Hard Drive Troubles, and the Weekend in Sports

What a day for a Friday. It's been a hugely long week for me at work, as most of the issues I wrote about at my worktiltier times this summer still persist and will never go away it is obvious, and I for one cannot wait for tomorrow to just relax and enjoy my freedom. Not wearing a tie will be a big fucking plus too btw.

I have to give a shout-out here to Dell service, who called me out of the blue on Thursday late afternoon and actually came to my apartment with my new hard drive and installed it at like 8:30pm last night without me even having to beg them. I can't believe that less than 48 hours after I first called Dell to report my computer wasn't loading, here I am with a brand new hard drive installed. What's more, the tech guy they sent also ordered me a new keyboard, new laptop screen and new AC adapter for my pc, all free of charge and under warranty. So I may actually make out well after all this, and all for basically just one night without a computer. I still can't believe how quickly they took care of everything. So, I spent basically all of Thursday night going and downloading all the apps that I need for my personal pc. That meant trips to get AOL IM and Yahoo! Messenger so I can talk to you girly chatters. Screenhunter for the screenshots for the blog. Core FTP for uploading files like those screenshots. Full tilt (obviously) and Pokerstars (for some reason) to be able to get my poker fix. Poker Tracker and PA Hud to be able to start rebuilding my database of over a million total hands. Resetting all my bookmarks. Plus with all these "clean" new apps comes all the configuring and other work that goes along with it -- choosing my preferences, actually getting fucking PokerTracker to work (those of you with Vista will know especially what I'm talking about here), selecting which of you donkeys to permablock on the girly thingy, you know how it is. So I did not have much time for poker last night, although I did manage to lose a little more than a buyin at the 2-4 tables, which is always nice to end the first evening on my "new" old computer.

You know, as I thought about it, there are really only two items of data that I will really miss losing with this new hard drive. One is my poker hand history database on PokerTracker. That sucks to lose, but in the end I only lose about 4 months of data on my unrecoverable hard drive, and in the overall scheme of things I can't believe that is much of a loss. And to be honest I barely ever run PA HUD and so I don't really get nearly as much out of that hh database as I should. But the thing I will miss the most is all the screenshots I've taken over the past four months. Dumbass me has never bought a flash drive or an Iomega anything in my entire life, but I suppose maybe it's time to invest in one of those badboys. I probably lost around 7500 poker screenshots on my fried hard drive, and even though I don't have anything specific planned to do with them, I would still rather not have lost them all. I mean, those shots of you fonkeys calling my allin preflop raises with JTo and 74s and limping utg with AJo and all the other awesome things you guys do, that stuff is really gonna be missed. But I'll make do, and eventually if it's like last time, after about a month of frustration then PT will finally be working again on my new system and it'll be just like old times.

So with my pc back in the house, it's time to focus on my favorite Friday topic: sports! And no discussion on sports today can start without mentioning the greatest chokers of all time -- those fucking New York Mets. My god are they horrible. Putting aside my Phillies for a minute here, the Mets absofuckinglutely do not deserve to go to the playoffs. For more than four months now, that team has played sub-.500 baseball. This is not some great team that is just going on a slide recently. I mean, yes they've now fully blown a 7 game lead with 17 games to play, and yes that is a collapse of biblical proportions, but this Mets team has been playing losing baseball for the vast majority of the season at this point. They stink. Their pitching and especially their bullpen has proven to be no better than the Phillies', and the hitting is just shitty enough to be giving up lead after lead over the past few weeks against teams all around the country. The Phillies deserve to make the playoffs a lot more than the Mets do, of that I am certain. F the Mets. They're a despicable bunch of guys playing for a despicable franchise. And nothing would make me happier than having a 163rd game tiebreaker in Philadelphia next Monday night to watch the Phillies claim the NL East while I rip shit up in the MATH at the same time. My god did I mention how bad the Mets suck it? They are horrible.

But I'm a real Phillies fan, and I have been since growing up in Philly and then in South Jersey for my entire childhood, so I know how tough the next few games are going to be for us to win. This team, this franchise, historically loses in this situation. Anyone who's familiar with the last few years of the National League alone knows exactly what I'm talking about, but think about this: in a division with five teams in it, plus a league wildcard for most of the time, the Phillies have not made the playoffs in 14 seasons. In fact, the team has made exactly one playoff appearance in the last 24 seasons. Can you imagine that? Just that 1993 season, the "Wild Thing" and Joe Carter World Series year, but otherwise Philadelphia is a city that is absolutely starved for some baseball success. And having watched and lived through the last generation of Phillies baseball, I simply do not believe they will get it done, even though I'd much rather be the Phillies playing the Nationals at home this weekend than I would want to be the Mets having to face the Marlins, and in particular Dontrelle Willis who I believe is scheduled to pitch on the last game of the season. Not that Dontrelle or the Marlins have had some great year or anything, but they play the Mets I think a lot better than the Nationals play the Phillies. But you watch, by the time I'm back here on Monday, something will have happened to have kept the Phillies out of the playoffs. It's gonna be a long and exciting weekend for Phillies fans over the next few days, that is for sure.

And on to football. So Duce McAllister's injury early in the Saints' Monday night game last weekend led my opponent to have a monster day from the otherwise worthless Reggie Bush and thus beat my fantasy team in my own league, giving me my first loss of the season in that league where I still sit 2-1 with lots of fantasy points scored and in 3rd place overall. I am ripping up my friend's league where I am the only undefeated team at 3-0, and in my third league with a bunch of college friends my team is 2-1, separated from a 3-0 record there as well thanks only to a 0.38-point defeat in Week 2. And then there is Chad's blogger league, where I beat the worst team in the league last week for my first victory of the season. So amazingly in that league, even though I am averaging over 100 points a week and have scored I think the 3rd most fantasy points of anybody in that league, I've also had the most fantasy points scored against me out of anyone, and somehow I'm sitting near the bottom at 1-2 over there, with little prospects for passing all the teams I would need to pass in order to make any noise in that league. Of course that's my one money league this year, isn't it always that way? Go figure.

The amazing thing about me having a generally very successful fantasy football season this year so far is how awful you may recall my draft position was in every single one of my four leagues this year. You may recall me whining in the blog about somehow getting the 5th, 7th, 7th and 10th picks in each of my four fantasy football leagues, which at the time I thought was a bad beat of pretty obnoxious proprtions, not being even in the top 4 picks in a single one of my four leagues, and not in the top 6 in three of them. I still can't believe that happened. And yet, it ends up being exactly the thing that has saved me to a large extent this season. Think about it -- those guys with the top 4 or 5 picks in every fantasy football draft this year, who did they end up spending those top picks on? LaDainian Tomlinson, Larry Johnson and Steven Jackson, all three of who are more or less abject busts so far this season. All of them, totally worthless more or less from a fantasy perspective. So in the end, I seem through the first three weeks of the season to have lucked out by not getting forced into taking those few guys who just are not producing at top-flight first-round pick levels thus far in the 2007-08 NFL season. All that could change at any time of course, but for now it has worked out for me to be starting guys like Chad Johnson, Reggie Wayne, Marvin Harrison, Ronnie Brown, Brian Westbrook (best runningback in the league bar none right now) and Shaun Alexander a heck of a lot better than starting those big-name non-performers this year would have been. That's what's been keeping me afloat so far, and hopefully it will continue as I have been putting up some bigass fantasy points in three games this year, which I've been rewarded for with my record in every league I'm in this year, except of course for the $100 bloggers league, which is obviously rigged.

So last week I ended up going 1-0 with my two picks, as I gave you the Eagles -6.5 over the Lions in what I described as one of the most ridiculous and absurd lines I've ever seen on a game, so I suggested that somebody must know something and to go with the line despite how recockulous it was. I guess that worked a little bit, as the Eagles ran up 56 points or so on the atrociously non-existent Lions defense in a good old-fashioned style crushing at the Linc in Philly. I also gave you the Jets -3 over the Dolphins at home, which ended up a push. This makes me 2-2-1 so far on the year in my picks against the spread, but last week was a strong comeback from my 0-2 embarrassment the weekend before and gets me back on the right track to pick some more winners this week. So here I am.

The first game I like this week occurs in Detroit, where the NFL's worst defense (sorry, Goat!) in the Lions goes up against the reigning NFC Champions the Chicago Bears. Only this time the Bears don't have the inept fonkey Wrecks Grossman at quarterback. Not that Brian Griese is the end-all be-all of NFL quarterbacks either, playing on his 4th team in a relatively short career in his own right, but something tells me that Griese will do enough in this game to make Lovie Smith question why he didn't make this move sooner (like, about 18 games sooner), especially against the Lions whose defense I think just gave up another touchdown to Kevin Curtis and another touchdown to Brian Westbrook as I type this. The Bears are favored in this game in Detroit by 3 points, and I like the Bears to win by more than that at the hands of Brian Griese at the helm.

My second pick this week is going to be a Miami Don special -- a road underdog. The Denver Broncos travel to Indianapolis to play the Superbowl champion Colts this Sunday at 4:15pm ET, where the superpowered Colts offense is favored to win by 10 points in the RCA Dome. Now don't get me wrong -- I'm not a big Jay Cutler fan, and I don't think the Broncos are all that this year. But they do have a good O-line, and they do have a very solid defense, and at the end of the day the Colts have simply not been blowing many teams out this year. I do believe the Colts will win the game and remain undefeated, but I think 10 points is an awfully large number against a run-oriented and defensive-minded team like the Broncos. I'll take the Broncos plus 10 points to make a game of it with the reigning Superbowl champions.

So this week's two picks are:

1. Bears -3 at the Lions.

2. Broncos +10 at the Colts.

At 2-2-1 so far this year, hopefully the above two picks will add to that record this weekend here as the first quarter of the season is already coming to a close for most NFL teams.

That's all for now. Hope everyone has a profitable weekend at the tables, and if you're around at all in the evenings, come check me out on my brand new old pc. Yay Dell service!!