the tindog coffeehouse

How accurate is NCAA Football 09 for the Wii at predicting the outcome of real football games? Probably not much, but it would be interesting to find out.

Each week I’ll play the Texas Longhorns (who else?) against their scheduled opponent and post the score here.

This week, UT opens the season at home against Florida Atlantic University. According to the Wii, the score will be 55-0, Longhorns.

Hook ‘Em, Horns!

Real Score: 52-10. Wow! Pretty close to the Wii. Maybe I’m on to something here.

I travel through the infamous Grapevine Funnel every day to and from work, and it’s the main reason I try to come in early and leave early. Hit the area just a little too late, and your daily commute goes from slow and tedious to simply painful. Throw in a minor fender-bender, and it’s enough to force you to do a U-turn and spend the rest of the day trembling beneath the sheets.

Aptly named, the Funnel is the area north of DFW Airport where seven different highways converge, a pretty good design if it weren’t for the roughly half million cars that pass through it five days a week. (Really, it must be more than that.)

There have been plans for years to reconstruct the area with additional lanes (including some toll lanes) and a better design. We were told it would take years to complete (up to 10 years by some estimates) and that it would get worse before it gets better.

Now it looks like it may just get worse.

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The mainstream press is finally starting to catch on to the broadband caps issue.

It’s about time.

The phone company, Frontier Communications Corp., is one of several Internet service providers that are moving to curb the growth of traffic on their networks, or at least make the subscribers who download the most pay more. This could have consequences not just for consumers — who would have to learn to watch how much data their Internet use entails — but also for companies that hope to make the Internet a conduit for movies and other content that comes in huge files.

Meanwhile, ISPs such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are starting to get behind the push for P4P as a way to reduce the load on their networks while speeding up traffic. (Overview of P4P here.) That’s good news.

Previously:
Metered broadband: An experiment
Bandwidth experiment, day 2: Throttled?
Metered broadband vs. cloud computing

A Chicago woman is conducting a year-long experiment to see if it’s possible to live explicitly according to Oprah Winfrey’s advice.

No, seriously! I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

Why is she doing this?

Well, for several reasons. On one hand, I am concerned about the manner in which power is wielded by celebrities and on the other hand, I am doubly concerned about how willing we are to hand over our power to our gurus.

I believe the most influential American public figure today to be Oprah Winfrey. Many of us allow her to dictate what we read, what we watch, what we listen to, how we cook, exercise, organize, and how we vote. We are convinced by her powerful public persona that her way is the right way. The road to happiness and success. …

I’m interested in seeing what happens when an average American woman (I’ll give you all my stats in my next post) tries to keep up with Oprah’s advice to (as her website touts) “live your best life.” Can I keep up? What will the financial, emotional and time costs be?

That was in January. Along the way she’s learned how to align her “vibrations”, the importance of owning a white denim jacket, and that “avocado” comes from the Aztec word for “testicle”.

OK… Well, at least it’s not like Oprah is some sort of cult leader or anything. Oh, wait…

First, John McCain has trouble remembering how many houses he owns (7, apparently). Then Barack Obama throws together a TV ad mocking him over it.

Then McCain spokesman Brian Rogers fires back:

“The reality is they have some investment properties and stuff. It’s not as if he lives in ten houses. That’s just not the case,” Rogers said. “The reality is they have four that actually could be considered houses they could use.” …

He also added: “This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison,” referring to the prisoner of war camp that McCain was in during the Vietnam War. …

“In terms of who’s an elitist, I think people have made a judgment that John McCain is not an arugula-eating, pointy headed professor-type based on his life story.”

Translation: I’m rubber and you’re glue….

I can accept a certain amount of advertising on any website. Fine. I accept your ads in return for free content or a free service. But everyone has their limits. Put popup ads on your site, and I’m simply going to block them. Put up blinking or animated banners or ads that make noise, and with the help of Adblock Plus I’ll block those too.

Those who have succumbed to the siren song of social networking sites like Facebook have to accept that while web advertising is sometimes annoying, it’s either that or pay for the right to “poke” your casual acquaintences. Again, fine. Put some relevant text-based ads in an outside column or at the top of the page, I may even glance at them once in a while. But use your friends as a medium to spam you? I’m not OK with that.

CNET’s Caroline McCarthy discusses Facebook’s new “Engagement Ads” initiative in which interactive (intrusive?) targeted ads are delivered to users’ profiles. Users are encouraged to comment on the ads, give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, or become a fan of the product. Any of those actions, naturally, then show up in all their friends’ news feeds.

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