As many have realized by now, I am a major Nascar fan.
And like every Nascar fan, I have been engaged by the ongoing decision of what car Dale Earnhardt Jr. will be driving during the 2008 Nascar Nextel Cup season. When I say ‘car’, that is more than just the sheet metal on a rollcage. This includes the number Junior will run (the numbers on the sides of the car are owned, and stay with, team owners in Nascar) and the sponsor whose logos adorn the car.
My fellow Bulldogs and I were elated today to hear that ESPN’s College Gameday will broadcast live from the Alabama-UGA football game this Saturday.
But I am a little upset to hear that someone might be spying on Georgia’s football practices. Coach Mark Richt has closed team practice to the media for the first time since he became the Georgia head coach in 2001.
David Ching, who has the UGA beat for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer seems to think that South Carolina might have already spied on Georgia’s practices:
They believe someone has already spied on them, so they’re closing things down this week to try to cut back on that. Hmmm, remind me again. Who did they lose to this season?
ESPN also indicates that someone might have already been spying on practice:
But a Georgia official with knowledge of Richt’s decision said the Bulldog coaching staff made the decision to close practices because they feared others might have been watching practice without their knowledge.
See also the coverage in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Normally this would not bug me, but the ESPN story makes me think that this might be a true story, and that it might have had an impact on the South Carolina game. But I’m going to withhold judgment, because without evidence, we still lost to Spurrier.
But I would sure like to know what Coach Richt knows.
The groundbreaking for the US 78 median construction and the beginning of the end for the reversible lane system on Stone Mountain Highway was held this past Friday along Highway 78 in Stone Mountiain.
Aiding the businesses through the Georgia Department of Transportation construction is the Evermore Community Improvement District, a group of business owners along the Highway 78 corridor committed to making sure business does not decline during or after construction of the median.
Regular readers may know that I interned with the Evermore CID in 2005 and 2006, and it is great to see this work finally beginning.
Here’s some other coverage of the groundbreaking:
Why is it that iTunes doesn’t need to restart your computer when installing on Windows Vista, but needs to restart after updating to the newest version?
And in addition to that, why is there no “Rescan library” option in iTunes?
I have always had problems with the default, bloated music player solutions (iTunes, Windows Media Player, and others), but the others (Media Player Classic, VLC, etc.) don’t really allow me to do what I want to do with ease.
And one more complaint. Why are there massive files left over from the installation and updates of iTunes that aren’t deleted? We’re talking 80mb from installing iTunes and updating it once. Wow. Bloated software that leaves your hard drive bloated.
Not all of these are mine (in fact, only one is mine). But still a sweet picture!
I got to an interesting article from Slashdot yesterday about light pollution and the . The article can be read straight from The New Yorker.
It may seem strange that this last observation could have surprised anyone, but in Galileo’s time people assumed that the Milky Way must be some kind of continuous substance. It truly resembled a streak of spilled liquid—our word “galaxy” comes from the Greek for milk—and it was so bright that it cast shadows on the ground (as did Jupiter and Venus). Today, by contrast, most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way in the sky above the place where they live, and those who can see it are sometimes baffled by its name.
I think that a childhood of Boy Scouting, camping, and hunting has led me to be fascinated by the night sky. I have often laid out under the night sky and watched for shooting stars. The darkest I think I have even seen the sky was in the fall of 2004 on a class trip to Sapelo Island, a barrier island off the Georgia coast.
If you happen to be close to Athens, I think the best place to skywatch is off of Georgia Route 15, between Watkinsville and Greensboro.
It seems that the Noah Mink and I, of the UGA Black Tie Party, haven’t been the only ones to notice the glaring problems with the University of Georgia’s online student information system:
Usability is a very important concept to me. I’m a computer programmer, and…well, have you ever had to deal with computer programs that were so utterly unintuitive that they were a complete pain to use? (UGA students, I need only mention one word: OASIS. All the counter-intuitiveness of an IBM 3270 terminal, made even less user-friendly by sticking a fake GUI on top.) There’s a whole field within computer science that’s known as human-computer interaction, dealing with how to design an interface that actually makes sense to a typical user and not just to the programmer.
OASIS, the Online Access to Student Information Systems, a cobbled together front-end for an outdated system.
I have always had issues with OASIS, including its horrible usability, its hours (the server must be shut down every night for some strange reason), and most of all, the fact that a Social Security number is required and must be typed in to login to OASIS (umm, can you say keylogger?).