Football humor

This is by way of apologies for infrequent updates over the last few days: some observations on how the northeast and the South look at football differently. After all, after the shellacking the Cavaliers took against Florida State this weekend, we all need a laugh:

Women’s Accessories
North: ChapStick in back pocket and a $20 bill in the front pocket.
South: Louis Vuitton duffel with two lipsticks, waterproof mascara, and
a
fifth of bourbon. Money is not necessary; that’s what dates are for.

Stadium Size
North: College football stadiums hold 20,000 people.
South: High school football stadiums hold 20,000 people.

Fathers
North: Expect their daughters to understand Sylvia Plath.
South: Expect their daughters to understand pass interference.

Campus Decor
North: Statues of founding fathers.
South: Statues of Heisman trophy winners.

Homecoming Queen
North: Also a physics major.
South: Also Miss America.

Heroes
North: Rudy Guliani
South: Archie & Peyton Manning

Getting Tickets
North: 5 days before the game you walk into the ticket office on campus
and purchase tickets.
South: 5 months before the game you walk into the ticket office on
Campus
and put name on waiting list for tickets.

Friday Classes After a Thursday Night Game
North: Students and teachers not sure they’re going to the game, because
they have classes on Friday.
South: Teachers cancel Friday classes because they don’t want to see the
few hung-over students that might actually make it to class.

Parking
North: An hour before game time, the University opens the campus for
game
parking.
South: RVs sporting their school flags begin arriving on Wednesday for
the
weekend festivities. The really faithful arrive on Tuesday.

Game Day
North: A few students party in the dorm and watch ESPN on TV.
South: Every student wakes up, has a beer for breakfast, and rushes over
to where ESPN is broadcasting “Game Day Live” to get on camera and wave
to
the idiots up North: who wonder why “Game Day Live” is never broadcast
from
their campus.

Tailgating
North: Raw meat on a grill, beer with lime in it, listening to local
radio
station with truck tailgate down.
South: 30-foot custom pig-shaped smoker fires up at dawn. Cooking
accompanied by live performance by “Dave Matthews’ Band,” who come over
during breaks and ask for a hit off bottle of bourbon.

Getting to the Stadium
North: You ask “Where’s the stadium?” When you find it, you walk right
in.
South: When you’re near it, you’ll hear it. On game day it becomes the
state’s third largest city.

Concessions
North: Drinks served in a paper cup, filled to the top with soda.
South: Drinks served in a plastic cup, with the home team’s mascot on
it,
filled less than half way with soda, to ensure enough room for bourbon.

When National Anthem is Played
North: Stands are less than half full, and less than half of them stand
up.
South: 100,000 fans, all standing, sing along in perfect four-part
harmony.

The Smell in the Air After the First Score
North: Nothing changes.
South: Fireworks, with a touch of bourbon.

Commentary (Male)
North: “Nice play.”
South: “Dammit, you slow sumbitch tackle him and break his legs.”

Commentary (Female)
North: “My, this certainly is a violent sport.”
South: “Dammit, you slow sumbitch tackle him and break his legs.”

Announcers
North: Neutral and paid.
South: Announcer harmonizes with the crowd in the fight song, with a
tear
in his eye because he is so proud of his team.

After the Game
North: The stadium is empty way before the game ends.
South: Another rack of ribs goes on the smoker. While somebody goes to
the
nearest package store for more bourbon, planning begins for next week’s
game.
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Bumbershoot Part I

Written Saturday 31 Aug: Just got back from our first day at Bumbershoot. Mental note: look at the map first next time. We parked on the wrong side of the Seattle Center for the Will Call desk, and that’s a long walk.

Despite which it was really pleasant. Walked around in the sun, watched a goofy circus, heard a lot of percussionists, laughed at kids trying out hula hoops for the first time, watched the last two songs of Johnny Lang and the first three of Ani DiFranco.

Watching Ani: the first two songs sounded pretty much alike: spoken lyrics, sung chorus, spiky guitar accompaniment. The third one got lyrical. She introduced it as a “long rambling folk song.” As she played I watched a blind woman being led down the sidelines of the stadium field by an usher; her cane steadily slid ahead of her, bobbing from side to side, as Ani played.

Tomorrow, Sonic Youth. Tonight, collapse.
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Sloan Roundup

I’ve had a few conversations about Sloan recently. I got my first call as an alum from an entering student two weeks ago. George and Jay continue to blog. George has become pretty prolific in spite of slipping away to Cape Cod every weekend.

Jay’s been quieter, for good reason: he’s been learning CSS and getting bored with his Xbox. Hang in there, Jay, though I can’t tell you why–and check out some of my posts about CSS and redesigning my site earlier this year.

Charlie’s been heads down at the office, from what I hear. Bransby just resurfaced in Newport Beach. No word from Niall.

Paper: Recession DOES make a difference in IT spending

Anna Pavlova: Adjustment Costs, Learning-by-Doing, and Technology Adoption under Uncertainty. New paper by one of the “young turks” in financial research at the MIT Sloan School about the effects of recession and organizational capability on technology adoption. Basically, the model shows that, under uncertainty, the rate of adoption of technology is critically dependent on capital expenditure and organizational capability.

This formally describes what many of us suspected already: companies with better technological capabilities will be better able to adopt new technologies even in down times. I wonder what this says about the wisdom of technology outsourcing strategies.
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Making progress…but not on company time

I narrowed the problem with iTunes2Manila down last night. It’s got to be in the code that handles creating and posting the news item to Manila; the sister script (iTunes2TextEdit) works fine putting the same information into a TextEdit document, so the disappearance of the track information must be happening somewhere else.

I haven’t made much progress on my apps recently, largely because:

  • I’m employed and doing anything with them on company time would be crazy stupid
  • We are still catching up with the house–the garden and general house improvements and unpacking continue to take a lot of time
  • My wife works east coast hours and I need to maximize the time that I can have with her, meaning after dinner programming is a no-no
  • I finally got the Diablo II Expansion Set working (I had had a damaged Diablo II install disc, which prevented me from installing the expansion set), and I’m addicted again.

I think I’m going to have to schedule my late nights. Programming Monday, Diablo Tuesday, unpacking Wednesday…
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I’ve been tired

It’s been a fairly turbulent seven days. I worked hard for about two months on a strategy project only to have it taken away, and am pretty much starting from scratch trying to learn about a new market, product suite, and set of job skills. I have regained a little balance over the past few days, which is critical because I have to be executing pretty hard now.

The strategy project is probably in better hands now. While I had been looking forward to going onto the next phase, we had reached a point where all the decisions needed to be made at a higher organizational level. I’m looking forward to the challenge of redefining what I can deliver and doing some execution. It’s been a while.

Jaguar Roundup

CUPS: MacNN has a tutorial on enabling CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) in Jaguar. After reading the tutorial, I would guess it wasn’t implemented by default because the UI sounds sketchy (printer configuration through a web interface on port 631 rather than through Print Center, for instance). The interesting thing is that it can support printing via SMB (Windows printers), though you have to do some terminal-jockey things to make that option available.

Prebinding: I always wondered why people claimed you had to update prebinding so frequently–and why there were about ten tools on VersionTracker to provide a GUI to a relatively simple command. Bill Bumgarner says that you never need to update prebinding yourself in 10.2, and that most people weren’t getting anything from doing it in 10.1.

Radio madness: I continue to have intermittent access to
Radio through its Desktop web interface. Right after starting Radio, everything works fine, but after a bit I start to get “connection was refused.” Next step is to play with the firewall settings and see how things go.

Manila Envelope (and other SOAP based AppleScripts): I was pretty freaked when Manila Envelope failed to work for me the first time I tried it. I’ve since gotten it to work reliably. However, iTunes2Manila appears to have an issue–haven’t figured out what the problem is. If you’re having problems with any of my scripts under Jaguar (or for any other reason), contact me.

Weekend update

The Seattle International Beer Festival was a good time but smaller than I expected. The main focus is international beers, meaning that the biggest representation is from importers rather than local brewers working in international styles (although there were some good examples). Brewery reps weren’t on hand either. But I did meet the ops manager from RealBeer.com (and signed up for a club subscription!). Standout beers included Lindeman’s Frambozenbier, a Polish porter from Ziewicz, and Harvieston’s Bitter & Twisted, along with the usual excellent Belgian brews.
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Well, never mind.

I was all fired up to write how I couldn’t connect to my Radio desktop news aggregator under Mac OS X 10.2. Which was true on Friday, but no longer true today for some reason. Maybe Manila Envelope will work today too?

Hmm…

So Manila Envelope doesn’t appear to work as is under Mac OS X 10.2. In fact, even rebuilding it doesn’t do the trick. Never fear, I’m working on it, but I can’t figure out what the hell is wrong…

Housework and beer

Lisa weeded this morning and ripped up a dead tree while I cleaned the house and cleaned up the garage. Nice having a space where you can just pound a nail into the wall or screw in a hook, hang something up, and youíre done.

Weíre going to head into town to pick up some Fiano di Avellino at the Pike and Western, then stop by the Seattle International Beerfest. Looking forward to seeing if it’s as good as itís hyped, but given the number of Belgian brews it should be worth the price of admission.
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First impressions

Yes, it’s a slow day at the office. But it’s a faster day on Mac OS X. Jaguar absolutely launches faster, multitasks better, and seems generally cleaner.

One or two complaints:

  • While the Help engine launches much faster, it takes longer to retrieve help for an individual application the first time; second time is much faster. The Help Center is now a drawer, which is both good and bad. Good–you can jump to any help book you want at any time. Bad–they forgot a scroll bar in the drawer and to see additional books you have to resize the parent window.
  • I very much dig the new address book. One or two glitches: it opens a “Converting” window on first run and takes forever to close it (stays with a full progress bar and the message “Saving…” for a long time). Not clear from the new UI how you have a card in more than one “group” at a time. I liked being able to categorize someone as “UVA Alum,” “Glee Club,” and “Old Friend”; this functionality appears to be gone.

Still looking at other things. Mostly I’m just glad my machine is working again.
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