Big Game Day! Gooo Bears!
So radio coverage of the game is available online through KGO 810 for you distant bears.

Also, the Cal vs. Stanford rivalry has become even more marketable, as is evidenced by the Lexus Gauntlet competition. They keep track of (almost) all the meetings between the two schools and assign points for each competition, and at the end the winner gets the prize. Now, it's kind of fishy that they don't display how many points a particular contest is worth untill the game is over; it seems like they could manipulate it to keep the contest close. On the other hand, it looks like major events are 5 points and minor events are 2.5.

The outrageous part is they don't seem to be including rugby in the contest! Boooooooooo. Maybe they're afraid Stanfurd Rugby will chicken out again.

So one of my favorite web comics, Penny Arcade is having this fundraiser dinner for their charity, Child's Play. It also happens to benefit Oakland Children's Hospital. I'd like to go, but the dinner's in Washington. Any other swanky events I can attend?

Oh, and ps. Here's some links to some of my favorite PA strips: Twisp and Catsby, An older one about Neverwinter Nights, My Brain is Coming Out!, Perfect Eternal Jackass, and Meat is murder. Ok, so many of these won't make a lot of sense unless you know something about the relevant video game. The strip itself has improved vastly in terms of the quality of the drawing in the last few months. I think the cartoonist just had a baby (well his wife had the baby). Could it be related?

Aaaargh! Steam or Brick and Mortar? I want the bloody disk, but I also want the 'silver' package. Well, in any event, don't anybody plan on hearing from me for a while.

Last weekend I played golf with my Uncle again. We played nine holes at Blackberry Farm in Cupertino. I got my typical score of about 2x par. And. I broke one of my uncle's golf clubs. His five-iron, to be precise. He wasn't too upset, but I feel pretty bad about it.

Here's how it happened: I messed up my tee shot and my ball landed about 3 feet from the trunk of this little tree. It was laying such that if I stood with my back to the trunk I could hit the ball. My backswing didn't hit the trunk, so I figured I was good to go. I hit the ball ok, but on the follow-through of my swing the shaft of the club hit the tree trunk. It broke right in half.

So I'm thinking I'll need to find a gift certificate to some golf shop or something. Who does golf club repairs?

AdSense is up. What do you think of the colors? I can choose pretty much any color-scheme, but I thought this one fit in pretty well. I need to figure out how to get it to float right, but that will just take some fiddling. Other ideas for placement? Also, I have the option to put a google search bar on the page. Should I do that? Maybe at the bottom? Chime in if you have an opinion.

Are Bush's Cronies Jumping Ship? If you read the whole article, it mentions several top members of Bush's cabinet leaving, including Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell, although some are presented as rumors more than anything else. I wonder how much airline tickets out of DC cost these days?

Let the theorizing begin on what's happening in the Bush camp!

I'm considering participating in Google's 'AdSense' program. Here's how it works: they display ads (if they can find any that are relevant to my blog) and I get some credit every time an ad gets a click. If (and that's probably a big if) I earn over $100 in credits, they send me a check.

I'm thinking that with my current readership I'll be getting $100 sometime in January (2012), so I'm not exactly slavering at the financial opportunities. However, it might be fun to see what AdSense thinks is relevant to my blog. What do y'all think? I think JJ is pretty anti-advertising, but maybe he'll make an exception.

Also, it might motivate me to post more often. That would also be fun.

Yeah, that was pretty much my gut reaction. But as per my post from yesterday, I believe US Citizens aren't dumb. I just disagree with a lot of them based on different world-views and information access.
That headline did make me chuckle in a dark, brooding sort of way, though.

If the election left a bitter taste in your mouth, this study might make you feel better. It made me feel worse.

The results of the presidential election have left me feeling alienated from the rest of the country. How did so many of my fellow citizens, whom I regard as generally reasonable and intelligent people, come to such an overwhelmingly different conclusion than I did? I have to assume we were looking at a whole different set of data, really. I guess that's a result of living in this bubble of Democrats. As someone living in a non-swing state, I haven't been inundated with propaganda for the past several months (or at least I'm seeing a whole different set of propaganda). Maybe if I had seen all the ad campaigns then I might not have been convinced, but at least I might come closer to understanding how anyone could support Bush.

Or maybe I can just take comfort from the study that said more than half of Bush-supporters are hopelessly misinformed and get on with my life.

One bit of comfort I found in all this is the turnout for the election. At least people are participating, and that's the first step.

It's my birthday! Also, remember to vote! Take back the republic! Yaaaa!

How exciting to have a blood moon so close to Halloween! This bodes well for the spooks and spirits this Sunday.

Whoever created this cube solver deserves some sort of trans-nerding award for combining three of the coolest geek fields ever: Lego, Rubiks Cube, and Robot Vision.

Last night I had a dream that inspired me to this Haiku. It's entitled:
"For Quelbo"

The gentle giant,
with lumbering grace and poise:
Hippopotamus.

An alternative second line, "king of subaqueous grace:", came to mind, but the word 'subaqueous' seems a little hamhanded.

The new Google Desktop Search application is now available for beta use.

I am very impressed so far. I searched for a word I knew would appear in several of my documents and in 0.01 sec it came up with 36 results. We're talking inside .txt, .doc, and .pdf files, too. That search takes the windows 2000 file searcher (yeah, that cute little puppy) at least ten minutes. To be fair, I should point out that the app hasn't yet finished indexing my hard drive (although in about 5 minutes it got through nearly 1000 files). I'm going to reserve judgement untill I've used it for a while, but so far it's looking pretty good.

So I finally got around to setting up an email address for this blog. You can mail me at benvis@gmail.com. I realize I'll get spam for posting here, but I'll deal. I'm also adding a link. Oh! And if anyone wants a gmail invite, I have a few available. If you know me it's free, but if you don't, you have to send me a story. Any story will do as long as I've never read it before.

I really kind of hope someone sends me a story!

Thanks to Allen for posting this movie of the Cal vs USC game from last season. Dr.J, you'll like the music they chose for the first half of play. Watching this thing just made my day. Anybody putting together a phatty game party for this weekend?

I'm listening to The Roots album "Phrenology". Here's a phrenological report on Charlotte Bronte!

In other news: today you could have gone to the Love Parade in SF.

Because I'm in Madison, home of Bucky Badger.

I'm considering going for a new template, but I'll have to do it when I have time to put all my links in. In other news, Cal destroys Airforce with a final score of 56 to 14. Gooooo Bears!

Oh, and I now have a Yafro page. Not much there, but I may start using it now that I have it. All you yafrodites add me as your friend. I don't know what it means to be a 'friend' in this context, but I like friends, so go for it.

Yup, that's my brain. Note the lumpy skull. I'm not sure what that weird rounded triangle-shaped thingy is, and that's a bit disconcerting. I'll have to hit the anatomy texts. I have 128 slices in each of the 3 major axes, so if there's some view of my brain you want to see, I'm taking requests!

Some of you may remember the trauma I experienced upon discovering that my brain produces insufficient brainwaves. Well, I have since learned that I give good fMRI signals. This means I have excellent blood flow in my brain. Hooray!