Matt Holthe's Fleeting Thoughts

As an update to this post I'm now the Foursquare mayor for 12 places. I lost Denny's Diner, so now it's exclusively Bloomington, IL places. I also lost Schooner's pub. But I added three new ones: McDonald's (there's a bunch in town - the one closest to my house where I go for breakfast a few times a week) Jimmy John's (don't know how I got this one - we go there for lunch about twice a month) Suburban East Park (daughter's T-Ball practice is here. After that's over, someone else should be able to steal this one pretty quickly) It seems like Foursquare activity is starting to wane, however. Maybe the fad is over nationwide.

For those of you that don't know, foursquare is a "check-in" web site where you check-in to different locations as you go there. If you check in the most at a certain location, you become the "mayor" of that location. Currently, I'm the mayor of 11 locations on foursquare. I think that's the most I have owned at any time. One of the most unusual ones was one I got last week at Denny's Diner in Wisconsin Dells. We went there twice for breakfast and I became the mayor. Here's a current list of all the locations where I am mayor: Holthe Household (Bloomington, IL) Rob Knight's Swim America (Bloomington, IL) Schooners (Bloomington, IL) El Toro (Bloomington, IL) Eastland Mall Play Area (Bloomington, IL) Chesterbrook Academy (Bloomington, IL) IBM Bloomington (Bloomington, IL) Super Gyros Blm (Bloomington, IL) Kulb Chalian Leak Urologists (Bloomington, IL) Denny's Diner (Lake Delton, WI) Supreme Buffett (Bloomington, IL)

Last week my family and I took a trip to Wisconsin Dells, WI. It's the water park capital of the world - there are tons of them. We stayed at a resort hotel that includes water parks. There are 4 indoor and 4 outdoor water parks exclusively for people staying at the resort. On the one hand, that's good - the number of people in the water park is limited, you can walk or take a shuttle to the water parks if you want, and it's easy to get back to your room if needed. On the other hand, you're paying for water parks as part of your hotel stay. If you don't make use of the water parks, you're losing money. Luckily, we were at a water park every day of our stay, if only for an hour or two each day. It was a great vacation and I'm sure we'll be back there in a couple years as the little one gets older and braver (she didn't go down any of the tall water slides, and very few of the shorter slides).

I've been keeping track of how many states and how many airports I've visited since starting my current job several years ago. My definition of "visiting a state" is two-fold. There are states where I've stepped foot in (being at the airport is good enough) and states where I've spent the night in. This week, I added the Seattle Airport (SEA) for my first official time setting foot in the state of Washington. And I'll be spending the night here before flying home tomorrow. So I've now been to 43 out of 50 states. I'm missing Alaska (pretty typical), New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine (I could get all of those in 1 trip), North Dakota, Oregon, and (believe it or not) South Carolina. I could imagine getting a trip to Oregon at some point in the future of this job. The other states, it's most likely going to take a side trip or concerted effort to get there.

Oh, my... this was a horrible travel week. I was scheduled to fly Bloomington (BMI) to Chicago (ORD) to Pittsburgh (PIT) to Tuesday, then PIT to ORD on Wednesday and ORD to BMI on Thursday morning. (I couldn't get all the way back to BMI Wednesday because of flight timings). Tuesday morning I get an automated call that my 10AM BMI-ORD flight was canceled (which means I would miss my ORD-PIT flight). I was rescheduled on the 5PM BMI-ORD flight and 9:30PM ORD-PIT flight. So that's 1 cancel and 1 missed flight. Around noon, I got another call that my 5PM BMI-ORD flight was canceled. Since it was noon, I decided just to rent a one-way car and drive up to Chicago (about 3 hours) to catch my ORD-PIT flight. Turns out the ORD-PIT flight was delayed for various reasons for 2 1/2 hours. We took off at midnight. I finally got to the hotel and my head hit the pillow at 3:45 AM local time. 2 cancels and 1 missed flight and 1 delayed flight isn't horrible, but that was only the ou...

Again this year I picked the line and total on every NCAA tournament game. Tonight's the championship game, so there's been 132 picks (66 lines and 66 totals) so far. U-G-L-Y is the only word for it. I went 29-37 on the lines (43.9%) and the exact same on the totals. For the line bets, I seemed to do a little bit better picking the underdog (16-17) compared to picking the favorite (13-20).

The end results for the single pick every day weren't pretty. I fell off the cliff a little bit toward the end of the season. There were 2 days during the big conference tournaments were 2 picks were made in a day (I won 1 and lost 1 of the "2nd picks"). Overall, I won 63, lost 64, and pushed 2. A 49.6% winning percentage. On the other hand, I picked a whole bunch of games Saturday (the day before selection Sunday). I picked both the line and the total in 13 different games (26 total bets). I also did a 3 team parlay bet. For the straight bets, I went 17-9 (that's really good). And I won the parlay bet. If I was in Vegas betting real money (which there's no way I would have made that many bets for real, but still) I would have had a 33.7% ROI for the day.

I've been spending the past day (and will be spending several more) trying to get my work computer back up and running. The Windows 7 boot file became corrupt. There's very little hope of recovering from that when the hard drive is encrypted like mine is. So I had to wipe it out and start over. I had a backup (but from late November) of my data. So it's a matter now of reinstalling all my programs and getting everything back up and running. Ugh.

I've been picking college basketball games for the whole season. There's several different methods for my predictions. The first is my "1 pick every day" method. With this, I choose exactly 1 game every day to predict. So far this year I'm 30-22-2 (57.4%). Another method is picking games when I "feel good" about them. With this method I'm 55-43 (56.1%). The final method is using computers to pick the games. These started a week or so ago - I wait until around the turn of the calendar before I start ranking teams. There's a few different ways I make these predictions. One picks quite a few games each day and is 23-15-1 (60.3%). Another picks only games which the computer thinks the line is "way off". This computer program is only 6-5-1 (54.2%). Finally, I have one program that only picks totals. This one is doing very well this year at 13-5 (72.2%).

I just got back from my last trip of the year. So now's the time to look at the year end stats. Using last year as a reference, I've added a couple things this year: I added one new state: Arkansas. I added 7 new airports: CMI (Champaign, IL), CVG (Cincinnati, OH), IAH (Houston, TX), JAX (Jacksonville, FL), MCO (Orlando, FL), TLH (Tallahassee, FL), and XNA (Bentonville, AR) I also remembered that I had been to the COS (Colorado Springs, CO), but I don't remember exactly when - there was a trip that I was supposed to fly out of Denver but ended up at Colorado Springs and I never wrote down when that happened. So I've actually been to 64 unique airports since starting this job. There's an additional 11 airports that I've been to in my lifetime, but before starting my current job: AMS (Amsterdam, Netherlands), AUA (Oranjestad, Aruba), CZM (Cozumel, Mexico), GVA (Geneva, Switzerland), HNL (Honolulu, Hawaii), OGG (Maui, Hawaii), PHX (Phoenix, AZ), PSP (Palm Spri...

I've been picking a college basketball game every day since the start of the season. (So far, I'm 60% 18-12 with 1 push). Today, I log in to make my pick, and there's a grand total of 1 game to choose from - Seattle +5.5 at Eastern Washington. I went ahead and picked Seattle. The line has since moved to 4.5, so at least I know that I'm picking along with the "wise guys" in Vegas - there's been more money on Seattle, so Vegas is moving the line to promote more action on Eastern Washington.

Congratulations to Northern Illinois Huskies football team! They are going to be playing Florida St in the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day. What an awesome pay day for the program - it's really nice to see one of the smaller conference teams (non-BCS) getting a chance to play in a big bowl game.

The next step of rebuilding my SUSE Linux Domino server as a Ubuntu Domino server was installing and setting up Domino. Many of these steps were taken from another web site . Log on as my main user and create the "notes" user. Note that almost every command listed here needs the "sudo" prefix so it can run as root. To save space, that is removed and just the command is listed. useradd -d /local/notesdata notes passwd notes     -- then give the "notes" user a password mkdir /local mkdir /local/notesdata chown notes:notes /local/notesdata Change programs around as instructed: cd /bin rm -i sh     -- answer "yes" to the prompt ln -s bash sh cd /user/bin ln -s mawk gawk FTP Domino from the server where I was holding it. I put it into my home "Documents" folder. I also FTP'd the ID files needed to recreate the server to the same directory. Then I needed to unpack the TAR file and install Domino 8.5.3: tar xvf lotus_dom...

I decided to switch my SUSE Linux Domino server at home to Ubuntu. So today I started the process with phase 1 - getting the OS going. First, I downloaded an ISO of Ubuntu 12.10 from the Ubuntu web site, then made a boot DVD on my Windows 7 home computer. Next, I put the DVD into the computer and started it up. There were only a couple questions that needed to be answered to install Ubuntu on the machine. Once finished, there was a prompt to reboot. Ubuntu opened up the DVD drive and then just sat there. I figured out from trial and error that I was supposed to press ENTER (after removing the DVD, of course) to get the machine to reboot. Upon reboot, I got a "[drm:drm_crtc_helper_set_config] *ERROR* failed to set mode on [CRTC:10]" error. I found a very similar error -- CRTC:6 on the Ubuntu forums. That entry had a solution. Press CTRL+ALT+F1 to bring up a text entry where you can enter in your user name and password. That logs you in, but you're in command mode. Then ...

It looks like that, yet again this year, I'm going to BARELY make keeping my status for 2013. (I wanted to make it with room to spare this year, as I mentioned last year ). I haven't quite hit it yet, but I'm scheduled for the 6 segments I need on American and the 4 hotel stays I need at Hilton properties. The 4 hotel stays is by far the more difficult to accomplish with just a few weeks left in the year, but I'm working the system to make it (assuming everything goes as planned).

The San Francisco Giants won the World Series last night. The whole post season was a season of streaks. San Fransisco's streaks: Lost 2, won 3 (to win division series). Then lost 1, won 1, lost 2, won 3 (to win league series). Then won 4 (to win world series) - they won the last 7 games. Detroit, on the other hand, won 2, lost 2, won 1 (to win division series). Then won 4 more (5 in a row) to win league series, then lost 4 in a row (world series). No "1 game streak" for Detroit at all in the post season.

We returned from a Walt Disney World vacation in Florida a few days ago, and I thought I'd review the character meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) that we had during the trip. These are sorted by the order we went to the restaurants. Akershus Royal Banquet Hall (Epcot) - lunch - grade A+ Our first character meal was the best all around. This is a meal with the princesses. Belle is the host - everyone greets her when you arrive and you get an included picture with her. Then Cinderella, Ariel, Aurora, and Snow White come around and greet you during the meal. There was a salad bar and a few entrees and desserts you could choose from. The sight lines were good - you could see the princesses most of the time. They did a "parade" of princesses where the kids could walk along behind one of the princesses during the parade. The cost (if we weren't on the Disney Dining Plan) would have been $111 for 2 adults and 1 child. The Garden Grill Restaurant (Epcot) - dinner - grad...

I was looking at my TripIt stats today. Since I started using it (January 2008), I have traveled 250,884 miles. That covers 130 trips. The average distance of my trips have been going down since moving back to Illinois. I have more trips to the east coast than the west coast, and now that I'm in Illinois instead of Colorado, I'm obviously closer to the east coast.

As I sit here in the O'Hare Admirals Club on my way back from Washington DC, I decided to see if I was still on pace for my 2013 status on American and Hilton. The end of August will be around 67% of the way through the year (8 out of 12 months, don't know the actual day number). This final flight today will get me to 41 segments (out of 60 needed), which is 68% of the way toward next year's status. And the hotel stay I just completed will make 18 stays and 41 nights. I need 28 stays, so I'm 64% of the way there, or 60 nights, which is 68% of the way there. Last year at this time I was behind schedule but ended up making it with a lot of creative scheduling of flights and hotels over the last three months of the year.

Over the last couple of days, fields for some of the early season college basketball tournaments have been announced. Illinois is going to be playing in the Maui Invitational this year. One of these years it would be cool to go to a tournament over the Thanksgiving week to watch some games and have a vacation.