Cleaned out all my old Tivo season passes over the weekend and set up my new plan for this fall. Here’s the lineup:

* Monday: Prison Break, Medium, Weeds. Medium is a holdover from last year. Prison Break is a marginal new add – we don’t think it has found itself yet but we are hoping. Weeds is hilarious. * Tuesday: House, Law&Order SVU. We love the House character, and well SVU is an old favorite. * Wednesday: Lost. We didn’t get into this last year but will try this year. * Thursday: Alias, Without a Trace. Alias an old favorite, and the characters in Without a Trace have grown on us. * Friday: nothing. DVD night! * Saturdays: NCAA Football. * Sunday: Desparate Housewives. Total brain candy.

We’ll sample My Name is Earl, Everybody Hates Chris, The Apprentice:Martha Stewart based on the buzz for the first two, and well we are just curious about the reinvention of Martha.

Later in the season we’ll pick up 24 and The Sopranos.

Shows that didn’t make the list: numb3rs (we sampled last year but the pseudo-math babble annoys us), other law and order shows (we just don’t like the characters as much), malcolm ( a long time favorite but you can’t see it all), the apprentice (we’re tired of the donald), entourage (boring), cold case (we just never got hooked), smallville (we used to love this show but last season was a disaster).

Even with Tivo time compression, we watch way too much TV.

Great game, tough loss. I am a Vince Young believer now. As is the entire state of Ohio. I am also an A. J. Hawk believer, but then I was before the game.

Obviously OSU’s failure to convert on turnovers cost them the game. From my seat, I felt the offense had good balance. QB play was OK. The running game was OK. Where the team failed is getting the ball into the hands of Santonio and Teddy in positions to use their speed. Too often they were catching ball in close coverage or on a sideline or in a situation where they couldn’t get the 1 or 2 steps necessary to use their speed as a weapon. Seems like we needed more crossing routes, more option pitches, more plays designed to get these guys the ball when they are at speed. Their performance on returns certainly shows that these guys can hurt an opponent when they have just a little room to run.

You have to say tho that OSU is certainly just a hair’s breadth away from Texas in terms of ranking. A loss in September to the #2 team is not a terrible blow to national title aspirations. OSU won’t fall that far in the rankings and they will have time to make it up.

* Adrian is trying out EDGE for wireless connections. Sounds good. I am tired of futzing around with crappy public wifi access points. Couple it with a box like this and you can run your own hotspot where you need it. * Brad in a thread on .net and vcs from this summer. Like he says, we’re agnostic. We can’t afford to be technology bigots. * Martin points out that biodiesel is now cheaper here than regular diesel. Exciting times for energy investors. * I’m a sucker for optical illusions – nice one from phil. * Rich is in love with a9 maps and misquotes me. I think what I was really trying to say is Google is finally figuring out how to be sticky. They are providing a platform now that hundreds of apps are using. As they expand and get thousands of apps to use their underlying service, well that will be quite an asset. * People inside Microsoft took note of the aggressive recruiting that our friends at Judy’s Book and Mpire co-sponsored. Nice work guys! * Phil keeps cranking on his blackberry app – find jobs on your phone, and his app will be featured in an upcoming bberry hacks book. Nice.

So rich looked at some gaming pcs recently – the big brands of alien, voodoo, and falcon nw. I’m in the market soon for a new pc and looked at their sites. On the way, A9 and Google pointed me towards some other contenders: Hypersonic in New York, and WidowPC in Texas – the Widow guys are particularly aggressive at trying to get gaming pc search traffic.

And PC Mag mentions ABS and Velocity Micro as options.

The Widow systems seem to have the most extreme config options. I’m tempted to try them.

I sure hope that all the bloggers, who have so much time and energy to blast the emergency preparedness and emergency response of our various levels of government, have spent just as much time and energy actually trying to help the victims of this disaster.

Kudos to everyone who has helped. We gave at the American Red Cross. CharityNavigator has some other ideas as well. I understand some refugees are coming to the northwest and we’ll look for ways to help them as well.

I don’t know how effective our government response has been and I personally don’t care to dig into that right now. First job is to help people. None of us should expect the government to solve the problem, that is not the way the world works.

Latest fanblog poll up:

1. Southern California (11) 167 2. Texas (1) 155 3. Ohio St. 126 4. Tennessee 108 5. LSU 97 6. Michigan 96 7. Virginia Tech 95 8. Iowa 83 9. Georgia 82 10. Florida 53 11. Florida St. 52 12. Louisville 46 13. Arizona St. 19 14. Notre Dame 18

OK I am biased but I think this poll is a lot more valid than the Coaches’ or Writers’ polls. The Fanblogs folks (me included) actually see a lot of these games, certainly we see way more than the Coaches do.

Nice info found by Jon Udell – suggests that open source techniques are best for easily-specified tasks and not so good for highly creative tasks.

OK so this wasn’t much of an opponent for the Buckeyes. The game had the feel of a scrimmage, OSU seemed to be running at 90% speed.

OSU is going to need 3 or 4 balls in play to get all the talent involved on the offensive. A plethora of skill position players – 2 QBs, Ginn, several emerging tailbacks, a good receiving corps – gosh this team could be the most explosive offensive team in the Tressel era if they can get it all together.

And the first string defense did a nice job shutting down Miami but not sure how much of a test this was. The Miami QB was very rattled early.

Huston did a nice job replacing Nugent. Hit on every opportunity.

I have to rant a little about ABC/ESPN/DirecTV. Halfway thru the 3rd, ABC cuts away to the Oklahoma game. OK I kind of get it, the OSU game was over, and the Oklahoma game was a huge upset. But I am paying DirecTV for the College Gameplan package so I can see every freaking game, and did they unblock the OSU game? No, they did not.

And just to top it off, with 5 minutes to go in the Oklahoma game, the local affiliate switches to the start of the UW/Air Force game! Grrr….

Something to look at later – some guys replacing MIDI and DMX type connections with an IP-based protocol – open sound control. Seems a little early but worth tracking

Wow I love this – Get a job in 5 minutes at a Seattle venture-backed startup – what a cool idea. Ignition is an investor in 2 of the companies, and all three seem to have great things going on. I’m very interested to see how this event works out…

From the WSJ and other press, discussion of the mosaic feature coming to our TV screens – watch 8 football games at once.

I think this is just brilliant. Football fans will pay for this. And further keeps the DSL guys at bay – they can’t even deliver one video stream, let alone 8 simultaneous games.

There is so much discussion about hollywood content, drm, iptv, etc – we seem to forget that live sports may be a much more important driver of video in the home. Certainly in my household our video provider selections are driven by sports programming issues – college game packages, hdtv availability, etc.

Catching up with all of Martin’s postings:

* Responding to the negative energy balance FUD around biodiesel – good stuff * Seattle leading way to embrace Kyoto – great news. I think we’re way behind in fully embracing eco-friendly industrial policies in this country. Put it this way – if you want to defend your economy and markets from high growth, emerging producers – raising the eco-bar way high is probably a good thing to do. Emerging producers may be able to produce basic high volume goods cheaply, but it will take them a while to catch up with highly-engineered green goods and services. * Martin discovers process modelling software – I have no real use for these tools but they are incredibly fun to play with. * Current supply and demand numbers – fuel prices are only going one way. * From Bits to Barrels – Martin’s contribution to SNS, journaling his transformation into the John D. Rockefeller of the next century :). Hey martin, go read “Titan”.

I’m doing some research on automotive engineering education for high school and undergrad students. Wonder if anyone has any tips. The things I’ve found so far:

* The SAE student site is a fine place to look for information. Competitions, awards, internships – more college student focused. This supermileage contest looks fun. I wonder if there is an opportunity to create some biodiesel version of this project. * The SAE website for college selection has some good tips about programs. * Kettering University -- formerly GMI – a highly regarded school, but Flint is tough duty. OK I haven’t been to Flint in 17 years, maybe it has improved. * Of course UM has all kinds of programs – Transportation Research, ARC – but you have to cheer for the Wolverines and there are some lines I just can’t cross. OK full disclosure – I spent my freshman year in college at UM, I was a traitor to the state of Ohio, but I finally saw the light. * Down in NASCAR country, Clemson has a program. There must be other NASCAR state schools that have programs? * Colorado State from the SAE site is supposed to have a program of some sort. * The art center college of design in Pasadena has a program, more focused on aesthetics.

* Kiko – an ajax calendar. looks nice. Walt reviewed two others today – it’s an explosion of web calendars, it’s 1998 all over again. Not sure I understand why people will migrate to this new generation. I guess people are more trained to use web services now, and in broadband households, it is easy to always have the calendar live. * Via furrygoat, No-install.com – apps that you can put on usb keys. * Monad and WMI – cool. * Greasemonkeyed.com has like a jillion greasemonkey scripts to install. Playing around with book burro at the moment. * I am easily bought – I use a9.com frequently now. Not because it is great, but because i get another pi/2 percent discount on my amazon purchases. Same reason i got an Amazon Visa card. * Via cpumag I found Free-codecs.com and the K-lite mega codec pak – every freakin’ codec you could ever want. Videozilla looks interesting in this vein as well. * I should try viceversa to manage backups in the house. * I’m tempted to renew my MSDN sub so that I can get winfs beta – because who needs a stable filesystem? * Via geekman I found myprogs. Given my appetite for software, a community ranking site for software seems great. * also given all the software i install, why doesn’t windows have something as nice as ppm in perl for downloading addons/packages/etc? ppm is so easy. * Movable type style generator seems cool * JK on the run talks about something that i thought was just me – the impossiblity of doing system restores for tablet pcs . I have a tablet pc collecting dust for exactly this reason – after struggling through 2 system restores i gave up.

From my road trip last week:

* “Century rain by alistair reynolds”:amazon – Modern nanotech-infused space opera. A fine read but not memorable * “Saving faith by david baldacci”:amazon – a great pageturner.