Fish Fear Me

Insane

This being a bye week for me in FFL, I'm mostly a bystander except for the race for the total points crown and its associated cash reward. There are six teams still in the running for that, including mine. The leader had 30 points on me going into this week, but as it stands now I've picked up 22 on him and have still outpaced the other four teams. It's crazy how close everything has been this year.

The Vikes had a nice win today over the really good Cincinnati Bengals. It was a tough and hard-hitting game that didn't become decisive until well into the second half. The Vikes were too much for them though, and it was good to see them bounce back from the beatdown they received from Arizona last week and the loss of E.J. Henderson. This week Minnesota won the battle in the trenches even though it looked to me that Favre took way too much of a beating. I'm worried that he can't take much more of that kind of punishment and still be available for the playoffs.

Speaking of E.J., the surgery to fix his broken leg apparently went very well and I'm surprised and cheered that the prognosis is that he will most likely be able to play next year. Whether he will or not remains to be seen, but I was afraid that they were going to say his career is over for certain. Get well soon E.J.

Back to FFL, one of my receivers, Brandon Marshall, set an NFL record for most catches in a game today with 21. According to ESPN, he also had an insane number of targets at 28. Indianapolis won the game though, so I'm hoping that the Broncos' opponents the next two weeks follow the same formula. The downside today? I just watched one of my running backs, Marion Barber, get stuffed three times from the one yard line. Speaking of insane, pulling a guard on the one yard line is a sure sign of it.

Another squeaker for my friend Rob's Saints. 13-0 is pretty damn impressive though. They haven't mathematically locked up home field advantage for the playoffs yet, but I think it's a done deal.

You Know It's Winter...

...when 15° and sunny feels pretty good.

Presented For Your Amusement

The mission: Transfer all documents, pictures, and email from an old Windows 98 PC connected to the internet via dialup to a new(newer refurb) one running XP connected to the internet via broadband.

Option: Burn all of the relevant stuff to CD and copy it over.
Determination: CD on the old PC is read-only.
Result: Fail.

Option: Transfer via floppy.
Determination: Um, are you high, Dave? There's like 250MB here.
Result: Fail.

Option: Network the two PCs together.
Determination: No ethernet card on the old PC.
Result:  Fail.

Option: FTP the files up to my FTP site via dialup and download via broadband.
Determination: Ish, that will take forever, even if I zip it all up.
Result: Fail.

Option: Connect the two Pcs via null modem cable and use the XP Transfer Files and Settings Wizard.
Determination: Hey, that will work.
Result: Ok, make an install floppy for the old PC. Shit, the floppy drive on the new PC doesn't work(for reasons I won't get into, the 90 day warranty had expired. I could go get a new floppy drive and install it, but odds are they would never use it again anyway. Not these days.) My laptop is XP and has a floppy though. Shit, I didn't bring my laptop with me. Go to make floppy for old PC and return next day. Load floppy on old PC and try to install. Floppy drive disabled by administrator on old PC. Spend two hours futilely seeking cause of that and uninstalling utilities and AV that may be the source. Burn wizard to CD from floppy and try to transfer to old PC that way. Now get unable to run program error. Abandon serial connection. Fail.

Option: Drink.
Determination: Why not?
Result: Good night's sleep. Decide to scrounge a NIC and install on the old PC.

Option: Network the two PCs together.
Determination: Determined.
Result: Installed NIC and hoped that Windows 98 would find a good driver. Hahahaha! Search internet for correct driver. Apparently either about four people bought this NIC or it's so old that the notion that someone would still use it shakes the very foundation of the internet. Find the driver after 45 minutes of searching and get the NIC working. Load everything up and go back to new PC location. Hook up all PCs. Short one network cable. Shit.

Option: Drink.
Determination: No, I'm going to get this done, dammit.
Result: Go get one more cable. Try to remember all of the crap needed to network a Windows 98 box. Resort to Google. Oh, yeah. Success! Transfer all files and setup email identities on new machine. Mom and sister happy.

Option: Drink.
Determination: Why not? Mission Accomplished.
Result: Good night's sleep. 

Home Work Is Good

It looks like we got about six inches of snow, but it's kind of hard to tell with it blowing around so much. The drifts were about two feet tall in some places and it's been a bit futile to deal with them until the winds die down a bit. Now comes the cold. Christmas in Long Beach is looking pretty good.

It's been a good day to stay home and absorb the two hour training session I received yesterday on some new software. The roads will be a mess until tomorrow anyway. Gotta love being able to work via the internet.

In The Money

The FFL regular season finished last night and the result for me was a tie for first in my division with another owner at 8-5. However, I beat him twice this year so you can call me division champ. That means I'm guaranteed to be in the money for this year and I get a first round bye in the playoffs. This year it has been mostly about luck as my team will score 60 points one week and then turnaround and barely scrounge 30 points the next. I think the odds of winning it all are against me, but having a first round bye improves that a little. We'll see how it goes.

Update: Huh. I didn't realize it until this evening, but I ended up as #1 seed also, for as long as I hang around in the playoffs. With the teams so close this year I don't think it really matters much, but every edge may count.

More On Temp Adjustments

The other day I did a post on the temperature data adjustments that are made on current and historical observations. Today there is a post up over at Watts Up With That? that details the adjustments that have been done to one station in Darwin, Australia. The adjustments remove a slight cooling trend and replace it with a warming trend:

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

Read the whole thing to get a good understanding about what I was talking about the other day as detailed in one particular station. It will be interesting to see if there is an official explanation, but I doubt that we will get one.

This is just one station in detail and it does not by itself prove that the global temperature data sets are corrupt. But this one sure appears to be and if it is, how many stories just like it are out there?

We are going to allow politicians to take even more control over our lives based on stuff like this? Seriously?

Soon

Here comes the snow! Which is fine with me I guess, because right behind it they say will be a whole bunch of arctic air that will drop us into single digits for temperature. If it's going to be cold, I would rather have some snow on the ground instead of a bleak landscape of dead and brown vegetation. A good six inches or more of snow followed by bitter cold air is also the classic set up for our annual winter event here: The Winter Dumbass.

Soon, I think.

Walkback

Fred Hiatt tries to weave similarities between how Bush announced his surge in Iraq in 2007 and how Obama announced his surge for Afghanistan last week:

No wonder conservatives are unhappy with the president. Imagine undermining an announced escalation of troops by simultaneously laying out a schedule for them to step back -- and suggesting that the mission will end if the government that America is trying to help doesn't shape up.

But wait -- it wasn't only President Obama who did those things but also President George W. Bush, in announcing his Iraq surge in January 2007. Those who say that Obama doomed his Afghan strategy with his promise to begin withdrawing in 18 months -- and who remember Bush's strategy as nothing but a clarion call for unambiguous victory -- should go back and read the speech.

By all means, go back and read Bush's speech. The tone was somber compared to Obama's pissed off, petulant, and petty attitude. It was also remarkable in its specificity and consistency compared to the sometimes contradictory generalities that President Obama gave us last week. But you don't need a detailed comparison to comprehend the differences in the way that Bush and Obama presented their surge strategies. All you need to do is look at the different effects.

After President Bush spoke in 2007, the Sunni and Shiite extremists blustered and took hope from Bush's domestic political opponents, but friend and foe alike in Iraq understood the President's resolve. After President Obama spoke, we got this:

The announcement of the July 2011 benchmark was also greeted with concern during private conversations among American officials and their counterparts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and administration officials in recent days have acknowledged that they were surprised by the intensity of the anxiety among Afghan and Pakistani officials that the United States would beat a hasty retreat from the region.

In response, the last week has seen a major attempt to reemphasize the "conditions" that Obama briefly mentioned in his speech and we will see more of that this week. Which pretty much confirms the foolishness of setting a date in the first place. President Bush faced much of the same recalcitrance and corruption with Maliki that President Obama is seeing with Karzai, but he deftly managed to put pressure on Maliki through subtle public language and most likely very strong private language and behind the scenes engagement.

President Obama and his team, in their arrogance, had a model they could have worked with but they tossed it aside. Now they are scrambling to repair the damage that anybody not blinded by BDS would have avoided in the first place. Hiatt and friends do Obama no favors by trying to hide this incompetence, they simply enable more of the same.

It's going to be a long and painful 3 years if Obama doesn't get his shit together and people like Hiatt keep spinning his failures.

More: Perhaps Steve Den Beste has the explanation. That would account for Obama's cluelessness when it comes to the economy also. I buy it.

Best Wishes, E.J.

It was looking like simply a good old-fashioned beat down last night as the Vikings-Cardinals game was winding down. The Vikes had been solidly outplayed at the line on both sides of the ball and they had also clearly been out-coached. They needed to get out of there in one piece, go home and lick their wounds, and then work hard this week to fix the many breakdowns and failures. They didn't make it on that first part:

The mood inside the Vikings locker room following a 30-17 loss to the Arizona Cardinals told the seriousness of a leg injury to middle linebacker and emotional leader E.J. Henderson.

The room was completely silent when reporters were allowed in. Several players were visibly shaken and near tears as they talked about Henderson, who suffered a fractured femur in his left leg when he collided with rookie safety Jamarca Sanford on a tackle attempt in the fourth quarter.

I was watching when it happened. Nasty.

I feel bad for Henderson, who had struggled back from an injury last year to really star this year. It hurts from a personnel standpoint, but it is much more a psychological blow I think, to him and the team. E.J. will be okay over time. I'm not sure about the team though. Their response to this adversity will tell us if they can compete with the likes of the Saints or Colts this year.

Hmmmm

Something that Thomas Friedman notes in his latest column on Afghanistan has me wondering how well Afghan President Hamid Karzai knows American history. Friedman recalls this exchange between President Kennedy and Walter Cronkite on Sept. 2, 1963:

Cronkite: “Mr. President, the only hot war we’ve got running at the moment is, of course, the one in Vietnam, and we have our difficulties there.”

Kennedy: “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the [Vietnamese] government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them; we can give them equipment; we can send our men out there as advisers. But they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the Communists. We are prepared to continue to assist them, but I don’t think that the war can be won unless the people support the effort and, in my opinion, in the last two months, the [Vietnamese] government has gotten out of touch with the people. ...”

Cronkite: “Do you think this government still has time to regain the support of the people?”

Kennedy: “I do. With changes in policy and perhaps with personnel I think it can. If it doesn’t make those changes, the chances of winning it would not be very good.”

Unknown to Cronkite at the time, and unremarked on by Friedman in his column today, is that "cable 243" had been sent out a week earlier and had already set in motion what would eventually be the overthrow and murder of the then-President of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem(Kennedy absolutely was aware of it though). That cable in part read:

....US would find it impossible to continue support GVN militarily and economically unless above steps are taken immediately which we recognize requires removal of Nhus from the scene. We wish give Diem reasonable opportunity to remove Nhus, but if he remains obdurate, then we are prepared to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem. You may also tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown central government mechanism.

Exactly two months after that interview, Diem lay dead in the back of a rebel APC. Fast forward 46 years and we once again have the United States, with a young president in office, involved in a war and grumbling about corruption and incompetence in the government it is supporting. And note the coincidence that the Nhu(Nhus?) referenced above was Diem's brother and that Karzai's own brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, has been sharply criticized recently for ties to the drug trade.

The parallel is certainly not perfect or exact and times have changed; administrations don't have the same ability to do things quietly that they once had. I just think it's interesting that Friedman used that example today when we have an administration openly griping about corruption and incompetence in Afghanistan.

I mean, it would take a particularly arrogant and inexperienced administration to attempt to pull off a coup in Afghanistan, right?