Pwned.

As in Matt Hughes pwned Royce Gracie.

Granted, MMA fights can end suddenly no matter what and that events in the octagon (and just about any sporting event) can and do turn on a dime. For example, it wouldn't be crazy to to see Hughes finish off Georges St. Pierre in a hurry or vice versa, but I think the chances of it happening are slimmer than I thought the chances were for a drawn out bloodfest between Hughes and Rocye.

I thought Hughes would win, and he did. It's a different UFC now. It does not diminish Royce Gracie at all. It's been a long time since his last UFC fight and he's older and isn't used to time limit fights. The fighters are much more well rounded and if not submission specialists, are pretty decent at defending against submissions. And lets not forget Hughes is one bad motor scooter. Pound for pound, I think he's the best the UFC has to offer right now.

Still Royce got pwned. And he wants to come back and try again? He better switch some shit up.

For an alternate reality ending, you can check out this version of the fight on Utube.

As for a fight I would like to see, I wish Wanderlei Silva could lose about 12 lbs and Huges put on about 10. That would be a fight I'd like to see.

On the Set of Saturday Night Live

For a few hours today I was in Studio 8H - the set of SNL for the past 30 years or so. Not in the audience seats, but on the floor and a bit left of center with the Grand Central backdrop with it's New Haven line off peak train leaving from Track 30. A co-worker joked that no matter how many times I came out of Grand Central, that he bet I never came out of that one. That was funny, but about an hour or so later I was on that same stage, right next to Track 30 eating some ice cream and wondering where this NBCUniversal ride might take me and the rest of my tiny IT department.

We were there for a town hall style meeting to discuss and learn about the digital media plans at NBCUniversal. Of course, they are aggressive and right off the bat you can see the executives leadership qualities and their embrace of ideas. It was great to hear them answer an audience question but follow up with "So it seems like you must have some ideas about that - lets hear them."

The thing is, ever since I left Texaco and the Strategic Management Group there - I've missed that type of thinking. It feels good to be back.

Martha Martha Martha

I managed to get out of work at 5:20PM yesterday -- and that's a major feat these days for those of you unfamiliar with the fun factory that is my work life. I stopped by Midtown Comics to indulge myself with copies of Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel and the latest Nova installation in the Anhilliation series and then headed off down 42nd St. toward Grand Central. Home sweet home bound and before 7pm.

Just as I get in front of the Grace building, I think I spy my Aunt Maureen cutting in front of me. It's not Aunt Cool, though -- it's freaking Martha Stewart right there in front of me and we make brief eye contact and I give here the universal "What's up" head nod and she smiles back in that made for TV smile of hers and raises her eybrows a bit.



In that brief moment I thought,

Holy Crap that's Martha Stewart! Should I go over to her? Nah what the hell would that be about? What do you say to her? There's nothing in common there, really. Why hassle her? Maybe I could ask her about jail?
Or just tell her she kicks ass, yeah tell her that.
Or ask her for a bag of money -- she'd hardly miss it. Just a garbage bag filled with hundreds...
Fuck! You should have some script or some shit to pitch to her. She's right there! Arrgh!

Give her the what's up nod. Ok. Yeah. Ok, we're cool. This is retarded.

And that was my moment with Martha. Yay.

That gets me thinking about all the other celebrities I've passed in the streets of NYC in the past year or so...

• Martha Stewart
• Spike Lee
• Jackie Mason
• David Brenner
• Kris Angel
• Chris Mullen
• Jalen Rose
• Giselle
• Joe Torre (2x in NYC and once at an ATM in Larchmont)
• The Donald
• Christina Aguilera

All of a sudden I'm Ken Griffey Jr.

Ok, not really.

I exaggerate to make a point. Mr. Griffey Jr., it seems to me - the casual baseball fan - that you are injured as much as Samuel L. Jackson in that piece of dreck, Unbreakable. You seem brittle and made of glass. Perhaps it's fairer to say that you are a fine but tempermental Italian racing car that is always in the shop for some odd reason. Nonethless - injured all the time. Seemingly.

These days, anything I try to do sport's wise and I get injured a la Griffey. I know that's part of the deal with sports, but I went through all my teens and college years with just minimal stuff like

• a concussion
• a broken wrist
• a torn knee ligament (medial something or other)
• a sprained neck
• a dislocated shoulder
• shin splints
• another knee injury
• cuts
• contusions
• abrasions
• a broken nose
• broken toes
• plantar fasciitis
• multiple sprained ankles

See? Hardly anything. :-P Of course, once I try BJJ, I get a dual torn biceps, a wickedly sprained foot (my toes actually touched the back of my heel on that one. Oy.) and a sprained neck. Time passes and I decide I need to do something to motivate me to stay in shape. So, I start playing hockey again. What do I do? I injure my right knee. I have no idea what part of the game it even was that did it, but it started to tighten up in the car, ached like hell over night and has been giving me some problems ever since. If it does not get better by next week it's MRI time. It does not hurt so much to walk as it does to move it sideways a bit or kneel on it. That really hurts.

Me and Griffey Jr. Bound together by pain. Separated by talent and money.

NBCUniversal

A year and a half ago or so I signed on with a small dot com called Healthology. Two acquisitions later and I'm an NBCUniversal employee. Wow. Life takes some odd turns.

Here's to an excellent future with the world's "employer of choice". I can only hope they don't over look little 'ol Healthology and that we get the resources, training, and management we need to get better or barring that -- that things open up elsewhere in the company. Right now it's too early to tell anything except that we are part of NBCUniversal. Witness that so far, in the form of "Welcome! We are not dismantling you!" gifts, I have received a tote bag, a $15 iPod gift card and DVD's of King Kong and the Constant Gardner. Zoom!

Plus, that trip to Universal Studios in July just got a bit cheaper. Nice!!

The Bachelor Life

Clarisa left on Tuesday night for Cottonwood, CA. She's out there visiting her aunt Melba and uncle Ted. Melba's sick (sick sick, not cold sick) and Ted's old as Methuselah, so she went out there to see them for a bit because she knows there's not a lot of time left. I'd have gone, but I don't have the vacation days she does and I want to take off when my brother in law, Matt comes out here and take another week in the late fall or something. So she's out there doing the family thing.

As for me, here I am, biding my time. Tick tock tick tock. Basically, life without CK has led me to work out after work and work later (and believe me, I already work late. When your express train pulls into White Plains and 8 people get off with you, it's late). As for the weekend - thus far I worked out and did a little shopping at Barnes and Noble and DSW. It was an amazing discovery. When you need to kill time, shopping like a chick works.

First I went to DSW to get some shoes and maybe pick up a shirt. While CK carries with her some of the same zeal and zest for shoes as Imelda Marcos and Carrie WhatsHerName from Sex and the City, I've got none of that. One pair of sneakers. One pair of black dress shoes. One pair brown less dressy shoes. Basically, that's the usual inventory. Probably not too uncommon. Still though, I've been getting sick of wearing the same old crap every other day. So what did I do, I picked up another pair of Diesel's that are pretty much the same style as the one's I have now but a different color and pattern.

While I was wandering the aisles in my socks trying on shoes, a couple was trailing me a bit and I could overhear them arguing. She'd brought him there to buy some shoes and the guy did NOT want to be there.

"This ain't no good shoe. Never heard of a Rockport shoe. What the hell is a Rockport Shoe?" he said.

"Rockport is the brand. A big brand." she said, exasperated.

Time passes...we are in the next aisle. I'm trying on the Diesel's I wind up buying and they are going around me, stepping over my shoes. I think, "don't trip"and "I hope my shoes don't smell" . They are still arguing. He is interested in nothing. There is no indication of a foul odor response.

"Are you telling me you want to leave? Is that what you are trying to say?" she said.

"Nah" he said, eyes downward.

I think, "Yes he is. You know that."

And so it went, aisle by aisle with the frustration and friction mounting. I felt for the guy. I'm not sure if they ever bought anything. I left them arguing about if Steve Madden was a good brand and whether or not John Madden had anything to do with it.

Anyways, I got my shoes and picked up a shirt as a reward for having dropped below the 200lb mark. The scale reads 199.5 lbs and 17.25% body fat. Finally! Just 17 lbs to go and it's new wardrobe time.

I picked up a few tech books at B&N even though my better judgment was screaming at me "No! What the hell are you doing?" After killing two hours skimming through a stack of books in the cafe and downing a some tasty lemonade chai tea concoction, I wound up with these books:

• PHP and MySQL by Larry Ulman
• Foundations of Ajax by Ryan Asleson
• MySQL Tutorial by Luke Welling

The reason being is that I've installed two applications (Flyspray and QATraq) at work that run on WAMPP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PhP) platforms and I figure it would be a good idea to know how to support them. Plus, open source stuff is free and available and given the good work of the people over at ApacheFriends and their XAMPP project it's pretty easy to install all that stuff versus the nightmare of configuring each one by itself. I'm into geekery, but hey, I like the easy road as well.

Truth be told, I am making one last ditch effort at work on a few different fronts to make things better and to enhance my reputation and my experience. As bad as it is there, I do not see how I can move on and upwards without doing a few key things first:

1. Empower the employees. We waste tons of time in IT implementing text changes to web pages. This takes hours and could be done by anyone, provided a content management system of some sort or an automated process. On the CMS side, I think we might be able to adapt Macromedia Contribute with DWT's or WordPress. On the automated process side, I think we could just create a Word document that represents the launched program and tie it to an XML schema, mark up the Word Document with XML tags and then just parse it when we need to do the update.
2. Get the whole company using Flyspray for work requests and bug reporting.
3. Implement and use QaTraq. It's an application to support a full testing team, so adapting it for Healthology is going to be difficult but at least I'd have something to point to that shows I can organize and execute tests.
4. Get better at database development and learn php.

I figure it's worth a shot. If I can't make it work despite my best efforts and I am really stymied by the organization I can chalk up some good experience and move on without reservation.

If you are interested - here are the books on Amazon.com:

Hockey Catchup. Hockey Frustration.

Lets go over some numbers.

• 4-2 -- WTF happened to the Red Wings? How does this happen? Frustration. Despair.
• 18-1 -- that is the total my adopted men's league hockey team has been outscored in two (count 'em) games. Futility. Hopelessness.
• 3 -- my total shots on goal.
• 2 -- my total shots completely wiffed like I was trying to hit a bee on meth.
• 2 -- my total questionable, but gratifying, checks in a no checking league. The first one happened in the first 3 minutes of my first game in 12 years. There was a shot on goal and a rebound and a bunch of hacking at my goalie's hand going on. That earns you a trip to the boards. The second was probably an unconscious effort to mar the game late in the third period with the score 9-1. Pleasure. Kasparitis. Tikkannen. Claude Lemeiux.
• 2 -- my total number of brawls due to said checks avoided. Touchy.
• 155 -- the estimated number of pounds of Swiss cheese it would take to replace my boss in goal with no ill effects on the outcome of a game. [Grin]

It's not a ton of fun to haul equipment down to NYC on the train and lug it across town and then take it on the subway and drive out past Amityville to play and just get creamed. Still though, it is fun to just play and occasionally lambaste someone. On the brightside there are just 6 games or so left in this league and then I can look forward to joining a league here in town. My boss, Mike will probably make the switch too. It's quicker for him to get up here than to drive all the way out there. Plus, his wife is backing that play. That makes it pretty golden. So, I'm willing to suffer for now.