Archive for the ‘Paintball’ Category

Welcome to the “Dark Side”

What’s this?  A blog update?

One of my friends recently purchased an Alienware pc, so last Sunday, not to be left out, I went and purchased an Apple Mac-Mini.  I’d been longing for an Apple to play around with ever since my wife got her iMac a few years ago.  Well my bonus check was in and the time was right…

Roughly the size of 5 cds stacked on top of each other, this thing kicks some  serious butt…so much so that I’ll be darned if this little box hasn’t become my “computer of choice” for darn near everything.

The model I picked up has an 80gig hard disk, 512meg of memory, wireless, and bluetooth.  It’s also running Apple’s latest version of OSX, code-named “Tiger” (See lengthy technical review here.)  When I got it home I plugged it into a KVM switch so it could share my 22-inch NEC Monitor with my XP gaming machine. 

That XP machine has been booted exactly once since Sunday.

Apple’s email is better than Thunderbird – and I love Thunderbird.  The spam filtering is so far and away superior that it’s not even funny.  I get a lot of spam…300-400 emails a day…and Thunderbird would routinely miss a couple hundred of that.  The 20 or so real emails that I get a day would be intermingled amongst that garbage and it became a daily grind that I loathed.  In the two days I’ve been using it as my primary mail client, Apple Mail has missed at most 4 emails a day.

That’s simply phenomenal, but it’s only part of the story.  Apple Mail has a feature that you can use to set up “smart folders”.  When mail hits your inbox, it scurries off per your directions.  Newsletters sift into a folder, mail from family and friends automatically goes into another.  It’s clean, fast, and totally configurable in less than 5 minutes.  This is the way mail is supposed to work. 

There’s more…the Dashboard and Spotlight and all of the “iTools”, I could go on for hours.  Suffice it to say that I’m using PC for World of Warcraft, and the Mac for everything else.  I’m a convert.

In other news, I played paintball again last weekend.  I spent most of the morning getting my Shocker set up, but after I got it squared away I got a good amount of play in.  My buddy Joel joined me and we did some damage despite the early rain.  Finishing the Sunday on the deck with a couple of beers was just about perfect.

Time for some links:

A worthwhile rant about healthcare…

Cheap Cooking

Stuff confiscated at airport security – now for sale on Ebay

Seven Deadly (gummy) Sins

One Man Safari

Well that’s it for now…I’ll close by saying:  My computer has a Hula Girl.  Does yours?

Paintball Tournament

I joined a paintball team recently, and after one practice we played in our first tournament yesterday. Our team (GXP) played in the GPL event at Del Hobbies in Pedricktown, NJ. We played in the rookie division and out of 32 teams we finished 3rd.

In the prelims we went 6-2 and in the finals we finished 3-2. The results were a bit frustrating. Early in the day they turnaround time between games was inordinately long and we ended up playing the last few games of the finals in the dark. Forget seeing the balls, you couldn’t see the players or bunkers. A couple of times I shot at gun lights, and in the last match of the day we actually shot out a couple of our own teammates (thankfully we still won that game.) We missed out on 2nd place by 20 points, which is particularly painful considering the prize for 2nd was a new Smartparts ION.

Regardless, it was a fun time. You couldn’t ask for better weather…upper 70′s and not a cloud in the sky. Del ran a pretty good operation other than the early timing issues and the fact that the kitchen ran out of hamburgers way too early.

Our team is sponsored by Smart Parts and System-X. Below is a photo of my sponsor gun. I didn’t use it in this tourney but I hope to get it tuned up and ready to go for the next one.

As you can see, I got welted up pretty good yesterday. On one particular series I was the last guy in. I shot 2 guys out but got bunkered and took about 5 shots up close. Good stuff…

All of the pictures from the event can be found here, including a photo of our prize package.

The Tank

I need to get one of these…

Paintball Pictures

I found some photos from the tournament that I recently participated in. This is the page for my team. Here and here, I’m the one on the far left, and in this one you can see me immediately after getting shot out (the only time I was hit all day and the guy decides to take a picture of it…

Poke around the rest of the site. Even though the pictures are rather small and the photographer annoyingly slaps his logo over everything, there’s some nice stuff here.

My first tournament

I participated in my first ever paintball tournament yesterday, and overall it was a pretty great time.

I was asked a few weeks ago to join a 5 man “Rookie” team for this event and I was so excited I eagerly said “yes” without really thinking. Later of course, I would remember that October 17th was my wedding anniversary (duh!) When I finally woke up I tried to find a sub, but the best I could do was to get someone who could play in the afternoon.

I’m not one to bail on an obligation, so yesterday morning I headed out to “Captain Carls“, just south of Philadelphia. I’m glad I did.

The Rookie portion of the tourney had 24 teams of 5, broken down to 3 divisions of 8 teams. Basically each team plays all of the others once, and then the top 2 teams in points in each division move on to the semi-finals. 2 more teams get into the semis as wild cards (based on who has the most points among the 3 divisions.) Games are 5 minutes each.

I played in 6 games, and we won all 6. I got hit only once, shot 6 opponents out, and grabbed the flag and hung it once. After that, I handed off to a friend and headed home. My team won another game to go to 7-0 before I left.

There were 3 fields, a couple of which were very muddy. Still, that only made things more interesting.

The event itself was well organized. Lots of give-a-ways like posters, stickers, and magazines, some neat door prizes, and a highly energized group of players. Upcoming games were announced via loudspeaker and there wasn’t a lot of downtime between matches.

One notable game featured us against the “Hawaiian Twisters”. We took to our bunkers and basically played to a stalemate for 3 minutes. Several of my teammates carried stopwatches that beeped at various time increments so we were aware of how much time we had left. At this point we realized we need to make a move to score some points, but we didn’t want to do anything foolish. Finally our back guy shot out one of their right side guys and that allowed us to move up. We quickly got an advantage, but now it was down to about 1 minute left. I found myself up at the 50, so I made a lateral run for the flag – grabbed it, and slid backwards into a 2 1/2 foot tall tube-like bunker extending perpendicular towards the middle of the field from the right side snake. Unfortunately this position was also 2 inches of mud and water. The flag grab alone was worth 20 points, so I just laid there in the muck and waited for my teammates to go to work. They finished off all but the last player, and shouted for me to hang the flag. I jumped up and lurched towards the enemy base while my team kept the last guy in by laying paint on his bunker. I hung the flag with less than 5 seconds left in the game, giving us another 50 points. Talk about adrenaline…! The field was so muddy I almost slipped on my ass 10 feet from the flag station.

The funny part about today is that we had never played together before as a team, we all had mismatched jerseys and pants, and we really stood out amongst all the other teams with matching colors and names on their backs.

A teammate and I got interviewed (on camera) by the folks filming for RASPN.
We may very well make it to the broadcast on Comcast and/or the dvd. If you’re located in the Delaware County PA, you can watch the tourney footage every Saturday in November on Comcast Leased Access Channel 76 @ noon.

UPDATE – Turns out my team won their final division game to go to 8-0. In the semis (I am told) the home teams got extremely preferential treatment. To the point where multiple hopper and mask hits were wiped off by the refs with no explanation given to our team. This seems pretty foul if true. I’m sort of glad I wasn’t there to experience it because it would’ve ended an otherwise great day on a sour note. It supposedly got so bad that at one point the spectators were booing the refs.

Anyway, I’m glad I got some play in. It was a great first experience at tourney play and I’ll definitely be back. Pictures from the event can be found here.

Weekend Wrapup

It’s going to be interesting explaining the welt on top of my head to my coworkers tomorrow.

I’ve got a few more on my arms as well, and I’m beginning to feel like Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club, flashing a grinning mouthful of blood to a coworker in a meeting.

Since most of my face never gets a chance to heal, I’ve got nothing to lose in the looks department. My boss, at work, he asked me what I was doing about the hole through my cheek that never heals. When I drink coffee, I told him, I put two fingers over the hole so it won’t leak.

We played at Paintball Invasion today, and it wasn’t nearly as good a time as it was the last time I played there. First of all, the weather started off pretty lousy…torrential rain. My friends and I had to drive at a crawl to get there to avoid hydroplaning off the road. Then once we’re there we had to wait more than an hour to get started. PI has an indoor field so the rain wasn’t such a big deal, but the pacing of the games (today at least) was. You’d get out there, play a game, then they’d shut down. The refs would slowly sweep the field, and the rest of the players would just loiter around aimlessly. A couple of times the rain slowed and 90% of the crowd would bolt outside, hoping to get some games in on the outdoor fields. We followed, only to be turned around when the rain resumed. The net effect was that we got damn little playing time in for our money.

Then there were the gun problems. My buddy Fax was breaking in a new gun, and ran into a couple of glitches that should’ve been avoidable. Initially the bolt wasn’t returning back all the way after each shot, resulting in the balls not being able to decend far enough to be fired. We fixed that (after a couple of calls to the shop) by loosening some screws around the back end of the gun. The real issue came with all the indoor/outdoor Kerryesque flip-flopping. Indoor you have to chrono at 260, whereas outdoors you can shoot at 280. Fax being new to the gun overtightened the velocity screw – to the point where it got stripped and was unadjustable. That ended his day…

I eventually got into a couple of games in outside, and it was fun and all until I decided to be a hero and run for the back left laydown can on the break. What looked like dry land from the deadbox turned out to be 3 inches of water and soft mud under a layer of tall grass. As I made my turn, my feet slipped out from under me, and I landed twisting on my back. My feet were in the air, my gun was in the water, my hopper was cranked around 180 degrees, and I swear I heard something crack in my spine. Meanwhile my opponents are still shooting at me, sending spray into the air as their paint strikes the surface of the puddle I’m lying in.

I don’t remember how made it to my bunker, got my stuff sorted out, and got back into the game, but I did. I remember whiping a lot of mud off of my gun, and spitting out some grass. My hopper kept spinning to the side whenever I leaned out to take a shot. I had to hold the thing in place with one hand while shooting with the other. I somehow managed to tag two guys before getting marked on the head. Totally covered in mud, and my hopper flopping around in the wind, I decided to call it and head home before I killed myself.

It was just one of those days…

I played with a pro tonight…

I was at the paintball field tonite for a little “Wednesday night action” when Matt and his uncle from the paintball store stopped by with Zack Ducharme from Redz Hurricanes. (See profile.)

I joined them and we played as a 4 man team against basically everyone else there. They were just rotating the teams in against us. The kids’ mouths kind of dropped when they saw this guy, as he’s one of the best front players in the country.

It was kind of interesting being close to a sports specific fame like that, even if it was relatively low level. I was on the periphery of it – only playing with him – but you could feel a bit of the spotlight shift. On an ordinary night games are going on all the time, and people are off doing their own thing…cleaning their gear, refilling air and pods, etc. When we walked out on the field with this guy it was like a switch was thrown, and the whole place pressed up against the net to get a better look. The atmosphere when I made a move, shot someone out, or got tagged myself was certainly amplified with all those eyes on us.

It was one of those rare experiences in life that I won’t soon forget. Fortunately I didn’t embarass myself out there. All of the guys playing on our team (other than me) were very good tournament players, so I was happy to contribute a few kills here and there and not shoot any of my teammates in the back of the head.