Get BoG'ed baby!

Tiff and Scary - Take me out to the Ball game!


So the 2nd annual Band of Gamers took place over the past weekend in St. Louis, hosted by Tony (Tboa) and Odette, his wife. Very gracious hosts' for all of us!

Tiffany and I drove 12 1/2 hours down to this! Didn't matter, there was no way I was missing this one after letting a buddy of mine (Barroom Hero) down the year before. I was gonna make it if I had to beg, borrow or steal to get there. We left Akron Thursday around noon and drove all day. Stopped in Terre Haute (yes, infamous to only KISS fans as the home of the KISS Army!) for dinner at Steak and Shake. Little did we know that this would not be the last time!

After gettin right to our exits, in good 'ol Scary fashion, we trolled around town for a few looking for the right way to go. After getting our bearings we finally made it to Tonys at around midnight.

In attendance already were DarkPrince0004 (Wally), Darhoth (Jason), The BachelorPad (Chad) and Amanda (Chads girlfriend) and Tony and Odette! We unloaded the car and Tiff jumped right in to some Halo action with the fellas! Fit right in! Of course, showing up good 'ol Scary as well! I love you baby! We played a few more hours before hitting the sack and waking up at 9am for an early start.

It was absolutely sultry there! At around 10am it was well in to the 90's already. Tony decided to take me for a spin in his H.O.T. as hell Mazda RX-8. Absolutely rocking vehicle!! I now know why they have the 'Oh Shit' bars in a car! This car has some get up and go!! Tony got back and he had to head out to pick up TJ (FreeFly3r) at the airport. He was the last to arrive!

They got back and everyone loaded up in to the Lincoln Navigator and headed over to a local sports bar and grill for some great wings and sandwiches. Back to Tony's house to decide what the day holds for us. Darhoth offers up a game of 'Demolition Ball' to play. Now this was an absolute blast! To just hear about it you may not care for it, but after you see it played it is an absolute riot!! Also referred to in some areas (Cleveland included) as Whirly Ball). You get bumper cars on a basketball court and ride around throwing a wiffle ball at a basketball backboard. Stopping your opponents by ramming em with your car. Great fun, especially when Wally offers up shots to us to make it even funner!! Red headed sluts here we come!! This was followed by shots from TJ as well. After an hour it was off to dinner where Tony treated all of us to Vietnamese food! At first looks it may not be too appealing, especially to a pregnant Tiffany. But it was all very good stuff!

Back to Tonys for a night of gaming in Halo 2. Great times in to the weeee hours of the morning. Helped out with a few shots of Grey Goose and Tequila. Mmmmm good!!

Saturday was a big day! Not to mention that it was damn near 100 before noon. We're supposed to show up to Chads (The BachelorPad's) house for a cookout and swimming. Well, a few of us were hungry and they wanted Steak and Shake, yes day #2 of the good 'ol SandS!! We definitely should have skipped this, lol! Good lunch, we load up and head to Chads. What a place this kid has!!! WoW!!!!! I've known Chad for 3 years now and I've felt like Chads been there a lot for me, so it was truely an honor to finally meet him after so long. He had a great swimming pool that we enjoyed for a few hours, a great, kick ass, gaming room with awesome seating in it, and a great grill that he hooked us up with a mid day BBQ on.

It was decided that we would head out afterwards and catch a ballgame at Busch Stadium where the Cardinals hosted the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was a total blowout, 8-0 Cards! Great game. And in good fashion, Busch Stadium was BoG'ed!!!


Get BoG'ed


The BoG Family at the Ballgame - Cardinals vs. Pirates

The game was done and we headed back to Tony's to get cleaned up and ready to hit the town! We headed out and went to a great place called Americas Pub, which was located in a great little area with lots of different bars in it. We were right at home here, minus the lousy DJ that Wally felt the urge to remove from the booth! HAHAHA!! Lot's of drinks and good times had by all! And yes, whisky is a terrible thing! I kept on insisting that if someone looked at me the wrong way, they soon would find out why they called me Scary!! Some times I amaze myself! Ya know??!!


Friends finally meet - Scary and The BachelorPad




A toast to BoG!

Sunday brought a close to the gathering as we all exchanged photos and pleasantries! What a great experience! Next get together looks like it will be in Houston, hosted by TJ! I am saving my money now! And this time, with a non-pregnant Tiffany in tow!

Thanks for the memories guys! Check out the Flickr link to the right for over 80 more pics!

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Dad's rental hot rod!

Dad's rental Hot Rod!

So my dad is really big in to cars. His latest facination is BMW. He's been buying these things all over EBay, it's maddening!

Well, his good 'ol reliable Beemer died on him a few weeks ago on a return trip home and left em stranded out in the middle of Pennsylvania.

Needless to say, the Beemer's still sitting at his place in New Jersey and he had to bring a rental home this past weekend. I had a chance to spend some time with him on Sunday and after a few brews he insisted that I drive his car home and just have it back before he had to leave Monday night! OK, let's evaluate: I live 1 (walking distance) block from his house, dad's had a few brews......Sweet, let's do this!

I have about an 1 1/2 hour ride to and from work each day and I'm driving a Ka-ka-ka-Kia! Not enjoyable at all! And spending waaaaaaaaaaay too much time in Forza lately, I felt like a speed freak behind the wheel of this bad boy! It's a 2005 Volvo S40. This car is H.O.T.!!!!! I took her out on the Ohio Autobahn (read I-271 express lanes) and wanted to see what she could do. I always get these pockets of traffic and it's a pain in the Kia to get around cars with the sweet acceleration she has! Not with this bad boy! I lightly touched the gas and I was off to the races!

I tell ya what, if I had an extra $35,000 to throw around I'd be all over this one! Fun ride for sure!

Finally, a paid vacation, leave from work!

Well,

This Thursday I'm off to St. Louis for 4 days of hanging with the boys of BoG! I've been gaming with some of these fellas for almost 3 years now and it'll be awesome to finally put a face to a gamertag! TBoa/The Bachelorpad are hosting some of us and I'm interested in what they have planned for the weekend. I really need the time away from everything and just forget about everything around me.

We're gettin down to weeks before Tiff has the baby and times will change. Gotta burn all this energy out of me before I pour it all into family!!

Conker's out this week! I may need to get my pissed off squirrel on this week yet! Who's joining me? I mean c'mon a squirrel who berates and cusses?? Enough said!

It's been a full week away from Gamertag.com and I'm still hearing crap over it. Good grief, a man (well actually 3 men) leaves quietly and all of the sudden 'Rome is burning!'!! It's a great site, it'll carry on, as will I!!

Dagon's gonna yell at me, but I have still YET to see Star Wars. There is just not enough time in the day anymore. I'm ready to see it though! My nephew Nathan has damn near quoted every line of the movie, now all I have to do is see it to makes sense of his ramblings.

Another fine Fathers Day has come and gone! Got dad a funny pair of grillin pajamas!! He enjoyed it! Tiff got me my first 'father to be' fathers day card, which was just awesome! I can't wait for the little fella to get here already!

I'll try and get some updates out here this week and definitely will host up some photos of the Lou trip!

Loved by the co-workers!

This is just awesome!

So I came in to work this morning and this picture was sitting in my chair!

As I've posted here before I've got a new office that is right in the middle of the building and has no windows at all. So some great friends here at work, Karen and Gretchan, thought they'd brighten up the room and put this photo in here!

Ya know, its the small things that can really make a persons day! Thanks girls!

Funny headline of the week......

OK, I'm just on a roll all of the sudden!

Here's your 'make your eyes pop out of your head when you read it' headline:

'144 arrested at 'largest cockfight' in U.S.'

Enough said, I don't even want to read any further..................

Word of the week..............

This week's word of the week is: Ginch! - G.I.N.C.H.! Ginch!

Listen to how that just rolls off of the tongue! I'd like to thank Vitamin B for an introduction to this word. Just like that, a new word to throw in to my crappy vocabulary!

OK, now back to the normally scheduled mindless rants...............

GI NOOOOOO BLIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!!!!

That's all I can say, quoting my favorite loud mouth Charles Barkley!

What a stud this guy is! Manu, Manu, wracking up the points and he's let the Spurs saddle up on em and ride em off in to the sunset!

What a great series this is so far. Whhhhaaaaa, wahhhh all you Lakers/front runner fans! The 2 real stud teams are in this series trading punches. San Antonio's just laying that smack down a bit harder!

If you guys get a chance, sit down and watch how real basketball is played, not streetball!

A few choice words..........

I'm not by any stretch of the imagination a bitter person (Shhhhh Tiffany!!) but this weekend brought to an end a courtship with a game site that I watched, from it's infancy, grow in to a mammoth monster. That site was Gamertag.com!

Back in the beta testing days, and the early infancy of XBox Live, I had the pleasure of meeting some really cool cats. After growing tired of everyone constantly asking 'hey, where are you from?' JFragment and his buddies put together an early database edition of what was back then, gamertagdatabase.com. For the first year or so we saw all sorts of editions to the site, Gamertag and Munck, which was always good for a laugh or two, Custard Speaks, the list goes on.

As time went on, GTDB.com grew enormous, and Jay, being the biz man that he is, decided he just didn't have the time to put forth on the site anymore, leaving it in the (at the time he thought) capable hands of Cynn/Slickmoney.

At first glance, a lot of us thought to ourselves, "Wow! This is gonna be huge! Big changes coming, and we get to be at the forefront of it all." Only Cynn/Slick decided to take their own approach and totally leave the rest of us out in the dark. So for months we chased down the messages 'what's wrong with Clash?', 'Why haven't I got my prizes from Clash', 'When can we expect new content from the site?' or even simple emails, as mods, we would get reports of bad posts, yet they wouldn't inform us that there were 'others' working on the site. So we had to be shotty mod's and leave most of that unanswered, and just wait for the day that Slick would post his infamous 'We'll tell you when you need to know', like it was some damn government operation! Guy's its a gaming site!

Hey, businesses have to run as a business. Period! But I look at it this way, here you have a guy, Cynn, who comes in and has Clash become a part of the GTDB.com lovefest, and he ends up gettin it so he's sole owner of the site now. Good for you. But listen, you must remember that those around you got the site to where it was at. You were handed the keys to the Ferarri and told to run with it. No one could have ever envisioned you driving it into a wall HEAD FIRST! You shouldn't treat friends/employees (however you labled us) as outsiders. We weren't asking for the blueprint to a nuclear bomb or anything. You chose your path, and gave no consideration to those around it. You started off the wrong way with your 'purging' of the mods in your first 90 days, just to follow everything up with 'You'll know when we want you to know!' Yeah, great, and let us mod's take shit for it!

I wanted to stay a bit more mature on this matter seeings how I let my buddy Dave throw my name in to the 'Resignation' letter without speaking my mind.

But then again, that's what my blogs for, isn't it?

Big things are ahead for me now. This gives me time to step back and understand gaming all over again. This is like 'lessons learned' for XBox in rev. 1. Now its time for 2.0! I think it's gonna be a very interesting year ahead!

As an edit, I would also like to throw in that Slickmoney was always a great friend online! We had the hardest of times always hooking up in-game, but when we did, good times were had by all! I sure hope to have your back in some WoW!

What the hell's wrong with me.......

I was pondering this thought the past few days, and I thought I'd put it out here and see if made any more sense to me after seeing it written down.

So here's the problem. I've found myself in a quandry......I'm listening to an exorbanent amount of AM radio and I cannot figure out why? Talk radio, sports radio, etc......It doesnt stop, the ride home, the ride to the grocery store.........Radio is just so damn boring to me anymore and I can't stand it. Radio has become so repeatitive that's its damn near unbearable anymore.

The old days of a rockin WMMS or Rock 107, 107.9 The End...........It's just all gone. Even the rock stations have become filled with DJ's that are ignorant and full of opinions that mean not a damn thing to me and it's the same group of music for the ride home every day. I can damn near predict it each time too........

Now I listen to AM to either catch our local sports talk show host rant about Cleveland teams, mind you, he's a Pittsburgh fan! Or I can listen to Mike Trivisano who is just funny has hell to enjoy. I mean, I've even become tired of Stern. Unfortunately for me I'm catching him first thing in the morning at 6am, and that first hour or so he's just bitching and griping about everything. Just a complete whine session, quite painful. I miss all the good stuff cause he waits til mid-morning to get in to that form.

Satellite radio's next, I'm just holding out for a model that is portable in the Sirius brand. XM almost got my money, but I'll take NBA and NFL instead of just MLB on my radio please!

Anyone else in this same boat as me? Or are you lucky enough to have radio that doesn't suck?

A sappy post for all of you!

Not many of you may know this about me, since most of you only know of me, or anything about me either thru this blog now, or thru our interactions on the net. But, outside of the internet world I don't have much of an exciting life.

I spent a lot of my time working since Tiffany and I split up and even before that I didn't do much except pour my time into her. Even as far back as high school, I only had a few friends, and is most often the case, after high school, those friends disappeared.

When XBox Live launched, I was invited into the beta program to get involved and be a part of a fun project. Along the way I made some friends who, to this day I still am friends with. As you can see I've even traveled to meet these friends.

I've always joked with Tiffany about how the only friends I have are over the 'net, but you know something, today I realized how true that statement is.

I've made some great friends thru my clan involvement and with getting onboard with the guys over at Gamertag.com.

This is more of a 'thank you' to those guys/gals for being there for me during hard times and being able to pick up the phone and either have you guys/gals call me or if need be for me to call you. All of you have made me truely appreciate people again! You guys have sometimes seen the worse I've gone thru and you've always been non-judgemental and always just offered support and friendship. It's hard to come up with a thank you, but I thought this might be a good start.

Here's a short list (and if your names not listed, don't be offended, I'm sure I'll miss someone!)

Ralph/April (Ram2600) - I can't say enough about how much I've appreciated 2 people like you guys!

Brian (Vitamin B) - Bro, you have been there for me! Thank you my friend! The phone calls are always a welcomed pleasure!

Dave/Heather (MrSilverblood and TheHeather) - You 2 opened your home to me and made me start to really understand how great you guys/gals all are! I can't say how honored I have been for the way you guys have been with me, and with Tiffany! Thank you for showing me that people don't have to judge others and can understand where a guy is coming from!

Pete/Mary (KegOWar) - Pete, it took several years to finally meet up with you and I wished we could have met sooner! You are an awesome guy and Mary just rocks! It's great to have finally had the chance to meet you both. I hope it's not the last time!

Cindy/Terry (The Lonestars) - Your community has brought me a home on the net! Your friendship has been wonderful and you guys brought me in and made me feel more than welcome there!

JFrag and the early GT.com boys - Good grief, we roll way back into the beta days! It was just so awesome to see what you guys created over there. Again, you guys brought me in and you have helped me create some great friendships! Thanks for all of your hard work!

The BoG boys - TBoa and fellas, you guys are my brothers! It's been so damn awesome to be a part of this group. It just shows that you can compete with friends and still have fun! Thanks for keeping it fun for me! Dagon, you rock bro! You and your brothers have been such a great group of guys to get to know over the past year and I can't wait to meet and shake all of your hands! TBoa its been great watching your leadership and control over such a group of us ruffians! Kudos for holding it all together! Can't wait for the get together!

The BachelorPad - Yeah part of the BoG boys, but I wanted to personally thank you for your friendship over the years! We roll way back to the SoS/Apocalypse days and again, I consider you a great friend! Thanks for everything bro! Some day, you will see that dream you and not many others know about, come true! Watch for it!

XBLF and GT.com - Community! Just so awesome to be a part of both! I've had great laughs on days I really needed it! I'm sure there's more I could say here, but for now Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!

Alright, I'll suck it up and quit being such a woosy here! But I feel a lot better having put this out there. Sometimes we forget to thank those around us, and I thought this was a proper way to do so.

Now, back to work!