* GM Chairman Scares Execs with Actual Expectations. * Wondermark on trip planning. Guilty. * Charting the Dow. Not sure this is supposed to be funny. How is this different than reading tea leaves or palmistry?

My picks this week (straight up):

* South Carolina vs. NC State (Thursday). SC. I’m tempted towards NC State as SC always lets me down. * Oregon vs. Boise State (Thursday). Oregon. Hoping for a good game. * Navy vs. Ohio State. OSU. I expect Navy to cover the spread tho, Tressel won’t show all his cards in this game. * Oklahoma vs. BYU. Oklahoma. Oklahoma just has too much. * Virginia Tech vs. Alabama. Bama. Tho I will be pulling for VT, I’m not a Saban lover. * Georgia vs. Oklahoma State. Georgia. I refuse to support T Boone Pickens’ attempt to establish Okie State as the common meaning of OSU. We must crush any attempt of this program to rise out of the murk of mediocrity. * Minnesota vs. Syracuse. Syracuse. This is a brutal game to pick. Going with the home team but these are two programs with all kinds of frothy expectations amongst their fan bases, and yet we all know they are going to crash hard. * Mizzou vs. Illinois. Missouri. Why does everyone love Juice? By the end of the Big10 season, he will be like the 5th best QB in the big 10. * Stanford vs. Washington State. Stanford. All the smart writers think Stanford is really stepping up, but not sure I can buy that. However they should have no problem with a pitiful WSU. * Maryland vs California. Cal. I don’t know that I have ever picked a Cal game right tho, they continually disappoint. * San Jose State vs. USC. USC. But SJSU covers the spread as the USC team starts to learn about itself. * Mississippi vs. Memphis (Sunday). Ole Miss. Tho I am not on the crazy Ole Miss bandwagon. * Colorado State vs. Colorado (Sunday). Col State. Another tough one to pick, Colorado has so often disappointed. * Miami FL vs Florida State (Monday). FSU. Sad but true, I don’t care about either of these programs any more. I can’t even get up the energy to hate them. Oregon State, Minnesota, Rutgers all seem more relevant, and wow that is sad. * Cincinnati vs. Rutgers (Monday). Rutgers. No idea so go with home team.

Will you see all 120 teams play in 2009? : Fanblogs College Football Blog. I’ve been wondering about this as a goal as well – just seeing a quarter of play from each team. Over 14 weeks of regular season, this is just seeing 4+ games a weekend IF you can magically pick all the games that cover all the teams. Going to need to pay careful attention to the Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday night games to pick up all the lesser programs.

This weekend alone I will aspire to see parts of

* South Carolina/NC State * Utah/Utah State * Oregon/Boise State * Minnesota/Syracuse * Ohio State/Navy * Georgia/Ok State * SJSU/USC * Missouri/Illinois * Oklahoma/BYU * Alabama/VT * Maryland/Cal * LSU/UW * Colorado State/UC * Cincy/Rutgers * Miami FL/FSU

OK I probably won’t get all but that would be 30 teams right there. Of course the only somewhat obscure programs would be Utah State, SJSU, and Colorado State.

Perhaps my goal should be to just see the BCS teams – that is 66 teams, a very doable goal. And probably less painful than having to watch lower-division Sunbelt conference teams.

* Touchable holography. Uses tracking cameras and directed ultrasound to create interaction and physical sensation. Cool demo. * Algortihmatic - online library of algorithms and IDE. Cool tho limited. * The LED’s dark secret. Droop in LED performance to be overcome for broader use. * Plasmobots – “their previous research has already proved the ability of the mould to have computational abilities”. * Ford Mike Rowe video. I didn’t realize they automatically tracked every single assembly operations through the tools. Fascinating. * Brad Feld’s open office hours. An intriguing idea. Commendable.

I’m having problems getting a clean Comcast signal to one room in my house. Used to work fine but at about the time of the digital transition, the signal started to fail. Comcast can see and query the cablecard but we can’t get any channel signals through. All the coax and cat5 cabling in our house goes back to a central wiring closet; the ethernet network in the room in question works fine at 1 gigabit but for some reason the coax/cable network fails.

Why does the protocol/modulation scheme for cable fail? Why can the device be addressed and queried but we can’t see channels? Why do they need to put a signal amplifier on the line – i never need to do this for ethernet? Is comcast still using some analog scheme to send the signals across? This just seems odd and ridiculously archaic. And the crazy pairing nonsense for cablecards with all kinds of identifiers needed to be traded back and forth – it makes DHCP and mac addresses look positively simple.

I know I could go read about 64QAM and 256QAM and Cablelabs and all kinds of other stuff to get all smartened up about this but I am frankly tired of dealing with it. I’ve been ignoring the verizon fios offering in our neighborhood but if it would let me junk the coax and move to all cat5/ip i might consider….

* Fold out shelving system. Wow this is just awesome looking. * Kurt’s key list of propbuilding tools. * Rich and Bob’s Tripod reco – Gitzo1541T and the Really Right Stuff BH-40LR. I actually need this. * Hangman light. Awesome tho I think the rest of the family might object.

Finally here. Here’s your reading for the day:

* Navy Football – know your enemy. Navy Sports, The BirdDog. * OSU Depth chart out and other goodies in the weekly PDF. * Because I can’t help it, a little USC preview – how to attack Barkley.

Navy opens at a 21.5 point underdog. I don’t think OSU beats the spread, Tressel will keep the plan conservative. OSU 28, Navy 14.

Some airplane reads:

* “Maelstrom”:amazon by Peter Watts. World at risk as cyber/nano/bio advancements spin out of control, helped by misguided human conspirators. The unique part of this tale is the abuse backstory of the protagonist and how that affects her actions. Amazon says 4 stars, might be a bit rich, but a solid effort. * “Third Degree”:amazon by Greg Iles. OK suspense tale, a control freak rips apart family when events happen out of his control. I am not sure why I bought, Amazon says 3 stars, that is probably about right. * “T is for Trespass”:amazon by Sue Grafton. First I’ve read in this series, perhaps that was a mistake. When do authors really hit their stride in a detective series? I’d imagine it is probably in the 4th or 5th book, not the 20th. The characters and cases are mundane, the detective misses massive issues to keep the story going, the plot really flags through the middle 50% of the book, this just doesn’t feel like a lot of effort went into it. I was really bored halfway through. Amazon says 4 stars, I’d say 2. Perhaps if I had read others in the series and was familiar with and invested in the characters, I would feel differently.

These labels are awesome. Hat tip to Kurt

• I used Shazam to discover Blinding by Florence And The Machine #shazam #
• Worried…LA is growing on me #
• RT @MartinGTobias: Thanks @troyd for the family computer support flowchart http://bit.ly/wojUQ I wish more people used it! #
• RT @edsbs: A year old, but timeless in its utility: http://bit.ly/TDg1W #
• RT @BlockONation: “Take the Field Tribute” – Ohio State vs. Navy – Please help spread the word! – http://bit.ly/HcPTM #
• RT @StatSheet: I often revisit this quote to keep my work ethic in perspective: “Don’t confuse activity with achievement.” -John Wooden #
• RT @smartfootball: …USC starting a freshman in Barkley is not a good thing…bodes poorly #
• RT @BlockONation: Looking Back—Michigan Football 2008 From a Buckeye’s Perspective – http://bit.ly/2dYBzX #
• RT @schadjoe: #USC WR Ronald Johnson (broken clavicle) 6 to 8 weeks. Big loss for #Trojans. #

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* WPTouch plugin for wordpress is awesome. check out theludwigs.com from your iphone. * Messing around with Slingbox finally. Works well tho I had to massively reconfig home network to get rid of routers – configuring to get through one router was reasonable; getting through two was nearly impossible; getting through the three I had in place would have required several PhDs. * Download Manager Tweak. Probably prefer download statusbar * Vacuum your firefox db. No idea if this actually did anything. Didn’t seem to make Firefox explode so I guess that is a plus. * Polymath. Lots of great links to math formatting services for the web. * Gliffy plugin for wordpress. Seems like it could be useful as well.

My Macbook had a motherboard failure two weeks ago. Both USB ports on left side blown, wifi chipset blown. (Blame Tekkcharge but that is another discussion). Discovered this at about 4pm on a Wednesday, went to Apple.com and scheduled a genius bar appointment at 830pm same day.

At 830 I roll into the Bellevue Square Apple store, in 30 seconds someone approaches me and logs me in for my appointment. In a few minutes I am at the desk describing my problem. The genius asked me if I had Applecare, I sheepishly admitted not. Crap, I am going to have to pay for this. Wait says the genius, perhaps your MacBook Pro has the faulty NVidia chipset, in which case it is a free warranty motherboard replacement! And indeed, my machine fails the NVidia stress test, so free motherboard for me! The genius says this will in all likelihood fix my problem – but if not, not to worry, once Apple has cracked the case and messed with the motherboard, if the system is still failing, it is now their responsibility!!! Awesomeness.

Two days later they called and said the motherboard had been replaced but one of my RAM sticks was faulty, and so they were going to replace that as well. For free.

Within a week I got the machine back. New motherboard. New RAM stick. My hard disk and software safely untouched. Total cost to me: $0. The only complication was discovering that Aperture would not run, the activation logic ties the product guid to the processor guid, and so Aperture felt it was not a licensed install. Apple.com again, scheduled a callback, in one minute an Apple rep called and we were finally able to resolve (they were going to get me a new activation once we established my proof of ownership, but I eventually found the original install media).

OK so the MacBook Pro is way more expensive than a PC but I just got hundreds of dollars of parts and service out of warranty for free. And, despite a tragic hardware error, I lost no data, and had the machine fixed locally in under a week. Basically the extra costs for the Mac represent prepaid parts, prepaid service, and retail store staffing to make the lifetime experience of owning a Mac painless.

I don’t even know how to replicate this in the PC world. BestBuy is the remaining significant retailer of PCs. And the service levels are dramatically different. You can’t get much in the way of service there, when we had a broken PC purchased through BestBuy it got shipped away for repair, and took weeks. And just the simplest store experience in BestBuy is worlds different. I was in BestBuy this morning to buy a microSD card reader. I found what I wanted easily enough and went to the checkout. There were two checkers working, each busy. 4 of us in line waiting to checkout. One checker finished with her customer, and apparently decided it was breaktime, and left her station and wandered away. 4 of us in line waiting with money in hand, just needing someone to give it to. The other checker was involved in some complicated transaction so we wait and wait. Meanwhile there are 10s of BestBuy employees walking through the store all doing super important things. I finally spot one and yell across 30 feet of floorspace “Hey, can we get some checkout help here, 4 of us are waiting?” She looks around for someone to help us and goes back to what she was doing. !!!! Finally she comes over and starts to help check us out.

If I was running a retail business, I think I would instruct my employees that job 1 is taking money from people who want to give it to us. Apparently that is not the BestBuy priority. I really can’t fathom this, what does BestBuy tell its employees to do all day??

It is not that PC hardware is necessarily terrible (some of it is but some is just fine), or that the software on it is awful (though again some of it is), but the entire experience from purchase through support over the lifetime of the PC is dramatically worse than the experience available from Apple. As a smart guy said to me recently, “PCs are now throwaway”, when they quit working, you really have no choice but to just chuck it in the trash.

Enough ranting. Glad my MacBook is back humming.

grimvisions on Etsy - Grimvisions - Where Grim Visions Become Dark Art – nice pieces from Kurt for the halloween season. I’ve seen his work in person, very very impressive.

I guess I have been a little inattentive to my home network config. I’ve been installing a Slingbox and installation keeps dying during router config. I suspected that I had some unnecessary router complexity. As I dug in, I realized I was putting the Slingbox behind 3 (!) routers – the Moto cablemodem, a Linksys in the wiring closet distributing out to house, and a Dlink wired/wireless in the room with the Slingbox. The odds of me configuring all the port mapping/forwarding correctly for this chain of routers are basically zero. Time to simplify…

• Math wonks figure out active cloaking – http://bit.ly/Idfj6 #
• Brains have built-in crumple zone – http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/braincushion/ #
• Stimulus in action – driving thru I-5 construction zone, passing semi loaded with crushed clunkers. #

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