Oklahoma State Football for FREE!!!

In keeping with my paltry once-a-month post schedule... I will explain the "Oklahoma State Football Tickets por gratiz Plan" I alluded to here.

So, to start, here's a refresher course on my "ranking of sports favorites" for those that don't know... the order goes a little something like this:

1. Oklahoma State Basketball
2. Oklahoma State Football
3. Oklahoma State Golf
4. All Other Oklahoma State Sports
5. Big XII Basketball
6. Big XII Football
7. All College Sports
8. Professional Golf
9. Professional Basketball
10. Professional Football

As you can see, Oklahoma State Football ranks pretty high up on my list... go figure! Now anyone with any sense would say "Hey, why doesn't your plan involve Oklahoma State Basketball? Isn't that your favorite sport?" and my reply would be "Yes, it is my favorite sport... and oh how I wish that all Basketball games were played on Saturday so that I could travel to Stillwater and watch my beloved Pokes toss the rock around... but that dream will have to wait. I can, however, live the dream of visiting my Alma Mater every Saturday in the fall for the 2nd choice on my list."

So, on with the plan:

I recently purchased 4 Oklahoma State Football tickets with a couple that my wife and I are friends with... we bought 4 in order to get the "Wild West End Zone Fun Pack" discount... which saves roughly $225 over the single ticket West End Zone price. That being said, I have now have 2 tickets to 8 home games that cost me a total of $575 (there was a $30 processing fee for those keeping track) These seats are in Section 101, Row 4, Seats 1 & 2... See Diagram Here (bottom right hand corner, if you're looking at the Diagram)

Currently the going price for a Georgia at Oklahoma State Football Ticket is roughly $300 for good seats, which we have... now i know that being that far down in the End Zone can be a negative, but being that freaking close to the field offsets any negative! Oh and by the way, Mike Holder (our mediocre Athletic Director) has made one game per season unavailable for purchase to "non-season ticket holders"... this season the Georgia game is THAT game!

To recap, if I can sell 2 tickets at $300/ticket for the first game, then I can recoup the ENTIRE cost of my season and enjoy the other 7 games por gratiz!!!

Ahhh, thank you very muuuuuuch!

Notes from a Whale's Vagina: Days 2 & 3

Alright, its been a while since the San Diego Trip... so we'll suffice it to say... beautiful, beautiful, beautiful... I will be visiting again... hopefully with my wife this time!


I'll spare you all the gory business details...The Sharepoint Conference was informative and well worth my company's expense. PLUS it was at the Hilton at Torrey Pines on the week of the Buick Invitational... I didn't get to see any pros out there, but i was this close (imagine me holding my index finger and thumb very close together up to an invisible "blog camera")



--:SHRUBBERY SIDENOTE:--
There was some very odd, grass-like, ground-covering plants that were everywhere (see left) It was a brilliant mixture of the aloe vera plant and bermuda... but with flowers... it was pretty and ugly at the same time. It was everywhere, but I (being a midwest native) had never seen it before.
--:END SIDENOTE:--


Next we went down to the Gas Lamp District in downtown San Diego... definately not quite Sixth Street in Austin, TX (less partying and more chill than Sixth) but very cool non-the-less. Didn't have much time to do much but walk around and have a nice seafood dinner (complete with sushi as an app-a-teaser)

Finally, that night it was off to Coronodo Island. My boss (the one with the white, or blonde as he like to say, hair in the 2nd SD Post) is a Navy man and was stationed in Coronodo for a time. So he took us and showed us around the small island. We walked on the beach at night and walked up to the Hotel Del Coronodo . 120 years old and still as magnificent as ever.

A few other notables pictured below:

Sea Lions IN THE WILD!!!

In N Out Burger - My first trip... WON'T be my last... very good... for a fast food joint.

A beach picture... to be jealous of...

A tree picture... to be wondering why the picture was even taken.... of.

Notes from a Whale's Vagina: Day 1 - Part 2

After we landed, we got off the plane and experienced 70 degree weather in February. Now, it needs to be said that the weather has been similar in Jan/Feb in Dallas as well, but it seemed much nicer in San Diego for some reason... I dunno maybe it was the fact that I was in California. Anyway, we checked into the Hilton Garden Inn... decent hotel in La Jolla (i think we were in La Jolla... if not we were dang close) By the time we checked in we were pretty hungry, so we set off to find a spot to eat. It requirements were A) they had food of some variety & B) it was on the beach. So we went to Del Mar (another little town outside of SD) and found Poseidon. The view was FANTASTIC! You can see it if you look right behind my boss's boss's head in the picture on the left...

I guess this would be a good time to tell you who the people in the picures are (or are going to be). My boss's boss, who I just mentioned is Chris. Stephanie and Josh were also with us (I'm sure you'll be able to tell who is who in the next two pictures)
So now that you know the cast, we can continue on this thrilling adventure... after we ate, we walked around a bit and decided we needed to find a place to park ourselves for the Super Bowl... didn't want to miss a second. We asked around and found a spot called Jimmy O's. It was a little hole-in-the wall in Del Mar with about as many flat screens on the wall as... well lets just say the capacity to tv ratio was somewhere around 5:1... not bad for a small joint like that. We grabbed nearly the last open/not already reserved table and prepared for the game. We still had about 2 hours till the game started (remember it started 2 hours earlier there than it did back home) so we all ordered a beverage of choice and talked shop for a while. Then we watched one of the best Super Bowl's in recent history. Though i wasn't impressed with the commercials, except 1 (now remember we were in a loud bar, so the audio might have made some of them more impressive than i could tell) Doritos Commercial was awesome!

After that we went home and slept... Day 2 coming soon (if you definition of soon is sometime this week... and possibly this weekend)

Notes from a Whale's Vagina: Day 1 - Part 1

Intro:
In my life I have had the privilege of traveling/visiting most of the 57 United States of America… I think at last count it was 36 or 37. Not only that, but I have been able to see most of the uber-historical sites in said states… Colonial Williamsberg and Jamestown in the Northeast, The Alamo in Texas, Disney World and Land in Cali… (Some notable ones not visited are Mt. Rushmore, the Redwood Forests, and the Grand Canyon, I will see these before I die) This was all possible because my parents thought it was important to bring their offspring to these places as yearly family vacations. (Little did they know that their kids wouldn’t truly appreciate this until they were well into their 20’s, oh well… ) Some of these destinations were checked off my bucket list long before I ever had a bucket list (or even knew what high school was for that matter) in other words we were young. This brings me to San Diego… well actually a Microsoft Office SharePoint Best Practices Conference that stared on Monday brought me there, but who’s counting…

I’ll do this a day at a time (and maybe not 1 day/ per day, if that makes sense…) So here we go…

Day 1:

Alright, so the first thing I remember from San Diego was the fact that when you fly in to town from the East (rather than the North i guess, since the city is tucked in basically the Southwestern most corner of the U.S) you come eerily close to the buildings downtown. Seriously, if i could roll the window down on the airplane like i could on our rental car (which by the way, was an Oldsmobile Grand Marquis) ... i could have thrown a baseball through a window of one of the downtown buildings... again, seriously... it was eerily close.

We flew in on Sunday morning… “Why? I thought the Conference didn’t start until Monday?” you ask… well, Sunday happened to be the Super Bowl. And I didn't want to be flying during the Super Bowl... ummmm DUH! Beauty is a common theme here... chicks, beaches, shrubbery (yes, i said shrubbery), the ocean... a whole lot of beauty here! After 3 1/2 days in San Diego, CA, I can say that it is the closest thing to paradise that you can find in the continental U.S. (and per my parents I have been to most of the Hawiian islands once or twice, and per my Honeymoon I have been to the Bahamas once, plust Cancun and Cozumel... so I've seen some decent beaches and waters...) and this is pretty darn close to all of those!

So, after we landed... well that's a different post...

A new year update... subtitled: My blog's not dead... yet

New year resolutions are for over-achievers, setters of unrealistic goals, and chronic procrastinators... Mine are listed below:

1. Look better naked (this is actually a request by my wife, but being a good husband i moved it to the top of the list)

2. Update this very blog more often (random mobile uploads accompanied by one-liners DO count)
3. Drink less alcohol (not by volume but by frequency, if the frequency is less and the volume comes out the same... well... maybe that'll make the list for 2010)

4. Keep in better contact with close, yet distant friends (having said friends read this blog DOES count)

5. WIN money in Vegas this year, rather going for a threepeat of the last few visits (Sorry Pat Riley, I'm not paying you any royalties)

6. Attend at least 5 regular season Oklahoma State Football games - FOR FREE (another blog on this coming soon)

7. Acheive World Peace...

8. See a Flying Squirrell fly (in real life, not on TV)

Ok, some were serious and some were for grins... you decide which are which...

As far as 2009 so far, well, I can say that it has been good me and mine. My wife recently got a promotion in a time when others are losing their jobs. I recently went permant at the company where I was contracting for the past year... yeah health benefits, boo pay cut...

Last year, I lost approximately 45 "el bees" and this year i have gained 15 of it back, and then lost 10 of it again... my closest friends refer to me as the "incredible shrinking, growing, shrinking man" (actually, no they don't. that would just be silly)

It has been 4 months since my last blog post... #2 above should take care of these giant gaps of time... and to end this one i would like to share the logo i created for my Fantasy Football Team this past NFL season:



My team was named either (depending on the League) "The Raging Mooseknuckles" or "The Mooseknuckles of Rage"...
Be Proud Mom, Be Proud!

The Paper Kutt v2.0 (a.k.a. The Paper Kutt 3G)

HOLY CRAP!!! July 15th?!?! Where has time gone?

That is the last time I posted on here... whew! I guess life has been busy lately... or maybe, just maybe, i'm just lazy with a capital Z?!?! The world may never know...

So for the last 5 months, i have been redesigning a website i built last year. (yes, it took me 5 months, i did it in my spare time.... sheesh guys!)

I think the site design is 110% better... but i'll let you decide... wait, what? you don't remember the old site? well, my friend, you are better off not remembering...

Anyway, check it and comment if you'd like www.thepaperkutt.com

PS Lemme know what you think of the logo...

Our NEW Saab 93!

Behold the wonder that is our new car. Not the best picture in the world, but it will do for blogging purposes...

The perfect blend of size, safety, power, luxury, looks and mpg. In case u didn't know it was rated the safest sedan on the road for 2008 (or something close to that, relating to safety). Which, contrary to popular belief, is safer than an equivilent volvo (s40/s60) that hasn't been redesigned since 2001. At 27mpg on the hight end (EPA rating - hopefully can get a bit more out of it on an actual road trip) and 20 on the low, it still comes in about 3mpg's better than the best performance of our old 2005 Jeep Grand POS... :)

Anway, just wanted to share our news with you folks...

-dwb OUT!

one word: iPhone... (part 1, the intro)

Enough said...

However, this is a blog so I should probably say more...

NOTE: I will add to this over the next couple of weeks... both good and bad about the iphone (although i doubt i'll find much "bad")

First of all, I picked up my iPhone yesterday (3/1) and have only put it down to drive and when i get incredibly frustrated with typing... and sometimes to eat. Soon after i received a congratulatory facebook msg from a good friend welcoming me to "the cult of the iPhone"... apparently they know when someone activates one. (he says he figured it out since i activated "facebook mobile", but i think they have a sort of iSense...)

Anyway, over the next few weeks i will write about what I think of the infamous iPhone.

After 1 day of playing and surfing and configuring and crying tears of iPhone joy... i have one piece of advice for anyone that likes a highly functional, beatifully simplistic (yet extremely complex) phone (as long as they do not need to wirelessly sync to an MS Exchange server, i.e. a blackberry user):

GET ONE NOW!!!!

To Be Continued....

CORRECTION: This series will be continued over the next few months, NOT weeks as previously stated. Sorry you two!

College Students...BEWARE!

i was in a staff meeting at work a while back and someone brought up the fact that businesses are now going online and looking up potential new hires' facebook and myspace profiles... they are doing this to see if they have any malicious, character-defining, less-than-sober, or otherwise "generally bad" content within their profiles. (this was pertinent to the meeting because I working for OSU and students need to be aware of this)

I was not aware of these happenings and was a little disturbed... students are getting overlooked/denied for potential jobs because they posted a picture that their buddy took of them bonging a beer the first weekend of their freshmen year of college... HOLY CRAP... this strikes me as the most ridiculous way to discover someones character/work-ethic/ability to excel in one's future job that i have EVER heard of. In fact, i bet that if 80 percent of the businessmen/women that are looking for this information were to try and remember back 20 or 30 years to when they were in college, that they would be fired on the spot, just for thinking about all the drugs and/or alcohol that have passed through their systems, if they were to be held to the same standards that they are holding their potential new hires to...

Nevertheless, companies are doing this... so job-seekers BEWARE! That picture of you and Lisa kissing to "experiment" at a date party your sophomore year - could deem you unworthy of becoming the head janitor at that big oil company you've been eyeing.

-dwb