Remembering Albany’s Professional Soccer Teams

I was thinking about this a while back. When I was a teenager, around 1979 or so, Albany had no real professional sports franchises of its own. Yeah, we had the Albany Metro Mallers football team, but that was a “semi-professional” squad. There was the Albany Twilight League amateur baseball season, but how charged up…

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Road Trip: Photographing the Premier Basketball League Combine

It’s what, 8pm and I’m here at the Thruway rest stop at Sloatsburg – the first rest area after you get off of I-287 from New Jersey.ย  It was a long road trip and I needed to take a break, a chance to upload some photos to my flickr site and decompress for a bit.…

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Any Verizon phone I get… better not have VZ Navigator on it

Back a few years ago, before GPS units were in every car, I relied on either MapQuest or Yahoo! Maps to plot my travel from Albany to another city.ย  I also owned a vintage BlackBerry – it was a 6750 phone, but it didn’t have a GPS or turn-by-turn navigation program in it. Those two…

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Week 3 of the Elbo Room Trivia Tournament

Another Thursday night in the books, another round of Team Trivia over at Elbo Room, as part of their $2,500 trivia tournament. It seems that more teams are showing up at Elbo Room; in addition to the regular squads like Mayhem (construction workers that actually went to school) and Dr. Occam’s Razor (lawyers) and The…

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Photo Essay: Return to Storytown U.S.A.

A long time ago, I acquired a vintage View-Master reel of some attractions at Storytown, U.S.A.ย  I bought the reel with the intentions of producing an article on the history of View-Master product, but that project fell through. Still, as part of the project, I attempted to scan in the original images off the View-Master…

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How the Boston Celtics’ Rick Fox became part of my honeymoon

This is definitely going to be the blog post that gets my sorry self in trouble with my wife. But it’s a great story to tell. I married Vicki in 1994, and we had a fantastic honeymoon week in Toronto and in Niagara Falls.ย  We stayed for a few nights at SkyDome’s hotel complex, and…

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“And leading is a team whose name we aren’t allowed to mention!”

It’s August 2006, and I’m getting ready for another Tuesday night of team trivia at Hooters in Crossgates Mall.ย  This was going to be a good time – I had invited a friend, Dennis, over to join me at trivia.ย  Normally I only play as a one-man “Street Academy” team, but it was not unusual…

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See John Wilkes Booth performing in an Albany theater!

With all the excitement about President Obama coming to Troy to speak at Hudson Valley Community College Monday, I looked over the list of various presidents who have visited the Capital Region, in one way or another.ย  When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1861, he traveled by train from Illinois to Washington, D.C. –…

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The Tandy 102 – the original netbook

Ain’t it amazing – you can go to any computer store or cell phone provider and purchase a “netbook” – a tiny, utilitarian computer with flash memory and enough power to write a small novel or watch a YouTube clip. Your alternative was to bring a laptop. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my…

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