Washington Post looks into edits on on Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia page in the hours before John McCain picked her to be the Republican Vice Presidential nominee. The edits showed that she would be picked, as the editors were also working on John McCain’s page.
There has been a lot of Nascar news breaking this week, and I have lots of thoughts, so I want to hit some of the highlights quickly.
Everyone knew that Joey Logano was going to take over the Joe Gibb’s Racing #20 Toyota that Tony Stewart is leaving at this season’s end. But, it is absolutely amazing that an 18 year old is going to take over a Spring Cup ride for a full season with no Cup experience. And now Home Depot (one of the biggest sponsors in Nascar) has announced that they are going to sponsor Logano. Amazing. And he is going to rock next season – just look at what he’s done in the Nationwide Series this year.
Nascar and Budweiser are changing the format of the Budweiser Shootout for next season. The Budweiser Shootout marks the start of the season, and it is a non-points paying race that traditionally fields former winners and the previous year’s pole winners. Now the field will include the top 6 cars (decided by owner’s points) from each manufacturer (a total of 24 drivers). I think it is BS, and I’m not the only one. Anheiser Busch is making this marketing move because they will no longer be the sponsor of the pole award (that was picked up by Coor’s, who is now the “official beer” of Nascar). I don’t like this format because it biases the field against Chevrolet. Chevy fields a majority of the cars in the Sprint Cup Series, while Ford, Dodge, and Toyota have few more than 6 cars each. So there will be 6 good drivers from Chevy, while Dodge and Toyota will be fielding some cars with drivers like David Reutimann and Michael Waltrip, who are currently ranked 26th and 30th in driver points in Cup. See the issue?
Last issue, the Carl Edwards vs. Kyle Busch episode last Saturday night at Bristol:
And what did Kyle Busch do after the race?
And then he whined (quoted here):
“He hit me getting into Turn 1,” Busch said. “Whatever. Carl’s going to say he’s sorry, that he didn’t want to race that way, but he always does. We’ll take it, we’ll go on and we’ll race him that way in the Chase if that’s the way he wants to race.”
Seriously? Kyle Busch? Did you just whine because someone bumped you out of the way to win a race?
And then Edwards says what everyone is thinking (quoted here with my emphasis added):
“It’s one of those deals where I couldn’t get by him, I couldn’t get by him, and I just had to ask myself, ‘Would he do that to me?’ Edwards said after doing his trademark backflip off the car in Victory Lane. “And he has before, so that’s the way it goes.”
And there’s no remorse in the offing, Edwards said.
“Let’s make it real clear – I’m not apologizing for it,” Edwards said, citing several instances where he felt like Busch took him out of races to gain positions. “We’re even.”
Kyle Busch has bumped numerous drivers numerous times this year on his way to all his victories. I’ve been waiting all year for someone to put him in his place (namely the wall, but I was hoping it would be done by Stewart or Gordon) and finally my wishes have come true.
I have issues with Kyle Busch, but this season has been boring. Who wants to turn on any Nascar race, any series, and watch him win a race? Because the odds show that he is the odds on favorite to win any race in any of the 3 Nascar national series. I’ve seen it enough this year.
Oh, and the reason for this diatribe was both Busch and Edwards received a 6 race “probation” for rough driving after the race was over. Nascar shouldn’t penalize these guys, they should applaud the fact that there was an exciting race at least once this season.
After returning home to Boise, Idaho, I exported the GPS data to several different formats, one of which I was able to launch with Google Earth. I was then able to trace the entire course from the comfort of my home half a world away and find a similar route to train on back in Boise. This capability along with having the elevation profile proved invaluable in my preparation for my Gold Medal race. It was also very nice to be able to show family members and friends the course from the excellent satellite views presented by Google Earth.
Post on Google Map team’s blog from Kristin Armstrong, 2008 Olympic Gold Medalist.
6 reasons we love football – Macon.com. This awesome article by Joe Kovac describes the 6 reasons to love football (especially college football) – tradition, schedule, theater, characters, passion, and party. Hopefully my classmates out here at KU will read this and understand my excitement over college football a little more.
In honor of 9 days til kickoff:
Three days ago, the new website of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was unveiled. The WordPress Publisher Blog spread the exciting news that the new site is powered by the open source software WordPress.
I’ve been drafting a post about open source software being used in big ways, in an effort to dispell the idea that utilizing open source is a security risk. The PM’s site is a big addition to the list, and should show the detractors that if the PM’s office thinks WordPress is secure, you should too.
My favorite new web browsing utility is called Shortwave and was created by Shaun Inman.
The idea and implementation is really simple. You use Smart Keywords to search in Firefox and other browsers that you use, but how do you keep all the searches you do in sync? What if you want to use keyword searches for the first time?
Go to the Shortwave page and drag the bookmarklet up to your browser’s bookmark toolbar. If you don’t know what a bookmarklet is, try Wikipedia or this introduction by Matt Cutts.
Then when you want to search on, say, Wikipedia, just click the Shortwave bookmarklet and type w Earth. This Wikipedia article will pop up. Want to search the Internet Movie Database? Click the bookmarklet and type imdb Top Gun.
Shaun added a lot of default searches (Google, Google Maps, Google Images, Amazon, Flickr, YouTube, whois). Even better, you can upload your own search file to a server of your own and customize your search terms. I added a Lifehacker search and some others to my Waves file.
The best part about Shortwave is you can use the same bookmarklet on any browser on any computer you use. You can have the same search terms on your work and home computers, and on your iPhone or iPod Touch (as a webclip).
I emailed Shaun last week with an idea for Shortwave – I hesitated to use his contact form on his site because I hate bugging people through email, but he had closed the comments for posts related to Shortwave. I had an idea to implement site searches with Shortwave, where you could perform a search within the site you are currently browsing on Google. Shaun got back to me, and quickly posted this update to Shortwave implementing the functionality. Now you can search gs Shortwave and find posts on ChrisMLindsey.com with the term Shortwave.
Hopefully you will find Shortwave useful. If you implement any custom searches in your own Wave file, share them in the comments!
Georgia Bulldogs make the cover of Sports Illustrated.
How not to implement pay cuts.
How to improve usability in free software. Usability can be a major problem with volunteer and open source projects, and Matt Thomas gives a list of problems and suggested solutions.