Spring Training Games, Bowling, Pool Tournament, Corona, and Ember's Birthday!

Spring Training - an Arizona tradition:

Every year, my friend Mike coordinates a trip back to Arizona to go to multiple spring training baseball games.  He gets his friends from the east coast to all attend and it's a good time hanging out and just checking out games during the day, since it's so convenient to go to multiple games in different stadiums throughout the Phoenix area.  At the beginning of March, Nate, Chris, Head, Brian, and Paul were all able to make it out to Phoenix for this yearly tradition.  Kevin and I were the local ones in the photo below.

While I didn't attend all the games they did, I still made it to 4 games in 4 days, featuring ballparks in Peoria, Salt River Fields, and Mesa and seeing teams like the Padres, the Royals, the D'Backs, the Brewers, and the Athletics.  For me, I don't even really watch much of the baseball game.  It's honestly just a great time to enjoy the weather, drink some beer, and hang out with my friends I grew up with who now live on the other side of the country and I only get to see a few times a year. :)

IBM Bowling League Ends:

The most recent bowling season ended on March 12th.  This was a strange season for me.  My entire team from last year moved on from bowling (leaving Arizona, to take care of kids, etc).  I was the only one to return to the league, so I ended up joining another team in the league that had lost two members.  Our 4th member actually turned out to be a coworker of mine, who had always wanted to try bowling league.  He had never really bowled before, but he really got into it this season, purchasing a new ball and learning how to bowl a ball with the proper form and mechanics.

While we were able to sneak into the playoffs as the 4th and finally seed, unfortunately we weren't able to overcome some of the huge scores other teams were bowling the championship night and yours truly did not pull-off a miraculous repeat.  It's okay though, I'm still very much into bowling and I look forward to the next season!  Just not sure who I'll be bowling with yet...

Singles Local Qualifier for APA Pool League:

I recently moved up to a 6 in pool league.  If you need a refresher, the skills levels vary between 2-7 with 7 being the highest.  I would say most people in the league are on average a 4-5, and being a 6 is quite an accomplishment.  However, there's also a lot of pressure being the highest rated player on my pool team.  I am expected to play the other top players in the league and beat them.  I don't really feel like I can hang with those studs just yet, so I've been trying to enter more tournaments on the side to improve and get better.

On March 14th, I entered the singles local qualifier tournament.  It's open and free to enter, and if you win, you go to Phoenix for regionals for a chance to play at Nationals in Vegas.  You may recall this is something I tried back in 2016 when I moved up from a 4 to a 5 in 8-ball.

Honestly, I only wanted to play in the tournament for practice, but after 8 hours at the pool hall, a bye, and 4 matches later, I found myself a winner and qualified for the regionals at Phoenix.  Whoops!  I am gonna consider going though, not with the intention of winning, but to play other great players and learn how to beat them on a more consistent basis. :)

Corona:

It's a really sad time in the world right now.  Many people are unable to work and forced to stay at home for the upcoming future, without a real good estimate of when they can go back and start making money again.  Personally, my job has not changed too much.  I already work from home 3-4 days a week, so going a full 5 is no big deal.  I am on the list of "essential employees" who have access cleared to go into the lab should I need to.

I am however affected in other ways because of Corona.  I can't go to my gym anymore (closed until at least the end of the month) and there is no pool league or golf league (which would have started on the 18th).  With no leagues to play in, I find myself just working out every day from home to the point that my legs are starting to feel like jello.  But in reality, my problems are very minor and trivial.  I don't have kids who are staying at home because school is canceled, so I don't have my hands full or a family using up all of the house's resources.  I am still working and making money, so I am the least of anyone's worries right now.

Take care out there, it's a scary time but hopefully all this crazyiness will be over real soon and we can get back on with our lives!

Ember's 1st Birthday:

And now to end the blog entry on a more positive note.  March 23rd was Ember's 1st Birthday!  She is officially an adult cat and a wonderful one at that.  She's so friendly with anyone she meets and is a great addition to my little cat family.  Happy Birthday Ember, I love you!

Not much going on here!

Not a lot going on since our last blog post, but I still want to get my monthly update in, so here goes:

The Chiefs won the Superbowl, so I'll need to go to Vegas within a year of the big game to collect my winnings on that sweet bet I made. :)

The cats are doing well, no issues with Benzi and Ember is a very healthy kitty.  Ember actually turns 1-year-old next month, but I've already started transferring her over to adult food.

I'm still playing pool, but our team has kind of hit a wall in terms of performance.  They moved me up to a skill level 6, which doesn't help, and I've already been bouncing back and forth from a 5 and a 6 this season.  I got that new Jacoby Black shaft but I'm still waiting on my custom butt to be made, so maybe that will give me some inspiration.  I'm also looking to join more tournaments and play in a summer 9-ball league to just get more reps in hopes of improving my game.  Right now, I just don't feel like a 6...yet, but it's definitely where I want to be.

Bowling league will be ending in 2 weeks, and our team looks to make it to the playoffs.  I have a brand new team (everyone from my roster of years past did not return), so it's been a bit of an adjustment.  But we're still in the hunt, which means I have a chance for another championship.  Updates on that to come later.

Next month will be busier and I'll have some new stuff to blog about.  I'm going up to Phoenix for spring training games to see Mike, Nate, and Chris.  Golf league should also be picking up soon, so I'm looking forward to that.

Sorry for the lame post today, but I figure it's better to blog about something than nothing at all (just like how I feel about working out!).  Until next time and thanks for checking in on me!

Chiefs are going to the Big Game!!!

I had never watched the NFL before the year 2000, but my friends in high school invited me to to try this thing called "Fantasy Football".  I wasn't really sure about any of it, but I wanted to participate with my friends so I gave it all a shot.

The first year of fantasy football, I remember owning a running back named Eddie George.  He was a really good player for the Tennessee Titans, but coming towards the end of his career.  I didn't do well in Fantasy Football, probably because I just had zero knowledge of the game and the sport.

Eventually, I would continue to draft players that I grew to like, some of them being Tony Gonzalez of the Kansas City Chiefs and Trent Green (but when he was first playing for the St Louis Rams).  Eventually Trent would lose his job for the Rams to some guy named Kurt Warner, but he found a home in Kansas City and had great running backs like Priest Holmes and Larry Johnson to run for him.  It was basically then that I started to really love the chiefs.  And eventually in 2006, I would travel out to Kansas City to visit my friend Chris from college who was working for Cerner at the time.

During my visit to Kansas City, I really wanted to go to a Chiefs game, which would also be the first NFL game I ever attended.  That's how I built a connection to the Chiefs, through Fantasy Football, through visiting the city and attending the game, and just becoming a fan of the team regardless if they were good or bad.

Now after 20 years of being a KC Chiefs fan, they had never really been a winning team...until now.  I had never seen them make it to the Superbowl, but the time has finally come.  And the past two years ever since Mahomes has taken over at QB, I have been feeling confident in the team.  I like their chances so much at the beginning of each year that I'm willing to put $100 on them to win it all.

So here's to the Chiefs!  I'm super excited for Sunday!  I guess we'll find out in a couple days if you'll see me agonizing in pain or celebrating in glory! :D

My "Final" Computer Upgrades :D

You may recall that I put together a new computer last year.  When I bought the parts for it, I figured it'd serve it's purpose for just basic, middle-of-the-road gaming.  It was very good in doing just that, being able to play games at a decent graphics level and at 144 FPS (frames per second).

I eventually got back into streaming and started to notice how much of a CPU/GPU hog my streaming encoding software was in order produce an average looking stream.  I was pretty happy with an average stream because I didn't have much of a following...maybe averaging 5-7 viewers on Twitch on a monthly basis.

One day in October, I got hosted by a professional Fortnite player on Twitch and saw my view count go from about 11 up to 9,000 and eventually level out at 2,000 viewers for the rest of the night.  I reflect back on that point as the day I realized, man people are going to see my stream and I don't want it to look terrible.  I saw a spike in followers that day, 250 right off the bat and up to 500 total followers after that host.  People actually liked me and my content and wanted to come back and watch.  And so began my path down the road of trying to be the best streamer I can be.  Of course, gameplay and personality is always going to be one of my caps, but certainly I could at least try to make the stream look better...that was something I could control.

The first thing I did was get a new camera.  While the C920 looks fine, I noticed all the big streamers were using a digital camera and not a webcam.  After much research, I decided the camera to get was the Sony Alpha 6000.  It's not Sony's highest end camera, but a very good one and still not cheap by any means.  Paired with an Elgato 4K Cam Link, the new camera setup would cost me $700.

After the camera was added, I felt like it looked good on stream, but could still look better.  My old computer setup was pretty low-to-mid range and I was unable to stream at 1080p or at a decent encoding level.  Ten days later, I figured it was time for another upgrade.  This time I chose to upgrade the CPU to the i9-9900K, one of Intel's flagship processors at the time.  I also decided since I was going into the computer anyway, I might as well pick up one of those fancy NVMe M.2 drives as well.  My SSD space was starting to get low having only 384GB worth, so I went for the 1TB Samsung 970 EVO.  Got the CPU for $485 and the new SSD for $170.

The new CPU was blazing fast compared to my old one. Makes sense, I was going from six cores to eight cores with multi-threading.  I was now able to get that 1080p stream with a decent x264 level using the "Fast" preset.  The camera looked good and I even saved the old C920 to use on my cats....basically enabling the ability to have two cameras on stream.  However, I would notice that my Fortnite game still wasn't holding 144 FPS consistently.  The frames would constantly drop below 100 during gameplay even though my CPU was far from bottlenecked.  I then decided it was time to get a big-boy GPU.  I ended up getting a RTX 2080 for $660 right before Thanksgiving, which was a very good price at the time.  I also picked up a HD60 Pro capture card for $160, because I wanted to start streaming other games including those on my PS4 and Switch.

With the new GPU in my computer, I never saw my FPS drop under 144 anymore during a game of Fortnite while on stream.  I was very satisfied with the new graphics card!  I then began to wonder, just how much FPS can I actually push out of this thing?  I did a test with Fortnite and was able to max out around 500 FPS and holding 240 FPS was absolutely no problem.  In addition, I switched over to the NVENC encoder on Streamlabs OBS after hearing it had comparable or better visual quality to that of the x264 "Medium" preset.  I was finally at a point where I was very happy with the way my stream looked and I have zero issues running any game anymore at high quality and FPS.  It was now a legit, high-end gaming PC.  However, there was still one thing missing...a monitor that could refresh those 240 frames fast enough.

I'm a loyal fan of ViewSonic monitors and it just so happened that they released a new 240Hz monitor out this year.  I expected all 240Hz monitors to be around $500, so when this one was priced at $430, I bought it pretty quickly.  When the new monitor arrived, I now had 3 monitors, but that was hardly a problem.  I installed the 3rd one on a desk mount and it now sits above my gaming monitor, so I now have a wonderful 3-monitor setup. :)

My setup is complete and I don't think I'll be needing anymore major upgrades anytime soon.  Although we'll see, I thought I said that months ago when all I got was the camera at first and well here we are some $2500 later.  My rig is now valued at over $4,400 and I'm very happy with the beast I've put together.  You can see the entire listing and cost in the spreadsheet below...

My goal now is to just be the best streamer I can be and I'm still shocked that I actually have a following and community...it's still kind of crazy to me.  But I'm having a lot of fun with this hobby and it's worth all the time and money I'm invested into it.

Here's to my future Twitch career wherever it may lead.  Happy Holidays and see ya next stream! :)