Checksum Arcanius

I implemented Tim’s suggested tweaks to improve the look of the page in IE. I’m not sure how far down that road I want to go though. After all, when someone asks me why it looks a little funny, I can tell tehm that they are simply using the wrong browser, and set them straight. It just might be a great way to spead Firefox.

A nice little program I discovered at work, Tray It! lets you minimize any window to the system tray. Its free, small, unobstrusive, and in my case, ridiculously useful. There are a few programs that offer the same abilities, but some of them appear to be shareware or demoware… and if they’re as easy to use as Tray It! is (all you have to do is hold control while minimizing), then I would be surprised. Congrats to the Tray It! team for a job well done.

A long-promised, long-overdue event occured today: I finally updated the look of my site. It isn’t perfect – in IE, it has a few rendering glitches – but I don’t view it in IE very often, so I don’t care. If someone wants to help me out in this area, feel free. Otherwise it may be a while (just this update certainly took its time).

Let me know what you think. I like it myself. But then I suppose I wouldn’t have done it otherwise :-D.

The BCS (Bowl Champ Series) is NCAA college football’s way of deciding which team is the best in the nation. And this year, like every year before, it is screwed up.

Before the BCS existed, the national champion was decided by two polls – one of sportwriters by the Associated Press and one of the coaches, run by ESPN, I believe. It was a pretty terrible system, because with two polls, there could be – and often were – split national champions. The problem was compounded by the fact that the after-season bowl games took the conference champions from pre-defined conferences. For example, the Rose Bowl matches the Big 10 champion versus the Pac 10 champion, regardless if the two teams were any good (other than winning their own conference… which sometimes doesn’t mean much).

When the BCS was created, the public idea was to put the two best teams against each other, so that there wouldn’t be the issues. But privately, the idea was to enrich the six most powerful conferences at the expense of less established conferences by, for most intents and purposes, excluding schools not from the PAC 10, Big 10, Big 12, SEC, ACC, or Big East conferences. In fact, this was the first year that a school from another conference “crashed the party” – and it was Utah, from BYU’s Mountain West Conference.

Now, to its credit, the BCS does actually does tend to get the rankings right – or at least close to right, as I see it. For example, Utah is ranked 6th, behind the also undefeated USC, Oklahoma, and Auburn, as well as the two teams whose only losses are to USC or Oklahoma – Texas and Cal. So, that ranking makes sense from a logical point of view (although Utah ahead could also make sense), but what makes sports interesting is that it often defies logic – how else would the Red Sox beat the Yankees after being down 3-0 in the ACLS? How else would we cheer for our underdog team and, on a few sweet occasions, be right?

That is why the only way to really know who is the best is to have a playoff system, because no poll can take the place of a game played. And when there are six or seven undefeated teams in the fray, how can either winner of a national championship game truly be legitimate? There are a few dead weeks after the last games and the start of the bowls, and this would be a perfect time to have a few playoff bowls – even the top eight teams would make a winner a lot more legitimate, and only require a few more games. The championship game could be on New Year’s day again, as it should be, instead of a few days after, and the other major bowls could either line up beforehand for the eliminations, or take off the not-quite-champions to line up more interesting match-ups, or the conference-specific ones. Something like that.

But alas, the BCS is going to be around through at least 2010… Still, life is good when you get to see Texas take on and narrowly defeat Michigan in a thriller. But then Utah whips Pittsburg and you have to wonder, why weren’t they playing Auburn? My guess is that it’ll still be a while before there’s any playoff system, and until then, we’ll just have to wonder, what if…

After a late night at Scott’s (of the Torborg variety), where we watched the Postman, Scott managed to convince me to go skiing with him the following day at Mt. Baker, three hours away, which mean leaving in the early morning. So, after returning home and getting to sleep around two, Scott called to wake me up at 5:20, and from there, we managed to make it to the slopes by 10 am, just an hour after they opened. The skiing was good, but I wasn’t – it was my first time of the season, and I only went once last year, and that added up to me being way out of skiing shape. I still have enough technique to do the hard runs, but the legs did not have the ability to keep me going all day. Nevertheless, a great time was had.

I have much more goings-on to catch up on as well, but a graduation party awaits!