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Hope Springs

As I write this, with the late evening games of Round 1 yet to conclude, I stand tied for first in my bracket competition. Come on, buckets, I could use the spare dough! I am officially worried by the Clemson Tigers at this second, however. A Tiger beats a Wildcat every time, though, so I am sure they’ll pull through. I don’t care how feisty that Wildcat is.

I’m happy to see the UT men’s basketball team put together a good season, and I thought the game against Memphis was a classic. I hope to see them do well, even though I picked them to get upset early. That way I at least get something to be happy about either way.

The Fans of the ACC 2008 season is about to get underway. It seems that there’s always something rocky during the off-season, and I’m considering having this be my last year as commissioner so that I can just enjoy playing for a change, but who knows.

I like the way my team looks—but I did last year as well and finished 8th out of ten! I drafted horribly and made some terrible trades. I tried to learn from my mistakes and put together a better off-season this time. You can check out my team if you like.

I may not have football, but it’s a good looking spring right now.

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Sponsor-Only Security at the 2012 London Olympics

Because it’s not like they ever took hostages at an Olympic games.

(Via Schneier on Security.)

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Quickies

  • Megan and I redid the kitchen! It’s mostly her doing, although I did a lot of the furniture assembly. We repainted and redecorated. In somewhat related news, is there some place like Flickr and SmugMug that’s actually free?
  • I thought the holidays went really well, although I personally was sick for most of Thanksgiving day and parts of the surrounding days. I am mostly over it now, but not completely. Yuck.
  • I was effectively eliminated from playoff contention in my one fantasy football league. That’s tough to take, because I feel like the top three teams are all in my division, and I just didn’t get the breaks this year. If I find myself in a football league half as enjoyable as the Fans of the ACC fantasy baseball league that I am in—that’ll be a happy day.
  • That fact has in no way damaged my enjoyment of this college football season, which is the most enjoyable in my memory—besides Tennessee’s 1997 championship, of course.
  • I think Jeremy and I are really getting into some fruitful discussion areas. Changing minds, both your own and others, is tough!
  • Thanks to this software, my iPod and I are finally getting along somewhat. I want to like it, I do, it’s a great piece of hardware but I much preferred loading up my iRiver—it just did what I wanted.
  • I’ve been getting more exposure to Zimbra at work since we’re transitioning to a hosted service for our e-mail. That is one slick program! I’m excited that I might actually be able to use a calendar. Neither Google’s nor Yahoo!’s ever stuck for me.
  • I’m going to see if my sister can turn out a design for my redesign. Then, even if that works, I’ll have to do the CSS part. Here’s hoping! After that, I’ll still have to do some work to get the categories into Mephisto ready shape. But I’m excited and ready to make the switch.
  • As far as CISV goes, a new web design is in store there, and I think it’s really good. That’ll be a fun week to move the CISV USA site to something from the 21st century.
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Quickies

  • Megan’s blogging a lot more than I am now. How embarrassing! But I couldn’t be happier at the prospect, since we’re already talking about how differently we value and treat our memories.
  • We’ve decided on a couple of wedding details. We’re getting married at the Dominion Club here in Richmond. Megan has already bought her dress, and my sister has already bought one of the bridesmaid dresses, since one of the colors has also been selected. We’re working on getting the budget for the food put together, then a lot of other pieces will fall into place.
  • I’ve fiddled around with the blog software that powers this blog, and, as much as I’d like to say otherwise, I’m likely to be on this software for the near future.
  • I am very happy having moved my Tracks installation to my friend Ryan’s GTDTracks service. It’s very affordable, considering I was spending much more than its monthly cost trying to keep it running on my own machine at home.
  • My favorite Wiki is available for free to non-profits. I’ve chosen Rose Hosting since they offered Debian Sarge at a reasonable monthly rate. Hopefully, CISV will finally have a wiki that won’t scare people and that can keep out the thugs.
  • I’m hopeful that the CISV USA website redesign project will begin relatively soon. We’re waiting on a design from International.
  • I don’t think that I’ve announced that I’m in the most fun fantasy league I’ve ever been in. I’m also doing quite alright. My goal was to score 55 points (in a 10-team league, that’s moderately above average) and to finish “in the pack”. I’m a little behind that, currently, but at one point I was in third place. I’ve got a better team for the future than I thought I would have. My off-season will now be visited by monsters.
  • I had a great time during a visit with Jeremy last week. I have been a bit concerned at various times during our past discussions that attempting to merge our outlooks would result in more heat than light, but now I’m more hopeful that we’ll both learn a lot from the process.
  • I am, of course, salivating at the prospect of another football season. Especially one where I’ll get to see my first UVA Cavaliers game. I’ll be at the Thursday night game, Oct. 19, against the North Carolina Tar Heels.
  • Last night’s UT-Florida game is just another example of why I love college football. Dramatic, huge momentum changes, great football played by young men on both sides, lots of mental toughness, and a bunch of great stories. I loved it, even if UT did take the loss.
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Flagellation

My longest absence ever from the blog, more than a month and a half. I can only say that I was needed elsewhere. I’ve been reminded recently about how I used to post about the smallest things, like the fact that it’s so much easier to appreciate Lennox Lewis’s career now that the heavyweight division is horrible. But these thoughts wither and die as I’m on my way from one place to another and I just haven’t gotten them up. Fortunately, or unfortunately, no one cares anyway. But, anyway, at least the drought is over now.

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Latest comments

Jim Van Fleet on What's Now In Rails: Information for the Beginner on Nov 17, 2008 at 03:57 PM

suprails was something that I tried to remember the name of, but couldn’t at posting time.

Jim Van Fleet

Jeremy on What's Now In Rails: Information for the Beginner on Nov 09, 2008 at 09:01 PM

Many people do not feel comfortable “attacking” a library formally in a comment thread, but will indicate that they had a slow or difficult time using some library. That is useful information, if you are willing to wait through the noise.

That’s actually a really good point, but the signal-to-noise ratio is just too high for me personally. They should be tweeting with ”#rails” so all that info can be processed.

Jeremy

Jim Van Fleet on What's Now In Rails: Information for the Beginner on Nov 09, 2008 at 12:51 PM

Jeremy is right about not using Twitter for in-depth analysis. But it is excellent for finding out when new things are released (not all of us empty our feedreaders, JW!) as well as impressions of use. Many people do not feel comfortable “attacking” a library formally in a comment thread, but will indicate that they had a slow or difficult time using some library. That is useful information, if you are willing to wait through the noise.

That said, just today at lunch, I was wondering if I should be either using it a lot less or go on a massive unfollow-spree.

Jim Van Fleet

Peter Braswell on What's Now In Rails: Information for the Beginner on Nov 08, 2008 at 08:28 AM

Jim, I really appreciate you pulling this together. It’s nice to have aggregated information from an informed expert as opposed to running down blind alleys from Google searches. THANKS!

Peter Braswell

Jeremy on What's Now In Rails: Information for the Beginner on Nov 07, 2008 at 05:27 PM

I find monitoring del.icio.us for the ruby and rails tags to be most helpful (in addition to reading Cooper’s and Daigle’s blogs). To me, following people on twitter for their technical knowledge is a complete waste of time (you can’t expect insight from microblogging), but different strokes I suppose.

Enjoy Rubyconf!

Jeremy