I lost to a girl…

Life Commentary, Terrible Things | Posted by miltos
May 13 2009

I went on a pool shooting date last night… These are usually fun for me because I used to play a whole lotta pool when I was younger, as we had a table in our house. I’d shoot at least 4 to 5 games every day with a friend after I came home on the bus. Usually these dates all turn out the same way.

  1. Girl suggests going to a pool hall because she’s “soooo good”, and she’s going to “whoop up on me, etc.”
  2. I humor the girl, and say, “I better watch out…”, then make an interesting wager.
  3. We get there, I show no mercy, crush them embarrassingly, and talk an incredible amount of trash throughout the process.
  4. Date is now angry, and tells me that I have a better chance of winning the lottery than claiming my interesting wager.
  5. I spend the rest of the night trying to talk my way back into their good graces, and an explain how it’s my family’s fault that I’m a competitive mess, and why I can’t help myself from acting that way during a match in not just pool, but anything in my life involving a win and loss. This has happened more times than I can count.

I was beaten 6 games to 5 last night, by a 5’1” girl who could barely reach over the table to line up a shot.

I knew there’d probably be an issue when she showed up with her own bag of cues, and EVERYbody in the pool hall was like, “Maria! What’s up! We haven’t seen you in over a week! What’s going on??”

I’m clearly better though. It was a fluke. I haven’t shot pool in months when obviously she’s in there every day of her life, for hours on end. I’m not bitter at all. It’s not like I go home and think about how a girl, who couldn’t reach over the table with her cue, could beat me in a series of pool. It’s not like I sit up at night thinking about how I missed easy shots to end 2 games that would have put me on top by a commanding margin. Not at all.

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Moussakapalooza!

Awesome Things, Concerts, Summer Concerts | Posted by miltos
Apr 30 2009

moussakapalooza-very-small

Hey everybody,

This year, we’re trying something a little different at the Greek Festival in EHT. For those of you who don’t know, the festival is a huge event that we hold every year at my church, and it raises a ton of money for charity and for the church community. There are thousands of people that attend the festival every year, and it has become a big event that locals look forward to the start of every summer.

To try and get even more people this year, I’m organizing a music festival that will take place on the church grounds on Saturday and Sunday of the festival. It will be an all day event, and we’re trying to get as many bands as possible to participate. We’ve cleverly, and campily, named this event the Moussakapalooza! If you’d like more information about it, you can contact me directly, or mail me at:

moussakapalooza@gmail.com

The event will be on Saturday June 6th, & Sunday June 7th.

Let any bands that you know who you’d want to see play that this is a great opportunity for them to come play in front of a great crowd, with some good publicity behind the event. We will also have professional sound and monitoring, and I will also be digitally recording performances, so bands will be assured to sound their best! Bands will not be paid, however, they’ll be given the opportunity to sell merch, and we might even pull some bands to play the main taverna, which will have hundreds of people in it at any given time during the day. They can also take pride in the fact that they are helping to raise money for important charities, and a church that does a lot of good things for the surrounding community. Please, spread the word so that this turns into a successful event, and one that the church will bring back every year! There aren’t too many local venues for original music any more, and this could be a great one for years to come. Please help me get the word out there. Thanks!

To post a flier on blogs and other web spaces out there, please use the following web-optimized link:

Web Optimized Moussakapalooza Flier

If you’d like to help by printing fliers, please use the following file:

Large Printable Moussakapalooza Flier

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Meals ala Tos: Jersey City Sausage Rice

Meals ala Tos | Posted by miltos
Apr 08 2009

me-cooking

Success, yet again tonight, in the Gogus kitchen. Like I said, I tend to work miracles when I have no idea what to cook for the night. This dish takes about 35 minutes to make, including prep time, so not too bad if you want to throw something together fairly quickly. It’s a creamy rice dish, loaded with nice greens, and some delicious Italian sausage. You’ll need the following ingredients:

  • Italian Sausage - I actually used a Parmesan and oregano filled one tonight
  • 1 cup rice
  • Bay Leaves
  • Red pepper flakes
  • Salt / Pepper
  • White Onions
  • Green Bell Pepper
  • Celery
  • Tomato
  • Mushrooms
  • Spinach
  • 1 cup / can Chicken Broth
  • 1 cup water

Basically take all of your vegetables and chop them up. Toss them into a skillet with some olive oil, salt and pepper them to taste as you’re sauteing them.

Slice up your sausage as well into smaller pieces, and toss them into the skillet with the rest of your vegetables.

After it looks like your sausage is cooked, add in your chicken broth. Also add in a cup of water… remember, you typically want to have 2 cups of fluid for every cup of rice that you cook. It may look very watery at first, but it will reduce down to a nice creamy mixture.

Add in your rice to the mix, and remember to stir every now and then to make sure that you don’t burn any rice on the bottom of your skillet, or any of the rest of the items in the mix for that matter. Your skillet should eventually look like the picture below as the fluid reduces:

skillet

Add in your bay leaves and red pepper flakes to taste. Salt and pepper accordingly as well as the mixture reduces. Remember, as chicken broth reduces, it gets much saltier. So be a bit conservative with your salt until the sauce gets closer to the consistency that you’d like it.

Cook the rice for about 15 minutes, or until you feel like the sauce has reached the desired consistency. It will definitely thicken up more as the water evaporates from the mix.

Serve directly from the skillet with a side of salad, and enjoy :)

serving-suggestion

Stella, optional of course, but I tend to think that sausage dishes go well with a beer! If you try this recipe out, let me know what you think :)

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Roomba. Mind blowing.

Awesome Things, Computers, Life Commentary | Posted by miltos
Mar 31 2009

rooba

You know, there’s been a handful of times in this life where I’ve been utterly and completely amazed by something. Just to name a few…

  • Booting up the Nintendo for the first time
  • Visiting the Parthenon
  • Watching Captain Sykes from the Beach Patrol swim out in a Noreaster by himself to rescue Darryl and I, after we were the only boat that unfortunately made it out past the break on rookie school that one day.
  • The rushing 5 foot wall of white water that eventually collided with the front of our boat at the end of the Steel Pier, which caused said rescue to occur
  • Watching Darryl jump out of the boat into the storm water as Captain Sykes ordered, “Darryl, get the fuck out of the boat and swim back. Georges you stay in here and get this water out while I show you morons how to row.” Shortly after, as we were facing 7 foot swells coming towards us at every angle he once again announced, “Fuck this wave! High side! I’ve seen bigger swells the day I took my 2 year old daughter out to learn how to swim! Keep pailing the water, Georges”, as he laughed maniacally into the swirling wind and rain.
  • Booting up Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the 64″ TV that we brought home one day, and seeing a Ken that was literally as tall as I was at the time.
  • Booting up Nintendo 64 for the first time
  • Bacon for the first time.
  • Bruce Springsteen
  • Michael Jackson’s Thriller
  • Metallica’s “One”
  • etc, etc.

And then… there’s the Roomba; The pinnacle of human achievement. What I just witnessed in my apartment tonight is nothing short of revolutionary. I was always skeptical at first, but now I’m convinced it’s only a matter of time before computers become self-aware and take over the Earth. This marvel of machinery - without assistance - cleaned every nook, cranny and corner of my apartment. No dust bunnies to be found anywhere, no dirt… nothing but clean floors. I’m honestly impressed. I can’t say I thought the thing would work this well. After Roomba was done, I just popped open the little hatch and dumped the dirt into the trash can. The dirt even looked like it was compressed into a little cube like in Wall-E. Ridiculous. The future is now… Seriously. Go buy one.

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Twitter

Awesome Things, Computers, Funny | Posted by miltos
Mar 24 2009

This movie is incredible:

The sad thing is… I just installed a little Twitter feed on my blog, and further more, I’ve been writing in my blog for years now. Even more sad, is that I will continue to do so for many more years.

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Playboy Archive

Uncategorized | Posted by miltos
Mar 22 2009

So, Playboy recently decided to post a bunch of back issues online for free. I know this, because I browse various geek sites such as digg.com, and slashdot.org, which are essentially websites that post all of the coolest geek news found on the web. Very convenient, because it saves me a lot of time from browsing around myself, and it guarantees that I keep up to date with all the dorkiest news on the web… I have a rep to uphold, after all. So when this move by Playboy to post many of their back catalogs was announced, naturally, all of my favorite geek sites were a-buzz with activity. Not for nothing, I decided to check this out myself - the Playboy articles are good reading, after all - but what really impressed me beside the numerous amounts of breasts that I could see on one web page, was the technology driving the presentation. I remember a little while ago, that Microsoft had purchased a company that was able to display copious amounts of data in an application - nearly limitless amounts of very high resolution images - with seemingly zero load times or without much strain on the CPU. Being that this Playboy archive is driven by Silverlight, I wouldn’t be surprised if this very same technology was being used for the presentation of the old magazines. In any case, I was very impressed and it was a lot more than I had expected from a company like Playboy. So, if you’re a geek who appreciates stuff like this, or you just like looking at some nice boobies, go ahead on over to the Playboy Archive and have a look yourself. As I said before, the articles are fantastic.

http://www.playboyarchive.com/

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One more Plug!

Corner Store Espionage, Music | Posted by miltos
Mar 19 2009

One more article about the last two weekends of live local music at the Fromage. My drummer, Dave Freeman, is actually quoted in this one, haha.

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/141/story/432888.html

And, check out our flyer for this Friday while you’re at it… there are advantages to having girls front your band…

girls-flyer-small

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Shocking Study: Virginity Rate Among College Majors

Uncategorized | Posted by miltos
Mar 17 2009

Well, the title of this post is mostly a lie… the study was not that shocking at all actually, if you consider that mathematicians and biochemistry majors had a ridiculously high rates, and Art History and Studio Art majors were about as loose as a clown’s pocket. However, I was happy to see that my fellow computer science compatriots were in the curiously low levels of virginity among the college majors. Go computer geeks!

http://www.forwardon.com/view.php?e=Id1200c8f6b7f5f813

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Le Grand Fromage’s Last Great Days!

Awesome Things, Corner Store Espionage, Music, Terrible Things | Posted by miltos
Mar 16 2009

The last venue in Atlantic City for original bands is shutting its doors to live music at the end of March. Come out to one last show at Le Grande Fromage as my band, Corner Store Espionage, and Juggernaut Drunk share the stage with a few other bands to mark the end of an era.

This could be your last chance to see these two bands on the same day in AC, so kill two birds with one stone and head to Le Grande Fromage at 25 Gordon’s Alley in Atlantic City on Friday, March 20th for good times and great music.

$7 cover

$20 includes All-You-Can-Drink beer.

Doors open at 9pm

First band starts at 9:30pm

Each band is playing a 30 minute set.

No order of bands has been made yet.

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Blog, Updated.

Computers | Posted by miltos
Mar 15 2009

So, after accidentally breaking my blog last night, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and just update the thing. Page O’ Tos is now running the newer and snazzier version of wordpress. This doesn’t affect you at all, aside for the fact that I broke my old theme that I had customized, and I had to pick a new one that works with this new version. I’m not sure if I’m going to stick with it just yet, but we’ll see. In any case.. it’s a lot nicer in the administration section. And now that I’ve got this brand new laptop - since all the other computers in my possession had died - I’ll be able to get back to posting stuff up here. In case you were wondering what kind of machine I picked up, yes, it’s another Dell. This may come as a surprise to some of you, who have been following my previous posts about Dell… Believe me, this time I really did do my research and try and find something just as good at the same price point, but I really couldn’t find anything else. The death of my old laptop just so happened to coincide with Presidents’ Day, which just so happened to coincide with a special Presidents’ Day sale that Dell was having. I ended up saving a few hundred bucks and getting a much better deal than any other laptop manufacturer out there. Unfortunately, I couldn’t resist. So, I’m the proud new owner of a souped up and shiny Dell Studio 17. I also can’t really blame my last computer for giving up finally either… after all, it made it through 2 trips to Greece, in a dirty back pack that survived high falls, crashes of waves, falls from moving vehicles, beach trips, plugs into faulty voltages, etc. In my opinion, my last dell laptop was actually quite the trooper. Sure, I couldn’t use the DVD drive for over 2 years on it, but that’s why you don’t leave something plugged in when you start to smell burning silicone, and see smoke shooting from the keyboard.

In any case, that’s my update for now. I have to head back up to Jersey City, as I’m writing this now back at my home in Atlantic City. I’ve currently got my mom yelling at me to get in the car and start driving before it gets too late, because she’s worried that I’m going to die in a car accident after falling asleep on the road. It’s currently not even 10 PM. I must put an end to the nagging though, so I’ll save pictures and other updates for another time!

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