Happy Halloween!

Weis on 60 Minutes

In the event that you missed the Charlie Weis interview on 60 minutes last night, here’s a link to download it.  You didn’t hear that from me.

Mahwidge is what bwings us togeher tooday

When you get married, you learn some new things quickly. No longer can you only consider yourself when making decisions. For someone who’s been on his own for a good number of years, this comes as a bit of shock. This past weekend there were two occasions in particular when I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore:

1. I’m kind of anal about the heat in my house. Let’s face it: oil is expensive these days! Last winter I had absolutely zero money, so I got through the winter by turning the thermostat as low as I possibly could without letting my pipes freeze and wore sweatshirts and big wool socks around all day. My wife is also very anal about the temperature, but for a different reason. She’s always cold. I mean, always. At one point this summer we were at the beach in Costa Rica and she had goosebumps (and no, it wasn’t because she was so thrilled to be in paradise with her new husband). So this weekend we had the following interchange:

Wife: “So do you have the heat on?”

Me: “Um…what?”

Wife: “Do you have the heat turned on?”

Me: (incoherrent groan)

Wife: “So I assume that’s a ‘no’. Look, I’m not going to live like an Eskimo this winter. We both have jobs. There’s no reason we can’t have heat in our house. Turn the heat on.”

Can’t really argue with that.

2. During the ND game on Saturday I noticed a commercial for 60 minutes expose on Charlie Weis. I forgot about it until Sunday night when the wife was channel surfing during an “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” commerical break. When she passed by CBS, I caught a glimpse of Coach Yoda and promptly high-tailed it down the other TV in the basement. When I returned upstairs, the wife had this to say:

“So how was Charlie Weis? Did you learn anything you didn’t already know about him? Was it everything you hoped it would be? I’ve never seen you run that fast before. I’ve certainly never seen you run like that to me.”

I’ve got some work to do.

Technorati Tags: marriage

The worst live-blog ever

Well, if you read my post from Saturday, you’ll see the worst live-blog of a sporting event ever. I got pretty bored with it after the first quarter. Truth was, it just wasn’t a very exciting game. Notre Dame handled an undermatched Navy squad just like it has done for the past 43 years. Maybe next year will be more interesting.

Notre Dame / Navy Live Blog

Well, this is going to be my first ever live blog of a football game.  It’s ND/Navy live from Baltimore!

- Navy takes the field first, followed by the Irish.  Commentators teach us that not only has Navy lost this game every year since JFK was president, but that they just lost their quarterback for the season and has been replaced by a Hawaiian guy with about 10 consecutive consonants in his name.  Things are already looking bad for Navy in 2006.

- Unfortunately this game is not in HD because CBS is too cheap to cart along a few HD cameras to Baltimore.  I guess only the SEC gets the red carpet treatment.

- Things look sunny in Baltimore, which bodes well for us.

- Q1: Darius has his best run of the season on the first play of the game.  Looks like our O line is able to block guys 40 lbs. lighter than them

- When you’re used to watcing games in HD and then you’re forced to watch SD, it’s kind of like buying the store brand Triscuts at the grocery store - a cheap imitation.

- Q1: Goia comes on for a 40 yard field goal and inexplicably hits it.  A pig just flew past my window.

-

Not much posting lately…

Well, no sooner did I see a bunch of people from college a couple weeks ago and get made fun of for blogging so much than I go on a near two week binge of NOT blogging.  I feel like I owe an explanation.

Basically the hedge fund I work at just started the fundraising process about two weeks ago.  When you work for a brand new company with only four employees and no administrative assistent and are trying to raise $150 million, you end up having to do a bunch of administrative stuff.  In our case, that means preparing mailings for lots of people.  At this point I’ve become quite adept at printing mailing labels and the like with our nifty company logo watermarked on the back.  We’ve spent about $800 in postage so far because the materials we’re sending out are a bit lenghthy.

The long and short of it is that I haven’t had much time on my  hands during work hours to scour the internet looking for interesting stuff to comment on.  Things have just been too busy.  I hope to get back into the groove soon.

Speaking of groove, check out Last.fm. It’s a pretty sweet social music site that makes it easy and fun to discover cool new music. Definitely worth a look. You can see on the right that I’ve added a sidebar that is an RSS feed of the 10 most recent tracks I’ve listened to. Another special bonus of this service is that it’s compatible with my modded Xbox and Xbox Media Center. That way I can easily listen on my stereo at home and all the info still gets tracked in the website. SWEEET!

The power of Youtube

There’s a lot of people out there that think the Google acquisition of Youtube is kind of crazy (including me), but consider this: the following video has been viewed over 34 million times since it was uploaded on April 6th of this year.  That is a staggering number.

Pay special attention at the 3:40 mark.  My sister, who insists that she had only consumed 3 drinks my entire wedding, performed the same move in front of over 115 friends and family at my reception.  Well done, sis.

Technorati Tags: youtube, google, wedding

Denny Green loses it

Da Bears had an unbelievable comeback in last night’s Monday night game vs. the Cardinals, and the unlikely turn of events had head coach Denny Green a bit up in arms.  Check out his post-game tirade.  If you’re watching this at work, you probably don’t want to crank the volume or anything (unless you work in Chicago, of course):

This may be better than the infamous Jim Mora post-game interview when he was coaching the Colts:

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: denny green, tirade, nfl, cardinals, colts, bears, post game

Back from the windy city…

Good times in Chicago/Indy this weekend, kids.  Busy at work trying to catch up, so sorry for the lack of posting lately.  I’ll do my best to get back on it soon.  Until then, enjoy this picture of Kel blowing away from the Hancock building on Friday.

How not to get a job on Wall Street

You guys have to check this out.  A guy named Aleksey Vayner recently applied for a job with UBS in New York.  He submitted a cover letter and resume describing his “insatiable appetitie for peak performance” that included a link to a motivational video he made entitled “Impossible is Nothing”.  Evidently the Yale student felt comfortable ripping off an Adidas ad campaign from a few years ago.  The video includes Vayner dancing with a latin chick, lifting weights at the gym, and breaking bricks with his bare hands.

This thing is such a joke that within days the video link had spread all over Wall Street to firms like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Credit Suisse.  As you can imagine, the video eventually ended up on YouTube, but has since been removed because Vayner claimed copyright infringement and had it taken down.  Thankfully you can still find it by going here.  Unfortunately I’m unable to embed it on my blog because WordPress doesn’t support Veoh (the site the video is currently hosted on).

Technorati Tags: vayner, resume, yale, wall street, joke, video

Today in history

10/11/2002: Jimmy Carter wins the Nobel Prize for his “untiring efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts” — proof that the Nobel Prize really isn’t all that prestigious any more.

Weis releases book

If you’re an ND nut like myself, you might want to take note that Charlie Weis released an autobiography today.  Looks like it should be a good read.  I trust Mike Frank.

Technorati Tags: charlie weis, notre dame, football, book

President of Disney calls piracy a “business model”

I found this gem from Torrentfreak:

Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC television group explained that Piracy is a business model. She told that content providers should compete, instead of fight it.

Sweeney spoke these wise words in her keynote address at the Mipcom festival

“We understand now that piracy is a business model, it exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do - through quality, price and availability.”

She continued:

“This time two years ago, Disney was congratulating themselves at the end of a season that saw lost and Desperate Housewives make it big. But at the end of the meeting, the head of operations and engineering presented a high-quality, ad-free version of DH that had been put online less than 15 minutes after the show aired. That was a defining moment for the business. We we don’t like the model but we realize it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward.”

That’s some innovative thinking from “the man” if I ever heard it.  The key component of that quote: “high quality, ad-free” and “online less than 15 minutes after the show aired”.

The big question is how do the networks compete with pirated material.  Well, I can tell you that the solution is NOT streaming the shows online — how would I watch them in my car on the way to work?  The answer is NOT charging $2.00 for an ad-less episode — I’m not paying $30+ to watch a season of a show with no ads when I already pay for cable.  The answer is NOT charging for a show with crappy quality — I want good quality, of course!

I would gladly pay, say, $0.25 an episode for a good quality, DRM-free, portable format media file with no advertisements.  Hey, maybe I’d even pay 50 cents.  I would pay ZERO to download such a media file with ads, so long as the ads were not any more obtrusive than current TV ads are.

Another question is bandwidth.  “The man” currently views bittorrent as an evil word, but at some point I think they’re going to have to adopt the technology.  Look at it this way: last week, about 30,000 people were downloading the latest episode of Prison Break at any one time, and that’s just nerds like me that know how to use bittorrent.  As online video continues to grow in popularity, the bandwidth costs will continue to skyrocket.  Bittorrent would save the networks (and whomever else) a bunch of money so they’d be able to reduce the costs of their content to the general public.

Just my $0.02 (or 1% of an episode of Lost, however you want to put it).

Technorati Tags: bittorrent, tv, downloading, media, drm, piracy

Adrian!

There’s going to be a Rocky 6.  No, I’m not making that up.

Rumor has it…

…that Sequoia Capital, a VC firm in California, invested about $11.5 million a year ago for a 30% stake in YouTube.  After YouTube’s sale to Google for $1.65 billion, Sequoia will walk out of the deal with somewhere in the neighborhood of $480 million.  If you do the math on that, that’s about a 3,900% IRR.  That’s a pretty decent investment, I’d say.

Technorati Tags: google, youtube, acquisition, finance, investment, vc, irr

Gootube

In the unlikely event that you haven’t heard, the Google/Youtube acquisition went through for $1.65 billion.  Craziness.

We’ve got company

It looks like there’s a Gamecock fan lurking on the blog.  I love a litte controversy.  Does anyone know what a Gamecock is anyway?

Google Hacked

The Official Google Blog got hacked over the weekend - yet another reason I switched to WordPress.  Readers noticed a post that was out of the ordinary due to a number of misspellings and grammar mistakes.  Hmm…has Todd Cochrane been playing tricks?

Technorati Tags: google, hack

I hate Steve Spurrier

What an absolute scumbag.  Read this.

The guy was a total jerk when at UF.  All he did was run up the score on lousy opponents to try and move up in the polls every week.  I’ll give the guy credit for turning Florida into a power and winning one national championship (1996), but that doesn’t mean he’s not a jerk.  Nothing made me happier than seeing him go to the Redskins and completely fail. 

Now that he’s back in college football, it’s nice to see him losing on a regular basis at South Carolina (at least relative to his UF days).  I think he’ll probably turn that team into a consistent 7-8 game winner, but realistically I don’t think he’ll be able to compete with the big boys in the SEC (read UF, LSU, Auburn, UGA, UT).  South Carolina just doesn’t have the tradition and foundation that those other schools do.

Update: Some Cock fans are a bit up in arms at my post!  See comment section.  Some sensitive boys down there in SC.

Spain loses again

Spain lost an embarassing game 0-3 to Sweden the other day, and people are less than pleased over there.  Most people want head coach Luis Aragones out of there.