January 2007 – Raised Weird

NFL Conference Championships

Wow, the final three games. Man, I’m going to miss football… I certainly won’t miss picking playoff games, though, I feel like I might as well throw darts. Actually, given my record this season, I probably should just throw darts. Of course, given the spreads, it looks like even the bookies are throwing darts.

NFC
Saints @ Chicago(-2.5)
As you pointed out last week, the Seahawks weren’t exactly juggernauts this year, and the Bears only barely squeezed by them. The Saints, on the other hand, were at least kind of in command against the Eagles, the hottest team in the NFC. The only thing which really gives me pause is that the Saints winning would be such a good story that it’s hard to imagine that it could really go down that way. I mean, after all, with the whole Boise State “big upset and star player proposes to cheeerleader” thing, haven’t we used up our cliche allotment for this year already? Ahh, whatever, I’ll take the Saints.

AFC
Patriots @ Indianapolis(-3)
The Colts just seem to be the charmed team, don’t they? Well, you know, they always look like the charmed team during the regular season. They certainly looked like they had a trip to the big game in the bag last year, too, didn’t they, but then the Steelers came into their house and took it away. Come on, look at their playoff records. I just can’t bet against the Pats in the postseason.

NFL Divisional Round

Saturday
Colts @ Baltimore(-4)
Manning didn’t look all that great against a mediocre Chefs defense last week and has a rotten road playoff record and they’re playing an excellent defense on the road. Hmm, seems like a no-brainer, which probably means I’m dead, but whatever. Ravens.

Eagles @ New Orleans(-5.5)
I think it’s time for the Saints to finally get a second playoff win. It’s been a great ride for the Eagles but the Saints are rested, well-coached (never thought I’d say that), and have a nice balanced attack, plus that whole week off/being at home thing. I’m taking New Orleans.

Sunday
Seahawks @ Bears(-9.5)
Is this an interesting game? I’m not sure. I think Chicago will win but Rex will keep it a contest. Maybe Simmons is right, maybe no NFC team should get more than about five or six in these playoffs. Has there ever been a more vulnerable-looing 1 seed? If I’m Seattle I play man all the time and stack the box, daring Grossman to beat ‘em. So, eight seems like too much, so I’ll take the points looking for the Bears to win in a close one, probably on a kick return or a blocked field goal or something.

Patriots @ San Diego(-5)
OK, so, the Bolts having a week off and being at home constitutes a pretty sizeable advantage (which of course applies to all the home teams this weekend). However, the Bolts have a couple disadvantages, too: effectively a rookie QB (and he’s been awful lately), and, of course, Marty and his shining postseason record. LT on one hand, Brady on the other. San Diego has Merriman and New England has… err, what else does New England have? Jabar Gaffney? Please, that guy couldn’t even make the cut on the Texans. I know, I know, make a pick already. Pats. I learned my lesson last week: don’t bet against the Pats in the postseason. Yeah, they may not actually win them all, but it’s dangerous to bet against them.

MacWorld reactions

Being both a Mac guy and a human factors/user interface guy, I’ve had a lot of people ask me about my reactions to MacWorld. Actually, this happens with almost every MacWorld but this time I thought I’d actually blog some of my thoughts on this.

Obviously, the big announcement was the iPhone. This is an interesting device to be sure, with a high “wow” factor. A big touchscreen with softkeys and multi-finger gesture recognition certainly seems like a better idea than the dumb little keyboards on most “smart” phones today. And the thing is clearly loaded in terms of cool tech like the accelerometer and the skin sensor and such. And the form factor seems about right, too; with all that stuff, I was worried that it would be too thick to really be a good pocket-dweller. With all that, one of the first questions one of my colleagues asked me was “So, how long after the first ship date will we see you with one of those?”

Well, despite all the coolness—and there’s one heck of a lot of that—there are some issues. I will qualify this with two things: I didn’t watch the keynote very carefully, and I’ve only had a somewhat cursory run over the iPhone web site.

Now, to the issues: first, Cingular is not presently my provider, I have T-Mobile. T-Mobile’s plans are much better deals than Cingular’s, and I know virtually nobody who’s happy with Cingular’s customer service. I really don’t think it’s worth breaking my contract over it.

Beyond that, I don’t recall any discussion of battery life. (Am I wrong? Was this mentioned?) Seems like an awful lot of bright, high-rez display… won’t this thing need a recharge every day, maybe twice a day? That might be a limitation.

Speaking of that bright, high-rez display (160 ppi sounds very slick), I also wonder about keeping it clean and scratch-free. If your fingers will be on it all the time, how do you keep it clean? Some displays are a lot easier to keep skin oil off of than others. And how easily will it scratch? I have a little case for my Nano so I don’t worry to much about that, but this thing is all about the display and I’m not sure whether a case would interfere with the whole multi-tap stuff, and if that sexy display gets scratched easily, that’ll be bad.

It also wasn’t mentioned (I think) but there’d better be an “airplane mode” where the antenna can be turned off so you can use it as an iPod alone. It would be Very Bad™ if they screwed that up.

Another concern I have (again, maybe I just missed it) is that I don’t recall any mention of a dock connector. That seems like an oversight. First, I have a hard time believing that syncing over wireless is as fast and reliable as a physically-wired connection. Second, and much more of an obscure concern is the lack of a proper line out. I know, most people won’t care, but for audio geeks like me, that’s a bummer.

The last thing is that these things are a bit dear for the storage capacity. I’m not really objecting to the price—yes, it’s expensive, but I’d use it a lot, so I would be OK with that—but for $500 I want more than 8Gb. If I want to throw more than one movie on there along with a pile of music, space will be pretty tight. I’d like more like 12Gb for $500. Yeah, I’m a greedy little bastard.

So,. yeah, when my current T-Mobile contract is up (in 16 months), I’ll probably get one, but I’m not in a big rush. Between now and then they’ll get some of the kinks worked out, probably offer more storage, and if they offered an unlocked one, that’d be even better. I’ll have to see how the early adopters actually like the thing after a few months before I get TOO excited.

Other reactions… well, AppleTV looks nice. I’m not sure, I don’t have a strong urge to rush out and buy one of those, either, because right now I have a computer hooked up to the HDTV in my living room. Why do I need to shell out another $300 to do what I can already do from that machine, exactly? Of course, for lots of other people—those who don’t want a computer in their living room but do have an HDTV—it seems like a cool toy.

My other reaction was, to be frank, “that’s it?” I know the iPhone is a big deal and all, but I was really expecting more. iLife ‘07 at the very least, and I will admit I was really hoping for iWork ‘07 to be released with a spreadsheet, as I’m not especially thrilled with my current spreadsheet options. Excel has a crummy UI in some respects and crashes a lot, Mariner Calc is nice in some ways but has it’s share of issues as well, such as lack of many statistical functions, some bad UI choices of its own—for Alan Kay’s sake, why don’t the row and column of the currently-selected cell highlight so you know where you are?—and I’ve found calculation bugs in it, so I’m not sure I trust it. Am I missing some other great choice here? Anyway, I guess I wasn’t surprised at the lack of Leopard stuff or new quad-core machines or a subnotebook, but the lack of new iLife really surprised me.

Yojimbo “Launch Items” Applescript

Kudos to BareBones for the 1.4 version of Yojimbo. I’ve wanted to be able to launch the location associated with a password via a single keystroke for some time, and now I have it, yay!

Actually, this will work for not just passwords, but bookmarks and web items as well, check it out.

on run
        tell application “Yojimbo”
                set tSel to the selection
                if tSel is {} or class of tSel is not list then
                        display dialog “This script only works on selected items.” buttons {“OK“} default button 1
                else
                        set foundSomething to false
                        repeat with tItem in tSel
                                set tLoc to “”
                                if class of tItem is password item or class of tItem is bookmark item then
                                        set tLoc to location of tItem
                                else if class of tItem is web archive item then
                                        set tLoc to source URL of tItem
                                end if
                                if tLoc is not “” then
                                        tell application “Finder”
                                                open location tLoc
                                        end tell
                                        set foundSomething to true
                                end if
                        end repeat
                        if not foundSomething then
                                display dialog “Could not find any locations to launch.” buttons {“OK“} default button 1
                        end if
                end if
        end tell
end run

Wild Card Round

First, a quick standings update:

	Me	Al
previous	115-116-9	110-121-9
week 17	7-9	9-7
Bowls 1	5-4	5-4
Bowls 2	4-8	7-5
Total	131-137-9	131-137-9

Wow, a tie, that ought to add a little excitement! And, clearly, I’m hopeless when it comes to the middle-of-the-pack bowl games, yikes. As of this writing, however, I am up three games in part 3 of the bowls, so my lead is slim but not really quite gone yet.

Anyway, I could easily go 0-4 here, I hate picking playoff games. Think Jim Mora Sr. blurting out “playoffs?”

SaturdayChefs @ Indianapolis(-7)
A hate-able spread. I’m not even sure about who will win this game, because it’s just so easy to imagine KC doing nothing but handing off to LJ and thus staying in it, maybe even winning it. On the other, it’s easy to imagine that the Colts get an early lead and Edwards gets impatient and the Chefs throw too much. Hmm, well, the Colts will almost certainly blow it sometime in January but I’m thinking not in the first round, plus I find it hard to bet on Herm on the road. Colts, I guess, but I would be completely unsurprised if it went entirely the other way. Hmm, could I waffle some more? No, no, Colts it is.

Cowboys @ Seattle(-3)
Yuck, what a horrible game. I can’t imagine how or why I would watch this. The Cowboys seem deeply flawed, but then, so do the Seabags. Both teams utterly sucked down the stretch, Romo being in the Pro Bowl is an all-time NFL travesty, the Seattle injury list is a mile long… ugh, too many competing factors. I’m taking the Cowboys because, uhh, because… probably because I’d rather see the Seahawks win, and that’s a reasonable guide.

Sunday
Jets @ New England(-8.5)
That just seems like too many points for two teams which aren’t spectacular. I mean, Brady’s home playoff record is just nuts, but more than a TD? Too rich for my blood. However, I think the real value of this matchup might be as a drinking game. Whenever the announcers mention that Mangini was a former assistant of Belichick or that these teams know each other well or something, take a drink. Anyone who’s still standing at halftime wins.

Giants @ Philadelphia(-7)
OK, so the Eagles are hot and the Giants are a mess. The question is whether, as Bill Simmons pointed out, any NFC playoff team should give seven. However, I think his logic is flawed, because I refuse to believe the Giants are actually a playoff team. It has to be a computer error or something; it reeks of the BCS. I say the Eagles cover and if we’re lucky, Shockey and Coughlin start fisticuffs about nine minutes into the third quarter.