had some for a while, liked it, and now have gone back to ol' headnshoulders and my hair isn't as nice, so i'm grabbing some more.

it's definetly different after a while, not stripping the oils out of your hair. like i said, i'm usually the last to give a shit, but it's actually noticeable.

if you happen to be a hippie, it's all earth-friendly and won't poison your smelly woodland friends should you use it camping, i guess.

J.R.LIGGETT'S OLD-FASHIONED BAR SHAMPOO