Matt Holthe's Fleeting Thoughts

Last weekend (Memorial Day weekend) my family and I went camping with a friend. It was my daughter's first real camping trip (besides the basement/backyard), my wife's first camping trip that she can remember, and my first camping trip since I was a child. That's why we chose a friend to go with - he has a lot of experience and has a lot of the gear we were missing. We chose to only go 1 night, which meant we had to go Sunday night. (If you picked Friday or Saturday on a holiday weekend, there was a 2 night minimum). We were basically limiting ourselves to the sites where someone picked Friday and Saturday night and left on Sunday so we could take their spot. We found a place about a half hour away. We couldn't have asked for better weather. It was gorgeous, not very windy, and not even a hint of rain. Temperatures were in the 80's during the day and got to around the mid 60's at night. It was a little cool at night, but not overly so. (I woke up early in th...

I spent the last two days at a conference called FILO  (stands for "first in, last out" meaning that technical people are the ones that are the first to arrive and last to leave when they work at church). It was a very interesting conference and I learned quite a bit. The problem that I, personally, had with it is that I'm a volunteer at church (although there were a lot of volunteers there). So I'm really only working a couple Sundays a month and nothing during the week. A lot of the information would be more relevant if I was putting in more time at church. Even so, I still got a lot of good information. One thing that was really good about the conference was to find out what other churches are doing. Church congregation sizes are fairly easy to find. And you can see online replays of services and get an idea about how many cameras they run, but you don't know how many people they have in the booth, how many cameras are remote controlled, what kind of audio an...

Last night the UPS driver delivered our brand new tent. Even though we had other stuff going on, I just had to put it up in the basement to see how it looks. The instructions were horrible - if they were in a foreign language it wouldn't have been any worse than they were. But I eventually figured it out and it looks pretty good. It's big (6 person) which is what we wanted - from my (very limited) experience, an "x" person tent comfortably fits about "1/2 x" people, or maybe a little more. Meaning, a 4 person tent is good for 2-3 people. So the 6 person tent would be good for 3-4 people. We're going to try it out for real in a couple weeks when we go camping. My daughter is excited about camping, but my wife isn't. We'll have to see how everything goes with this trip. Going forward, it may be something that my daughter and I do together instead of being a full family thing.

I think the family summer vacation is all planned out now. This summer we'll be driving out to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, Custer State Park, and so on. My wife and I had been there when we lived in Colorado, but we want my daughter to experience this. She'll be 7 years old and should be able to remember this trip when she gets older - she's in the "maybe, maybe not" age of remembering things way down the road. Meaning, I remember some stuff from this age, but not a lot. We figured that if she doesn't remember this, that's all right - there are other experiences we certainly want her to remember (Grand Canyon, Washington DC, and some others) so we're going to wait until she's a bit older before doing those.

What a great finish to the NCAA Tournament. Villanova making a last second shot to win the game, after North Carolina made a double-clutch 3 point shot to tie the game with 4.7 seconds to go. Great finish. Here's the results of my picking the line, total, and money line of every single game this year (except the money line which wasn't available on the 16 vs 1 games in the first round). On money line picks I was 45-18 (71.4%). Tim was 40-23 (63.5%). For straight bets (with the spread) I was 31-33-3 (48.5%) and Tim was 35-31-1 (53.0%). (Note that for some games, depending on when we made our picks, the line was different. That's why I have 3 pushes and Tim only had 1). For totals (over/unders) I was a putrid 29-37-1 (44.0%) and Tim was even worse at 28-38-1 (42.5%). Combing all those bets, I was 105-88-4 (54.3%) and Tim was 103-92-2 (52.8%). If we were betting real money (which we wouldn't do on every single line, total, and money line - we'd only bet the o...

Last September I posted about a trip to Great Wolf Lodge . We ended up going back there for a few days over spring break. We were able to complete MagiQuest (finally defeated the dragon and the goblin) and went through most of ShadowQuest (the next phase). I don't know if ShadowQuest was easier because we knew more than when we started or because it was actually easier, but we were able to finish most of that game when there were things on MagiQuest we struggled with. You can always go back and re-do some of the past adventures, but I don't know if we'll do that or not. Again, the trip was good. The water parks were crowded, but not overly so. We were able to spend enough time in there. We ate one dinner at High Rock Cafe and would certainly go back - that was delicious. So we now have Mac's (highly recommended) and of course Moosejaw Pizza and Buffalo Phil's and Pizza Pub . There's a few others we would like to try on a return trip, which I'm assuming...

I don't think it's ever happened before, but my national champion prediction lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Michigan State lost to Middle Tennessee St in the first round. The bracket is divided into two halves every year. My left half is almost perfect - 15 out of 16 in the first round, then 8 out of 8 in the second round. As for the right half, I got 12 out of 16 in the first round (pretty good), and then only 3 out of 8 in the second round. The sweet 16 starts tonight. Obviously, the left half of my bracket could still win all 4 games. But on the right half, I only have a chance to win 2 of the 4 games. I'm in the 99% nationally in ESPN, ranking 96,467 total. (I don't know how many millions of brackets there are). But of course that could drop based on what happens from here going forward.

Yesterday started the NCAA Men's basketball conference tournaments, which means there are now some teams that are officially done with their basketball seasons either because they lost in the first round of the tournament, or didn't qualify for the tournament. This begins my favorite time of the year - from the conference tournaments through the NCAA tournament. (The fact that the days are getting longer and the weather is getting warmer in March also help make this my favorite time of year).

I tend to follow sports betting a little too much for someone who doesn't actually bet on sports. With this year's Super Bowl between Carolina and Denver, I had heard that all the money was on Carolina. And that was true, initially. At the start of the week (after the one week break between games), 86% of the money bet was on Carolina. But then Denver was getting bet more and more heavily, to the point where it ended up being just 51% of the money on Carolina at kick off. The Panthers winning but not covering the spread would have been the best-case scenario for the books. It looked like it might happen when they had the ball and were down 16-10. But Denver ended up winning and the sports books did pretty well. One area where the books didn't two well was on a prop bet "Will there be a successful two-point conversion?" 96% of those bets were on "Yes" and it did happen. Another area was betting on the Super Bowl MVP. Von Miller opened as high as 60-...

I haven't posted in a while because things have been fairly rough around the house. My father passed away the week between Christmas and New Year's (December 29, to be exact). It wasn't a shock that he passed away (he had been on hospice for nearly two years) but it was kind of sudden. He was fine (as fine as someone on hospice can be) and visited with people that morning, then took a nap and didn't wake up. In hindsight, that was exactly what he wanted - he avoided going to a nursing home and he died in his sleep. So it was a blessing in that regard. But there is a lot of stuff to do when the second parent passes away. Luckily, we had already settled his large assets - he sold his house and car after going into assisted living. We didn't have to deal with that. But all the financial stuff that comes with dying - contacting life insurance companies, his mutual funds, and so on, had to be navigated. Plus all the extra stuff - contacting the dentist, canceling uti...

After my past last week about the upgrade to Windows 10, I've discovered a few things that have been trying... We have a web site where we post family pictures for our friends and relatives to view. Yes, I know that there are web sites that do this, but we created our own web site long before these other ones existed, and I own all the data on my web site instead of giving all that data to someone else. To make things easier on us, I have a script that takes all the file names from the digital camera and renames them based on the date the picture was taken. So instead of some file "IMG_2754.JPG" it's "2015_12_10_01.JPG" and we can see that the picture was taken December 10, 2015. Well, that code stopped working on Windows 10. The library I was using didn't seem to work no matter what I did, so I ended up creating a new library to read the exif information out of the images. The new library seems to work, but it took several hours to get everything wo...

Last weekend I updated the home laptop to Windows 10. Since that laptop doesn't get used all that often, I honestly don't have much of an opinion about Windows 10 yet. The upgrade seemed to go smoothly, although there have been a couple of "C++" errors reported so far. The desktop UI is quite similar to Windows 7, but the Start Menu is quite a bit different. It doesn't seem to me to be any more or less difficult to use than Windows 7, but it was nice to get a free upgrade and not have to buy anything for that purpose. Down the road we'll end up getting a new laptop to replace the existing one, but at least now I know I can go a year or two before I *have* to replace the laptop.

Today is the Monday before Thanksgiving. This is the first year in a long time that I'm actually in an office for this week. There have been a couple of years where I had trips - once to Mexico where I flew home Thanksgiving morning and six years ago when we moved from Colorado to Illinois over Thanksgiving week. But that's been it for the last 15 years I think. So normally I have a chance to stay at home and watch some of the college basketball during this week - the Maui Invitational is one of my favorite tournaments. This year I won't be able to watch much if any because of working in an office and other stuff I have going on this week. Oh, well, maybe next year.

Today is the first day of the 2015-2016 college basketball season. College basketball is my favorite sport to watch, and has been for many years. I think I like it so much because games are usually right around 2 hours long, so there isn't a huge time commitment (pro football is a little over 3 hours and college football is more like 4 hours any more). And I like the unpredictability that comes with college age kids playing a sport - there's clearly talent, but sometimes the decision making process isn't as crisp, which leads to unpredictability. And although I don't make bets with real money on games, I do follow point spreads and over/unders in college and pro basketball and football, which does add a different spin to watching the games. Team A is favored by 26 points in basketball? You can still be interested in watching that game, not for whether they will win or not, but whether they will cover the spread or not. It's kind of like playing with a handicap in ...

I did a walk around my entire neighborhood yesterday. It's about a 2 mile walk to get up and down every street. I made note of lots that were empty to see just how close the neighborhood is to being complete. There are two parts to the neighborhood - east and west of a four lane road that eventually (maybe 20 years down the road) will be a major street. Today that street is just a way to get in the neighborhood and nothing more. There's plans to build further north, which will increase traffic on that road, but that hasn't even been started yet. Anyway, in the "east" part of the neighborhood, there are 6 empty lots. One of them is being built on right now (has a basement). On the "west" part of the neighborhood, there are 4 empty lots with 2 of them having "sold" signs on it. By knowing what sides of the street the empty lots are on, it is possible to walk entirely around the neighborhood on sidewalks. (In other words, there isn't a str...

A couple of days ago the Cubs finished their season by getting swept in the National League Championship Series by the New York Mets. It was nice that the Cubs were able to win the division series against St Louis. They won the division series at home, which is the first time EVER that a post season series was clinched at Wrigley Field. That was nice for the city of Chicago. Hopefully this is the start of a good run for the Cubs where they can continue to compete year after year and eventually get to and win a World Series.

This is the kind of record that I'm excited about. Since I started in my current job in March of 2007, here's how many actual miles I've flown each year (all airlines combined): 2007 - 76,442 2008 - 81,865 2009 - 50,020 2010 - 33,270 2011 - 36,594 2012 - 36,543 2013 - 45,309 2014 - 9,425 2015 - 8,033 The year 2014 was a down year (not very much business) and 2015 I was assigned to a contract that was local to me. I was renewed on that contract for 2016, so next year will be another down year for miles. In fact, this year there were only 2 trips for business and 2 trips for personal where I took an airplane. 4 trips to the airport the entire year. At the end of next year I'll have to figure out something. I like not being on the road - I did it for 7 years and am now pretty sick of it. But once this contract runs out, I might be forced back on the road to keep employed. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Last Saturday I (most likely) played my last golf round of the year. It was the annual tournament with 3 other friends from High School. I played just well enough to win the tournament this year by 1 stroke. Had to make a curvy 3 foot putt on the last hole to win, which was a good feeling. I played in a few scramble tournaments this year and a few rounds of 9 holes with some friends that have a standing weekly tee time. Golf just isn't as much of a priority right now in my life, but it's better than a few years ago when I played at most twice per year. My friends who are members at a country club keep trying to get me to join. That would be a complete waste of money for me to join - there is no way I would play enough to justify the cost. They also bring up the pool at the country club, but we wouldn't make much use of that, either - it's not like we're going to pack up and drive out there to spend 45 minutes on a weeknight, so we would only use it on certain week...

My family and I just got back from a trip to Great Wolf Lodge in Wisconsin Dells. It was a short trip, but very enjoyable. We've been to Wisconsin Dells several times, but never stayed here. The size was smaller than Wilderness (where we've stayed a few times) but I think that helped. The water parks weren't as crowded, but we don't know if that was because of the weekend we chose or if they would always be that way. I slept horribly both nights, though - the floor above us creaked when those people walked around (thanks for getting up at 6 AM, by the way...) and I just couldn't get comfortable for some reason. One thing that was fun and unique was MagiQuest . It's an interactive role playing game. You buy a wand (which can be reused on future trips) and go on quests to find things and solve riddles. We had a lot of fun doing that. But we weren't able to defeat the dragon or the goblin. After doing a little looking around today, I think I know how to beat ...

Another year for the golf majors is complete. I've been comparing Tiger Woods to Jack Nicklaus for several years now (ever since it was a "foregone conclusion" that Tiger would break Jack's record of 18 major titles). Tiger has now competed in 70 majors as a professional. Here's how they stand after 70 major starts: Tiger - 14 wins, 6 second place finishes, 24 top 3 finishes (14+6+4 others), 31 top 5 finishes, and 38 top 10 finishes. Jack (and here is where it's hard to believe just how good he was) - 15 wins, 14 second place finishes, 38 top 3 finishes, 45 top 5 finishes, and 54 top 10 finishes. 77% of the time, Jack was in the top 10. Tiger's been in the top 10 54% of the time. And very close to winning (top 3)? Jack 54%, Tiger 34%. More than half the time, Jack was in the top 3 of a major. That's amazing. At this same point in their careers, Tiger is 1 major win behind Jack. And it doesn't get any easier. For Tiger next year (and, by the...