Oregon State National Champs!

Oregon State National Champs!

Way to go Beavs! We’re proud of ya!

Beavers to play for national championship, Oregon State’s athletics on SI’s top 20 list

SI Top 20 list

Now THAT’s a good looking uniform. By the way, the Beavers will be playing for their first ever trip to the NCAA Div. 1 College World Series Championship against North Carolina this Saturday. They beat Rice University–the number one ranked team in the country–2-0 tonight in a pitcher’s duel in Omaha, Nebraska. Pretty exciting stuff, you can’t help but be proud of these guys.

And, apparently, Oregon State University is on SI’s list of top sports schools of all time. I don’t know what formula they used to arrive at their rankings, but I’m sure not going to argue with their results.

Funny, I look up and down that list, and I only see one Oregon school listed on there. Nope, I sure don’t see Portland State anywhere on that list.

Admit it, Duck fans, these unis make you sick, too

Forgive me for putting such a horrid picture on an otherwise very attractive weblog, but this was too interesting to pass up. These new Duck uniforms have got to be the worst things ever. I mean, come on–is the University of Zero serious about these new uniforms? Are they going for the Pac-10 record for Most Consecutive Years With The Most Hideous Uniforms? Does the yellow one come complete with a French’s logo? And we won’t even discuss the industrial-steel tread on the shoulders and knees.

These guys have a long history of bad uniforms. I remember a few years ago when some boosters paid for a giant mural of Joey Harrington on the side of some building in New York City. They were trying to hype him for the Heisman award. Dude ended up looking like the Jolly Green Giant coming to attack the good citizens of New York.

So how about it Duck fans, I seriously want you to weigh in with your opinion on these uniforms. What do you think of them? And I don’t want to hear any we’ll-settle-this-on-the-football-field business. We both know that, come Civil War, we’re going to hear plenty of “Canfield finds Newton across the middle–Touchdown Beavers!” And, “Bernard breaks through the Duck secondary for another 10-yard gain!”

Friday Puzzler

There is a common English word that is nine letters long. Each time you remove a letter from it, it still remains an English word — from nine letters right down to a single letter. What is the original word, and what are the words that it becomes after removing one letter at a time?

iPodding + Driving

Techdirt article link

While driving, I have seen people:

* Talking on the phone
* Doing their makeup
* Eating
* Reading the newspaper
* Looking for something
* Disciplining their children

So now, apparently, listening to an iPod while driving has become a dangerous thing. Never mind that the statistics don’t support it. And I don’t buy the “you can’t hear anything around you” argument. I don’t listen to mine so loud that I can’t hear anything. In fact, I would submit that my iPod is a lot safer than my car radio for several different reasons. For one, I’m fiddling with the controls a lot less because my iPod already has what I want to listen to on it. And when I do have to adjust something, my eyes never leave the road.

Of course, I’m sure we’ll see a nation-wide law before too long, a law passed for political expediency more than out of a need to improve public safety. Some things never change, I suppose.

The Pasture: A poem by Robert Frost

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n't be gone long.–You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n't be gone long.–You come too.

The cold, hard facts

Article Link

I’m glad there’s somebody out there that agrees with me on this stuff. You know that flash intro you spent hours working? Guess what–people are clicking it away! Either by hitting the “skip intro” button, or–more likely–clicking away from your site all together.

A Flash intro is annoying and has no place on an attractive, useable, and informative website.

It’s also interesting to note that the right hand column on a 3-column web page has nearly become invisible because of the (over)abundance of advertising taking up that space on so many sites. From the article:

Another problem is site blindness. “We are now seeing right-column blindness, where users do not see information and links down the right hand side of the screen. This occurs because the right hand column has become known for advertising,” Cunnington said.

Here’s my short list of Annoying Website Things:

1. Animated .gif images. Enough said.
2. Flash intros
3. Any kind of “intro” page
4. Content that doesn’t relate with the rest of the site
5. Too, too many ads

So let’s start designing some pages with your audience in mind, instead of showing off some obscure skill that nobody wants to see. Yes, you know who you are!

Build your own computer for $500

Computer Shopper: Build a Bargain

This sounds intriguing. Sure, we could get on the phone and order a Dell and get approximately the same thing for maybe the same amount of money, but where’s the fun in that? Besides, if you build your own, it stands to reason that you’ll have an easier time upgrading later on when it becomes necessary.

The instructions here certainly look doable, and Computer Shopper appears to have mapped out any potential trouble spots in the building process. Also, they give you some options if you want to spend a couple hundred extra dollars to upgrade right away.

A few caveats here are that this computer doesn’t include a monitor, keyboard, mouse, or printer, but if you’ve been using a computer for very long at all, you probably already have those items that you can use. You could probably legally use the Windows XP operating system and/or Microsoft Office suite you already have, provided you take it off your older computer. I’m sure you legal beagles out there will chime in if I’m wrong about that, though.

I might give this a whirl at some point in the near future. My three-year-old Dell is starting to show it’s age, and I do have the need for some larger HD space and a faster processor. If nothing else, I’ll learn something useful, and possibly save a few bucks in the process.

Anybody have any experience building your own computer? Anything I need to know that’s not in this article before I take the leap?