The whole objective of the early daylight saving’s time was to reduce power consumption. In reality, it just caused some minor grief for the tech industry and saved no measurable energy.
Florida Wins, and Scott’s Mad Dribblerz Wins The ’07 Pick ‘Em
Sorry I’m a bit late on this — was tearing apart a friend’s laptop last night and didn’t get online after the game. But Florida won the championship, which means that Scott’s Mad Dribblerz is our 2007 Tourney Pick ‘Em winner. Below is the final scoring talley:
- Scott’s Mad Dribblerz: 158
- Rusty from Portland: 153
- goldenglove7624: 151
- bend no more: 146
- bojack: 141
- #1 bracket: 141
- casual picks: 134
- shots hot: 132
- GO GATORS!!: 131
- PLU_STATS_231_2: 130
- Coz’s Bracket: 119
- monkeyinabox: 116
- whiteybarkley: 114
- Repeating Greatness: 114
- Reigning Dud: 107
- jaylee: 106
- MN Shivs: 99
- Bowser: 97
- jenB_goDucks!: 95
- Tasmanian Devils: 94
- Briar Patch Project: 86
- PAIZANO’S PIZZA: 85
- I can’t think of a name: 83
- steph: 83
- Canadian Bacon: 79
- Jake’s ’07 Pick ’em: 79
- kandray’s bracket: 75
- HEELSTAR: 70
- shlid: 48
- Bretigny: 42
Thanks to everybody who participated, and I’m already looking forward to next year.
If you have a hankering, I’ve posted an Excel spreadsheet of the day-by-day scoring here so you can see how your scores moved around (if anybody wants to turn that data into a pretty graph, by all means go ahead and I’ll host and post it here — my Excel-fu is not very strong with graphs, just with raw data).
Scott, if you’ll post something in the Yahoo! group’s message board or make your e-mail address public in the member area (so I know it’s you and not somebody pretending to be you), I’ll get in touch about your prizes, and give your e-mail to the folks who promised prizes to the winner (and anything you don’t want, Rusty has already said he’d take).
Secondly, Rusty, the bitter second-place guy (joking, Rusty), asked about second and third place prizes. I honestly didn’t think I’d get the turn out for this like we did, so next year I’ll get on the ball with prizes and see what we can round up.
Thanks again to Lyle at Jake’s Diner here in Bend for throwing in some grub into the pool, Paizono’s Pizza in Baker City for throwing in a trucker hat, and Brad (last year’s winner) for throwing in the basic will.
Why Does The Government Have To Make Things So Difficult?
Why does claiming unemployment have to be such a royal pain it the tuckus? The government just seems hell-bent on making it a royal pain, especially if you have unconventional circumstances (read on for full story).
Having Trouble Getting My Daily Posts Via E-mail?
If you’d been having trouble getting my daily update e-mails, there’s a very good chance it was because it was getting dumped into your spam folder because of some old code I had in there that was getting blacklisted because of who it linked to. I’ve since cleaned up that code, so hopefully that should smooth out the delivery a bit (I still can’t promise it’ll go through all the time, especially with AOL accounts, but I’m at least trying).
Thanks to Ken at Breaking Windows for sending me his SpamAssassin log that helped me find the problem.
Internet Jackass Day
I completely forgot it’s April 1st, aka April Fools Day, aka Internet Jackass Day. I used to follow this quite a bit more, but I’ll just let Wikipedia do it for me.
Update: Forgot about Urgo, which also links to a ton.
It All Comes Down To The Last Game
Last year, by this point in the tournament, we had thing wrapped up, and the last game was being played just for fun. However, this year, the last game will decide the winner. If Ohio State wins, “shots hot” will win. If Florida takes it, “Scott’s Mad Dribblerz” will take it. So Monday night, this thing will be all wrapped up, and prizes will be going to the winner.
Here are the scores before Monday night’s final game:
- shots hot: 132
- Scott’s Mad Dribblerz: 126
- Rusty from Portland: 121
- Coz’s Bracket: 119
- goldenglove7624: 119
- monkeyinabox: 116
- Repeating Greatness: 114
- bend no more: 114
- whiteybarkley: 114
- #1 bracket: 109
- bojack: 109
- Reigning Dud: 107
- jaylee: 106
- casual picks: 102
- MN Shivs: 99
- GO GATORS!!: 99
- PLU_STATS_231_2: 98
- Bowser: 97
- jenB_goDucks!: 95
- Tasmanian Devils: 94
- Briar Patch Project: 86
- PAIZANO’S PIZZA: 85
- steph: 83
- I can’t think of a name: 83
- Canadian Bacon: 79
- Jake’s ’07 Pick ’em: 79
- kandray’s bracket: 75
- HEELSTAR: 70
- shlid: 48
- Bretigny: 42
After the game on Monday, I’ll post the final scores, along with a graph showing the scoring progression (if Ohio State wins, I’ll be moving up some spots), and will be contacting the winners and putting them in touch with the prize-providers (thanks again to everybody, including Paizano’s Pizza, coming soon in Baker City, as well as Jake’s Diner here in Bend, along with last year’s winner Brad, for providing prizes).
Best Way To Describe Net Neutrality
Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist, describes the issue perfectly:
Most Americans believe that if you play fair and work hard, you’ll get ahead. But this notion is threatened by legislation passed Thursday night by the U.S. House of Representatives that would allow Internet service providers to play favorites among different Web sites.
Here’s a real world example that shows how this would work. Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others. For them, this would be a money-making regime.
Thanks kottke for the link.
More Oddball Commercials
While the gun rental commercial ranks up there as one of the weirdest commercials I’ve seen, this whole series of 10 second commercials from the Krass Brothers has to be right up there, too (and I still don’t know what the heck they sell)…
Want To Drive From NYC To Dublin (Or From Bend to London)?
If you ask for directions via Google Maps, they’ll tell you to swim (screenshot below in case it gets changed):
Link via Kottke.
Update: Upon experimenting a bit, it looks like it works for many US and European cities — in case you wanted to drive from Bend to London
It’s Going To Be A Late Night
I came into work late today with the intention of doing some work on our servers here that required me to shut down the office while I do it, so I was just going to stay late tonight, after-hours, to do it. Basically, I’m just installing some additional hard drives on our file sever and setting up a new RAID array, as our SCSI drives are basically full (installing a server-grade SATA card instead, as SATA drives are much cheaper and larger capacity). No sooner than ten minutes after I walk in, people starting complaining that things are freezing up (we’re on a Citrix Metaframe setup so when something freezes, it generally affects everybody, which sucks but the boss but budgets don’t allow replacement/upgrades at this point).
So I go upstairs, and the file server that I had planned on working tonight is totally unresponsive. And since many of the profiles and some of the applications (like our cludgy DOS-based reservation system) that Citrix uses are on that server, it was causing things to freak out all around. So I reboot the the file server, and find the problem: one of the two drives in the systems main RAID1 array died.
Thankfully it was in an array, otherwise we’d be screwed right now, but I don’t like sitting here with no redundancy on our reservation data. Since it’s an old server (Compaq Proliant 800 1600 — I forgot we had an old front bezel on the thing, but it is indeed a 1600), finding the same hard drive requires a trip to eBay, where I found somebody that could overnight one for me.
Meanwhile, I’m hoping and praying that nothing else dies on the system (like the boot drive) before the new one gets here on Friday. I’d almost considered making the new SATA array the boot array, but I have a feeling that’s going to be a bigger nightmare than it’s worth (I’d rather keep data and boot on separate drives anyway, which was my reason for setting this up). But if I can at least get the data onto the new array, I can sleep better tonight knowing that I have a bit of redundancy (and yes, I do have off-site backups, but I never like to dig into backups — I’d rather just have things keep running without issue).
Than after I get all that crap up and going again, I have to rebuild the database for the aforementioned reservation system, which is always loads of fun. Basically, just hit a button, and wait until it’s done (and watch as a bunch of ASCII characters scroll down the screen).
Hopefully tonight will go smoother than the last time I did major work on these servers (which are really past their prime, but our boss is too cheap to replace them because he doesn’t seem to understand how much technology is used in this office).
Update at10:30: Went mostly smooth until I tried to reboot the system once I had the new card and drives formatted and array setup and data copied: Non System Disk Error. The thing was detecting the SATA card I added in (a Promise TX4310) and trying to boot from it instead of the SCSI card already in the system. I tried re-ordering the cards, telling the BIOs that it was supposed to boot from the SCSI card, but everytime I put back in the Promise card, it was trying to read off it, and refused to read the SCSI card. Lovely. So I’m taking the Promise card out, recreating the share on the old drive, and hopefully will get this figured out in the morning. People are going to be able to function, and that’s really all that matters.
But in the meantime, does anybody have any experience with these types of add-in cards and this particular server?
Update again: Just for giggles, I looked at the original product description and reviews on NewEgg, and it looks like people had issues with this card — if you don’t upgrade the BIOS. So I’ll have to upgrade the BIOS, me thinks, for this to work properly.
Update again the next day: My other employer had an extra SCSI drive as they use the same servers, and I didn’t know they had spares, so I’ll be taking this spare and giving him my other one when I get it.