BCS. We don’t get BCS ratings til mid-October but look at this – ESPN.com: NCF - Inside The BCS

BCS Projected Top 10 Three of the computers have not yet released their rankings this season, but based on what we have to work with, here is how the BCS Rankings would theoretically stand through games of Sept. 28. 1. Miami 2. Virginia Tech 3. Ohio State

Yee ha! Number 3. Go Bucks.

Buckeyes. Nice game yesterday – good thing Maurice was back. But the offense had a little more depth – Gamble played well, Krenzel started to hit receivers. The dispatch posts a nice photo gallery from each game by the way.

Two more games (Northwestern and SJ State) to work the kinks out before the brutal Penn State/Wisconsin back-to-back. That will be the measure of this team – can they focus and put away these first two teams they ought to beat, and then survive two tough opponents back-to-back. If the Buckeyes are still undefeated on Halloween then they will be quite a team.

Kudos to UW Admissions site. This chart is great, provides very clear direction to students about their likelihood of admission at the U. Last year’s version was even more detailed but this is still great. Wish every university did this.

WIFI Terminology. I love Ray Ozzie’s terminology for WIFI – 11G, 54G. Not sure if he invented or if that is common use somewhere.

War Ringing. Hey Tong you need to do this – a distinctive weblogger ring for your nokia. Another feature for our BlogPhone.

Regression Analysis. I used to run regressions all day long when I worked at Booz-Allen – trying to unearth manufacturing cost behaviour as a function of scale, complexity, etc. Back in those days I used a calculator or a package that was called StatGraphics on the pc, which i see is still around. I remember forcing Booz-Allen to buy IBM PC ATs so that we could run StatGraphics faster.

I just did my first regression in years. Just used the data analysis pak that comes with Excel. Really easy. Flipping variables and observations in and out of the set is not very easy, but the basics work fine. Charts aren’t very exciting either. I bet there is a better add-in to use – Google lists quite a few.

I was analyzing VC returns for most recent funds. What I learned – fully half the variation in returns to date is unexplained by quantitative variables (at least the ones I had at my disposal). Sector focus? Quality of VC staff? Hard to know. Of the rest, returns are most correlated with number of deals, and % of fund invested. Still wrapping my head around this but seems to say: don’t by shy about putting your money to work, and spread it around across a lot of deals (portfolio theory at work)?

Halloween. Time for the Halloween blog color makeover. This weekend is the beginning of the big house transformation. All the external carriage lights get flicker bulbs this weekend, and the floods and uplights go to blue filters. Probably start to deploy fog and sound cabling this weekend too.

A Blogging Phone. Tong and I were riffing today about what a great blogging phone would be. My phone today is a crappy part of my blog lifestyle. I can painfully enter content thru the tripletap/tegic interface and i can painfully see my blog thru the wap browser. But it is all so painful that i never do it. There is work to be done on the input side, and the viewing side, and then on the phone/blog integration side.

Input: There are a couple aspects of current and future phones that are most important. One, the phone is a voice device. Let me call in and place audio content on my blog. Some people are playing around with audio blog content – for instance Audio Blogger – so lets yoke that to a phone so that I can call in from anywhere and place content on the blog. Speech Reco and autoconversion to text would be a bonus (if the reco quality is good enough to be useful). Two, we need to do work on the button set on the phone. One path is to add a keyboard ala the Handspring Treo. There may be another path with a more limited set of blog buttons – the fully customizable skin platform of Wildseed will help here. Certainly the button space dedicated to WAP today could be repurposed to better use. Finally, the wan has a lot of latency and intermittency, so let’s make sure the post model is fully async – that is one of the best features of the blackberry – it doesn’t try to force a sync model on an async network.

Output: I don’t want to see full web pages on my phone. The screen just doesn’t permit that. And the screen is always going to be small, until we have some future magic display technology that unrolls or displays full pages on my retina or something that I am not going to bet on in the medium term. So we need to tailor blog viewing to fit the small screen. Some people have toyed around with voice rendering of content – for instance Blogger, VoiceXML, and TellMe Studio. I think there may be some value there but let’s start more simply and just have an RSS reader/aggregator built into the phone. RSS does a great job of stripping off all the formatting fluff and letting me see the pithy summary, exactly what the phone needs. Maybe you combine this with voice rendering and voice render RSS headlines. But RSS is the start.

Phone/Blog integration. Many cool things to do here. Autopost my call history to my blog – the phone numbers and friendly names as I decide. Autopopulate my phonebook with my blogrollers if they publish a phone number. Autopopulate my blogroll with my phonebook. Obviously configure the RSS aggregator on the PC side. Push my call forwarding rules to my blog and let me edit them there. Publish my voice mail as audio blog items (at my wish). Have the idle screen on my phone display scrolling RSS updates. There may be some cool presence information we could integrate back into our blogs.

I’d love to know what others think we could do to create a great blogging phone. Or how people would use such a device if one existed. I’m going to encourage my friends at Wildseed to put some of these ideas into their product plans.

250G Drives. Like Rich, I love the sound of these. But I was talking to someone who runs a large server farm and he pointed out that access times are not increasing with disk size, in fact they are driven down. His farm limits themselves to 70G drives with 15,500 RPM for best performance. With all the vidcap I am doing, this may become a real issue but the high RPM drives are quite expensive.

Ray Ozzie and Multi Modality. Couldn’t agree more with Ray’s argument – If all that you have is a hammer, everything looks like a browser. Everytime we’ve tried to cram more stuff into a single page, the resultant single page (for instance the msn portal page, or the outlook today page) becomes so general to be useless, or becomes bloated. It becomes useful only, as ray says, to people who are only online infrequently – certainly this is what the portal homepage has become.

Busy Halloween Prep Weekend. Busy busy making tombstones and other props – I love foamboard and stonelook paint from Home Depot (I can’t provide links as they don’t seem to sell them online). While a lot of people recommended electric carving knives as the way to do the largescale cutting of foamboard, I found mine to be ineffective on the 2” thick foamboard I bought. Also been horsing around with small motors to use in props – as recommended on some of the project lists pointed to on my halloween blog, small appliance motors work great in a lot of projects – for example orange juicer motors, easily available at Value Village. You just take out the pressure switch and you have a nice cheap durable motor.

From Lockergnome Windows Digest. Good stuff on lockergnome this week, saving a bunch of these here to look at later:

E-Mage for Web is a simple utility for creating HTML image galleries from pictures on your computer. HoeKey is a small program to assign hotkeys to various tasks. NetworkActiv Sniffer enables you to capture and analyze IP packets. iFind is a web search tool that allows you to query the major search engines and produces the results in a unique way. Winsonar is a simple process monitor that allows you to monitor which applications and background processes are currently running on your system. Notes By George! is a must-have replacement for Windows NotePad. Idex is a complete multimedia database and web publishing solution. Novobot is a smart headline viewer and news ticker that can dramatically improve your web browsing experience. Manage Your Workgroup. This Microsoft Knowledge Base article tells you how to create a script for Outlook 2002 that would allow you to perform tasks that are not possible using the regular features of the Rules Wizard. This Microsoft Knowledge Base article explains some of the features available for Windows XP by using NTFS version 3.1.

Volleyball Results. Big win against Bush last night – deep in this link – Eastside Journal prep sports results

Liz Ludwig 2 kills, 4 aces, 25 assists, 3 digs

OSU 23, Cincy 19. What a nailbiter. Wish we could swap QBs with Cincy. Krenzel is a solid player but the Ohio State passing game is weak weak weak.

Hollywood v Silicon Valley. Good article in the National Journal about the inter-industry politics. Kind of long but a good read.