I don’t know what happened in the TV world this week, but all week I have been seeing a lot of sweet TV deals on slickdeals.com and woot.com:

• Sharp Aquos 52″ LC52D85U 120Hz 1080p LCD HDTV $1000 or $970 DPA http://bit.ly/9AGOkp
• $199.99 : Vizio 22” 1080p LCD HDTV http://sellout.woot.com (today only)
• LG 47LH30 47″ 1080p LCD HDTV $680 http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/30217
• LG 42LH30 42″ Full HD 1080p LCD HDTV $499 http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/30197
• Sharp 42″ LC42SB45UT 1080p LCD HDTV $499 http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/30177

On last night’s College Football Final, the topic of “Final Verdict” (a segment where Lou Holtz and Mark May take different sides of a controversial topic currently existing in College Football), the topic was the political action committee (playoffpac.com) that has just been created as well as Utah’s own Senator Orrin Hatch’s actions to change the face of College Football. The “debate” started off with Mark May complaining that there are more important things to worry about right now than college football.

While this may be true, it makes as much sense as telling the police officer who just pulled you over “Why aren’t you out there catching murderers and rapists?”…

I was a little surprised that this was Mr. May’s response, as he usually takes the more liberal side while Lou Holtz is Mr. Old School. As it turns out, Lou Holtz WAS Mr. Old School and started ranting and raving, saliva flying all directions, about tradition and “back in the day” and the national defecit, and possibly flying monkeys (i lost consciousness halfway through).

Point being, this is the first time the two of them have sided together during this segment. Go figure.

I was unable to make it to College GameDay in Provo, Utah, but a friend of mine was there to cheer on BYU. When I watched the show on Saturday, I was disappointed to see that there were no anti-BCS signs in the crowd, but wrote it off as lack of anti-BCS enthusiasm. As it turns out, so my friend told me, ESPN confiscated all of the anti-BCS signs before the show started! What is this, a cover-up? Their excuse was somewhere along the lines that they didn’t want any “negative” signs. What? What about all of the anti-TCU, Boise State, and Utah signs? Those aren’t negative enough?

All you BCS-haters out there, no matter what your team affiliations are, this is your time to shine. Get your creative caps on and then get to walmart for any supplies you need to make a brilliant anti-BCS sign to display to ESPN and the nation. Get up early (6 am-ish) and get to Lavell Edwards Stadium’s west parking lot ready to hold that sign high.

Why this weekend? (Besides the fact that, if you live in the area, this is a one in a million chance to get on a live national sports show dedicated to college football.) The meeting of BYU and TCU is a significant game for College Game Day to visit because both of these teams have been labeled potential BCS-Busters. BYU has one loss, so it’s not likely for them to bust said BCS, but TCU is still undefeated.

The reason I bring this up is that there will no doubt be conversation on the show about the impact of these non-bcs-conference schools on the playoff movement. So get your signs ready, get your sleepy sleep, and get up early to get your bcs-busting on! (Recommend pump-up music: Muse’s “United States of Eurasia”.)

Coming off of such an amazing season last year, I would have thought it would be hard to get excited for this year. On the contrary, I have been looking forward to tomorrow’s game for the last 2 months, counting down the days. I’m much more excited than I had expected. Why is this? Perhaps because of the opportunity to prove ourselves again. Perhaps because I get to go to the Oregon game. In my opinion, I think I simply really like Utah Football.

My brother and I decided to start buying season tickets last year. Before last year, we just bought tickets for 2 or 3 games a year. Could there be a better year to get season tickets for Utah Football?? I submit that there could not, not just because of their perfect record, but because we were witnesses to some amazing games. If you don’t remember, take a look back at the last two minutes of the Oregon State and TCU games. Amazing. My brother and I even rushed the field after the TCU victory, something that couldn’t be done from home. At the stadium, you can be as loud as you want. At home, you have 1-year-old children who get scared when you shout and jump up and down.

As mentioned above, my brother and I will be making the long trek to Oregon to watch the game. Our parents currently live in Eugene (home of the Ducks) and my father has access to tickets from his boss (normally around $55). This will be the high-point of the season for me, at least until the Holy War (to hell with “Deseret Duel”… Who agreed to this? Not the fans.)

I work and live in Cougar country. This, at times, makes me want to puke. There are a lot of extremely obnoxious BYU fans (and yes, I know this goes both ways.) There are also a lot of cool BYU fans that know how to have fun with the rivalry. Even the president of the company has started dishing it out the past few days. All I have to say to anybody who wants to start smack-talking about this year’s game already is:

Koa Misi Sacking Max Hall

Mind you, both of the aforementioned players are still on their respective teams this year (although Max Hall was arguably Utah’s MVP of last year’s game…)

There’s another point I wanted to touch on dealing with BYU, and that is BYU’s opener. I just finished having a conversation with a co-worker about this. Should I cheer for BYU to win or Oklahoma? On the one side, it’s good for the conference if BYU wins. On the other hand, I would love nothing more than to see BYU get creamed by a top-5 team right after Utah performed such a creaming on Alabama. I simply don’t want BYU to have the glory Utah had. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a rivalry.

However, the decision becomes clear to me once I consider a third point: Utah and BYU are competing (along with TCU) for the conference championship. Sometimes we overlook this in our persuit for national recognition. For this reason, it is the Utes’ best interest to see their in-conference competition fail. Perhaps the best outcome would be for BYU to show their strength and lose by less than a touchdown.

sarien.net

I ran across this last night just before going to bed, so I only got to play about 20 seconds of Kings Quest 2, but it seemed to work just fine. For all you folks old enough to remember these games, you should really enjoy this website. I know I’m going to. I already beat Kings Quest, Space Quest, and got mostly through both KQ2 and SQ2 back in the day. Now I will begin again and work my way back up through the ranks.

“Look grass.” “You see nothing special.”

For my website building services domain name, which do you prefer?

• colossuswebsolutions.com
• colossuswebsites.com
• websitecolossus.com
• colossalwebsites.com
• tinycolossus.com

Feel free to offer any other suggestions (please make sure they are available first.)

About a month ago I was working on my PC at home and decided that I wanted to listen to music. Normally, I use itunes for listening to music, so naturally I got online and downloaded the install file. First problem, you either download “itunes + quicktime” or nothing. Lame, but whatever. Quicktime never hurt me, I’d just like to have the option. So I start installing it. I notice it’s really big, but continue anyway. One progress bar after another fills up. I’m reminded of the scene in Office Space when Peter is trying to log out of his computer. Each progress bar says something like “installing files” or “configuring blah blah.” Seemed like an awful lot of steps for 2 programs. Finally it finishes installing and I add some music and enjoy a little Easy Star Allstars as I work.

After the work comes the play. I decide I want to play Red Alert 3, so I insert it into one of my DVD drives. Nothing. I open up “My Computer” and my DVD drives are gone! I spend the next 2 hours or so messing with settings and looking for answers online. I finally discover the problem: itunes8. That’s right, itunes made my disk drives vanish (at least virtually. Luckily they were still in my tower when I checked.)

So I uninstall itunes and voila, my Disk drives are back. Solution: don’t use itunes. Well, one of the reasons I use itunes over other media players is that I love how it keeps my music folder organized. So I decide to give it another go. Same thing. So I recruit Google to find a solution. As it turns out, itunes 8 is full of extras that you had no idea it was installing. You can never trust such programs to uninstall everything after you’ve installed it. Here is a link to images of the multiple progress bars. I don’t really want to go through my computer searching for these programs. If only Windows had the coveted “Time Machine” that Apple enthusiasts rant and rave about. Oh wait. It does. It’s called System Restore and has been around since the early days of Windows. Restore to before the itunes 8 install. Problem solved.

Unfortunately, I have an ipod. ipod – itunes = brick. Luckily other programs will support it, such as winamp, just not as well. And heaven forbid I should ever have to restore it (which I will, as it crashes often). I guess I’ll just go find an old itunes 7 installer somewhere in the dusty cellar of the internet.

“Guess”

At least that’s what I’ve decided. Recently, I was doing some SEO work for a site that sells fraternity and sorority merchandise. They also have some Freemason stuff. As I was looking through the products, I noticed that there was a G in the center of the logo:

If you ask a mason what the square means, you might expect to get varying answers, as you would if you asked about the compasses. However, one would expect that if you ask a mason what the “G” stands for, you would get one answer. After all, the U on the mountain stands for Utah, and the Y stands for Young. The “D” on a coin stands for Denver, where a “P” stands for Philadelphia, determining where the coin was minted.

Now go online and try to find an answer to what the “G” stands for and you will get one of the following answers:

• God
• Great Mathemetician
• Geometry
• Greatness
• (my favorite) “It means what you want it to mean.”

For a group that supposedly has all the answers, this sure doesn’t help their cause much.