Fish Fear Me

Da Bears

I'm not trying to rub it in about the Vikes' 36-10 win today, my Chicago friends, especially since they still must travel down to there this season and I imagine that it is going to be one po'd team that they will meet when they get there. And I'm not at all happy about the 10 penalties for 70 yards. That's just too much sloppiness for this time of the year. And Adrian Peterson's two fumbles, one lost, also makes me cringe. Still, I gotta like stuff like this:

• Brett Favre: 32-48, 392 yard, 3 TDs, 0 Int.
• Vikes: 537 yards of total offense.
• Chicago: 43 yards rushing, 169 total.
• Vikes: 31 first downs.
• Vikes: 83 plays on offense.
• Vikes Time of Possession: 40:55.

I still think the Saints are the premier NFC team so far this year, but the Vikings can hang with them if they tighten up on the mistakes. There are still five games left and the Vikes face Arizona(7-4) next and Cincinnati(8-3) the week after. Those will be tough games, and I don't discount Chicago in a Monday night game where they will likely relish the chance to play spoiler. The Saints face a tough opponent with New England tomorrow night and it will be a good test. I haven't been at the bar much lately as cash is tight, but I may splurge and go watch that one. Besides, I'm down by eight points with Laurence Maroney and Marques Colston going for me and my opponent this week is done. I HAVE to watch it.

More: The Strib says the Bears offense managed only 2 yards on 12 plays in the second half. The ESPN drive charts show 13 plays and -3 yards. I'm not sure which is correct, but obviously Chicago couldn't get anything going. Meanwhile, the Vikings offense produced 4 scoring drives that chewed up the clock and let the defense stay rested and ready to go. That's the way you do it.

Happy Thanksgiving

Here's wishing you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving.

Mom had kind of a tough year on the health front, but she's recovered nicely and was able to travel to New York to be with the East Coast contingent of the family today. This holiday finds our family healthy and whole and I'm very thankful for that.

I'm also thankful for those Americans, military and civilian, who are serving overseas and are away from their families today. Their sacrifices, and those of their families, are a huge reason we have much to be thankful for in this often brutal world.

This has been a tough year for me in some ways. Losing Sammy was a blow. Business has been awful and like many people, my financial situation has worsened this year. I've been very frustrated with our software provider for Keepsilks and our inability to get improvements done and fix known issues, to the point of almost slipping into depression again. It's been that toxic to me. I truly understand now why they say that 90% of new businesses fail. Barring winning the lottery, it is very much uncertain what I will be doing or where I will be a year from now.

But you know what? I feel good right now. For the last few months I've been looking at replacement software and website developers and while most people are hunkering down, I think we'll double-down. It has been reinvigorating to back away from the arguments and the "you can't" and get back into imagining the possible. It will make the next month brutally busy, but I think that will be in a healthy way.

It's a risk and I may fail again. But the other edge of that sword is opportunity.

And I'm very grateful today to have that.

Hide The Decline

There's actually a serious issue here, but this is pretty funny:

(Minnesotans for Global Warming)

(Via Watts Up With That)

Minor Miracle

This weekend's FFL opponent was the division leader and I was one game behind him in the standings. I was up 35-28 going into last night's Tennessee-Houston game, but I was done and my opponent had Tennessee running back Chris Johnson going. Those who follow fantasy football know why I figured my goose was cooked, but for those who don't, Johnson had rushed for over 100 yards(3 bonus points in our scoring) his previous four games and had scored two touchdowns in each of the last three games. The dude has been on fire. His FFL points contribution those three weeks? 15, 15, 18.

Well, he ran for 151 yards last night but by some miracle he didn't get in the end zone. Those three points weren't enough for my opponent and so we are tied for first with two games left. What could be key is that I now own the tie-breaker over him since I have beaten him twice this year. There are two teams in our division that are just one game back though, so it truly is up in the air. The other division is pretty much the same way, but with one team in first and three more just one game back. In the 15 years or so that this league has been around I don't think I've ever seen that kind of parity.

I'm also glad to avoid what could have been a little controversy. We went online with the league last year, but one of the rules we retained was that you still had to call your opponent(or email) with your lineup. My opponent got 6 points from Steve Smith on Thursday night, but he never let me know that he intended to play him. Had Chris Johnson scored a TD last night those points would have mattered and I would have faced a dilemma: Do I cry foul to the commissioner? Or do I just let it go, since he probably would have started him anyway? The unfair advantage here is that if Smith had not scored on Thursday, my opponent could have claimed he didn't intend to play him and put another receiver in his place. Oh, and my opponent is the commissioner's son. The commish is a fair guy, but that would put him in a tough spot.

Going into last night my inclination was to let it go, but point out that this is the kind of thing that can lead to some hard feelings and split a league into factions. The other teams in my division also had an interest in seeing me knock off the division leader, it wasn't just me. If I were to let it go I might also be screwing them over, though they may not have found out.

I don't think my opponent was trying to game things, he's a pretty good kid I think, he was just a little sloppy with the rules. I'm glad that it's not an issue this morning, but I'm still going to point it out to him.

Monday Morning Notes

It's kind of wet and dreary today, but temps hit the 50s both days this weekend. That will probably be the last weekend for that until late April or May. Bye-bye 50s. I'll miss you.

My mom finally has a new pc at home and broadband internet service. Minneapolis has 3MB service under $20/month and I was there when they did the install. She's actually getting around 5MB up and down at this point. Now I'm wrestling with getting all of her files and pics transferred from the old Windows 98 machine to her new one. It is, of course, a pain in the ass.

Today at 2:00 P.M. Eastern the American League MVP will be announced. The general consensus is that it will go to the Twins' Joe Mauer and I think that's appropriate given his batting title, gold glove play at catcher, and his leadership on the team. There are certainly other worthy players out there, I just think Mauer was the best of the best this past year. I understand that Yankees fans want to see Jeter get it, but this kind of cracked me up:

Fortunately, the New York media haven’t been fanning the flames of the myopic — at least according to my Google checking — although there was a reference in an mlb.com story noting that no Yankee has won a major post-season award since A’Rod “took home the MVP in 2007.” It’s going on two years now. Maybe ESPN can fix that.

Two whole years. And I don't think ESPN came to the rescue this year. New York fans will most likely have to settle for that World Series title this year. So sad.

It was a nice win for the Vikes yesterday against a banged up Seahawks club. The Vikes were expected to dominate and they did. There is still some room for improvement, but they played very well yesterday compared to their sloppy return from the bye week the Sunday before. Favre looked outstanding again and was able to leave the game after his fourth TD and give Tarvaris Jackson some reps. Even Jackson looked pretty good yesterday, going 6 for 8 including a TD. The defense only gave up 4 yards rushing, 4 yards! And look at the time of possession: 42:11 versus Seattle's 17:49. Yowza.

I have to give a lot of credit to Brett Favre and Brad Childress. There is none of the circus atmosphere and frustration that everyone saw in New York last year. I fully expected Favre to bring at least some of that with him if he came to the Vikes and it was a prime reason that I was unenthusiastic about him arriving here. But we've seen none of that from Favre this year. None. He has been a solid leader and team player, doing exactly what the Vikes have needed to be a serious playoff contending team.

Let's also give Brad Childress and his group of coaches a shout out. Right now they are making the adjustments that are needed during the game and making good play calls. I haven't been a big fan of Childress in the past, but so far this season he is doing just about everything right, and it's only proper to give him the credit he deserves.

I Smell Smoke

I saw this via Mr. Bingley this morning, and it has the potential to rock the political world:

Hackers have broken into the data base of the Hadley GRU unit - one of the world’s leading alarmist centres - and put the files they stole on the Internet, on the grounds that the science is too important to be kept under wraps.

The ethics of this are dubious, to say the least. But the files suggest, on a very preliminary glance, some other very dubious practices, too, and a lot of collusion - sometimes called “peer review”. Or even conspiracy.

A warning, of course. We can only say with a 90 per cent confidence interval that these emails are real.

The caution that this is all unconfirmed is one we should pay heed to. However, I downloaded the entire file this morning and took a look at some of those emails. If this is a hoax, somebody spent a hell of a lot of time setting it up. Many of the emails contain complete headers and details that can be easily checked, including message IDs that investigators can use to find emails or see if they have been deleted. There is plenty of evidence available to quickly confirm or debunk these emails.

This is a huge moment of truth for the mainstream media. If organizations like The New York Times or WaPo ignore or fail to at objectively investigate this story they will prove that they are absolutely worthless in providing the essential information that the public needs to make informed decisions. I think we should see how things work out before rendering judgment, but this is one hell of a lot of smoke.

Commonplace Book Day

It's Commonplace Book Day at Sheila's blog, something she does a few times a year and one of my favorites. Lots of great quotes with a solid mix of insight, wisdom, and humor. I don't see a category to link to, but for today you can hit the main page and keep scrolling. Or you can hit this one and just keep working back. Good stuff.

It Took Awhile, But I Finally Got It

About two months ago I had a problem pop up with my home pc where it would hang on boot up. No matter which method I tried to use, it would always hang after or while trying to load a file named agpcpq.sys. I was working off of my laptop for awhile and was kind of afraid that I was going to have to flatten the damn box and reload XP. I have most of my stuff backed up to CD, but there were some recent pics and docs I would have lost and it's just a royal pain in the neck anyway. 

So a couple of weeks ago I gave it a shot again and found success. I can't say it will work for everyone because none of the other fixes I found worked for me and none of them said to do what I did, but this appears to have worked for me. Why the problem occurred in the first place and why the following worked for me I'm not sure. If someone finds this post while searching for a solution, here's mine and good luck.

I had secured both an original XP SP2 CD and a Dell reinstallation CD, having foolishly not created my own recovery CD(since addressed). Booting to either CD would still hang at the same spot. On a whim, I unplugged the pc and removed the Radeon graphics card that I had installed years ago and tried another boot from the Dell CD. Lo and behold, it booted to safe mode. Through control panel I then completely uninstalled the Radeon card and rebooted successfully in normal mode. A little bemused, but happy, I shutdown the pc and reinstalled the video card(don't forget to unplug the pc). The pc rebooted successfully and appears to be back to normal now.

I credit my IT brilliance. The chicken, the candles, and the pentagram were merely coincidental.

The Gamble

The decision to try five members of al Qaeda in a New York federal court while sending five others before a military commission somewhere has me a bit puzzled. I suspect that it is another victory for wishful thinking over common sense for this administration. And maybe also the inevitable result of eight years of intellectual dishonesty and moral weakness about  distinguishing between civilians, soldiers, and illegal combatants, and the state of international law regarding parties in violent conflict.

President Obama, and make no mistake, this was his decision and he owns it, is gambling his Presidency that:

1. There will be no terrorist attacks in New York City during the trial. The possibility exists that al Qaeda would attack New York during a military commission trial in Guantanamo, but I don't think President Obama could be blamed for that. By staging the trial in New York though, he has actually provided an incentive for al Qaeda to strike while the world's attention is focused there. If the bastards want to ensure he is a one-term president they will strike in some fashion then, because a large percentage of Americans will blame Obama for setting up the likelihood of that particular disaster, including me.
2. Attorney General Holder appears confident that a case can be made against the five that will not compromise intelligence methods, nor put the judiciary in a position of having to choose between excluding evidence or setting precedents that diminish our own civil rights. I hope so. I don't have the legal background or the access to the information that Holder has to assess whether his confidence is misplaced. All I can say for sure is that a diluting of our rights under the guise of the necessity to prosecute foreign terrorists will be unacceptable to me and millions of Americans in no uncertain terms. That result would put the nation on very dangerous grounds.
3. The odds are that this trial is going to be a media circus. Any number of nations and groups will have all sorts of incentives to create incidents and issues that can quickly spin out of the control of the administration. Do they have any idea what kind of information ops arena they are setting up? Will they be ready for it? Maybe, but right now I'm skeptical. And once again is this another area where we may see compromise, this time by major American media outlets, that sets dangerous precedents regardless of which party is in charge?

The larger fail over the last eight years has been in how we view the various parties in a conflict. The world consensus that was built in the wake of WWII is not just broken now, it is shattered. The victims of this are primarily the innocent civilians in areas of conflict, but they are also the soldiers who strive to fight in ways that protect the rights of non-combatants in their area of operations. Our failure, our unwillingness, to discern the difference between the types of combatants in the world today is killing innocent civilians while allowing moral midgets, who at best appear to look good in suits on various talk shows, to drone on about how "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

That's just bullshit.

There's no escaping that we as a society, and western civilization as a whole, have made a complete muddle of that though. Mostly in the service of political ideology at the expense of integrity I think. More on that aspect later.

Hey, It's A Valid Question

My friend Mark emailed me the following pic that was captioned as "How to spot a guy from Wisconsin with a DUI conviction."

Exit question: Given the known proclivities of some Cheeseheads as reported in the media a few years ago, was he deer hunting or is that his date?