* Literary themes in Saturday’s game – “Where Ohio State heaves, Michigan hos; where the Wolverines yin, the Buckeyes yang. Where Troy Smith, um, Marcos, LaMarr Woodley Polos.” * How Ohio State Wins – “If - you know, if - OSU can get out into its familiar advantage, perhaps aided by a giveaway, Michigan’s odds of avoiding falling into a one-dimensional game are not significantly better than those of Texas or Iowa.” * Theories and Axioms – “Michigan is not going to run on 80% of its first downs, nor is it going to close up shop with a two-touchdown lead. I’ve tried to note the divergent philosophies Michigan employs against teams they respect and teams they think they can roll over.”

In case you need help getting in the mood, ESPNtv.com - ESPN Classic is showing past games daily, as well as one hour summaries of key games. I saw parts of the ‘69 loss again, damn we should have won that. And parts of the 74 12-10 OSU win.

Per KOMO-TV - Seattle, Washington - Program Schedule, The Game is not in HD in Seattle. Even tho the Cal/USC game later in the day is. ?? Is this a Seattle problem only, is The Game on in HD anywhere?

UPDATE: got an email response from KOMO, it will be on in HD, their website just isn’t correct. Whew.

* Classic jokes at Michigan Sucks and at rivalfanatics – Q: An OSU fan and a Michigan fan are in the third grade. Who’s bigger? A: The Michigan fan… he’s 18 years old. * T-shirts at MichiganSux, cafepress, MuckFichigan * Cafepress bumper sticker

Awesome – YouTube - Heisman Chase - Desert and New York – best rendering of a Buckeye ever.

Men of the Scarlet and Gray ? Blog Archive ? Data on common opponents – heartwarming for buckeye fans. Tho our turnover trend is a little disturbing.

(BTW if you are looking for non-Game posts this week, well don’t hold your breath).

Emulating various internet posts about Chuck Norris, the legend of Troy Smith. My favorite: “Troy Smith’s handshake grip is so strong he once inadvertantly turned a man into a diamond.”

I don’t think there is any Wolverine I hate more than Tim Biakabutuka – he made OSU look silly in ‘95. A classic game of the Cooper years, OSU came in undefeated and threw up. I still feel the pain.

Ohio is #1 in pumpkin production! Michigan is #2 in hitting deers with cars

Less than 6 days to the game of the millenium. I kind of prefer the Sporstline countdown timer over the The Columbus Dispatch countdown timer. And they differ by an hour?

As far as I can tell, neither of the Detroit papers have a countdown timer, they just aren’t serious about the game, which is a strike against them.

I’ve totally set aside my fiction and general nonfiction reading for a while. I’m totally focused on texts to support my materials science education.

* “Fundamentals of Microfabrication”:amazon by Madou. Great comprehensive overview of the MEMS field, tons of info, tho pretty scattered. A good reference but hard to read. * “Micromachined Transducers Sourcebook”:amazon by Kovacs. Much more readable, but not as current. But a nice job of walking you through the basics. * “Microsystems Design”:amazon by Senturia. So far I find this to be a little less essential than the Kovacs text tho there is some unique content in here. * “Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction”:amazon by Callister. Used in undergrad materials science courses, I am reading this just to refresh myself on the basics. Very readable, I am breezing through it, tho it probably helps that I have seen all the material at least once before.

We had a credit card stolen a while back and I was just on the phone with the bank clearing up one last transaction. The vendor, Steam, was claiming that the charge was valid. It took me about 2 minutes to convince the card issuer that the charge was not valid by simple reverse DNS of the IP addresses captured by Steam. Account signup happened at a location served by Adelphia (I have never been an Adelphia customer), and subsequent accesses all took place via two different Russian ISPs.

What surprises me is that neither Steam nor the card issuer (a huge national card issuer) was able to figure this out. It seems very automatable. And seems like card issuers could easily cut down on online fraud by looking at IP addresses – for myself, 99.99% of my transactions come from my work or home machines with fairly stable IP address histories, at least at the subdomain level. Not foolproof of course, and I do occasionally do transactions from other locations, but it seems like another good piece of info to consider when assessing the validity of a particular transaction.

As I previously mentioned I’ve been taking a graduate course in MEMS design – A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way: The ass-kicking began this weekend in my re-education process – and the analytics have been the toughest thing to recover after 20+ years out of school.

Midterm yesterday. Analytical problems on comb drives (involves mechanical and capacitive behaviour analysis), on MUMPS structures, etc. I can take some solace in the fact that I had an idea how to approach every problem, I got an answer down, and the youngsters didn’t get done dramatically before me – only 1-2 people out of 50 got done early. I know I blew 1 question at least tho on further thinking.

Fortunately no final in the class, just a team project which I am pretty excited about – good team with a set of experienced people, with expertises spanning mechanical and electrical domains.

Also looking at winter courses – Nanophotonics (EE 539c) or Electronic and Optical Structures of Engineering Materiials (MSE 565). The MSE course is a little more fundamental and probably my first choice.

Halloween Masks? Better! Foam Latex Prosthetics, Make-up, Costumes: The Scream Team – some of this is a little too gruesome for my taste but some good stuff in here.