Photo Gallery – love the drowning pumpkin.

Up at fanblogs – NCAA College Football - Fanblogs.com: October 6 BCS Projections. Everyone plays tough games this week as we enter the meat of the conference schedules, will certainly be some dramatic changes in this come next monday.

Rich Tellshow’s projections are worth looking at also – he has a full strength of schedule model, I do not.

Great dinner at Place Pigalle this weekend – we hadn’t been there in like 10 years and it is still a great restaurant in a great setting. Certainly one of my top recommendations for a night out in Seattle.

Microsoft Tweaks Its Small Biz Server Plans – I ran small biz server for a while at my home and, well, it was just a big productivity suck. So much software, so much to configure, doing the simplest things was made hard. Maybe the new version is better tho the fact that they are upping the CAL limit seems to suggest they are moving up market with the product and away from simplicity.

Over at SportsBlog, Brian advances the argument that the SEC is the best. As one data point, he points out that the Pac-10 are beating each other up and therefore giving each other losses.

That is not really compelling data. I looked at the interconference records so far, starting from Rich Tellshow’s data, and then eliminating Div I-AA results. Here’s what I see:

The evidence suggests that the Big12, Pac10, Big10 are doing fine this year, while the SEC is just an average performer.

In the comments on my post about college football conference strength, Brian takes issue with a simple win/loss ranking, and he makes some good points. Rich Tellshow has done some further analysis on strength of schedules which is worth looking at – points to the Pac10 and Big10 as the strongest conferences so far this year.

I just installed this – Logitech > Cameras > QuickCam? Pro 4000 – and so far I am underwhelmed. Audio doesn’t seem to work – a USB problem? Comes with a mountain of shovelware, some of which seems to be nearly spyware. I tried to send video to an AIM buddy, and the software on my end to bring up my picklist of AIM buddies was very slow, and on the other end, it nearly hung the receiver’s machine. And they never saw a picture (firewall/nat problems?). I’ll try it with MSN Messenger next but not a great first 30 minutes.

Fittings, Inc. seems to be the place to get pneumatic gear (fittings, hose, valves, cylinders, etc) here in Seattle. They look a little odd at you when you start talking about building animated Halloween props, but they have all the right gear.

Technology Licensing - HyperSonic Sound – here’s one source for hypersonic sound systems which can deliver sound to a defined spot in a room – I’d love to include this in a halloween setup someday.

I’ve posted my current projections over at Fanblogs – NCAA College Football - Fanblogs.com: Sept 30 BCS Projections. Among the loser’s bracket (the single-loss teams), Georgia, USC, WSU, and Michigan are the leaders. I suspect that we will end up with two major unbeatens but if the unbeatens falter, look for these teams to sneak in. One of the crazy things about college football is – if you must lose, do it early in the season so that the memory fades.

Spent the weekend in LA. A great place to visit but wow am I glad I live in the Northwest – the smog, lack of greenery, and congestion are so wearing.

Best things we did in LA: Dinner at Mako – pan-asian cuisine served tapas-style. Great service and fun food. Lodged at the Four Seasons – great service, and a veritable freak show of celebrities, celebrity-wanna-bes, celebrity entourages, and plastic surgery victims.

Worst things we did in LA: Rodeo Drive looks like a war zone, don’t bother going until they finish the street work (Christmas? next year?). Farmer’s Market – a lousy market with lousy restaurants. Come up to Pike Place Market in Seattle instead. Duplex -- not Ben Stiller’s best work. Funny at times but overall pretty weak.

Welcome to Hard Times by E.L. Doctorow. My first Doctorow, recommended by my friend Tim. Great tale, no good deed goes unpunished, and boy is the central figure punished in this story. Replay by Ken Grimwood. Read again based on several recommendations. An introspective and very human look at a classic scifi theme – what would you do if you could live your life again? Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection is another good effort from Gardner Dozois. These collections are routinely good, and his annual review of sci fi publishing activity is always interesting and a source of potentially good reads. Finally, The Horned Man by Lasdun. I am just halfway thru, but this is a great story. Some of the blurbs compare it to Poe, the story itself references Kafka, a very compelling tale so far of a man in the grips of either a conspiracy or some dementia.

Forbes.com, in Best Sports Blogs, mentions Fanblogs as #3. Way to go guys!

Pac10 College Football - Fanblogs.com: Pride Came Then The Fall (The Story of USC) – USC clearly celebrated a little too soon this past weekend. From Sunday’s LA Times coverage of the game: ?When you get on a streak…you get to thinking it can never happen,? Carroll said. ?It can. You can get beat.?

Oregon fell prey to complacency as well this week. ?We were still thinking about the Michigan game and I don’t think we were fired up,? Oregon receiver Sammie Parker said. ?Everyone is usually fired up in the locker room, but we were really quiet today. We were just kind of waltzing around and I don’t think we were ready to play. ?

Now the Pac-10 is basically out of the national championship hunt. A lesson to all the other teams and conferences out there.

JD’s New Media Musings: September 24, 2003 Archives