• Three (or more) major conference champions are undefeated. Let’s say the winners of the PAC-10, the Big 12, and the SEC are all undefeated. In the current system, only two of them get a chance to win the title. The third is left outside looking in, even though they never lost a game. Going to my proposed system clearly solves this problem.
• There are no undefeated teams, but three (or more) contenders only have one loss. Again, the current system tries to pick the best two subjectively, but that decides things off the field. Being able to make your case to the media and on TV becomes a coaching skill. With my proposed system, it’s settled on the field. Note that you may run into a case where a team is considered a top contender by the polls but loses their conference. I say, tough shit. They should have won their conference.
• The only undefeated team is from a smaller conference, and the major contenders (according to the polls) all have one or more losses. The current system tries to decide who is better – the major conference contenders with losses, or the undefeated minor conference team. This is not where the debate belongs. Teams from the smaller conferences that have great years deserve a shot to at least play their way into the national title game.

All that being said, there are a few problems with my proposal, but I think I have answers to those as well. The first one is, at least in theory, easy to solve. Right now, there are just 3 teams that don’t belong to any conference, the most famous being Notre Dame. The simple solution is to force all teams into conferences. With 120 teams, there’s no way to fairly evaluate the best teams if you don’t divide them into groups and have them play each other. Having “special” teams outside those groups just doesn’t work.

The next two problems are kind of related. First, what do we do with all the current Bowl Games? Second, how can we make sure that students from the competing universities can still have enough time and afford to attend the games? If we make each playoff game a different bowl, the average student will only be able to make it to one (or two at most), and then they get into the case where they have to either go to the less meaningful early games or try and guess how far their team will make it. Again, I think I have a solution. The first three rounds of the tournament should happen after the regular season during the early bowl season. These games should be home-away games, with the higher ranked team getting the home-team advantage. The bowl system stays intact, but six bowls agree to participate in the new system. Each of those six bowls takes turns hosting the national championship game, with the other 5 hosting the remaining 9 teams from the tournament, as well as one at-large team from outside the tournament. The 11 conference champions and those 6 bowl games are the only special case here – the rest of the bowls can pick teams to participate however they wish.

Finally, there’s the matter of determining rankings, which can be tremendously important because the higher ranked teams get bye weeks as well as home-field advantage. It’s tempting to use a ranking system similar to the BCS to determine the higher ranked teams, which isn’t terrible, but I’d like to stick with the philosophy of keeping things deterministic. Since the teams are each representing a specific conference, I would suggest we rank the teams based on the past performance of their conferences, so that the average finish of a conference over the past 10 years will determine the ranking of each team in the playoff.

Alright – that’s my idea in all its glory. I’ve mentioned it to a couple of people at various points, and now I’ve written it down. Let me know what you think.

Not only would getting rid of junk mail be an excellent way to save paper, it would also require less energy to transport all this crap around from place to place, to recycle it when people throw it away, and to dispose of whatever percentage can’t be (or just isn’t) recycled. Even better, and this is something people don’t place enough weight on, it would be less of a bother for everybody. Getting rid of junk mail is damn near universal in this country. Think of how many people go home every day and have to grab the extra mail from their mailbox, sort through it, and throw away the crap they don’t care about. Put it all together and that’s a lot of cumulatively wasted effort and time. I know there are ways to opt out of it, but that’s the wrong way around. This is just too easy of a target for the people pushing us all to conserve resources; I can’t believe they haven’t gone after it yet.

It’s incredibly stupid when you think about it, epsecially when you take into consideration my experiences (both today and previously) trying to find a bar that I can watch the Patriots game at. Today I tried King Cobra, but the story is the same pretty much everywhere. The bars are full of Seahawks fans, and good luck finding a place that has the Sunday Ticket subscription and is willing to change a TV off of the Seahawks game. Even if you do find a place, they are usually only willing or able to put on one additional game, and it becomes a battle of who has more fans there, and who was there first. The few bars with enough TVs to show all the games (Spitfire and Fox Sports) are filled to the brim with, you guessed it, Seahawks fans.

For the record, I don’t have any objection to the fact that local bars are full of Seahawks fans and are primarily showing the local team’s games. That’s a good thing. My issue is with the fact that the local TV stations aren’t allowed to show the other games that the rest of us might care about.

I have been looking around for some kind of fan organization I can join to officially register my displeasure with the whole lack of games thing, but so far I haven’t been able to find anything. I am going to keep looking, and will put up another post if I find something. Until then, if any of you know of such an organization, I’d love to hear about it.

But then last week it stopped working. I don’t know if somebody is broadcasting a new station or if the old one just got stronger, but whatever the case, I can’t use that frequency any more. And I’m having trouble finding a new one that will work on both sides of Lake Washington, which is necessary for my commute, and up north to Tulalip, which is necessary for my weekly poker trip. If I don’t find a good station soon, I’ll probably start looking for some way to plug my iPod into my stereo.

The trickier part was figuring out what to do with the hot air produced by the A/C. It has a vent in the back, and there’s a hose that you can hook to it with some rubber so you can seal one of your windows, but I don’t have any windows that open in my living room. I just have a screen door. So, in the pinnacle of modern home decor, I went to the Home Depot and bought some styrofoam to seal up my screen door with. It’s all hooked up now, and my apartment has already cooled off about 6°, which is a big win in my book.

For the past couple of weeks, Sirius has been calling me to try and convince me to sign back up, and it is by far the most annoying telemarketing ever. First of all, they keep calling. Second, they’re calling my cell phone number. And finally, the calls just play an automated recording when I answer the phone. It’s one thing when I call my cable or phone company and they have an automated system to route me to the right person, but Sirius is using one to call me, which is completely unacceptable. They called me today, and this time I hit zero to try and complain to somebody about it. But the automated system put me on hold, and my patience ran out after 30 seconds, so I hung up. There needs to be a “Fuck that, you called me” button. Freaking ridiculous.

And then there’s my alarm clock and its crazy snooze button. When you hit it, it turns the alarm off for nine minutes before turning it back on again. That part is pretty standard; I’m not sure why they picked nine minutes, but whatever. Unfortunately, whoever designed the thing also decided that it should give up after three times. After you hit the snooze button a third time, the alarm never turns back on until the next day. Not only does this lead to all kinds of waking up late, it also forces me to try and remember how many times I’ve hit snooze already. This is especially challenging given that it only comes up while I’m trying to put off waking up for another nine minutes.

Well, since I’m writing this, I’ve obviously remembered to set it up to record. I probably never would have remembered if I hadn’t found their website, where you can browse through most of their old reviews. It’s great for wasting time online; I personally like to try and find the best movies I can that got two thumbs down (so far, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Reservoir Dogs are winning). They don’t hesitate to recommend against a movie if they didn’t like it, which is a good thing for a critic, but it also means they’ll have a few that lots of people disagree with after the fact.

Anyway, I’d give a pretty high recommendation to recording the show and for checking out their website.

Then, as I was driving along (more slowly than before), a warning light started blinking on my dashboard. My Audi has a couple of different ways to show warnings; there are several fixed warning lights, presumably for the really significant stuff, and then there’s an all-purpose screen where they usually show things like what station I’m playing, gas mileage info, and mini-directions. That screen can also show warning symbols, and those symbols will be red if it’s serious and yellow if it’s just a warning. The symbol I saw last night was yellow, so I wasn’t too worried.

But I couldn’t figure out what it meant. I drove with it blinking off and on for about 20 minutes, I looked through my car’s manual (it wasn’t there), and I’ve had a whole day to think about it, but i still don’t have any idea what it was trying to tell me. I was going to take a picture of it and post it here, but it’s not showing up today, so I had to draw one instead. You’ll have to forgive my lack of skill with the virtual paintbrush, but the basic idea is there: it was a trapezoid, with one corner missing and replaced with an arrow, and with 5 or so lines on the left side. Keep in mind that this symbol showed up on a screen that is perfectly capable of showing text.

If you’re still here, congrats. Let me start by explaining why I wanted to make a switch. I own two computers at home (a Mac Pro and a MacBook), and I use Apple’s Mail program to check my mail on both of them. At work, I use a PC, and since I use Outlook to connect to an Exchange server for my work email, I also like to have it set up to check my personal mail. With POP, each of these computers was keeping a separate, independent copy of my email. My mail would stay on the server for a couple of weeks, but after that, the only copy was on these three computers. My Mac Pro had the definitive set of my mail, my MacBook had most of my mail since June, and my work computer had most of it since last year sometime. When I sent a mail from my personal mail account at work, it would only get saved in the sent messages folder on that computer, and wouldn’t show up on either of my home computers. Obviously, that kind of stunk if I ever needed to be able to go back and look something up that I’d sent.

I’d known for a while that there was something called IMAP out there, and that it was somehow related to email, but I’d never really bothered looking it up until I noticed that my hosting company (BlueHost) seemed to be recommending it on their page for configuring various mail clients. I did a little quick research, and discovered that with IMAP, instead of your computer making a separate copy of your email, it leaves it all on the server. The client computer is no longer the definitive storage location for your email; it just reflects what’s on the server. It became obvious very quickly that this was designed to solve exactly the problems I was running into with my multiple machines checking my email. The only downside at first glance was that all my mail would live on the server, which could require a large amount of storage space over time, but that wasn’t really a problem for me since BlueHost gives me 600GB, which is almost more storage space than I have on my home computer.

So I set about migrating over to the new settings. I tried it first on my laptop, figuring that would make a pretty good trial, which it did. After a few initial problems, I got it all working and moved the other computers over as well. As of right now, everything is working great, but I have to say I was a little disappointed in how difficult it was to set up Mail on the Mac, although difficult isn’t really the right word; it was pretty easy to do, just undiscoverable. I had to change the settings of various folders, which you can only do through the main menu, not the context menu. That seemed weird to me. Also, the IMAP standard seems to be a little vague on how clients should behave. It doesn’t really affect the server or the interoperability, but Outlook and Mail present different ways of working with the same data. That may actually be a good thing; I haven’t decided yet.

Anyway, for the other two of you who are still using POP to get your email, I’d recommend giving IMAP a trial.

So this winter I’ve been driving almost all the time. But for whatever reason, I decided to take the bus today. I even checked the weather before I left, and it was supposed to be around 45°; neither snow nor ice were mentioned anywhere. That seemed somewhat funny to me as I thought back on it as I stepped on the bus late in the afternoon in the pouring snow. I got home fine, and the weather seems to have stopped for now, but it did mean that I had to walk around in the rain and snow a bit, and that led to the unfortunate discovery that my shoes have started leaking. I don’t know how else to describe it; before today they’d always done a pretty good job of keeping my feet mostly dry, but today the front of my feet wound up getting soaked, which made walking around a real pain in the ass

Since I got home a little early, I decided to take the opportunity to stop by the AT&T store to get a new phone to replace my busted one. My contract still has quite a bit of time remaining, but I was hoping I’d be able to talk them into letting me convert to a new contract since my phone is broken. Long story short, the sales lady was very nice, and told me that I technically wasn’t eligible for an upgrade, but if I bought an accessory package, she would get me an exception. I don’t really need the accessories, and since I don’t really like being forced to buy something I need just for the privilege of buying something I do need, I passed. At this point, I’m checking to see if my phone is still under some kind of warranty (it’s not even a year old; I just looked it up). Failing that, I may be forced to reconsider the stupid accessory package.

1. The Unit – I can’t believe I like a show on CBS this much…
2. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia – the season finale might be the funniest episode of TV I’ve ever seen
3. 30 Rock
4. Friday Night Lights – the first season was better than this one, but this one’s still pretty good.
5. Weeds
6. Dexter – I think I like the second season better than the first
7. Damages – a very interesting show – they did a lot of things that were different, and Glen Close was awesome
8. Brotherhood – it’s like The Sopranos, except Irish, in Rhode Island, and with no comedic relief at all
9. Heroes – this show is probably better than I think it is, but I consider it a guilty pleasure

Anyway, I was watching the show the other day, and I was doing some work at the same time so I didn’t bother fast forwarding through the commercials. I was amazed at what was being advertised. First, they did this thing where they had somebody interviewing women on the street (with a GSN-branded microphone) about what bras they preferred and how great Playtex is. They ended this little segment with a trivia question: what is the largest bra size that Playtex makes? 55T, 54DDD, or 66F? After that, they showed a regular Playtex commercial, and then they came back to the woman on the street for the answer (it was 54DDD). After that, the next commercial was for a feminine product that I tuned out of pretty quickly and don’t remember completely. I do remember hearing the following phrase at the end: “Use it after douching; use it after intercourse,” but I pretty much blocked the rest of it out.

But it left me wondering: who in the living hell do they think their audience is? This is the most hard-core serious poker show on TV, and they’re showing bra and feminine product commercials.