Sporctober

If you have read any of my previous blog entries you have come to the conclusion that I’m a pretty big sports fan. From football to baseball to basketball, all the way to UFC and pro wrestling -we could spend hours talking about pro wrestling and if I should call it a sport or not. While the results are predetermined, you need to be a complete athlete to perform the way the do, there is no denying that; so I do consider it a for of sports and entertainment- I love watching sports, I’ve played most of them (soccer, baseball, basketball, flag football, bowling) and without a doubt I love talking and writing about them.

That being said, I’m really excited by the way October is shaping up. October brings to us the MLB playoffs and the second month of the NFL season, also kicks off the NBA season (most likely not going to happen this year), so there are a ton of options on stuff to see live. The reason I’m so excited is because I’ll be going to a ton of events that month:

• UFC 136 – October 8th we get UFC 136 live from Houston’s Toyota Center. Just today I bought my plane ticket and made hotel and car reservations for this trip. The card is looking good so far: Demian Maia vs Jorge Santiago, Chael Sonnen vs Brian Stann, Jose Aldo vs Kenny Florian for the Featherweight title, and Frankie Edgar vs Gray Maynard 3 for the Lightweight Championship. If you follow MMA you know that these have the potential to be some of the greatest fights in a long time. Also during the day we get the UFC Fan Expo which should be an interesting event.

UFC 136 Edgar vs Maynard III Poster

• Raiders vs Texans – While these are two teams I don’t really care for, the game will be October 9th so I’ll be in Houston to catch it. Basically any NFL game I can catch live I’ll do. Reliant Stadium is a beautiful venue (was there last year for a great Chargers-Texans game), the Texans have a great high powered offense and I expect the Raiders to suck (which is good for us Charger fans) so the Texans will certainly score a ton of point. Not to bad of a quick Friday-Sunday trip up to Houston.

Reliant Stadium and Reliant Astrodome at night from Kirby Dr.

Inside Reliant Stadium

• WWE Raw Live – every chance I get to see WWE live I’m there, so I’ll take full advantage of them being in town for 2 straight nights. October 12th  is a house show (not taped for TV) but these usually provide the most interaction with fans as the wrestlers have no time constraints and can go out there and have a good time doing their thing. While they don’t bring a big screen and all the stuff you see on TV, you get that interaction that more than makes up for it.
• WWE SmackDown Live – The following night, the 13th, we get Smackdown for another live show. Same as the above, the interaction is well worth the price of admission; also getting to hear some of the guys curse in Spanish is pretty funny. I’m waiting to see who comes out with a soccer jersey (Monterrey has 2 teams), a couple of years ago Michelle McCool came out wearing a Tigres jersey looking for a face pop but half of the arena booed her – I guess most people in attendance were for Monterrey.

CM Punk & Alberto del Rio in Monterrey 05/14/11

• WWE Vengeance. On October 23 WWE will revive the Vengeance PPV (I was at the 2001 edition in San Diego, yeah the one were Chris Jericho was crowned the 1st ever Undisputed Champion, see video below) live from the AT&T Center. While at a Raw taping at the same joing in May WWE announced that the event would be Uprising but quickly changed that. The last couple of Pay Per Views have been really good, lets hope they keep the trend leading to October.

• WWE still has not announced any other events around the PPV, but we’ll most certainly get a show in Austin, maybe Laredo, McAllen or Corpus Christi. This would definitely will be a great way to close out what is shaping up to be a great month.

What cool events do you have on the radar for the coming months?

Mr Khakbaz out!!!

Wandering NYC

Friday, final day in NYC (flying out at noon on Saturday) so I got to make the most out of this day. After a long Thursday night drinking and watching the Mavs-Heat game I slept until 9:30; as soon as the alarm woke me up I was off to the races to do everything I wanted to do.

At 10:15 I’m out of the room and hopping onto line A up to 59th street. Boy it is hot and humid, I’d say it’s around 90 degrees and 50-60% humidity. A quick 7 minute trip and I get to my first destination, the Apple Store at 5th avenue; as a geek this place was like heaven to me. Just from the outside the place is beautiful, check out the pic

The big cube is just the outside, right in the middle you get to the stairs down to the store. Inside you can find any thing Apple, from all Macbooks, iMacs, iPods, iPads and a ton of docks for playing digital music. The place is just awesome, yet I could not find the iPad cover/case I was looking for (odd that I didn’t find it at the Apple Store yet I found one at a Brookstone in the Newark Airport next day). After Geek Paradise it was off to next door to FAO Schwarz.

If you’ve seen Home Alone this is the toy store they base Duncan’s Toy Chest on, FAO Schwarz has any toy you could imagine. You find the Harry Potter section, the action figure section, this huge piano you can dance on and the keys will light up (you can take it home for the nice price of $250,000 dollars)

Also you have this huge Lego section with some sculptures made entirely of lego such as a Indiana Jones and this Statue of Liberty

Got a gift for her and also for my Godson, a little Red Sox puff and a Cars 2 toy for each one.

Right across the street from both store is the SE corner of Central Park, so it’s time to walk like crazy in this beautiful place. Need I remind you by now it must be over 95 degrees and humid as hell so to say I was sweating is an understatement. Walked all around the park but the place I really wanted to hit was Strawberry Fields -a small section of the park dedicated to John Lennon-, if you read my blog you now I’m a big Beatles fan so this was a must. Why the place is modest it just has this great aura and was so worth the long ass walk.

Just a nice place to visit; this is up around 72nd street, so I’m about 13 blocks off the subway stop I need to take back down to Times Square. By now it’s almost 1 PM so I’m starving, on the way down I decide the eatery of choice will be the Hard Rock Cafe on 44th, smack dab in the heart of Times Square. A house salad, Baby Back Ribs and a couple of Sam Adams later I got my tank filled up so it’s off to wander around a bit more.

The next stop is the Hershey’s Store a couple of blocks away to get some chocolates for her and for the office. Just the smell of the place is off the hook, chocolate all around. They’ve got these great boxes with a Times Square image and has an assortment of miniature chocolates.

Souvenir shopping, gotta get some things for friends and a final gift for her. A quick walk down on 7th to 36th to get to the World’s Largest Store, Macy’s to get some clothes. To say the store is huge is an understatement, it must be 8 or 10 floors high; I got a new wallet on the street level, two shirts on the second floor, a pair of shoes and two pants on the 4th. It’s around 5:30 and I’m sweaty and dead tired, time to hit the hotel to rest a little and shower before the show at 8.

After the pitstop it’s time to head up to Radio City Music Hall to watch the second show ever of Cirque De Soleil’s Zarkana. Had a couple of drinks before the show, those 15 dollar scotch & soda’s were pretty darn good.

I’ve always wanted to see a show at Radio City so this was a great opportunity, the show was OK but in no way was it better than that O show I saw in Vegas in April or The Beatles: Love. Also the fact that it was the second show ever show with lots of production quirks that need to be worked out. Not the best show I’ve seen, actually the worst of the 3 I caught this trip (Rain: tribute to the Beatles and Stomp were the other 3) but was pretty entertaining.

10:30 PM and a quick subway trip takes me back to the hotel. My legs are dead, I’m hungry and I need to get my bags packed for the trip back home. Got a couple of pizza slices which were great; NYC has got to have the best pizza around, maybe I’ve got to go to Chicago to see if the theory is right. Dined, packed and off to sleep. Long trip back home tomorrow, for now…

Mr Khakbaz out!!!

NY blog, monday

Bare with me, I wrote this on my ipad and most pics are on my camera so I’ll be uploading them on Sunday when I get home

Wake up in the morning feeling… Wait a moment, no shitty songs in my blog.
Alarm off at 8, time for a shower and off to the Convention Center for a 10am kick off. I’m on 33rd and 7th so I’ve got to get up to 34th then down to 11. Seems like a quick walk but those blocks from 7 to 11 are looooong.

Got to the convention center which is huge and right by the Hudson river. About 3 or 4 conventions are going on simultaneously, so you can imagine its pretty big. Quick check in and into the Cloud Computing Bootcamp to get a general knowlede on the topic. The official keynote is until 1pm but this was a good way to get acquainted with the event.

After this had 1 hour for lunch, so I had a chance to get to White Castle again… That shit is addictive. BTW I find it amazing that there is no free web access at an IT conention, SysCon (event organizer) will hear abou this. Also a real bad thing of all IT events is that most of the attendees are male, almost no women and those few are mmm well not to attractive.

At 1 we get the keynote speech by Seve Shmuckenbrock from Dell, it even included a welcome video from Michael Dell. A nice keynote speech, got us into the groove of the event. He talked about the cloud, benefits, challenges and how the business is focused on the “yes, now!” idea. Yes we want it, we want it now. That is the main foundation and motivation of cloud computing as a whole. I liked he talked from a Dell perspective yet he didn’t try to push it a a sales presentation.
The second part of the keynote was by Bill Zack of Microsoft. Right from the start lots of people left, that speaks loads of how the public sees Microsoft. This was boring as hell and nothing more than a platform to push the Azure service.

The next presentation was by Jill Singer who is the CIO of the NRO. This actually was a great presentation, she talked about how she and the NRO has planned the migration to a cloud, her recommendation for any enterprise doing this and some best practices they are using. A real insightful presenation.

The next one was War on the Cloud, a boring sales presentation. It was so boring that midway throught the presentation half the people had; also there were 5 minutes left for q&a, not a single question, you know no one cares when there is not a single question.

A presentation on Entreprise Private Cloud was next. A pretty good presentation with the experiences of 2 companies – abiquo and roundarch. These experiences were pretty insightful, yet i still dont have an idea on how to start implementing could with my customers in Mexico, maybe later at the demo floor I will get some more insight.

Had a couple of more presentations, nothing to write home about but was able to hit the floor and see what the vendors had to offer. I found some interesting things mostly for storage and for x86 servers, not much for UNIX (AIX specifically); still some good offerings from which I hope to get more info to offer tu my customers and see what happens.

While I thought there should have been snacks and drinks during the day for us to take in between sessions, there were some great drinks and snacks to have during the opening of the floor; the thing was that by this time it was around 8:30 and I hadn’t had any food since 12 so my stomach was pretty empty and the scotch and beers got to me. Time for me to hit the road.
Made the 15 minute walk towards the hotel, grabbed some pizza and headed up to the room. Was able to catch some of WWE Raw on tv and winded the day down. Some might say I should take advantage of NYC but I must rest as tomorrow is a long day and, after all, I’m here to work. Hoping for some better presentations tomorrow and a great trip to Yankee Stadium to catch RedSox vs Yankees, for now…

Mr Khakbaz out!!!