Axodys

The Notre Dame - USC game was a great game with a disappointing ending. Matt Leinart made the plays he needed to in the last couple minutes and “USC came from behind to win 34-31″:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/football/ncaa/10/15/usc.nd.ap/index.html. His perfect 61 yard pass up the sideline to Jarrett on 4th and 9 was a complete dagger in the hearts of Notre Dame fans everywhere.

I was definitely rooting for the Irish in this one so the outcome was not what I was hoping for, but Charlie Weis and his team continue to impress. The way they took advantage of a vulnerable Trojan defense and dominated time of possession with their offense was brilliant. Without question this is a game that the Irish can build on and I expect them to finish strong.

In other news my Cougs are up 28-14 on UCLA at halftime. If recent history holds up (I really, really hope not!), the Bruins have them right where they want them.

*Update* Well, the Bruins did come back and win 44-41 in overtime. The thing that irritates me the most is that the Cougars didn’t manage their final possession well before the overtime. They had 44 seconds left and let 20 seconds tick off without calling a timeout after a Jerome Harrison run when they had at least 2 available.

The Cougar defense needs to get Will Derting back as soon as possible. Too many big stupid penalties in the fourth quarter and the secondary just got abused by the bigger Bruin receivers late in the game. The defense line did a pretty good job of putting pressure on the UCLA quarterback, but he always seemed to have someone to throw to downfield. Disappointing game all around.

Well, today after weeks of speculation we learned that the updated “iPod”:http://apple.com/ipod now supports video playback capabilities, comes in black and is a little bit thinner as well. The talk has always been about fitting movies into your iPod, but now that it’s here it makes a ton of sense that Apple is initially selling individual television episodes and music videos at their store for $1.99. The videos for sale at the store are only 320×240 unfortunately, but the encoding is H.264 so I’m hopeful that the quality will still be acceptable when viewed on my laptop.

I’ve already run into a couple annoyances though while trying to buy and download one of the new videos. You need to install iTunes 6 and it wasn’t available under software updates yet so I had to download it directly. Not too big a deal, although it was annoying to have to restart OS X after the install. After the install and reboot I ran iTunes and it complained that Quicktimes 7.0.3 was required. Again, not available under software update yet so I had to download it directly and install. Upon completion the installer informed me that I needed to restart my computer yet again! Seriously irritated I let the computer reboot and left it to work on a couple other things.

When I finally got back to my computer I was eager to try one of the new videos so I quickly fired up iTunes and went to the video section. A black screen greeted me. I tried pushing a couple of the different category buttons with no visibile effect. Baffled and annoyed, I decided to go back to the store itself where I saw some nice banner ads for Lost and try from that angle. That almost worked, but unfortunately the store indicated that is was temporarily closed. Doh!

*Update*
Okay, I finally managed to download the first episode of Lost and I have to say that for a 320×240 movie blown up to 1024×768 it looked a lot better than I expected. There were occasionally visible artifacts, but it was definitely totally watchable. The files itself was only a little over 200MB as well based on iTunes Get Info command (I have no idea where the file is actually stored).

As my three regular readers have probably noticed (Hi Uncle Jim!), the posting here on Axodys has had a bit of a drop off so far in October. Part of the reason for this dearth of new content is a little bit of blogging malaise, but the biggest reason for the decline is that I’ve been devoting a lot of blogging energy to a new weblog project. This project is actually a bit different than anything I’ve done before and I’m hopeful that it will end up being a worthwhile endeavor. It’s still too early in the development process for me to start openly promoting it to the world, but rest assured I’m trying to get it finalized as quickly as possible and you, my loyal readers will be the first to hear more about it when it’s ready to go live.

This weekend was a so-so football weekend for the State of Washington. My Cougars managed to bring their Pac 10 record to 0-2 after “losing to Stanford 21-24″:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/ncaa/recaps/2005/10/08/32768_recap.html. The Huskies were idle this weekend as they to head into the meatgrinder portion of their schedule when they play Oregon, USC and ASU in consecutive weeks. The Seahawks were the sole bright spot when they managed to post a “37-31 win”:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/nfl/recaps/2005/10/09/1636_recap.html over a Rams team that owned them last year.

*Random Thoughts*
Apparently the Cougars were breaking their pregame huddle with “Pac 10 Champs!” early in the season. Now with two losses in the games that they should have won they’re looking more like Pac 10… no, that’s too easy. I think having Will Derting out really hurt them a lot on defense yesterday and just last week the Huskies showed that UCLA isn’t invincible despite their undefeated record. The Cougars have the necessary talent when at full strength, but without some training room miracles this week they’re going to be hurting next Saturday.

In today’s Seahawk game today Ferris graduate Jeff Robinson had a 24 yard reception for the Rams today which was cool. He’s mainly a long snapper, but apparently the Rams were shorthanded at tight end and Jeff got to fill in at that position. Jeff played for Dallas the last couple years, but played for the Rams during back during their recent Super Bowl years.

Google just announced their new web based RSS reader called unsurprisingly “Google Reader”:http://www.google.com/reader/lens/ and it seems fairly cool for a web based application. Keyboard command shortcuts and lots of ajax goodness make for a pretty useful interface. It works fine in Safari so that’s certainly a plus. It also has support for importing your existing feed list via OPML.

All the same, I don’t expect to give up “NetNewsWire Pro”:http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ any time soon, but this is definitely a handy way to catch up on news if I’m away from my primary computer. Of course now that “Newsgator”:http://newsgator.com has “purchased NetNewsWire”:http://www.newsgator.com/NetNewsWire.aspx I’m probably more inclined to use their “web application”:http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/default.aspx anyway.

There’s a very interesting new free web based social application development site purcolating over at “Ning”:http://www.ning.com. Everything there seems to be built around PHP 5 and I’m very curious to see what kind of stuff evolves out of the mix. I use the word evolve because developers on Ning have the ability to view and clone any pre-existing application and then modify and remix it to their hearts content. That’s very powerful and a little scary.

Right now developer accounts are being doled out sparingly so that they can keep the Ning Playground running smoothly, but standard user accounts are freely available. I imagine this Ning thing is going to really take off once it hits a few sites like “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org and “Digg”:http://digg.com.

Check out the “Ning FAQ”:http://http://faq.ning.com/group.php?FAQGroup:title=General+Questions+About+Ning#faq-147218 for a lot more in depth information.