April 2007

There’s a neat story on SFGate.com about the 101^st anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake. This year only one man who was there at the time made it to the festivities, 104-yr old Herbert Hamrol. As far as I’m concerned, the most fascinating thing about the article is not that this man is over a century old. It’s not even that the old guy got out of bed at 2:30 in the morning to make it to the ceremony. It’s that it notes Hamrol took the day off work to attend. What the hell?! Retire, dude!

From mefi: The 15 Most Outrageous Claims in Pop Music History. Hilarity abounds.

Tuesday Morning Quarterback scores again with 2010: The Mock Draft.

Are you a sports fan? Have you ever wondered just how accurate those clocks are? And can a ref — or anyone — really determine a hundredth of a second?

All three of the televisions in my house are connected to either a TiVo box or a DirecTV box. Both of these systems give me the option of displaying a “guide” in a grid right on the screen. If I want to see what else I can watch, I click to the guide and browse until I find something I like. That way I can search all I want without changing channels and stopping whatever is currently being shown from being recorded. I love this feature.

My girlfriend fiancée hates it. When she is watching TV she never uses the guide. She just punches the code for E! or VH1 and goes right to the channel. This bothers me both because she sometimes stops recording something by changing channels and also because it just feels inefficient. Why not just use the guide?

I can’t really get upset about it, though, because her method is the same one I use to read my blogs. I just can’t seem to get into feeds. RSS is certainly cool and I dig the ability to subscribe to the feeds of the sites I like. But I never do. I have a bookmark folder in FireFox called “Blogs” and that’s where I save the links of my favorite online reads. About once a day I scroll to the (incredibly cool) “Open All in Tabs” link in that bookmark folder and pop open all my blogs at once. This is definitely less efficient than using an RSS reader — or the system included with Firefox — and only checking the blogs which have been updated recently. Why in the world do I do it this way?

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At some point in your life, you’re going to be asked to find a bat stretcher. This is a terrific story.

I’ve gone through this experience myself, so I know the feeling. It happened to me while I was loading trucks on the midnight-to-ten shift for Old Dominion Freight Lines. One of the dock managers told me that I had about 30 feet worth of furniture to load onto a 28-foot trailer, and that I’d better find a trailer stretcher in time to get the truck on the road.

I’m also ashamed to admit that I’ve done this to every new guy at almost every place I’ve ever worked. At Infosearch Media we told junior tech support guys to find a cable stretcher. When I worked for Regeneration Technologies we told fresh meat that we had to find bone stretchers. When I rowed for Florida Crew we told the rookies that the only way they’d get to sit in a boat was if they found a rigger stretcher. Even at Subway we used to tell kids that the sandwiches were too short and they had to go grab a bread stretcher.

If you’ve got 10 friends and about 14,000 Post-It notes handy, you, too, could spend five hours and create a scene from Donkey Kong on the windows of a four-story building.

A week or so ago I found a link to the Griffin Mirrored Chrome Finish iPod case on Dan’s site. Anything that beautiful must be mine. I ordered one immediately and it arrived last night. The previous case I had — Agent18’s video-shield — was awesome, to be sure. After a year and a quarter, though, it had seen better days. It’s a testament to Agent18’s quality that my iPod doesn’t have a scratch on it. But my new chrome one is just rockin’ cool. Sweet.

The schedule for the University of Florida 2007 football season has been published. You can find it at the University Athletic Association website. They even give you the ability to import the schedule directly into Outlook!

It took me a few minutes to find it, of course. There is just a lot of stuff cluttering the site … Y’know … all about how we won the National Championship in basketball last year, and then the BCS Championship in football this year, and then the National Championship in basketball again this year.

Last night on my way home from work I stopped at La Bruschetta to pick up some of their excellent vegetable soup for my sick girlfriend fiancée. We’ve eaten at La Bruschetta a few dozen times over the years. It’s on Westwood Blvd, just on the other side of Santa Monica from my house. When I attempted to pay, the waiter — who is the owner’s son — wouldn’t let me. He said he could tell that Tricia was sick when she called to order and it was on the house. How great is that?

Unfortunately the chef accidentally gave me a bowl of some other soup. I didn’t realize it until I got home and she told me it was the wrong one. We called them and they apologized profusely. I jumped in the truck and returned to grab the correct soup. Since I was already there, I asked if they could make me some penne arrabiata, too. I forgot that the arrabiata is no longer on the menu there. Not only did he have the chef make me an order and add some breadsticks, but he also refused to let me pay and insisted that I take home two great bottles of wine. Now that is how you earn a good reputation.

Funny: If ancient Rome had the Internet…

Here’s a nice way to look at things: A man details his life with pie charts.

The feature I’d most like to see added to iTunes “smart playlist” building is the ability to exclude songs based on metadata. I like to listen to music that I haven’t heard in a long time and / or that I haven’t heard very often. The only problem is that when I choose to select songs based on the criteria “Least Often Played”, iTunes annoyingly adds its own sub-sort based on Artist. That means that my 50-track “smart” playlist will include, for example, 25 songs by Bruce Springsteen. That doesn’t give me much randomness and it drives me crazy.

What I should be able to do is create a “Recently Played” playlist (or use the existing one) and add a limiting factor to a separate playlist like this:

Artist is not in the playlist “Recently Played”.

That is what I’d really like.

Can there possibly ever have been a better time to be a Florida Gator? Basketball … then football … then basketball again?! I almost — almost — feel bad for Ohio State. We don’t even consider them “rivals”, but they must hate us now.

The Gators became the first team to go back-to-back since 1992 and the first ever to repeat with the same starting five.

They finished with a 10-game winning streak and haven’t lost a postseason game in 18 tries, counting sweeps at the Southeastern Conference tournaments the last two years.

The Florida Gators are, in sum, why we love college basketball.

Last year was for a ring. This year was for history and something as simple and pure as a teammate’s respect. That’s a legacy.

“Why go to Kentucky?” junior Corey Brewer said. “When’s the last time they won a national title?”

Also see: Eddie Munster Coaches Florida to Second Consecutive Championship