Year: 2008

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There IS a God: Rooneys Keep Steelers

The four Rooney brothers have agreed to sell their shares in the Pittsburgh Steelers football team to their oldest brother Dan, current chairman of the team. This will give Dan (and his son, Art II, who is team president) an 80% share of the club, which will meet all NFL rules and regulations and keep the team within the Rooney family.

The Steelers began way back in 1933, when Art Rooney Sr. won $2,500 at the Saratoga Race Course in New York. He used his winnings to buy an NFL franchise for the city of Pittsburgh. The team was called the Pittsburgh Pirates, after the local MLB team Art loved as a child. In 1942, the team was renamed the Steelers after the city’s heritage in the steel industry. After decades of losing records, the Steelers finally began to show signs of life in the late 1960s, and later went on to become the “Team of the 1970s” by winning 4 Super Bowls in that decade.

When Art died back in 1988, he left 80% of the team to the each of his 5 sons, so that each one owned 16% of the franchise. This violates an NFL rule which states that one person must own a minimum of 30% of any team. Additionally, some of the Rooney boys owned racetracks and slot machines, which violates NFL rules about team owners having a stake in gambling businesses.

Continue reading “There IS a God: Rooneys Keep Steelers”

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Stand Firm interviews +Iker

Stand Firm has published a great interview with Jack Iker, the bishop of Fort Worth (for now). Iker, known as a cantankerous defender of Anglican orthodoxy, lays down the smack in this interview on a variety of issues, mostly to do with the founding of a new Anglican province in America. Here’s an excerpt:

Stand Firm: But surely Katharine Schori and the powers that be are not going to let the diocese of Fort Worth – which is not just a high-profile diocese, but one that hasn’t been shy about expressing its disagreements with the national church – surely they’re not going to just let you go without exhausting all of their canonical and legal options.

Bishop Iker: I fully expect that I’ll receive notification from the Presiding Bishop’s office, within days of our diocesan convention, that I’ve been inhibited. Of course by then it will be irrelevant, because I won’t be under the authority of the Episcopal Church. But they’ll play that out in the same that they did with Bishops Schofield and Duncan. What the “Remain Episcopal” people here are told by David Booth Beers – they’ve been to New York and met with him – is that I’ll be inhibited right after our convention, then I’ll have sixty days to recant, and if I don’t then I will be deposed at the next meeting of the House of Bishops, which is some time in March. After that, they’re planning on having the new organizing convention here in April, and probably get organized, elect a new standing committee, and a new provisional bishop.

Read the whole thing here.

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Cocteaus on OGWT

Here’s an awesome performance of the Cocteau Twins’ song “Lorelei” from the British show Old Grey Whistle Test:

Interesting fact: Old Grey Whistle Test’s budget was so tiny that the show couldn’t afford a proper set. So in many early episodes, show staff simply painted the back of an existing set black – a set that was used earlier that day, mind you – and hung an “Old Grey Whistle Test” sign on the wall!

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Time to Bench LB?

NFL head coaches hate benching starting quarterbacks. Starting quarterbacks usually have the most overall talent in their position on a team. And they say something about the head coach and his philosophy and decision-making skills. Benching a quarterback for reasons other than health means that you might not have made the “correct” decision the first time… or that “panic time” has set in. Neither option is good for a football team.

But so it is that the Steelers face this question this very week. Large Benjamin is not only not living up to his gigantic paycheck, he’s directly costing his team games. His 4 interceptions against the Giants cost the Steelers the game. The Colts rolled up 14 points off his interceptions.

But perhaps the best example comes from the Redskins game. The Steelers offense, which struggled mightily against the Redskins, roared instantly to life when an injury to Rothlisberger forced seasoned veteran Byron Leftwich to enter the game. Once Leftwich came in, the offense, which could barely get a first down in three quarters with Big Ben, suddenly “clicked”, and the Steelers almost instantly ran up 2 touchdowns.

So the word in the blogosphere is that fans (and certain sports writers) think that Ben should be benched for this week’s game against the Chargers. And you know what? I think they might be right. Maybe Ben’s shoulder is hurt much worse than we had been led to believe. Maybe he’s just in a slump. I don’t know. What I do know is that the Steelers defense has been playing their hearts out, only to have Large Benjamin throw the games away with stupid plays. So why not give Byron a chance? With the way he’s playing, there’s even talk of him looking for a starting job next year… so why not use him while we have him?

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Accessing this site in Chrome

If you attempt to surf to jimcofer.com with Google Chrome, you will probably get the following error message:

This webpage is not available.

The webpage at http://www.jimcofer.com/personal/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.

Error 320 (net::ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE): Unknown error.

This is caused by a known bug in Chrome.

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Fixing Poor Flash Video Performance in Firefox

Just when I thought I had fixed my problem with Firefox, another one rears its ugly head!

I have a client that wants a Flash-based slideshow on their home page, so I downloaded and installed the demo of Adobe’s Flash CS4 to create it. The only problem was that Flash upgraded the web browser plug-ins on my system from Flash 9 to Flash 10 without telling me. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but Flash 10 breaks the “image upload tool” in WordPress (read all about it here), so upgrading to 10 is a no-go. And, as it turns out, Flash 10 (the program, not the plug-in) is way overkill for the simple slideshow thing I want to do, so I uninstalled Flash, then the Flash plug-ins, and rebooted my computer.

I was good to go… or so I thought. I reinstalled Flash 9 and everything was OK for a couple of days. But then anything to do with Flash ground to a complete halt on my box. For example, a YouTube video would drop frames like crazy. Remember the early days of Internet video, when everyone had RealPlayer installed so they could watch postage stamp-size videos that often “froze up” on slow dial-up connections? That’s exactly what a YouTube video looked like on my system: the audio was fine, but the video would play fine for the first few seconds, then freeze up, then slow down to about 1 frame every 5 seconds, then freeze, then continue on slowly again.

Another example: the audio player on this very site. If you click this link, you’ll be taken to a “SONGS I LOVE” post, which contains a small audio player embedded inside. If you click on the “play” button, the player should smoothly expand to reveal a progress bar for the song. On my system, clicking that button in Firefox would cause the bar to move to the right a few pixels and freeze, then move a few move pixels and freeze and so on, until the player finally opened all the way (the audio would sound just fine, however). If I opened the same post in Internet Explorer or Safari on this very same system, the player would expand smoothly as expected – only Firefox had a problem.

Continue reading “Fixing Poor Flash Video Performance in Firefox”

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Making Your Own Kubrick Header

I’ve been using WordPress for around 18 months now, and I really like it. Unlike old-school “manual” solutions like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, the WordPress platform makes it easy for me to simply publish the stories and information I want to get out.

I’ve toyed with several WordPress themes during this time. I’ve downloaded and played with them late at night when few people go to my site. I’ve even liked a few well enough that I’ve used them for a few days here and there. But the fact of the matter is that I’ve never found a theme I like more than Kubrick, the default WordPress theme. It’s simple and elegant, and unlike many third-party themes, everything in it “just works”.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I’ve stuck with the original kubrickheader.jpg file. By default, Kubrick uses a boring blue box at the top the screen. Early on I replaced it with the cover of Madonna’s Ray of Light album. After a while, I changed it to a picture of Ian Curtis. And just in the past few days I changed it again to an awesome picture of Don Draper (from a Mad Men wallpaper I found on AMC’s site).

You can easily make your own Kubrick header files. All you need is Adobe Photoshop and a copy of the default kubrickheader.jpg file. Although I could easily type up a quick list of instructions, I think it just might be easier to show you. Here is a link to my very first screencast. I’ve never made one before (at least, not in the past 10 years), so please be gentle:

http://www.jimcofer.com/personal/screencasts/kubrick/kubrick.htm

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Clam Chip Dip

When I was a kid, I loved clam chip dip – you know, the stuff they sold in the dairy case at the grocery store right next to the French onion and ranch dips. For whatever reason – increasing cost, decreased demand, or both – it simply disappeared from store shelves… I haven’t seen it in ages.

The other day I went on a nostalgia trip and tracked down a recipe online. After some tweaking, I’ve come up with a recipe that’s not exactly like the stuff I remember from childhood… but it’s pretty close:

Ingredients:

1 6oz. can chopped or minced clams
1 16oz. container sour cream
1 package soup mix (see below)
Fresh or bottled lemon juice

Hardware:

1 container (with lid)
1 spoon

1) Pour or spoon the sour cream into your container.

2) Add the soup mix.

3) Open the can of clams and drain the juice into the empty sour cream container (do not throw away yet!)

4) Add the clams to the dip and mix well.

5) Add a small amount of the reserved clam juice to the dip and mix well. You want to add enough to give the dip a clam taste throughout, but not enough to make the dip runny. I use about half the reserved juice, but that’s just me.

6) Add enough lemon juice to “brighten” the flavor of the dip. This is around half of a fresh lemon, or a couple of squirts of ReaLemon.

7) Cover and chill for several hours before serving.

As far as the “soup mix” goes, I use the “Savory Herb with Garlic” style from Lipton’s “Recipe Secrets” line. Plain old onion soup mix will work in a pinch, but I like the garlicky taste the Recipe Secrets mix gives the dip.

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Revolt Against TEC Continues…

The revolt against the leadership of The Episcopal Church continued today.

Firstly, the Diocese of Quincy (Illinois) voted to leave TEC and join the Province of the Southern Cone. That the diocese voted to leave is not surprising; the overwhelming vote in favor of the move was:

Clergy: 46 Yes, 4 No (92%)
Lay: 55 Yes, 8 No (87%)

For the record that’s three entire dioceses that have voted to leave the Episcopal Church (the other two are San Joaquin and Pittsburgh). I can smell a new American province already!

Also today, the diocese of Pittsburgh voted to reelect Bob Duncan as bishop. Duncan had been deposed (removed from power) by the House of Bishops by a vote on September 18, 2008. The diocese of Pittsburgh then voted to leave the TEC and join the Province of the Southern Cone on October 4. As expected, the diocese reelected Duncan today. Read more about it here.