Here’s an online color scheme producing tool that I use all the time.

This was the best fencing competion that I have ever competed in or attended as a spectator. The organizers need to be commended. It was better than the Crescent City Open, any of the North American Cups I have attended, and the two Summer National Championships that I visited (not to denigrate any of those events).

All of the strips were grounded. The events were executed in a timely manner. The orgainizers made efficient use of AskFRED making registration the quickest I have ever been through. There was a strip set aside for finals, a stage for medal ceremonies, and some vendors. I only regret not purchasing more equipment, but I wasn’t sure how that would fly with my wife.

There were a few shortfalls, but they were not big enough to detract from the event. I would have liked to see the final strip placed on a raised platform. A rather large crowd formed during the men’s foil final making viewing a little difficult. The selection of food was limited. In addition to their offering of junk food (pizza and candy bars), I would have liked to see energy bars and sandwhiches. The prices for the food available was extremely reasonable ($1 for a slice of pizza and $.50 for a bottle of water). The organizers used X-seed instead of Fencing Time and failed to take advantage of AskFred’s automatic results posting. Finally, I would like to see the Rose Condon have a year-round dedicated website. It is an event that is worthy of one.

One Final Note: The Rose Condon is named for a young fencer who passed away (not sure of specifics). The proceeds from the event go towards a scholarship in her name. It’s nice to see a fencing event benefit two worthy causes like these, the memory of this girl and the scholarship program.

Here is my latest google news:

1) I took #1 for nicholas roussos on Google. What does this mean? Basically, according to google, I’m THE Nicholas Roussos. Now, I’m setting my sites on nicholas. Much more difficult, but still doable. I need everyone’s help though. You can help out by linking to this site, www.nicholasroussos.com.

2) My pursuit of top ten for sports is progressing. United States Sports Academy is now #97 up from 108. That puts us in the top 100. I didn’t expect to see this kind of progress so fast.

I’m back from Shreveport, LA where I fenced in the Rose Condon. I fenced well, but had some bad luck. I ended up placing 19 out of 45, a dismal result. But it was a good experience. I saw some results from my training. I was able to execute actions that I had been working on, and it was a chance to get back in the tournament mind-set. My last competition was in November; I finished second. It was, however, a much easier tournament.

Pics from Rose Condon. (currently none from foil)

Google sent me this nice email at work:

Greetings,

Google is currently blocked from crawling your site by the robots.txt file that your server uses to control access by search engines. As a result, users who are looking for your site are not able to find it using Google. As you know, a large fraction of internet users use Google as their starting point and over 50% of search engines referrals come from Google. Google’s mission is to deliver the best search experience on the Internet by making the world’s information universally accessible and useful. We would like to include your site at http://www.ussaonline.org in Google’s index to make it easier for your users or customers to find your site.

To allow Google to crawl your site, add the following lines to the robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

Once you have allowed Google to access your site it can take between 4-6 weeks for your site to appear in our index. For additional information on getting your site included in our index, please see: http://www.google.com/webmasters/.

Regards,

Raina

**********************

Raina Rathi
Google, Inc.
Business Development
[removed contact info]

If you do not wish to be contacted regarding inclusion in the Google index again, please send us an email so that we can remove you from our mailing list.

It’s the first time I’ve gotten an email like this from a search engine. Don’t they think that the robot.txt is blocking search engines for a reason? In this case, the site is a learning/classroom portal. There’s nothing there unless you’re a student with an account. I thought this email was a little silly but nice of them none the less. It’s nice to know google wants you. Consequently, if they want to index something, they should try indexing the main school site, United States Sports Academy.

I stumbled on these interesting color photos of WWI.

InsaneRobot (one of my BUDS) just started his very own blog, VirtualHigh5.com. He describes it as “The inter-galactic pit-stop.” Give him a visit and leave some comments.

I recommend blogging to everyone. Give it a try. It’s a lot of fun. Just be sure to link back to www.nicholasroussos.com. It’s only fair, afterall.

ScubaDiving.com features different underwater photographers. Check out this pic by Christa Loustalot.

Christa says:

I could not physically get down under the ledge where this guy was hiding, so I just set my camera down in front of him and hoped for the best!

Wow, great shot.

Update: Christa just dropped me an email. She’s posting a ton of her pics to her website, Photograsea. This pic of a Sea Turtle makes me feel like I am one, very nice photography.

Here’s my top 10 favorite meals of all time.

1. Veal Parmesan (w/out spaghetti, the way my dad makes it)
2. Pastitsio (goes well with a side of spinikopita)
3. Pepperoni and Sausage Pizza (from Benzi’s Pizza)
4. Totino’s Pizza Rolls
5. Chinese Chicken Lo Mein (from Panda Haven)
6. Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich on thick white bread
7. Country Fried Steak with white gravy (nothing like the next item)
8. A real good, thick steak (medium rare to rare, I’d like to have one right now topped with sauteed crabmeat and chunks of lobster)
9. Chicken Tenders with Ranch Dressing (perfect for any occasion)
10. Hamburger ketchup only with cheese, side order of fries, maybe a milkshake too (a true American classic)

What are your favorite meals?

A co-worker and fellow web designer just finished a redesign of the American Sport Art Museum and Archives website. It looks really nice. Seeing it brought to mind the art of Hiro Yamagata, a great artist who created artwork for the ‘96 Atlanta Olympics.

One of my favorites pieces by Hiro Yamagata:

‘96 Atlanta Olympics - Fencing

I also really like the swimming piece he did.

Here’s another nice piece from the museum’s collection.

Purple Fencing by LeRoy Neiman

Consequently, Purple Fencing hangs in my office

Want to waste a lot of time? InsaneRobot (One of my BUDS) tipped me off on this insanely complicated flash-based web game called Hapland.

Give it a try, oh and I assure you that it can be beat without the death of a single stick man.

Here’s a screenshot.

Pastitsio has got to be in my top 10 favorite dishes of all time.

The mother of one of my BUDS asks me for a pastitsio recipe everytime I see her. Of course, I always forget to get one. Well, I found a pastitsio recipe online at epicurious, who claims to be the world’s greatest recipe collection.

I wonder if my grandmother would be willing to put her pastitsio recipe on my blog. I’ll have to ask.

Rumored Nintendo Revolution mockup

I have yet to see an anonomous rumor like this prove to be true, but supposedly this is a mock-up for the new Nintendo. Well, we’ll see, we’ll see. via Engadget

Actually, the line drawings look much more authentic.

I thought I would share some great fencing photos that I found a while back. The photographer made a device that snaps the pic when the scoring box goes off. Basically, when one fencer touches the other, the camera takes a picture.

Here are two of my favs:

• Attack. Touche. - Check out how his off-hand is flexed and the look in his face. That’s athletic focus.
• Attack, no. Counter attack. - A classic example of a passato sota (or a duck). This is a hard move to pull off, just look at all the pics of the failed ones in this galley.

Google has a new movie search engine that is awesome. Just type movie: in the search box to get a list of movies in your area.

Or you can movie: movie title to get reviews for that movie (or an actor or a genre). Here’s a list of the best rated horror movies. via InsideGoogle

Oh and the offical Google Blog has an announcement on this too.