Ryan Morlok’s Blog

Last weekend wasn’t a shining star for the history books as the Gopher’s hockey team dropped two games to North Dakota (the first time that’s happened in Minneapolis since 1980).  The team just couldn’t seem to get it done, and the goaltending just wasn’t at the level it has been the rest of the season.  It’s unfortunate that it was one of these games that drove Gophers hockey to the front page of Digg videos for the first time I’ve ever seen.  This video is of a fluke goal that was scored by North Dakota from the far end of the rink, and not on an empty net.  Frazee couldn’t do much about it.  He might have come out a little further to cut of the angle, but the puck was bouncing weird.  Poor guy will have to deal with that one being in highlight videos for a while.

Since I’ve moved to IL, Dusty and I have periodically discussed the regional language idiosyncrasies as we’ve observed them both from our home locations (Minnesota/Tennessee) and what we see in central Illinois.  Perhaps the most famous debate is Pop versus Soda versus Coke.  I ran across an article on Digg this afternoon that has an interactive map that shows the regional usage of the terms.  Unfortunately, I haven’t actually seen the site because it is down to traffic load, but I was able to find another blog entry that has a map that shows similar information by county in the U.S.

When I lived in Minnesota, I almost always said ‘pop’, but since I’ve been in Illinois, I switch off between ‘pop’ and ’soda’ (though I still use pop more). That’s pretty consistent with the region, which seems to be right on the boarder between ‘pop’ and ’soda’.  Looks like ‘pop’ is used most often of the three in the U.S.

Kim Laboratories celebrated Myung’s 40th birthday this last Friday at Kennedy’s at Stone Creek.  It was a nice, fancy place but I wasn’t overly impressed with the food (especially for the price).  I know most people reading this don’t know who Myung is, but if you do, you might be interested in these pictures.  As a gag gift, we got him a cheap plaid jacket from Walmart.  To say Myung is normally a classy dresser is about as big of an understatement as saying the Pope is Catholic.  Anyway, we put a gift card to Back Rack (fancy men’s clothing store) in the pocket.  We still made him try it on so we could get a few pictures.

I just saw a great clip in which O’Reilly brings on a body language expert to analyze his encounters with Stephen Colbert.  Colbert then responds to the O’Reilly segment in on the Report with this clip.  Basically, the expert said that Colbert came off as completely cool and confident, and O’Reilly, at times, seemed annoyed and on the defensive.

It actually snowed here in Champaign (gasp!) Sunday morning. Enough snow to do something. Obviously, we had three options for the day: go sledding, or build something out of snow, or have a snowball fight. Champaign is flat like a pre-pubescent boy (does that even make sense?!?), and the one man-made hill in town specifically designated for sledding is always packed with children whenever it snows. So that eliminated sledding. Dusty throws like a girl, so that eliminated the snowball fight. The only thing left to do was to build a snowman!

And build a snowman we did…

It took us several hours and half the snow available between the townhouse complexes, but we build a snowman so big frosty would have wet himself. The snowman came out to be about ~2 lauras tall (8–10 feet), and weight in somewhere in the ballpark of 8–10 lauras (I’m guessiong 1000lbs, but I’m just making that up).

The sections were so large (and more importantly, heavy) that we had to cut in half the middle and head snowballs so that the pieces could be lifted into place and then reassembled. That construction strategy came from our resident mechanical engineer Amanda Hilldore. Our chemist, Doug Davis, tried to take credit for the idea, but accidentally breaking a snowball in half while you’re trying to assemble the snowman doesn’t count as an idea. Full pictures of the ordeal are available here. Videos of the process are here and here.

Last Saturday was the first (hopefully annual) Hockey Day Minnesota.  Although I was stuck in Illinois, I was able to partake in the festivities thanks to my satellite subscription to FSN North.  I watched the Lake of the Woods/St. Paul Johnson outdoor game, the Gophers and even the Wild.  Normally the Wild games are blocked out in our viewing area, but for some reason, this time it wasn’t.  Lake of the Woods won (though it didn’t really matter as I wasn’t rooting for any particular team), Gophers won, and Wild lost in an 8 round shootout.  Great day of hockey.  In honor of the event, here is the State of Hockey anthem.  I’d like to get an MP3 of this song, but I haven’t been able to find one.  If you know where I can get a copy, leave a message in the comments.

I added a sidebar (after Pages and before Categories) that shows the stories/videos I’ve recently dugg on Digg.com.  I’m sure I’ll continue to post stories that I really like, but this sidebar will provide a short summary of my digg profile.

Both Colbert on O’Reilly and O’Reilly on Colbert.  Personally, I think the first one is more funny.

That’s a variation on a (fairly) famous Bible verse (Matthew 15:27) that emphasizes how pet food/care is getting ridiculous. I ran across this website today that sells dog food that is supposed to improve your dog’s health. Specifically, their dog grub contains “natural bioactive ingredients, which specifically target harmful biological processes responsible for ulcer, cancer, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic diseases.” That’s all well and good — I’m in favor of healthy dogs — but at $2 per dog biscuit, it almost becomes a commentary on modern society. While 852 million people don’t have enough to eat each day, we’re spending $12 (+shipping) on a box of dog treats.

This video shows some of the upcoming new features in Parallels, such as coherence mode.  Looks really cool.  I haven’t installed any of their pre-releases because I don’t want to risk hosing things with my Windows installs, but I can’t wait until the final version.