Checksum Arcanius

The internet went down today. More precisely, my internet went down today, but thats pretty much the same thing. After my counterstrike game froze, and then web pages started timing out on another computer, and I could no longer contact my router, I knew something was up, so I sauntered on down to look at my WRT54G, a wonderful peice of equipment by Linksys that has served me very well. It looked like a scene from a bad sci-fi movie. The lights on the front were blinking randomly, and a red LED marked “Diag” flashed ominously. Except for beeping sounds, and the camera zooming in on the LED (although my eyes did a fairly good representation of this, if I can say so myself), all the bad sci-fi movie elements were there…

Anyway, after I pulled the plug to restart the router, adjusted the antenae jsut so, and returned to my laptop, things still weren’t working quite right. Its then that I noticed a new wireless network, called “linksys” with good signal quality. Wait a second…

Indeed, the WRT54G bit it hard. This was no soft reset, but hardcore no recovery, all-settings-lost, start-over-from-scratch reset.

In other news, the Sonics won, and Firefox remembers form information, so setting up the same port redirects that I had before was remarkably easy.

Unsurprisingly, the Seattle Seahawks lost to the St. Louis Rams, their 6th straight playoffs loss, tying an NFL record. It seems fitting that the play that sealed the fate was a dropped pass – not a perfect pass like so many of the drops have been, but definitely a catchable ball, especially for a reciever in the NFL.

Hey, at least with my low expectations I’m not all that disappointed at the loss.

And Mr. Torborg, I need you to contact me.

Well, Oklahoma got whipped again, this time by USC… on the other hand, a PAC-10 team won it, and I don’t mind USC, they seem classy enough for it to me. It is also nice to hear more and more people calling for a playoff, even if its just 4 or 8 teams.

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…

Tuesday, Hester caused a great stir of excitement when she proposed Ultimate at 2:00. Turnout was unexpectedly excellent – we had a genuine full 7 on 7 game that was quite a bit of fun. To keep up traditions, my team lost a close battle to Joe’s team, but this is to be expected. Our four point surge to 6-4 was overcome by a three point surge by the opposition to win 8-7. Still a very fun game, despite the frigid air. Today, we are going for a repeat performance, meeting at 3:00 at Robinswood for another game. Y’all should come. You know who you are.

Thursday Morning, I awoke around 8:30, dressed for a morning football game in the rain, picked up Scott, and headed to Newport High School’s football field. These days, Scott and I are “old” people (better than 19) so we joined forces with that crowd against the younger crowd. And it was a crowd – it was the largest turkey bowl in my memory. But the numbers only seemed to help the old people; we slammed the younger guys pretty well. So bad, that we had to switch up teams to make it resemble a competitive game again. I wasn’t too productive on the offensive side of things, with only a couple of catches and one interception-shortened series as QB (after the teams got switched), but I also had two interceptions and a very good time.

Unfortunately, I also jammed the index finger on my left hand pretty badly at the beginning of the game. It swelled up pretty well and made me less agressive throughout the rest of the day. And its still hurting, so I may have to see if there was any additional damage. While I’m at it, I might as well have my right pinky looked at too, which has never been up to par after a flag football game way back in my early high school days.

After the turkey bowl, I dropped off Scott, returned home, and made myself presentable for company. And there was lots of company. My aunt and uncle (Dad’s brother Mike and Marie) came from Florida, my sister Robin and her family (husband Dave, daughters Zoe and Thea) came from Seattle proper along with a family friend and her daughter (as an aside, the friend, whom I had never met, showed up first. I looked quizically at her as she drove up, which prompted her to ask, “Is this the right place?” Having no idea, really, I responded, “Maybe…”). Also, my cousin (Christine, daughter of Mike) and her Husband Luca and daughter Isabella were there, along with my brother and his girlfriend (soon to be fiancee) Kaylee. It was quite a crowd, with a good contingent of youngsters mixed in.

Then came the food. We are not always a traditional thanksgiving-feast family, so instead of turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes, we had roast beef and wild duck, mashed sweet potatoes and baked potatoes (which I mashed myself, because I’m not too much of a fan of sweet potatoes), and various other misundry fruits and vegetables and other items. It was really quite good, but I sure do miss downing those perectly mashed potatoes smothered in turkey gravy. Hand-mashed potatoes in beef juice is still pretty good, though.

After dessert, we sang some songs, which the kids seems to especially enjoy, told some thanksgiving stories (Marie, as a kindegarten schoolteacher, was most excellent at this). Then we mostly hung out and talked and got tired early. Seems to happen when its pitch black by 5:00. I still managed to stay up late, though, because Theo was comign over. We managed to lock the door on him, so when he arrived about 1:00, he had to get my attention by lightly rocking my window. It finally worked, and we stayed up until 300 playing around (albeit unsuccessfully, moslty) with Linux f the Gentoo variety.

The next morning, I awoke late, enjoyed breakfast, and then people started to arrive for the party. With Scott, Dan, Colin, Theo, Ben, Kaylee, Jim, and Julie ready to go, we began to figure out how to enter GPS coordinates into our three units (it wasn’t too hard) and then we began our journey. The first Geocahce we stopped at was called Forest Drive Pipeline, and it was, predictably, by Forest Drive. We took the hard way, through woods the entire time, and then we spent a good fifteen minutes with all of us wandering around in the area until Dan found the cache itself, an ammo box hidden beneath some branches and leaves in the nook of a maple tree. I filled out the log book, and then we took a pink carribeaner and left an alligator clip (as is the custom, you take an object and leave another object).

It had been a while since I’d been out tromping through the woods, and it was good to do it again. I had a lot of fun, and even though I made my shoes and pants pretty dirty, it was well worth it. We stopped at McDonalds for lunch, then we drove to the Red Town trailhead where we started the hike for Geocache #2. This one, which I was attracted to because of its less-than-trivial difficulty numbers and pretty photo, was called Sandstone Falls. The hike only needed to be 1.5 miles each way, but we took the long way on the way there and ended up taking more like a 4 mile hike, which I also enjoyed, but along with soreness from the Turkey bowl, I was moving pretty slowly by the end of the day. Since it was getting past 4 by this point, we abandoned further attempts at geocaching and returned home for fooding.

Joining us at this point were Beth and Maneesh. Clams, french dip (thanks to my wodnerful mom), and caesar salad were the main menu items, and the all were good (I am told, as I cannot speak for the clams, which I did not partake of). We also played Pass the Pigs quite competitively, followed by a few rounds of Setbefore we generally became just a bunch of talkers. Beth and I were unable to rally the troops for a game of Mafia, so I suppose that it will have to wait until next time. If I’m not too old the next time around…

Everyone was leaving around 9:00, so I got Beth and Scott to take home. After droppin Beth off, Scott and I drove all over creation (from Bellevue to North Seattle to Des Moines and back) talking up a storm. I finally returned him at 2:00 am. It’ll be good to have him back for the month of December, even though he’s taking a week and a half off for a swimming camp. Crazy man, but what else should I expect?

Saturday was another busy day, in which I made a brief appearance at a lego league session, went shopping, attended Tim‘s Eagle Scout Court of Honor, got miscommunicated with more lego league stuff, then went to Max’s birthday party at Mary and Jason’s place in Redmond. It was good to see them all again, even if Jen and I aren’t as good at Cranium as we wanted to be. I guess it makes sense that the newly expecting couple should have more of a mental connection than the rest of us. That ended with me taking home some hard drives to try figuring out what was wrong with Jason’s desktop. The drives appear to be not-so-good (aka bad). Speaking of which, my computer is giving me issues as well, but thats not for this post.

Sunday, I went to church, where Max spoke, and where I realized that my old ward (Cougar Mountain) is a lot nicer to attend than the one I was going to most recently (Singles). More people I know, more people I like talking too, better lessons, talks, environment… I think I know where I’ll be next Sunday. After all that, I worked on a linear algebra project, making a program to calculate the determinant of a matrix recursively. Its pretty fast until you get to about 8×8 matrices, and then it slows to a crawl, because recursive cofactor expansion is just about the worst way to calculate a determinant that there is.

Which brings me to today, in which I worked, spilled hot chocolate on myself, got a replacement shirt from Dave (thanks, by the way!), went to class (couldn’t concentrate – too hot, a little sick, and had the computer there to work on the project), and then came home and ate. My Miles One Platinum Visa credit card also arrived. Time to start saving up miles and traveling the world on my consumerist habits! w00t.

In an amazing turn of events, the Boston Red Sox forced a game seven after falling behind the New York Yankees 3-0, a feat never before accomplished in 100 seasons of baseball playoffs. Then to top it off, they won that game, a feat hardly imaginable four games ago.

That lifted my spirits enough to almost erase the bottom-of-the-class score I got in my most recent math test. Sure, most of the class got high 90’s, and I wasn’t exacly failing, in terms of raw score… but suffice it to say that I was considerably lower than the mean, the mode, and the median. I guess that rushing so I could go see Primer ended up being more expensive than the free that I had previously supposed it to be. I figured there might be some damage, but I sure felt good about the test when I left. Oh well, its only 25% of the grade.