Posts

Apparently the University of Minnesota has turned down new men’s basketball coach Tubby Smith’s bid to hire Jimmy Williams as an assistant coach. The reasoning? …Williams was on Bill Musselman’s staff during the period of 1971 to 1975 when the program was penalized by the NCAA for a number of violations. Okay…I’m a huge fan of high standards when it comes to hiring coaches. Coaches have a lot of influence over the student-athletes under their tutelage, and their decision-making when it comes to who to recruit has an impact beyond the basketball court. ...

Yep, this is the 500th post since I started this blog back in May 2004. Wow, really shows what longevity can do for a blog. (For instance, when the owner only posts every three to four days or so, it can get the blog up to 500.) :) I was going to write something to celebrate the occasion, but then again, I’m the same person who had to go look and see when I started doing this, so I doubt it would have been any good. However, I figure I should write something so I can blog about other things and not end up celebrating my 517th post. This way all of you can be sure I’ll be able to post regularly on interesting topics such as…ah…comics, wrestling, the Internet, spam, UNC basketball players from 2005, quizzes…myself…okay, mostly just stuff that interests me. ...

You know, if this rumor is correct, and the Carolina Panthers are actually thinking about trading Kris Jenkins for any less than a first or second round pick – which they’re unlikely to be offered for an oft-injured defensive tackle – I’m going to be further convinced that they don’t get this whole “personnel” thing. They might have a lot of depth along the defensive line, but Jenkins is one of the better tackles in the NFL, and I’m not convinced they can come up with something better in the third round or lower. Besides, at one point the Panthers had a lot of depth at linebacker, and then they overpaid to keep the talented but fragile Dan Morgan, and let just-as-talented Will Witherspoon and versatile Chris Draft sign with the Rams. ...

The subject line of an email I just received (not spam): loaner mouse for photo shoot Yes, that would be a live lab mouse. It’s always the little things that surprise you when you move to a new job. :)

When Sam Zell, who has just become a major player in the newspaper industry, is making comments like these published in the Washington Post, I fear for the future of newspapers affected by this sort of ignorance: In conversations before and after a speech Zell delivered Thursday night at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, Calif., the billionaire said newspapers could not economically sustain the practice of allowing their articles, photos and other content to be used free by other Internet news aggregators. ...

Hmmm, what does one do when they don’t keep up one blog? Start another one! :) Actually, I ran across the concept of the tumblelog, and I thought it sounded like a good place for the interesting things I pass up because I don’t really think about them as a blog post. So, I’ve started one at phantom-thought.com, hosted by Tumblr. Let’s see how it goes. The name for the tumblelog comes from a Thomas Hardy poem I ran across one day. ...

Okay, I’m back to Bloglines after two days. Google Reader was okay, but the way I use feed readers doesn’t quite match up yet. For one thing, when you email an entry from Bloglines, it includes the entire entry. Google Reader cuts it off after a bit. I also like organization options that go beyond alphabetical. Not too far from where Google Reader is now, but those sorts of things bothered me more than Bloglines’ occasional problems with feeds. I did like Reader’s approach to marking items as read. (You scroll past, and it’s read. In Bloglines, you open the feed, and everything’s read.) ...

I’ve been a faithful Bloglines subscriber for years now, but I’m finally breaking down and trying out Google Reader to see if it clears up a problem I’ve been having with indexing new items. I hated the Reader interface before, but they’ve sped up the AJAX-y effects, which makes it a lot more tolerable. Anyway, the one thing I noticed immediately is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to share feeds like in Bloglines, just individual items. I’ll have to see whether I like that or not. In the meantime, maybe it’ll be like a linkblog for me. So, News From Afar, which used to require the reader to work to find interesting content, now changes over to me having to work to keep interesting content. :| ...

In 1952, fashion designers were asked what women would be wearing in the year 2000. I like this one: Marcel Rochas envisions a spiral antenna headdress for thought transference; sunglass-shaped eye make-up; costume reminiscent of ancient armor; floating veils, and sandals of panther skin. I miss the days when you could walk into any store and buy panther skin clothes. Now all we have are free-range panthers, and they’re harder to catch. ...

Okay, let’s see how well spam knows me today: Get a visit from the big dick fairy Okay, Spam, I’m never reading you again. :(