stuff is cool

So, for any of you pro football fans out there, here are my handy-dandy power rankings for Week 10 using my not-so-patented formula (which I may write a post about soon after this):

Rk(Prv) Team			W-L	Pts	Week 9		Moved
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1(1)	Indianapolis Colts      8-0	108.48	W at NE		--
2(2)	Chicago Bears           7-1	 71.40	L vs MIA	--
3(4)	Baltimore Ravens	6-2	 64.42	W vs CIN	+1
4(5)	San Diego Chargers	6-2	 56.22	W vs CLE	+1
5(7)	Denver Broncos		6-2	 55.36	W at PIT	+2
6(3)	New England Patriots	6-2	 49.26	L vs IND	-3
7(6)	New York Giants		6-2	 45.68	W vs HOU	-1
8(9)	New Orleans Saints	6-2	 34.77	W vs TB		+1
9(12)	Jacksonville Jaguars	5-3	 29.93	W vs TEN	+3
10(16)	Kansas City Chiefs	5-3	 23.49	W at STL	+6
11(8)	Atlanta Falcons		5-3	 21.47	L at DET	-3
12(11)	Dallas Cowboys		4-4	 12.33	L at WAS	-1
13(15)	Philadelphia Eagles	4-4	 11.24	  bye		+2
14(10)	St Louis Rams		4-4	  9.11	L vs KC		-4
15(17)	Seattle Seahawks	5-3	  9.11	W vs OAK	+2
16(14)	Minnesota Vikings	4-4	  0.37	L at SFO	-2
17(13)	Cincinnati Bengals	4-4	  0.18	L at BAL	-4
18(18)	Carolina Panthers	4-4	 -7.68	  bye		--
19(19)	New York Jets		4-4	-12.94	  bye		--
20(22)	Washington Redskins	3-5	-23.80	W vs DAL	+2
21(20)	Green Bay Packers	3-5	-32.04	L at BUF	-1
22(25)	Buffalo Bills		3-5	-32.86	W vs GB		+3
23(28)	Detroit Lions		2-6	-41.65	W vs ATL	+5
24(21)	Pittsburgh Steelers	2-6	-42.24	L vs DEN	-3
25(29)	San Francisco 49ers	3-5	-43.38	W vs MIN	+4
26(31)	Miami Dolphins		2-6	-45.81	W at CHI	+5
27(23)	Tampa Bay Buccaneers	2-6	-47.94	L vs NO		-4
28(26)	Cleveland Browns	2-6	-52.83	L at SD		-2
29(24)	Tennessee Titans	2-6	-53.20	L at JAC	-5
30(30)	Houston Texans		2-6	-59.53	L at NYG	--
31(32)	Arizona Cardinals	1-7	-61.17	  bye		+1
32(27)	Oakland Raiders		2-6	-61.67	L at SEA	-5

Kansas City jumps quite a bit, taking out what was the top-ranked 4-3 team from last week, jumping into the top 10. Oakland’s dismal offense drops them below even the Cardinals, and the Dolphins get off the cellar door by taking out the Bears. The Ravens continue to do well in spite of a somewhat suspect offense (though Jamal Lewis seems to be coming around, perhaps), though their defense is so good just about any old offense will do. They’re sort of the anti-Colts.

I’ll publish these week-to-week for the rest of the season.

Okay, so you’ve probably noticed we’ve gotten a new theme. It’s a little less pink, much to Meg’s chagrin, but she still gave it the thumbs up anyway. Other than the ajax inline comments plugin (the thing that made it so you could show/hide comments on the main page) being disabled, pretty much everything else should be the same.

If you haven’t already, head over to our photo gallery and take a look around since, after all, that was one of the main motivators of this whole move in the first place.

(edit: I just noticed that this particular theme doesn’t note who wrote the post in question … I’ll have to hack that in or go back to the old theme, as it’s pretty important for this blog) fixed, that was surprisingly easy

Last month I found a pretty incredible deal on web hosting over at Dreamhost. For $20 up front, I got everything you see in the “Crazy Domain Insane!” package seen here for an entire year. And considering that I drop $60 a week on poker sometimes (of course, I make some of that back…), I figured I could justify this.

Anyway, since it has so much more disk space and bandwidth (compare: 1.5GB disk/23.4GB bandwidth to 200GB disk/2 TB bandwidth … and each of those grows per-week), I’m going to try moving everything from stuffiscool.com over to my Dreamhost account this weekend. Currently, the 1.5GB disk space available would barely be enough to hold half the photos Meg and I have taken with our her digital camera in the past year. Meanwhile, not only can I put every photo we have up on the Dreamhost space, I can put a lot of my personal projects up there as well under a different domain name as well. Once I get those up and running I’ll be posting about those as well, since apparently the consensus opinion of the readership (well, the vocal readership anyway) is that I should just go ahead and post anything that I feel is worth saying.

So, if you can’t read this, then I’m probably moving things. Just a heads up. But it won’t be happening until this weekend (11/4, 11/5), so live it up for now.

UPDATE: So far so good, I’ve got most of the stuff moved over for the blog and I’ve got the DNS updated. Now I just have to re-theme it and reinstall the WP plugins I had installed before, as well as redo gallery.stuffiscool.com

UPDATE 2: Got Gallery up and running but due to some version mismatches that I couldn’t really fix, I’m going to have to recreate the albums and re-upload all the pictures that I had already done as a sort of pre-staging thing yesterday. I’ll try and get the theme and plugins done tonight when I get home.

UPDATE 3: Bah, all of the images uploaded into the older posts are going to be broken unfortunately (see my Web2.0 Greek Festival post for example), and rather than muck about with more DNS changes and wait for them to take effect so that I can get the files back and move them over, I’m just going to chalk that one up as a loss. Oh well. Getting it about 95% right isn’t too bad

Well, really this post doesn’t deal entirely with Lost but it’s what inspired me to get on this train of thought.

About 2 years ago I basically never watched any TV. All the TV was really used for, other than collecting dust, was to watch the occasional DVD (which was also fairly rare since I had canceled my Netflix subscription at the time) and play the occasional Gamecube game. In fact, I couldn’t even watch local channels on my TV without going through an interesting ritual involving hooking up a coaxial cable to the cable input, and holding the pin on the connector against a metal portion on my coffee table because that was the only way I’d get any reception since I didn’t have a real TV antenna.

One of the few exceptions to my “no TV” habit was 24, as I’ve stated here. And really at that point (which would have been either the 3rd or 4th season of 24) I only really watched it because it provided an opportunity to hang out with my family for an evening each week. Oh and a free meal didn’t hurt However, one thing that started making even the somewhat predictable and often outlandish plot twists on 24 more fun again was participating in what are called “live watching threads”. Basically, over on the Something Awful forums, there are 24 fans that will all watch the show and comment on it in a thread on the discussion forum as things happen. A lot of the time it’s pretty simple reaction stuff like “HOLY CRAP!!” or “awesome!”, but the people who post there are also pretty clever and funny, so there are often lots of funny little comments. Since I follow along in each thread (and sometimes post my own comments), I’m often cracking up during even the most tense of episodes. Of course, when somebody’s cracking up at something you have to know what it is, so now I have to share what I find to be the funniest remarks with my mom and Meg since I watch along with them. The best part is that instead of sitting there with someone who is actually saying these things, it’s all on my laptop screen, so it doesn’t make me miss any of the dialog/action (though with DVRs these days that’s almost a moot point). I dare say that if I had to watch a show with 20 people actually shouting out things trying to be clever (or other things like “what did he say? my cable went out for a second!”), I wouldn’t watch it for very long.

But what does this have to do with Lost? Well, Lost has live watching threads as well and although these threads aren’t often as funny as the 24 ones (probably because Lost has a more tenuous relationship with reality than 24 does, so something glaringly other-worldly or flat-out unbelievable isn’t as ridiculous on Lost) the Lost threads are often full of interesting speculation and/or ideas. In fact, I became one of the folks who was chomping at the bit trying to figure out what everything said on the Swan Bunker blast door and what it all meant in relation to the larger mysteries involved with the show. I started listening to the Lost podcasts to hear the teaser information from the producers. Though my interest waned somewhat with the end of last season, it’s picked up again a little bit with the little 6-pack of episodes (the “mini-season” if you will) that they’re airing now before going on a long break until February. I dare say the show is addicting, but it’s really something different than that to me, which I’ll explain here once I tie things back to my introduction.

So is Lost just a show that I finally deemed worthy enough to break my general “no TV” habit? No, I figured out that it’s not the programming itself that makes the TV I watch appealing to me, it’s the shared experience. It’s the fact that the shows sort of live outside of the TV itself. Try and get me to watch a new TV show and I’m still most likely to balk at it, honestly. Very few shows have I found to be good enough to watch just because I enjoyed the shows themselves (I’m looking at you, Arrested Development).

The only reason I started watching Lost at all wasn’t at someone’s recommendation, it was because I saw so many people chattering about Lost on the forums that I thought I’d watch through the first few episodes and see what I thought. Well, the show itself was good enough for me to watch the entire first season (25 hour-long episodes) in about a day and a half, but I still watch it every week now because there’s a community of folks that I can chat with about the show.

So to any of you who have tried to recommend a TV show to me and I’ve turned my nose up at it, now you know why

Obviously there have been periods when I’ve posted more frequently on here as I’m about to hit the one month mark between posts (and it was a 31-day month too!), and I don’t know that I’ve ever gone quite that long before. However, it’s not that I’ve been lacking in stuff to tell the world, it’s that I’ve kept it off of here for fear of boring the audience. If there’s one thing I absolutely don’t want to do, it’s post stuff on here that nobody really cares to read about. So, here’s what I’ve been not posting about:

• sports stuff, and often more specifically, fantasy sports stuff
• software projects I’m working on (though I may at least write up a post listing them, though not discussing specific issues/triumphs/other details)
• random rants/thoughts on programming and/or computer stuff in general

Really, those are fairly broad and encompass a lot of things, but I (again) didn’t want to go into too much detail because I don’t know that any of the people who read this blog are really all that interested in it. So, if anyone has any desire to hear about any of these things, let me know, or if anyone wants to encourage me to just “let it all hang out” on here then let me know that as well and I’ll take it into consideration

PS - if I have time today, I have a Lost post I thought about this morning as well … gotta make up for (oh god pun not intended..) lost time