I am a wreck. What a game. OSU certainly has used up their 9 lives. My top observations:

• Krenzel continues to be spotty. Smart in the first half, throwing short controlled passes. Missed a lot in the second half. And then yet again, cool as a cucumber and efficient in the OT.
• OSU still has no running game. The loss of Stepanovich at center is probably hurting. But clearly Hall and Ross are not guys who can bang it up the middle and find a hole. They look OK when they have some room to run, OSU needs to install some option plays, more draws and delays, more screens.
• NC State slowed down the OSU defense with all their crazy sets and motion. OSU eventually adjusted but this was a tough offense to defend. And of course Rivers is just a great QB.
• For the second week in a row, Will Smith embarrassed OSU with late hits on the QB. Coach Tressel, you need to sit him for a half or a game. He is not a great representative of the university.
• Punt returns are a rare breed without the halo rule. The punt has become a defensive play now, a chance to plant your opponent deep in their territory or even get a turnover. The threat of a big runback is substantially reduced.
• Obviously the lack of any kind of running game is killing OSU. Most noticeable at the end of the second half when OSU got the ball with 3 minutes to go, and could only burn up one minute. NC State gets the ball back, runs the 2 minute drill to perfection, and entered the locker room on a high note. And at the end of the game, the OSU defense was clearly tired. OSU must figure out a way soon to control the ball.
• OSU received some huge gifts. The fumble on the kickoff in the first half. The interception in the 2nd half which hit the ground, but was granted to OSU. The refs soon made that one up by granting the ball back to NC State on a fumble which looked like it was caused by the ground.
• In return, OSU tried to give the game back to NC State thru penalties. I think I counted 4 first downs thru penalties that OSU gave to NC State in the overtimes.
• Why NC State ran 2 QB sneaks on their final possession, none of us will ever understand. Especially when OSU couldn’t cover the receivers, or was giving up pass interference calls on every down.

Mike points to Steve Gibson’s DCOMbobulator – Life of a one-man IT department – very helpful tool and site; steve is a great citizen.

A feature request for my aggregator – NewsGator - the RSS news aggregator for Outlook – I’d like to be easily able to see the RSS feeds of the sites to which I am subscribed. E.G. I have a subscription to the feed from MediaSavvy, I’d like to also see the feeds from the blogroll on MediaSavvy. I want my aggregator to auto-discover the list of feeds and go gather their most recent headlines on my demand.

Back in the day when I used to actually visit blogs, it was easy to discover new websites by occasionally walking thru their blogrolls. With aggregators, I lose that behaviour as I rarely go to visit the sites, and so my reading list gets stale and static.

Reading Jon Udell’s site reminded me of this new feature of Exchange 2003 – Inside RPC-over-HTTP. Seems great for users, absolutely terrible tho for the VPN market – seems to me like this will decimate the demand for VPNs.

Nielsen//NetRatings: The global standard for digital media measurement and analysis. – good source of high level summary data on net usage. Home broadband user base grew 49% year over year!

Blue’s News: Message Board – the upcoming release of Half-life 2 is causing a lot of frenzy in the video card industry. Gabe at Valve currently seems to recommend the ATI 9800, tho Nvidia is spinning hard. It is fascinating that the release of a single game can cause so much angst, and as a user it is great to see these vendors trying to kill each other because I am going to get much faster video cards as a result.

Meanwhile Valve has released the new Steam client and the website is DOA, i assume it is getting hammered with traffic, so that is good for Valve.

It’s surprising to us how little ongoing coverage there has been of the death at Disneyland last week. Maybe because we were just there, and just on the ride, we expected to see more coverage and concern. We’ve see no outrage from the family of the victim or from the other injured parties. Disney must be bending over backwards to help them all?

meryl’s notes: September 2003 Archives – some good ideas pointed to at listamatic.

We live in fascinating times. The channel for recorded music is collapsing. JD’s New Media Musings points to Moby’s advice for the music industry, all good points. I am especially intrigued by his counsel to stop spending large sums to produce music and videos. As music prices drop, it would seem like we’ll have to get back to fairly raw recordings with very little production, and videos will either have to get very simple, or alternatively will be funded in other ways – by advertisers, as part of going to a movie, etc.

Personally I think this is all good, we get back to music for the sake of music. The funding for all the other ancillary “value-add” activities around the music is just going to dry up. 100 years ago there was no recorded music industry – you went out and listened to artists if you wanted music. It would not be terrible if we ended up listening to more live music.

SEC College Football - Fanblogs.com: Vandy Eliminates Athletic Department – this seems dumb. Running an athletic program is a significant body of work, quite distinct from that of running an educational program. NCAA rules and regulations, budgeting, facilities, recruiting – it is all different than what your normal university administrators deal with. One way or another you are going to have dedicated staff focusing on the issues; denying their existence is not going to help the quality or professionalism of the effort.

Here’s the transcript – -- Andy seems quite testy in the interview, this has clearly been a trying process for the school. And I am sure he is still worried about the implications for the school and program – there is a strong denial in the interview that this will affect the school in any way but I am sure it is a concern.

Found via a comment on Rich’s site – Venture capital is hazardous to your company’s health in 9 out of 10 cases – ouch! On the other hand, maybe he isn’t talking about me:

With the first dollar of venture capital accepted the entrepreneur?s control slips away to 28-year-old MBA wonder-boys with only the shallowest of operating experience.

The age 28 is long behind me, I was off in the shallow end of the operating pool at that time, hopefully I’ve learned something.

Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog – gosh it seems like there must be some great software companies to build in this space.

Scott Hanselman’s Weblog : Scott Hanselman’s Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tools List – what a great list of utilities. I am still perusing the list. Whiteboard Photo looks like a killer.

Big 10 College Football - Fanblogs.com: Clarett done at OSU