This from my good friend Adrian.. a real scream:
This year, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address fall on the same day. As Air America Radio pointed out,
"It is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication, and the other involves a groundhog."
The last few tunes on my iTunes playlist while I work:
Talk about electic tastes.
Well, I'm glad that's over.
The Steelers beat the Colts to advance to the AFC Championship. Where they deserve to be. I'm not sure I've ever seen officiating in an NFL game that I felt was crooked -- at least until today. I thought the officials were beyond biased, rather that they had been bought off.
I guess I can say that as a fan because a couple of their calls seem ridiculous - especially on the Troy Polamalu fumble recovery.
In any event, the right team won - though I have expected the officials to call a penalty on the botched field goal by Indianapolis.
Before you say I'm crazy, remember that several top-flight Bundesliga officials were convicted of fixing games last year.. so it does happen.
It's 12:30am and I'm watching Liverpool play Luton Town in the FA Cup. For those who do not follow football, and particularly English football, there are five levels of football in England (five "leagues"). The lowest league, the Nationwide Conference, is semi-professional (pub teams, weekend players, generally not paid for play but probably sponsored) and the highest level is the Premier League where players make as much or more than NFL players.
The FA Cup is a many-tiered, season-long tournament that allows teams from every league to compete against one another. In the latter stages of the competition, the Premier League teams enter - it's equivalent to being given a bye in the first couple of rounds.
Over the years there have been some famous upsets where Premier League sides were beaten by teams from a much lower level.
I thought one was in the making this evening.
When I joined the game (about 20 mins in), Luton Town (League One) were tied with Liverpool, the European Champions, 1-1. To put that into perspective, Luton town is 26 places down in the standings from Liverpool. In the English system the bottom three teams in each League are demoted to the league beneath and the top three teams of the league beneath are promoted every season. It will be a long and hard slog for Luton Town to make it to the top of League One and then survive in the Premier League.
By half-time, they were up 2-1. Then shortly after half-time, their keeper blocked a penalty try and they got their own penalty (unfairly given, IMHO) and scored, making it 3-1.
But Raffa Benitez must have given his men a great talking to at half-time because Liverpool has stormed back to score three successive brilliant goals to make it a 4-3 lead.
I'm on the edge of my seat, and quite happy that Luton Town may not be giant killers this evening. It would have been too embarrassing.
Though I've got to say that they've played damn well so far.
It used to be easy to scrape a site, at least, when I still used a PC as my primary machine. Now that I'm operating with OS X it's gotten a little harder.
I scrape sites so I can take them with me on my laptop and figure out little details without having to be connected to the Web. So now I'm engaged in a hunt for a scraping tool that will function well under OS X. I used to use Anawave Websnake under Windows.. I may yet have to fire up Virtual PC and use it under that -- what a hack.
One of the great things about being between jobs is the sense of potential: there is a lot to discover and do and not nearly so much time when one is managing a product or a group.
I'm starting to play around with Ajax and get back some chops with CSS. I just downloaded both Jambo and Sandvox to play around with. Jambo is a social networking tool based on discovery of peers in your WiFi surroundings. Nifty if probably pointless.. Sandvox is a Mac OS X-based Web site development tool. Now, I'm a handcoding kind of guy but I figure that eventually someone has to come along with a GUI-based tool that generates decent DHTML/HTML/CSS code. Maybe this is the one.
I'm starting on building a Web site for a dear artist friend and I think that some Ajax features could be quite useful. From what I've seen so far, Ajax just seems a logical evolution of features that used to exist in IE4.0 (they may still be there, I'm not sure). Lots of potential and I have a little free time to explore and update my skill set.
Finally got my Airport Express set up to extend my Airport Extreme network. Real pain in the ass compared to the normal Apple ease of use I was expecting. What they don't seem to tell you in the manuals is that you cannot set up an Express as an extension to a network unless it's in the default (uninitialized) configuration.
When I finally realized this and chose "Setup a new Airport Base Station" I got the option of extending my current network. Took a couple of hours to figure out why it wouldn't work before this revelation. Sometimes, my geekiness gets in the way ('cause in this case I had already mucked with the default settings on the Express in my attempts to do this by hand).
I note that Apple has finally released a firmware upgrade purported to allow the Express to stream iTunes while permitting Internet access - something that I could not do earlier in the year and found most annoying. It was only circumstance that stopped me from returning the unit. As I said to my PUM at Microsoft, it was the first instance of a modern Apple product that I found completely inadequate - both in support and configuration. Hopefully, this has a happy ending. Hard for me to tell while my stereo is in storage.
I guess I'm a Longhorn tonight.. I'm watching the Rose Bowl (USC v. Texas) and since my cousin goes to Texas (and they are the underdogs) I thought I would root for them.
This has the prospect of being a cracking game and Texas has just scored to go up 9-7.