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Well I guess it is about time I talk about the Saints' victory on Monday night.  I am still a little bit shell-shocked about the entire thing, but it was definitely the highlight of the weekend. I went to Cappy's, where a bunch of school, work, and other friends joined me for the excitement. It was good, because otherwise it would have been me and a bunch of Eagles fans.

The Saints played a strong game, leaning heavily on super-stud Deuce McAllister. He was amazing, and acted like the kind of running presence that the Saints haven't had in, well, forever. Very nice. Being a Saints fan means being a pessimist though; I always think one game at a time, and never think the game is over until there are three zeros on the clock. This game was no exception with roughly four minutes left in the game, up by only three points, the Saints were driving when Reggie Bush bobbled a backwards toss. The Eagles recovered, and nightmare scenarios began to flash through my head. Amazingly (and this is something the old Saints never could have pulled off) the Saints defense stepped it up. The Eagles went three-and-out, and bafflingly decided to punt with 3:30 or so left in the game. With Deuce in the backfield, the game was over from that point.

Next week, it's the Bears. It should be a blast, and I am hoping for another shakey Rex performance. Wish us luck. And to Mr. Benson; boogie down!

So, big news to report. After months of hemming and hawing, stopping and starting, splishing and splashing, I finally got my act together, and purchased a ticket to this weekend's Saints football game! (For those of you outisde the loop, that doubles as this week's Steelers game since they are playing each other.)

There are two interesting aspects to this story (divided up into further subsections):

1. Tickets to see Steelers' home games are expensive. When I saw that the prices of scalped tickets had fallen to only two and change times the fact value of the ticket, I just had to go for it. That is actually down from the five times face value that they were initially going for. I attribute this to:
1. The general not-so-good-ness of the Steelers at the moment. I mean, if you had told me at the beginning of the season that the Saints' and Steelers' records would be mirror images of one another by the time this game came up, I would have believed you. But I never would have believed that it was the Saints who possessed the better record.
2. The splitting up of pairs of tickets into singles. No one wants to go to a sporting event alone, which is why single tickets usually end up being cheaper. This brings me to my next point....
2. I am going to the game by myself. This is not a usual thing. Going to a movie by yourself (I have done this) is bad enough, but going to a sporting event by yourself is so rare as to be mostly unconsidered. I am wondering if anyone out there has experiences like this. The fact that tickets are so expensive kind of prohibited me from just buying another one fom someone else, but now I am beginning to wonder exactly how lame I am going to feel at Heinz stadium when I roll up into the one empty seat between two separate groups of friends. Is there any precedent for this situation?

Well, in all honesty, I know I am going to have a good time. Plenty of people I know have never been to a professional football game in their entire lives, and I now will have the pleasure of saying that I have seen Saints games in three separate cities. Next year I will go for four (road trip to Cincinnatti, anyone?).

Wish me luck. Hopefully I will not be mauled by rabil Stillers fans... At least I'll leave a beautiful corpse.

It's funny I didn't post anything last night or the night before, because I had a particularly awesome day on Monday.

First, I gave a presentation at the SSSG, my first of the year. It was on my summer internship, and I thought it went pretty well. I got a few helpful comments from people during the talk, and then a bunch of people came up to me later on to tell me that they thought it was pretty decent, which is definitely what I was going for!

Anyway, the way I prepare for talks can be quite stressful, so I was glad to be done with it.

Moreover, I had something I had been looking forward to for a while: The Saints playing the ugly ugly Atlanta Falcons on Monday night football. It was the first game in the Superdome since Katrina, and it was huge. The whole place was sold out, as it is for the rest of the season! (This is a really big deal in New Orleans, where the games never really sold out that often, but not so amazing in just about any other city with an NFL team.)

The game was awesome. The Saints won by 20 points, and I was hanging out with some friends at the William Penn tavern watching the whole thing. It just put me in a fantastic mood!

At the moment, not too much else. Preparing for an advisor meeting tomorrow, my first in two weeks because of his absence. Wish me luck!

One more thing:
This web cartoonist David Malki ! who writes a comic Wondermark, has a whole series where he tries to make unfunny newspaper comics funny again. This one about Marmaduke had me laughing uncontrollably in my office.

First things first, thanks to the advice of Albert, my photos will soon all be going on Flickr at the following location: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dixiepistols/
They are not all up at this point, but they will be, so just hold on to your horses.

The rest of the weekend was not quite so awesome, but fun in a relaxed way.
Let's count it down!

• Saturday night: Half-way crashed an EPP party. I did see some neat people there, but I was feeling seriously ill from running and drinking earlier that day, so overall I wasn't quite in the mood to rock. I did see my boss Chris from over the summer which lead to...
• Sunday morning: Massive football in eye at the William Penn Tavern. Watched our New Orleans Saints sneak one out against the truly horrible Cleveland Browns. Fun, but took up basically my whole day.
  
• Sunday night: After some serious ML hacking, Kevin organized some kind of awesome dinner party at the Hunan Kitchen. We somehow managed to get 15 people at the same table, although really it was more like three socially dispersed tables.
• Monday night (BONUS!!): I had already had a not altogether horrible meeting with my advisor, so I was already feeling alright. Got invited to see the Pirates for FREE, and watched them demolish (or, hold on to the lead just long enough) the Brewers. It was windy and I was ill-prepared since I just found out during the day that I would be going. But what evs, free baseball is just that.

Let's hope this week is rock and roll...