Cornell-University

Just got home from the Capitals vs. Red Wings game down at the Verizon Center. It was my first time down there, so here are some impressions: -I really hate DC’s Chinatown. It’s the most Americanized Chinatown I’ve ever seen and it’s an absolutely terrible venue for ice hockey/basketball. There’s just no character to it. It’s too corporate! -The Verizon Center is pretty mediocre. Not a lot of character because it’s shared between the Caps and Wizards, but it filled up nicely. -The Caps came out in the first period looking pretty sluggish, but they picked it up a bit in the second and third to come back from deficits and eventually pull ahead. -No beer once the third period starts?! Really?! -I miss Cornell ice hockey… ...

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“424” caption=“False Advertising”] [/caption] While running errands the other day I saw a girl wearing a blue pair of sweatpants that had the word “Pink” in large white print on the back. It got me thinking about the discrepancies between who we are and who we tell people we are. I can honestly say that I’ve never met a girl in a bar and opened by saying that I play approximately 20 hours of video games a week or that I run this blog. Instead I’d be far more likely to mention the movies that I like, the music I listen to, or the fact that I love baseball. It’s not really a lie, I’m not proclaiming to be pink when I’m clearly blue, but it’s not being totally honest with myself or the things that I spend most of my days doing. ...

Last month I found myself worrying about a friend of mine who was going through a tough time. Kim had just lost a friend and was headed to Louisiana for the funeral, so I wouldn’t be hearing from her for a week. I told her I was sorry and that I was there for her and then she left. Funny thing is, I’ve never met Kim. I only know her because I love to play Left 4 Dead. I’ve never even seen a picture of what she looks like and I’m only 98% sure that Kim is even her name. With all those layers of abstraction, you’d think it would be difficult for me to call her a friend, but I’ve come to realize that there can be value in the tenuous, ephemeral online friendship, so long as it doesn’t replace the ones you have in your physical life. ...

It’s really been tough coming up with the music that has most resonated with me in the 2000s. Wanting to represent the entire decade is tough, since I don’t really find the music that I used to listen to before I went to college all that good. Once I had more money and exposure beyond the mainstream acts I was familiar with in high school, I feel my tastes really changed up some. This list is definitely not representative of the actual best bands of the decade, they’re just bands that had a strong effect on me and my musical development. ...

The pride of my trip to Japan no doubt has to be the 12 jersey collection I brought home with me. Here is a quick rundown of each of the jerseys, a little background behind each, and what I think of it. I’m gonna cover them in the order that I got them, so that puts the Giants jersey a little later, even though that was the first game I went to. ...

This was a piece I wrote for Gamers With Jobs to try and score a writing gig. They ended up going with two other writers, so I figured I’d post what I wrote here. Enjoy. It was last month when I realized that something had gone terribly wrong . There were fifteen people in my apartment, maybe a tenth of them lifelong gamers, and they were all here to play video games. Most strange of all: there I was, microphone in hand, belting out “Don’t Stop Believing” in front of my friends. As my voice cracked on the high notes I wondered how I reached this point. Wasn’t I the same guy who refused to go to karaoke bars to avoid singing in public? Weren’t these people the same ones who scoffed at Final Fantasy and Halo? ...

The famous McGraw Tower. A Cornell icon… …About to be consumed by Domo-kun

When Schneider tagged me in her version of this I almost pulled a Linus Torvalds (http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/02/25-things-about-me.html), but instead I decided not to do one at all. Then I came across two “25 Random Baseball Things” articles and fell in love with the idea as a way to release pent up excitement about the upcoming baseball season. Hope you enjoy it.. 1. Baseball was the first team sport I ever played. To this day I don’t really understand what motivated my father to sign me up for the game. My grandfather is afraid of playing catch due to an incident where he got beaned, my dad is mostly apathetic toward sports in general, including baseball, and my older brother hated little league baseball. My best guess is that we were living in the mostly Cuban (at the time) Hialeah where little league baseball is the predominant sport. ...

Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter. Graduation has come and gone for me this past weekend, which is why I haven’t had any posts since Friday. Our Convocation speaker was the amazing Dr. Maya Angelou, who gave a very cool speech on Saturday. You can watch the speech (in Realplayer only at the moment, WTF?) here. She’s definitely a great speaker and funny when she wants to be. I hate to brag, but she beat the pants off of my brother’s convocation speaker four years ago, General (Ret.) Wesley Clark. To be fair, the president back then, Jeffrey Lehman, knocked the socks off of the dull speech by our president, David Skorton. He’s just so boring I can’t stand it. ...