StubHub: Ohio State at USC Tickets - TrojanWire. Nice Stubhub data on this weekend’s game. Best-selling game of this season, 3rd best selling college game in stubhub history. Nice to see that OSU is involved with 4 of the top 5 selling events ever.

Why not save the schadenfreude for Michigan? The obvious answer, understood by anyone who was around during the 1970s, is that USC broke more OSU hearts than anyone not named Schembechler. Three times during that decade, Ohio State lost a piece of the national championship by losing to the Trojans in the Rose Bowl. The less obvious but still accurate answer is that while OSU vs. Michigan is a border dispute, OSU vs. USC is a clash of cultures.

BuckeyeXtra - The Columbus Dispatch : Rob Oller commentary: OSU-USC rivalry goes deeper than football.

Nice writeup.  No less than the future of the free world is at stake.

Tickets arrived today.  Section 10 row 60.  Hot dog!

• Fan note: ESPN Gameday is coming - USC - OCRegister.com.  7am, not sure I am going to make it there
• Your guide to discussing the game with friends
• Oops – Small fires up the Trojans
• Beanie expected to play tho it seems a little iffy

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Details.  Pretty interesting price point.  If i was starting a company, why wouldn’t I equip everyone with these and ask them to use google docs and other cloud services?  Massive cost savings relative to the old way of doing things.

Technology Review: Does the U.S. Need a CTO?.  Interesting proposition.  What is the reason not to have one?  You can debate how active the CTO should be and how much the CTO should leave to market mechanisms, but wouldn’t it be reasonable to at least have someone leading the discussion of strategy?

• Plex Media Center for OS X.  Very nice looking and I always get sucked into the idea of media center software…but at the end of the day I don’t think I would use it
• Rich on Fission
• Rich on how to see invisible files
• Transmit.  Not sure it will displace filezilla for me

And then the 5d Mark II is supposed to be coming out.

Now it looks like maybe RED is going to try to turn the market on its ear? Wow.  Good time to be a customer.

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“The Black Swan”:amazon by Nassim Nichoias Taleb. Been on the shelf for a while, finally read it at the urging of one of my smartest friends. A quirky and insightful book. Some of the central thinking about the nature of uncertainty and the human inability to correctly assess risk and act on risk is very important; but as with most nonfiction books, this tome could have been at least 50% shorter, and the author’s style sometimes gets in the way of understanding. I don’t mind the snarky humour but the pedantic nature of some sections gets old – it is as if it is not enough that the reader open his mind to the writer’s ideas, but that the reader must accept them fully and displace all others. Not a tone I find endearing. But still, an important set of concepts to understand.

15 must-haves for the 2008 college football season! : Fanblogs College Football Blog. – very helpful list of sites for stats, results, injury reports, etc etc etc

A solid opening for the season, though just reinforced that we should never ever schedule FCS opponents, there is just no upside. My pregame pick was 44-0 so not feeling too bad.

* At the QB position, Boeckman looked efficient tho at times continues to underthrow the receiver – are the coaches really encouraging him to do this? Against tougher opponents this just seems dumb. Pryor looked great on runs and short passes – he can zip the ball. Not there yet on longer passes and at times made poor decisions to run under pressure. But clearly a talent. * Beanie, beanie, beanie. Honestly, why was he still playing at the time of his injury? The highest paid coach in the Big 10 should have had him out once he hit 100 yards. Hopefully it is just a sprain. The backup running backs played well. * Nice to see a shutout, nothing else would have served against this opponent * Nice to see some kicking practice

Upwards and onwards.

• Fluidforms :: Individual Design. – awesome topographical bowls and other objects.
• Drippable adhesives as sculpting medium.  There are some cool Halloween designs hiding in this idea
• Fire fighting gun.  Makes you want to have a fire nearby.
• Bits needed for making wooden train tracks – i just like the idea of doing this
• Recycled tire mulch – this actually seems like a disaster, i have a hard time believing all our plants would love this.
• Good looking LED desk lights
• Beyond the lunchpail and thermos.  The Mr Bento one is cool

OnyX 1.9.6 - MacUpdate. – useful utility.  Spotlight indices were exploding on me and consuming my whole hard disk, this tool made it easy to whack Spotlight.

OK I don’t know that I am going to pull off our regular Halloween setup this year. But if you want to set up a haunt in the neighborhood, well here is how I’d start. You can get crazy creative about the kind of scene you want to create – but nothing beats a graveyard. And to have a great graveyard you need to have tombstones.

You can buy tombstones from all kinds of retailers – Halloween specialty stores, Home Depot, garden stores, your drugstore will all carry some, mostly all with the message RIP. Some of these look good and there is nothing wrong with picking some up. The more elaborate ones can get spendy but they may be worth it.

But you can also make your own. Start with sheets of foamboard – use foamboard, not a styrofoam board which is crumbly and hard to glue together. This stuff is very carveable, you can cut out as simple or elaborate a form as you want. And you can carve designs in the face, you can bond pieces together to make pedestals (with the right glue), etc – here are some ideas, and some more. Personally I like to rough up the edges of mine a lot, and i even break some and reglue them for added ruggedness. BTW, wear a good mask when you do all this, fumes and particles come off the foamboard and it is probably a nasty biohazard.

For epitaphs, you can carve them in now prior to painting, or paint them on later, or mix the techniques. I do some of all. If you need ideas for epitaphs, well the web is full of them, just search for “epitaphs” or “funnny epitaphs”.

After you have shapes, you will need to paint. I use the cheapest paint I can find in the “Oops” bin at Home Depot as a base, and then finish with one of the various stone effect spray paints. Now, some of the stone effects don’t survive rain well, so experiment. And again, wear a mask, spray paint is nasty.

At this point you now have tombstones! Lean against walls, mount with stakes into the ground, whatever your surface allows. Note that they don’t weigh much, and if you are at a windy site, well, you are going to have a lot of movement.

In future posts I’ll layout simple lighting and sound plans.

Marginal Revolution: The Return of the Zombie: “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that there is only a 7% probability that someone born in 2000 will receive their Social Security benefits as promised today”

I don’t think anyone in the family is confused about this but in case you are…

The Flying Skull chomps like a flying Pac-man » Coolest Gadgets.  30 or 40 of these flying around the yard would be awesomely cheesy.