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A Modest Proposal

Perhaps the biggest sin in American sports fandom is bandwagoning – the act of becoming a fan of a team when they’re playing well, but then ceasing to be a fan once they’ve cooled off.

We all know bandwagoners… like your hypothetical friends “Dave and Cindy”. Dave and Cindy don’t especially care about the NFL. They’ve never owned a piece of NFL apparel in their lives, nor had they ever even considered buying any. They express no desire to watch regular-season games with you, and might even be hostile to the idea of watching a game in the first place. But then your local sports team makes it to the playoffs and suddenly Dave and Cindy want to come over to your house to watch the game. They’re wearing matching team sweatshirts, have officially licensed pom poms in team colors and even have a pair of team flags on their car. Dave sits on the sofa and tries to converse with you using things he’s cribbed from the sports section of your local paper. Cindy sits with your missus and cheers at the appropriate times. Unfortunately, as soon as the playoffs are over, Dave and Cindy completely forget all about your team… until the next time they go to the playoffs, in which case Dave and Cindy will be back wearing their sweatshirts and waving their pom poms.

Over the years, several unwritten rules have been developed in the “Man Code” to prevent bandwagoning. The biggest rules are thus:

If you are born in a city with an professional sports franchise, you must be a fan of that team if you’re going to be a fan at all. If you move to a city that has a team in the same sport, you are allowed a five-year “grace period”, in which you may root for your original home team, before you are required to become a fan of your “new” team. If you move to a city without a team in that sport, you are allowed to continue cheering for your original home team; if a team is created after you move, you are allowed to keep cheering for your original home team. If your home team moves, you are absolved of any allegiance to them, and can root for any other team you choose.

It’s silly, isn’t it? The problem with bandwagoning is, as I see it, not with the first part of the definition (“becoming a fan of a team when they’re playing well”), but the second (“ceasing to be a fan once they’ve cooled off”). After all, every sport needs new fans, and if a team on the other side of the country makes you an NFL fan, well… fine by me.

Continue reading “A Modest Proposal”

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Girls and Football

I just had to post this! Nextround.net has this awesome list of things “your girlfriend” said during the NFC\AFC Championships.

Here are a few of my favorites:

“I thought the Cardinals were in St. Louis. Is St. Louis in Arizona?”

“I thought you said Matt Leinart was on one of these teams.”

“You really don’t see that many black guys named Larry.”

“Which guy did you say would draw me a picture of Jesus?”

“THAT’s who Kendra is going to marry? He can’t even catch.”

“What did you mean when you said you thought it would be a Pennsylvania Super Bowl? None of these teams are called Pennsylvania.”

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STEELERS WIN!

The Pittsburgh Steelers knocked off the Baltimore Ratbirds last night 23-14 to win the AFC Championship! My team is now off to Tampa, where they’ll face the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII!!!

AFC Championship FootballHere we go Steelers, here we go!!!!!

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TV News

Two quick items from the world of TV:

– Yes! Matthew Weiner, the show runner for Mad Men, signed a seven-figure deal with Lionsgate to create (at least) two more seasons of Mad Men, as well as another show and a movie! Hurrah! Read more about it here.

– ABC hasn’t forgotten Pushing Daisies. The Alphabet Net says that it will run the final episodes of Daisies, Dirty Sexy Money and Eli Stone this summer. I’ll believe it when I see it, but it’s good news for those of us missing the last three episodes of Daisies.

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Random News Dump

– Krispy Kreme is giving away free doughnuts on Inauguration Day! So if you’re near a KK store next Tuesday, be sure to stop in a get your free doughnut!

– 79 year-old Donald Peters bought a couple of lottery tickets on the morning of November 1, 2008. He died of a heart attack later that day. His wife, in mourning for her husband, put off checking the tickets. In fact, she was almost going to throw them away. But she checked the numbers anyway… and found out that he had won $10 million!

– Here’s a scam that you won’t believe: a couple of guys walked in to Hattiesburg Cycles in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and gathered up $8000 worth of merchandise. Then then presented the cashier with a credit card. The card was declined. They then claimed that they “expected that to happen”, so they somehow convinced the cashier to call an 800 number, where a voice on the phone gave the cashier an “authorization number” and told her to authorize the charge. You know where this is going, right? The card was either stolen or fake, and the person at the 800 number was working with the crooks. How they managed to convince the cashier to call their 800 number and not the one on the credit card machine is a mystery.

– A recent Pew study found that, for the first time, more Americans get their news from the Internet than from newspapers.

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SMS via Email

Did you know that you can send SMS messages via email? It’s something that’s been around for ages, but many people never use – except us IT folk, who often set up server monitoring programs to send an email out when something goes wrong.

To send SMS messages via email, all you’ve gotta do is address the email to the proper carrier (see below). Keep in mind that your email will still be limited to 160 characters, like any other text message. As far as I know, email to SMS works with these carriers, and requires nothing at all special – all email services and all email clients are supported:

T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
AT&T: phonenumber@txt.att.net
Alltel: phonenumber@message.alltel.com

Remember, “phone number” means the complete 10-digit number – using 7 digits won’t work.

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Goodbye, Old Friend!

Back in 1999, computer hardware was far more expensive than it is today. At the time, the difference between “top of the line” and “middle of the road” in processors was (looking back on it today) laughable. Back then, people seriously agonized over whether to buy the 500MHz or 533MHz processor; it was a clock difference of only 33MHz. But back then every megahertz counted, even if those 33 MHz cost you an extra $100.

I wanted a new computer at the time, as my PII-300 box was getting a bit long in the tooth. The only problem was that the high-end Intel processor of the time – the Pentium III 933 – was incredibly expensive… like, “well over $1000” expensive. I simply didn’t have that much scratch at the time.

And this is where the Abit BP-6 motherboard came in. The Abit BP-6 was a wonderful feat of hacker engineering. At the time, Intel didn’t allow Celeron processors to be used in SMP (multi-processor) systems; the BP-6 changed all that. Using Intel’s legendary 440BX chipset, the BP-6 board allowed end-users to use two inexpensive Celeron chips in place of  a single high-end Pentium III processor. So instead of buying a $1200 PIII-933 processor, the BP-6 allowed me to buy two $150 Celeron 466 chips. Sure, two Celeron 466 processors working together wouldn’t be as fast as a single PIII-933… but performance would be very close, close enough to justify the $900 savings. The BP-6 was also one of the first boards to heavily advertise its overclocking features, so people lucky enough to get a closely-matched pair of the “special” Celeron 300A MHz chips got the same performance for even fewer dollars (because the Celeron chips were essentially a Pentium II without the L2 cache, the 300MHz “Mendocino” Celerons could easily run at the Pentium II’s 100MHz FSB speed, thus they could easily be overclocked to 450MHz).

Abit BP6

I put together my BP6 with two Celeron 466 processors, a then-outrageous 512MB of RAM, and the largest hard drive I could find at the time. Since Windows 9x couldn’t handle multiple processors, I installed Windows NT Workstation 4 on this new box… and then went to town. This computer and I went through a lot together. We learned a lot about IT and computers together. I was an official Microsoft beta tester at the time and would soon be constantly installing (and reinstalling) beta versions of Windows NT 5.0 (later named Windows 2000). I got my first taste of Linux on this computer. I fell in love with the BeOS on this computer. I soon got a TV tuner card, and learned all the ins and outs of video capture on that computer.

Continue reading “Goodbye, Old Friend!”