Gray

So in titling this post I had to pause and decide if I should use 'grey' or 'gray'.  For some reason I'm much more partial to 'grey' but the "traditional american spelling" is 'gray' so we'll stick with that.

So in (approximately) 10 days and 22 hrs BYU will host (presumably) nationally ranked Oregon State in BYU's annual homecoming game.  This is a special game because BYU head coach Bronco Mendenhall is a graduate and former assistant coach of Oregon St.  Also it will be the cougars first real test since barely loosing to Boise St. and the first of three huge and difficult games that make up the meat of BYU's schedule this year.

Finally, it is also the first time that BYU will not wear white, or blue as their primary color.  I'd like to say that BYU has been a uni-staple, but between 1999 and 2004 they went a little crazy with uniform ideas, but in 2005 settled back down into the tradition.  This month all that tradition gets a little tweaking with a (jumping on the bandwagon) black out.

In the uni-watching world we call this BFBS, and black for black's sake is generally frowned upon, as is grey for grey's sake, or pretty much using any color that isn't one of your team's official colors.  But I don't care, these uniforms are gonna rock.  Why? because I said so.  While this comes as a surprise, it's not quite as jaw-dropping since the idea was leaked back in April.

All this thought of BYU uniforms makes me want to compile an awesome database of their uniforms... but for now I'll leave you with the beautiful pictures of BFBS.

You're probably wondering why I called this post Gray, well it's because of this beauty.  That grey with the blue!  ohh it is soooo good!!! I LOVE IT!  if they did one thing right here, it's the use of grey.  boom.

Oil

For some reason I love this logo, like a lot.

For those of you who don't know about former NFL teams, this is the logo of the (since moved to Tennessee,) Houston Oilers (and being in Tennessee where there's no oil, the became the Titans... go figure).

The logo is just simple, nicely colored, and it says a lot about Houston, Texas, the oil industry, and the history of all those.  It's just cool, and you never see it around anymore because the new Houston football team chose worse colors and an ugly logo.  So I decided to memorial-ize the Houston oil derrick as a 3D sketch, 'cause I do that.

BOOM

I know, it's pretty cool, right?  I worked pretty  hard on that... ok, like 3 hours maybe.  It's actually a REALLY complicated structure to model without proper structural design software (I use a free google product).



On a completely unrelated note:  I was at wal*mart a couple weeks ago when I saw huge boxes of cereal on sale (huge as in almost 2 lbs).  I bought some not knowing that my wife wouldn't eat Reece's Puffs, and I didn't really think I'd get sick of them.... but 2 lbs of cereal last like a month!

Sunday Edition : Hymns

Today in church we sang four hymns that have strange but significant meaning to me personally. I thought it was pretty amazing that ALL of them I have a special (if not strange) connection to so I decided to write about it.

Three of the hymns have connections to my mission, first God Speed the Right. A line in this song, "If we fail we fail with glory" meant something to my MTC companion and he mentioned it a few times, in a testimony once I believe, so it always reminds me of him. Next was We Sing All Hail, which has a particular line, "... and bruised the serpent's head" which is in reference to God's promise to Satan given at the fall of Adam, "and he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." (Moses 4:21) Meaning that Christ will have power over Satan. This line was brought to my attention by one of my favorite people in the MTC, and when I sing this song I always think of him. Finally, Gently Raise the Sacred Strain, became one of my favorite hymns in the middle of my mission when it mysteriously became stuck in my head, and I studied the words and learned so much about the importance of the sabbath day. I used the hymn as the basis for a wonderful talk I gave a few months later.

The fourth song we sang wasn't a mission related song, but has even more meaning.  #166, Abide with Me was sung as the closing hymn at my grandpa's funeral in January, 2006.  Since then I has been one of the most special hymns in my life, and I will never forget it's importance since I almost cry any time I sing it.

Po-po-police-ece-ece

So today the BYU Police Beat intern from the Daily Universe must have gotten back from summer vacation because they just tweeted a million and two police beat lines, dating way back to last year even.  Anyhow, if you don't follow them on twitter do so (if you don't have twitter do so first, and follow me while you're at it) it's quite funny to hear about the mischievous deeds committed on BYU campus.  

Today though as I watched the many, many tweets roll in I began thinking... why do they have a police beat?  So many of them are so ridiculous, and stupid, and pointless.  I remember while I was a student making fun of the campus police due to the stupid calls they had to respond to.  Today however I began to see that it's not the police that are stupid, it's the people calling in these things that are the idiots, and perhaps the police beat is being published to let people know that not every suspicious looking person is a rapist.

If you think about it, there are kids attending BYU who have just come from very dangerous places.  People who grew up in inner cities and/or downtowns of pretty much any large city will have been close to murders, rapes, gang fights, and all sorts of cray stuff.  Coming directly to happy valley, you might not realize that those things only happen once every few years in Provo.  A lot of people are paranoid and worried about these horrible things happening to them, but the BYU police beat is there reminding students every week, that those kids hiding under windows are probably playing hide & seek.  Here are some tweets from today that I think might be a hint to those paranoid people that you don't have to call everything into campus police.

• There was a call reporting two suspicious people sleeping on a sidewalk. Officers arrived and discovered they were not sleeping and were not on the sidewalk. They were lying on the grass talking to each other.
• A middle-aged man was reported laying in the grass with his shirt off outside Helaman Halls. The man was not breaking any laws so officers let him be.
• A person was reported to be lurking in the shadows at 67th and Wymount at 12am. It was a lost parent of a tenant.
• A female tenant looked out her kitchen window and saw a guy dressed in dark clothing staring back at her. Officers were called to the scene, but couldn’t locate anyone matching the description.

It seems to me that the police beat (while containing some useful information) is used primarily to try to get less pointless calls made to campus police, and also to get people to lock up their bikes (maybe double lock, and maybe take the front tire into your house).

Vacationeering

I've largely neglected writing on this blog over the summer, but that's only because everything I've done has been more of a family affair, and so Steph and I posted about our vacations on our family blog, http://smmurray.blogspot.com/

So check that out to see some of our amazing vacation photos.  :-)

Also I am getting really excited for college football season, just 16 more days... AHH!!

Major League

Over the weekend of June 8th-10th over 20,000 people gathered at the Anaheim Convention Center to watch people play games.  I was able to count myself among those present and got the chance not only to watch people play, but I did a little playing myself.

The event was the Major League Gaming (MLG) Spring Championship, with most of the focus on the Starcraft II tournament.  There were also tournaments for League of Legends, Mortal Kombat, and Soul Calibur V, as well as a North American Starcraft Championship sponsored by Blizzard.  All the games were streamed online for millions of viewers, but as an added bonus for those attending, there were playable demo stations for the new Starcraft II expansion game set to be released later this year (Heart of the Swarm).

Most of my attention was focused on the MLG tournament, watching games and playing HotS against my friends.  We were there for all of Saturday and watched the finals online Sunday afternoon.  It was a great experience something I would definitely do again.

I'm sorry for the lack of quality pictures.
It was fairly dark all over, so lighting was less than ideal.

A high view of the main viewing area.

Leading up to this I have been getting really into the pro-scene of starcraft.  There are certain celebrity  like players and commentators.  It was cool and weird to be so close to them because they are very much just normal people.  Also the best players are Korean and many of the don't speak much english so its not like you could talk to them much or anything, but whatever.

There are tons of games going on at any given moment, this is a row of computers facing each other where two players face off.  

The most important game going on (with highly seeded or more popular players) is put on the main stage.  The players are in those little lit booths at the front, the screens show to the audience what either player's screen looks like on the sides, and then the commentators screen in the middle.  The commentators (who's voiceover is heard, are actually in little booths of their own behind the stage) have access to information about both players units, production, mining, etc. basically everything needed to commentate and say who is probably ahead and say how engagements will end up.  If you're not familiar with Starcraft at all... I'll explain it sometime later.

The next two most important matches at a given moment are played on a semi-stage where there are no commentators, but you can see either player's screen above their head so you can watch the big battles, also you can watch close up their fingers on the keyboard and mouse and really watch them play.  That dyed haired Korean is MarineKingPrime (aka MKP, aka Lee Jung Hoon) the winner of MLG Winter championship.  Here at Spring he came in 3rd.

This is SK-MC (aka Jang Min Chul, aka The Boss-Toss) talking to his coach and getting ready for a game against Quanitic-SaSe (aka Kim Hammar, he's Sweedish).   MC recently won a Red Bull tournament, SaSe went to take 4th place here at MLG (and I said 'hi' to him).

This is EG-ThorZaIN (aka Marcus Eklöf, a Norwegian) who came out of nowhere a year ago and started winning tournaments.

And this is Grubby (aka Manuel Schenkhuizen, Dutch) one of the few pro-gammers not on a team.

The finals were super amazing!  Even though it was just back at our hotel with the 3 starcraft nerds, then a handfull of girls, we got them all to be a little interested.  We watched some of the quarters and then the semi final matches and everyone started rooting for certain players.  Alicia made an astonishing climb through the losers bracket to make it to the finals where he was pretty much crushed by DongRaeGu (aka DRG, aka Park Soo Ho).  We were mostly rooting for Alicia, but DRG was pretty awesome to watch since he really was just soooo good.

A great way to spend a weekend :-D

If you're still interested here's an article from Forbes.com about the event, including an infographic on viewership and attendance.  It's a big deal because at one point over 400,000 people were watching live or on the internet, which is more than many major tv programs that happend at the same time.

Ducks

Saturday morning we were camping near Provo with the Herds, and Saturday night we had dinner plans with some friends in Payson.  Naturally we didn't want to drive home so we decided to pass time hanging out at my Grandma Bu's house.  I hopped on the computer for a minute and on twitter I saw that BYUSA was holding a Ducky Derby that day.  What is a duck derby you ask... well, we didn't really know, but since we had nothing to do we decided to go.  

We arrived south of campus and began to under stand the meaning of Ducky Derby.  The stream that runs along the south edge of campus has been rehabilitated to be a beautiful walking path with rocks, waterfalls, and wonderful flora.

Also of course some wonderful fauna

So BYUSA was selling jDawgs and rubber ducks for eating and decorating.  People bought the ducks, drew on them, and then raced them down the river.  It was amazingly fun!!

Raphael and Polka

The racing was surprisingly exciting, everyone cheering on their ducks, getting excited as they passed others, and crying when they got stuck in a slow spot.  

placing the ducks

The Start 

Raphael in 1st pace...

eventual winner of our heat, The Cheat.

The Cheat, Polka, and The Missionary

Stephanie actually came in 2nd.  So we got a FREE Jamba Juice, and a chance to win again in the winners round at the end of the day for a BYU Bookstore gift card (and trophy)

Winner's Round

Movin' Groovin'

Real ducks getting in the way. 

Stephanie actually led the race in 1st place for most of it, then got stuck and fell to last place (about 14th)... but then came back to 5th place by the end.  Her duck must have been pretty stelar.

We then took our ducks back to the beginning of the stream and let them float along.  It took half an hour to do half of the stream... so we stopped there.

our ducks are amazing