OK it has taken me a week to wrap my head around the latest goings-on at OSU re the football program – Maurice’s claims, the car program (sub req’d), OSU’s invititation to the NCAA, Geiger and Tressel responses, people calling for life bans and death penalties, etc.

Man do I love college football, and OSU football in particular. It is in my blood. Been going to games at Ohio Stadium since I was a toddler. Father played and lettered for the Buckeyes. I have Woody’s autograph. Watched the ‘68 team win it all. Suffered thru the end of Woody’s career, the Bruce and Cooper years. Was at the Fiesta Bowl when the team won it all again two years ago. There is just nothing rational about my affection for the sport and for the Buckeyes.

But…Hmm…I have to say I have deep deep deep misgivings about the morality of college football. OSU brings in roughly $90M a year in athletic department revenue, and that is mostly from the football program. To keep things simple, let’s say that is $1M per scholarship football player per year (don’t whack on me about other sports, this is just a convenient ballpark figure).

That is just the on-the-books benefits to the university. You have the car program – 85 cars to everybody and their dog associated with the program. I am sure there are other benefits like this that come in to the staff. You have sponsorship and TV revenue for the top coaches. Is any of this controlled or limited by the NCAA?

And then the Big Ten and the NCAA make revenue off the top of TV packages and bowl/tournament proceeds.

Where does all this largess go? Great facilities. Support for other sports programs. Great salaries and comp packages for coaches, administrators, NCAA staff, Big10 staff. What flows to the players who we are all going to see? About a $15K annual benefit in the form of scholarship and room and board.

Do the players, who are the reason the money is coming in, have any representation in the allocation of the funds? No. Can they opt out of the system? Not really, the NFL won’t let them in. If you want to play football as an 18 or 19 year old with a chance to go to the NFL, you have to go to a college, whether you are interested in a college education or equipped to handle one.

Oh and by the way, while you are at college, you have a full time job called “playing football”. It consumes a ton of time. You have to fit in your academic responsibilities on the side, and good luck finding time for a job to earn some spending money.

So this is the system that responsible adults have created and are running for these young men. Huge benefits flowing to the administrators of the system and to other bystanders, no representation for the players. Does this seem moral at all?

And then we attack the players and destroy their careers if they somehow get some small extra benefit or extra help fighting their way thru college. With the huge inequity between value creation and value distribution, do we really believe that the system is not going to be leaky?

Honestly the rational thing for me to do is to quit supporting the sport, quit watching it. The system is taking terribly unfair advantage of young adults. I am not sure I can quit tho, the emotional connection is so huge.

Perhaps I need to start investigating reform measures and how to get involved in grass roots advocacy programs for the players. They deserve a lot more out of the system than they are getting today.

* Martin looks at remote desktop solutions – I did this a while ago and ended up just using the built-in Windows RDP stuff – has some shortcomings but it is generally stable and more performant than the others I tried. * Rich looks at cool ebay sites. * Rich and John’s book is doing well. Oh and a great review in the FT. * Rich looks at handtops. I’m a sucker for these. This Sony machine looks way cool. * John on simplicity (and a reminder to read the latest Economist technology quarterly) * Martin points to a good article on NW M&A trends. * Rich’s guide to the extended family of Ignition blogs * Rich’s best practices for audio encoding.

Since I can’t play Halo2 today, trying out other software:

* from Gadgetopia I found Editplus. Love the integrated FTP support. * Firefox 1.0 release – irresponsibly upgrading all machines now… * Furrygoat points to the MSFT error code lookup tool – as he says despite the title this tool works for all windows error codes. * Marc points to a new version of Clipmate. Ok I didn’t really try this one, just posted here because it reminded me of WFW and the mods we did to the clipboard to support network sharing of clipboard items – boy was that a waste of time. * Turborisk – a free classic. OK the opponents are braindead but it is free. * Photostory 3. Free. Haven’t tried yet but intend to… * Udell talks about MSH – this looks pretty cool. I waded thru the beta signup process and have my key so I can try later today.

And I’ll close on a good general point raised at Microsoft Monitor – There is no reason why back-up capabilities shouldn’t be built into digital content software, even if consumers don’t immediately use the function.

* Reputation Services – second interesting conversation in a week that I’ve seen/had on this topic. Hmm. * Peer to peer alarm systems. Fascinating – embedding of peer to peer functionality in everyday systems. * Mark Cuban on the music industry – a kajillion people have pointed to this, let’s hope some lawmakers read it.

I thought I’d slip by the MSFT company store today to grab a copy - ha ha ha ha ha ha. Wish I’d had a camera with me. I would have needed a machete to get within 100 yards of the door…

OK the box is coming to my house next thursday…again per someone who should know – “Call 1-800-COMCAST and order their dual-tuner DVR box. It comes with 120GB harddrive and has both HD and DVR integrated. It’ll cost you an extra $4.95/month and they’ll switch your current HD box.”

Been a busy couple of weeks…

* Comcast deploying MSFT software – how do I get on the trial? Will it work with my existing fairly new comcast pvr settop box? The comcast/moto provided software is so clunky, I would love an alternative. * Looks like a little ecosystem of media center addins is developing… * MSN remote record will let you remotely futz with your media center box…

It’s too bad that it is so hard for consumers to get their hands on all the above – waiting for your cable company to roll the features out is no way to kickstart a market, nor is depending on new pc purchases. Contrast with the Halo2 release which is going to be a huge hit – consumers have an easy way to acquire the product.

UPDATE: according to someone who should know re the comcast/msft offering, “This is not a trial ? it?s full fledged commercial deployment to over a million subscriber in Washington state. The software will be eventually downloaded to all set top boxes including the older stuff, but I would warmly recommend upgrading to Comcast?s new dual-tuner DVR with HD. It?s a steal at $9.95 a month and if you already have HD, it?s only $4.95. You can order it starting next week”. I can’t find it on the comcast web site yet but I’ll check daily.

Blindness by Jose Saramago – the author and book have received all kinds of gaudy awards and notices, including the Nobel Prize. I guess I just found this book to be somewhat engaging. The most notable thing about the book is the unusual writing style – thoughts and actions from the viewpoints of multiple characters are intermixed, it takes some fine parsing to sometimes figure out what was action, what was thought, and who was doing it. Is this Saramago’s normal style or was it crafted for this book to convey the confusion and disorientation caused by the world-wide blindness? As far as the story itself, a parable about human nature, how quickly we can descend, and how people can still maintain dignity and hope – well it was a bit of a yawner for me, I think this theme is better explored thru reading actual history books and biographies of world war II or other episodes.

OK I’ve finally got some pictures to post for Halloween. I took all of these with a Sony DSC-F828 using the nightshot feature – IR illumination. Hence the odd coloration but I think it captures better the mood of the evening. Clickthru for bigger images.

I have to say I am not very happy so far.

I am using the iPod with a windows laptop that has no cd drive. So first i downloaded iTunes 4.7 and installed (well, updated the version of iTunes that was on the machine).

then I attached the photo iPod. oops, doesn’t work, i also need to download the iPod updater, install, and reboot.

Reattach the iPod. It is auto updated. Then I need to detach it and plug it into the wall so it completes the reflash.

Reattach again. All my songs and photos are on a network drive and iTunes claims they are not available. Well they are. Looked all over iTunes for an option to force it to recheck availability. Never found anything, finally selected all of my tracks and told itunes to play them. after a looooong time, itunes finally decided all the songs were available.

detach and reattach the ipod photo. songs updated automatically. now i grovel thru the options dialogs to point it at my photos. looonnng time synching as it downconverts all my photos.

ok i don’t really want downconverted photos, i want the ipod to be a backup of all my photos. click the option to bring over full copies and resync.

ok finally i am ready. i hook the ipod photo up to my tv thru an aux port and try a photo slideshow. hmmm, the photos show up on the ipod photo, but on the tv i only see the first photo, it never changes.

sigh. will try again later today.

UPDATE: The iPod support site has a relevant discussion which seems to have made my slideshows work. So I am happier, the iPod is fully functional now. Still a total pain to set up tho.

All over the map here. Probably some pithy summary to write about how apps and data of the future should be partitioned and hosted.

* Adam Bosworth’s Weblog: Evolution in Action: The user interface customized itself to the users needs, location, and data in a dynamic way through the magic of dynamic page layout. Today, a full ten years later, most windows apps still don’t do that. But heck they are only 2 or 3 or 4 generations evolved. Services, in the last decade, may have evolved 600 times by now all in reaction to what they have learned directly from customer use. A pithy observation. * From windley.com, Amazon’s Simple Queue Service. Interesting that AMZN would offer such a general purpose service. * Jon Udell on the myth of the one true device. Very wise. People don’t really need or want convergence of devices – they do want convergence of data. * The twilight of Passport. Some people never thought MSFT should offer a general service for the web, some people thought Passport should just make it easy to have a single login for all MSFT sites – which is where it seems things are ending up. * Jon Udell under gmail’s hood. * I haven’t really dug into the newsgator online feature allowing ratings on your site but it seems like a great notion. I love the idea of spewing ratings around (for articles, restaurants, books, etc) and then letting someone aggregate them, rather than having to post my rating and content to someone else’s site. * From windley.com again, a web-based slide show system. Hmm. How long til people can give up powerpoint and go to a server model? * Beinsync -- one of the N services that lets you keep folders in sync across the net.

…is not the presidential results. I am sure the country will muddle through whoever is inhabiting that office.

The thing that is of most local, immediate importance to me is the failure of I-884, the education funding initiative. I’m suprised about the totality of the failure here. Obviously the electorate does not like new taxes. It is obviously going to take way more effort to increase our educational funding – it is going to take unified statewide political support – both parties, all major state and federal elected officials – as well as private sector leaders to ever push any significant educational funding package through.

* I like the thinking behind The Project PC: A New Windows Form Factor? – I’m not sure you need wholly different form factors for different tasks, but I suspect there are rich veins to mine here * Matrix Raid explained up at Tom’s. I love this idea, what a great use of all the cheap mips and gigs i have. * Silenx fans – 11 db fans – i need to move all my machines to these. * Sonos digital music system – seems cool but I really want my ipod to be the controller…or I want the controller to work like an ipod when i am not at home.

I’ve had comments off for 4-5 days while i started to move towards typepad registration required … but i loved not having to deal with comments anymore since they have been 99% crap (either spam or “i need a product key”). i concluded i didn’t need them at all. send me mail, or send me a trackback (until trackback spam causes me to turn that off).

* Martin gets his first Skype spam * And he is getting into alternative fuels – biodiesel from algae, alternative fuel price index, energy lifecycles, and more up there. * Johnza has great observations on Nike vs New Balance, and the Dave Mockett site – I agree, I love this site * Rich pointed me towards justblogit, another great firefox plugin. * Rich is also into ipod gear and ipod knockoffs. We’re a 4 iPod family now, I understand Rich’s desire to get on board. * Rich summarizes the reviews for the book, and John mentions the upcoming talk at Entrepreneur U. * Martin points towards Eliyon, this is a pretty cool tool for people searching.

Oh yeah, we raised our 3rd fund at ignition