OK this has been a little rocky. First, some of the teams have their own private nets set up in the pits and you can glom onto those sometimes.

Otherwise, the Clubhouse has WIFI – free if you are a clubhouse member, $15 a day otherwise!! Nothing is free here at Miller. Once you are past that hurdle, you have to get on. In theory they let any device on and force you to a webpage where you enter a provided password and ID. Worked ok on my iphone. However, simply will not work on my MacBook – I can never get an address from DHCP.

So…I logged on with the iPhone, cloned the settings over on my Mac with a static address setup, switched off WIFI on the iPhone, and turned on WIFI on the MacBook. Tada!

I am betting not many people use the WIFI connection…

UPDATE: works better with Firefox3 RC1. I have to wade thru a bunch of insane invalid cert dialogs but i can get to the web login page on the mac. doesn’t work in safari tho.

Bumped into Nick in the pits, driving a car owned by Cantrell Motorsports of Kirkland with a Windows Live sponsorship. Nick was super gracious, let us get a picture in the car, and even offered to take on J as a garage worker tomorrow – a clear step up from flag duty! Someone once said “90% of life is just showing up” and boy is that true.

My god what a facility – brand spanking new, huge, a variety of viewing from plain bleachers to delux clubhouse. Great views from all kinds of places. And the pit activity today is fascinating with 3-4 classes of cars all mixing it up. Worth the trip.

Toolmonger » Blog Archive » Powder-Actuated Tools – a gunpowder-based power tool. awesome.

OK Yahoo could have been a Microsoft division, all of Microsoft’s internet ambitions would have been handed over to them, they would have been able to run semi-autonomously.

Or they can be ripped apart by private equity guys like Icahn – massive layoffs, milking their current traffic levels for cash flow, spinning off parts.

This is preferable? Did Yahoo management not foresee this??

Northshore Lacrosse Club, player stats. Go Overlake!

I had an HP4550 printer for years that I picked up at a liquidation event. It has been a workhorse but it died in the last 6 months, some ugly hardware problem. The cost to fix would have been 4x the cost of new printer so I just decided to junk it. The problem is, it is huge and weighs like 100 lbs and the recycling guys would have laughed at it. So I spent sunday taking it apart – taking every screw out, every piece apart. My gosh I now understand why this thing was so freaking expensive, hundreds and hundreds of screws and parts. It is now a giant pile of scrap metal and plastic that I can fit in the recycling bin and get rid of. I have new appreciation for the recyclers of the world.

OK if you are going to give money to disaster relief this week, might as well make sure you participate in the College Charity Bowl. OSU currently lagging but I have just done my part to fix that so stay tuned.

SportingNews.com - Your expert source for NCAA Football stats, scores, standings, and blogs from NCAA Football columnists

Rather than some sort of conspiracy, the APR and its sanctioned, slow strangulation of smaller schools unable to pay for massive academic support centers is the result of something even more unstoppable and faceless: bad policy.

Exactly. The big schools have the dollars to pay for staff and facilities to manage APR. Small schools do not. That is why 35 out of 37 schools punished this year come from non-BCS conferences. Just another face of the ridiculousness of the current “student-athlete” pretense.

Welcome to LaxPower – a colleague at Ohio State pointed me towards this, great computer rankings of every program in every state.

MAKE: Blog: Craftsman 1470 piece tool set - only $8,600 – early father’s day wish list. ha ha.

* Google Docs: Style Your Google Docs with CSS, wow, reminiscent of old word stylesheets * Monitoring airport client performance – thanks rich * WHatpage for rotating through start pages * A bunch of blogging tools and hints

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: Buckeyes top Dawgs - NCAA Football - CBSSports.com – OK ridiculously early but I can’t argue.

Getting geared up for this game already. A classic for so many reasons.

First of all, a great personal history with the Buckeyes – been at their games since I was a kid, we are alums, my father played for Woody, my grandfather was an alum.

Amd the schools have a great history, particularly in the Rose Bowl. My dad was on the team for the ‘55 win and national championship; I remember the great ‘69 and ‘74 wins, and still suffer from the ‘73, ‘75, ‘80, and ‘85 losses. I hated John McKay and his teams.

In this century, Jim Tressel and Pete Carroll have arguably been the best coaches with the best programs, albeit stylistically very differently – Tressel is buttoned-up, a solid midwestern values kind of guy. Pete is a flashy new media loosey-goosey kind of guy, and I have hated him.

So a great early season matchup this year, and particularly so, because a family member will now be attending USC! So I am going to have to cheer for the Trojans in every game except the OSU matchup – that is going to take some getting used to.