wrighters.net

Take a look at the NCAA football schedule for ABC TV this Saturday:

* 11:00 Pitt vs. Syracuse
* 2:30 Oklahoma vs. Texas
* 7:00 Nebraska vs. Iowa State

Now I live in the Chicago area. Notice the games that aren’t being shown:
* NU vs. Wisconsin
* Michigan vs. Michigan State
* Illinois vs. Indiana
* Iowa vs. Purdue

Now I know that some of these were on ESPN, but give me a break, who is in charge of this scheduling?

The NU game was shown on ESPN360, the dumbest idea to come out of the ABC Empire ever. Basically, you can view clips and games using a Flash based player, but only if your ISP has signed up with ESPN. My guess is this means they do some kind of server co-location to keep the load down on their corporate servers, but of course Comcast doesn’t want to play ball with them. So I listened to NU get blown out by Wisconsin on the radio. I would have been willing (before the game) to shell out the $22 extortion fee that ESPN gameplan would offer online, but even that’s not available without the ISP collusion.

I don’t understand how the NCAA can’t just go with a competent third party to offer games online, I wold think there is a lot of money to be made here.

My PowerBook 80GB drive died the other day. Luckily, I was able to pull off all my stuff (I think) before it really stopped working.

I looked on the internet for some good tips on how to open up the powerbook. Both xlr8yourmac and ifixit don’t quite get it right. I want to find the guy (or girl) at Apple who designed the tabs above the optical drive and punch them in the mouth. Figuratively, of course. It is so much harder than they say in the guide - and when it finally came apart, I think I now know how to do it. But it can’t be explained. So if you think I’ll be able to tell you, forget it. If your 15” PowerBook Aluminum 1.0 to 1.5GHz with Bluetooth 1.1 hard drive dies, you are going to have to enter this rite of passage on your own. Or hire a professional. Sorry.

As a Northwestern alumnus, it never fails to amuse me when the sports media seems to be shocked when NU loses it’s annual “shocker”. For example, Mike Downey from the Tribune recently found the NU loss to New Hampshire to be quite a shocker. But as an NU fan since I enrolled in the fall of ‘91, I have seen my fair share of shockers.

Who can forget the 1995 Rose Bowl team losing quite a shocker to Miami, OH (thanks Randy!), where they gave up a three touchdown lead in the fourth quarter, just a week after shocking Notre Dame.

Or how about the 2001 42-43 loss to Bowling Green, where NU gave up touchdowns, two point conversions, and onside kicks in a dizzying array of failures.

How about Brian Huffman missing five field goals in one game where NU had 637 yards of offense (wow!) and still lost the game. That was the same year we beat #7 Ohio State.

Or even better, look at the 2005 Sun Bowl where NU gave up a 22-0 lead, lost 50-38, and gave up 2, yes 2, onside kicks for touchdowns, both of them returned by the same guy. It was like watching an instant replay. Has that ever happened before in college football history? How about high school? Pee wee?

So, no, losing to New Hampshire (ranked #2 in NCAA Division 1-AA) was not a shocker. I was there, and most people didn’t even complain that much.

I don’t want to complain too much, though. I remember when I was in college, the idea that NU would ever be in a bowl, let alone beat Michigan (several times in great games), Ohio State (another all time great game), and Penn State (heck… every single Big Ten team, and lots of them in huge comebacks with last second heroics) in the years since I’ve graduated, win three Big Ten titles, and go to four bowl games was out of the question. I remember tearing down the goalposts after we beat #17 Illinois, running with them all the way to the lake, and tossing them in during a rainstorm. I guess things have changed.

I read this 43 folders post on shaving a few months back and in the back of my mind thought that I might be missing out on the true shaving experience by just hacking away at my face hidden under a pile of Gillette shave gel.

The top link in the 43 folders wiki on shaving tips is the Leisure Guy’s comprehensive guide to the gourmet shaving experience. You gotta love the Internet - there’s always someone who is a true expert. This definitive guide will tell you more than you could ever need to know about wet shaving.

Turns out I am definitely not top of the line, but did pick up a “Best Badger” shave brush (a good starter brush according to the Leisure Guy) and some sandalwood shave soap from Crabtree and Evelyn - a great anniversary gift from my wife. The refills are only $8, and I’ve been using it for two weeks now and it hasn’t appeared to even wear down the indented lettering on the cake of soap. I think you can save big bucks by shaving this way, and it is a much better experience, no cuts so far, and a great way to start the morning. I actually look forward to shaving now.

I’m still using a Gillette Sensor, I need to move the safety razor once my blades are all used up and I’ll be saving even more money.

One thing to point out, when using shaving soap, getting a good lather takes some technique. This guide with photos was really a good thing that got me started. After using this technique, the lather was 10x better.

Update: The trailing slash problem in Apache is a well known issue that I was also dealing with. Basically, if you went to http://wrighters.org/blog you would get a 404/Page Not Found because Apache would be looking for a file called blog. Well, everyone on the net says this can be fixed by doing something like this in your .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTPHOST} wrighters.org$
RewriteCond %{REQUESTURI} !blog/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ blog/$1

That’s fine, but if you use symlinks (which Site5 uses when it creates a blog for you, and which I used as well when I did my update… and most rails apps deployed using Capistrano will do as well), you need to enable symlinks for Apache. So add this in your .htaccess file above the RewriteCond and RewriteRule lines:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks

End of Update

I know this is in the Technorati Support FAQ, but I figured out why I couldn’t find any of my posts in Technorati. Even though I could claim my blog (which this FAQ deals with), posts never showed up. Turns out I had a temporary redirect from http://wrighters.org to http://wrighters.org/blog/. When I made this a permanent (301), then magically my pings worked and posts showed up in searches.

Now, we’ll see if that solved Google blogsearch as well. Funny, I can see the Google bot crawling the page, but not for blog searches.

BTW, the Typo 4.0.x built-in Pinging is nice - another reason to upgrade from 2.6.

Today is my 10 year wedding anniversary. Wow, what a lucky guy I am.

My wife, Laura, is an English teacher, and she loves “To Kill A Mockingbird”, by Harper Lee. Thanks to my coworker and friend Thomas, I was able to score an author signed 40th anniversary copy in time for the big day. What a treat, it’s so cool to look in the inside cover and see the signature of the author there in blue ink. That must be quite a feeling to sign your own book, but quite another when it is probably the greatest American novel.

I’m going to have to read it again - but probably not that copy.

There’s a very interesting article in this Sunday”s New York Times about an Evangelical church in Minnesota that has (somewhat) rejected the Republican party”s stranglehold on their church. The Senior Pastor, Greg Boyd preached a series of sermons on the hot issues (morality, abortion, taking back the country for God, etc - all of these are linked off the NYT article). The result? Maybe up to 1,000 of 5,000 members left, but those who stayed had interesting things to say. Some of the comments reflect the peer pressure that Christian Republicans place on other Christians to vote and think Republican - or else! It can be difficult to speak up and not agree with the current set of Republican talking points if you are in an Evangelical church today.

It looks like Greg Boyd has written a book based on the sermon series that the article is based on: The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church. I might have to get a copy. I wonder if this will be a start of a trend?

I got my eBible alpha/beta (their blog uses both terms) membership today, and spent a little time checking it out. There are some very impressive AJAX effects, including verse highlighting, side-by-side bible reading, and flyover commentaries for each verse. It was also pretty speedy, so hopefully they are ready for a full launch next week.

There are a few interactive features - like the ability to tag and search tagged verses, storing bookmarks, and seeing who last tagged a verse. However, I don”t see too much in the way of community building - it looks like more of a resource site that is trying to sell Christian literature (which is not a bad thing). The ads are not too obtrusive, and it looks like they have a few companies publishing ads now (and while they”re in beta, it looks like the ads are free).

I have 3 invites, let me know if you want one.

I’ve decided to get back into the habit of tracking
our expenses against a budget again. When I last used financial
software, I was using a PC and used Quicken 2000. Now that I’m on a
mac again, I’m finding the pickings are quite slim.

Your first choice would be good ‘ol
quicken for the mac. However, just
before I decided to outbid some other sucker on EBay for a Quicken 2005
for Mac, I decided to read the reviews at
amazon.

Probably a good idea, it looks like Intuit could care less whether
they maintain this product, but they’ll gladly continue to take your
money. In fact, you typically see the low end PC versions for 25-30
bucks, with rebates available, but the Mac version only available in one
version and goes for 60-70 bucks, depending on where you buy it. So I
figured I’d look at the competition. Well, not much out
there.

Whereas PC users have two giants duking it out (Microsoft
with Money and Intuit
with Quicken, Mac users are lacking in options.

There’s
[Moneydance](http://moneydance.com/). They took the approach of using
Java, and thus could easily support Mac, Linux, or Windows on one
codebase. This seems like a good idea, but when I tried to download my
information from either of my two banks, neither worked. Quicken on the
PC worked flawlessly every time. So I moved on.

There’s also
iBank. I guess I must be
a typical Mac user, because I saw the cool graphics and the ‘i’ in the
name and must have subconsciously thought it would work as well as the
iLife suite. So I bought a copy. And it crashes at least once every
time I use it, and is severely lacking in features. But I think I’m
willing to patiently wait and see if the author implements some of the
features that I’m missing (like integrated downloads instead of QIF
imports) and provides a little more stability in future
releases.

So I guess I don’t understand why no one else seems to
want to compete in this area. It seems to me like there’s some money
to be made.