Random Thoughts of Jorriss

On Saturday we held the draft for the second league that I'm in. It was the best draft that I have ever had. I landed the third pick out of the ten teams. The first pick was a huge shocker, Clinton Portis. The next pick was a bigger shock, Ahman Green. At this point I'm beside myself. I was trying hard to contain my glee. Without a pause I drafted Priest Holmes. The top back in fantasy football at the number three pick. But it doesn't end there I picked up the top QB in the draft with my number two pick, Peyton Manning. My next picks were Steve Smith and Koren Robinson two tier two wide recievers. Then I dropped the bomb and picked the Baltimore defense. That's the top running back, quarterback and defense all on my team. Heh heh heh. My following picks were Thomas Jones, Trent Green, T.J. Duckett, Ashley Lelie, Deion Branch, Jason Elam (at thirteen???), Itula Milli, and Lee Suggs (a starting RB at fifteen). I'm really excited about this team and hopefully I'll bring home a championship.

This morning I woke up at 5:45 AM to get a five mile run in before work. I've got to be going nuts. The run was going great until the four mile point. At that point my left knee got a little "tweaked". So I decided to play it safe and walk the last mile. The knee feels fine now but it was a bit scary.

Our fall bowling league started up again on Friday night. I started the new season with the first ten strikes then rushed to the line and pulled the heck out of the ball. I finished up the game with a 286. I followed up the other two games with a 236 and a 247. I had a personal best 769 series and we took all of the points.

In other bowling news, last Sunday I bowled in the last Dade County All Stars tournament of the season. Because my tournament average was ten pins higher than my yearbook average I had to use my tournament average. Which meant no handicap so I missed the cut by thirty-eight sticks. Oh well, the next tournament I get to use my yearbook average.

ESPN has released their 2005 college football predictions. Most of their “experts” chose Miami to win the ACC. But none of them selected them in the Orange Bowl. I can't argue with picking Oklahoma, USC or Georgia but Michigan? Rece Davis is on some kind of drug. But I want to know where are Kirk and Corso's predictions?

UPDATE: Kirk's predictions are listed in the Herbie awards. (Note to Herbstreit: If you are going to have an football awards named after you don't call it the Herbies. It sounds like a badminton award.)  He chose FSU to win the ACC. It's his opinion, even if it's a wrong one.

It's that time of year again boys and girls Night of Joy and Rock the Univerise is right around the corner. And as usual we will be heading up to Orlando for the festivities. I'm disappointed about the lineups this year. It seems that there is more pop artists than ever. What happened to the alternative artists? Lucy and I will be attending Night of Joy on Friday for Third Day and Rock the Universe on Saturday for Toby. Drop me a line if you'll be there.

I have already booked a room at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. I really love that place. The room will have a savanna view, where we can watch the giraffes and zebras frolic in the grass. I also think I'm going to spend some time at the spa. And of course we'll be eating at Boma. I think that Boma has some of the tastiest cuisine on property. It's not the stuff I can eat everyday but it sure has some flavor. We will also be dining at the California Grill and its great view of the Disney resort. We might also drop by Blizzard Beach or Typhoon Lagoon. It should be a great trip.

Last night I played my first XBox Live game with NCAA College Football 2005. I was thoroughly beat 24-0. It was a good experience but a little laggy. I'm going to try again tonight. Let's hope I can run a little better.

Last night I had a great run. I ran from my house to the park then back to the house, that's 4.1 miles. My time: 40 minutes my target. The run was so good that I did something stoopid. Really stoopid. I signed up for the Walt Disney World Half Marathon. I've really wanted to do this for a few years now and I've finally gathered the guts to do it. The race will be held on January 9th and I'll be running through my old stomping grounds. I've got to go now, time to start training.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I implore you to read Scoble's post on security. It will give you a better idea on how you can keep your computer(s) safe from the bad guys. Scoble has mapped out fourteen points on how to be secure. Do I follow every one? No. But I have made a conscious decision on why I do and why I don't. If you are a home user or a novice user take the time to understand the issues and learn why security is important. Microsoft shouldn't be the only one to blame if something awful happens.

A few weeks ago I picked up wired-wireless-bridge-USB-print-server-analog-optical-audio-source-thingie from Apple. They officially call it the Airport Express. I personally like my name better but I don't know if anyone would remember it. Just so you know my home network is composed of the Buffalo WBR-G54 router and the WLA-G54C repeater bridge. After blowing through Linksys and and Netgear routers I moved to Buffalo and have been very impressed. Their tech support is friendly and helpful. Their interface is a little complex but with that complexity resides great flexibility and power. I also don't have to figure out what firmware I need to install like the Linksys.

Setting up the Airport Express (AX) is quite simple. Install the tools from the AX CD fill out a few screens from the wizard and it was up and running. OK so it wasn't that easy. I had to fumble around for the better part of an afternoon figuring out why some things wasn't working. It turns out that the Buffalo repeater bridge was interfering with the AX some how and I had to disable it. No worries though, since the AX covers the east side of my house while the router covers the west side. If someone figures out why this was happening please let me know.

I did have another interesting problem. When I started streaming audio from iTunes to the AX I was getting a lot of static from the speakers. So of course I restarted the whole thing and tinkered with it for about an hour. As it turns out I had the audio out plugged into the phono jack instead of the CD/DVD jack. As soon as that was switched everything worked just fine.

Overall, I'm quite impressed with the Airport Express. The Air Tunes feature works as advertised and it's very cool to stream music wirelessly to my family room receiver. I've also hooked up the ol' XBox to it and now can access XBox Live without a twenty-five foot CAT-5 cord. Below are some resources that I found invaluable to configuring the Airport Express. Enjoy.

Set-Up Guide Buffalo WGR-G54 BaseStation with Apple Airport Express in WDS mode. A step by step guide on how to configure the AX with Buffalo. Start here first. This is an excellent guide!
Thread on the Apple Discussion board on configuring the Airport Express with the Buffalo WBF-G54.
AirPort Express Support Website on apple.com.
Resetting the AirPort Express.

Last night we held our fantasy football draft for our "Cane Crazy" league. This league is pretty much composed of friends of mine in InterVarsity at the University of Miami. This year we expanded the league to fourteen teams and went global with our live draft. One of our own, Brent Hodkey, has moved to Hong Kong and had to find a computer at 6 AM to participate in the draft. Luckily for him, he found one in the tallest building in Hong Kong you know the one Lara Croft BASE jumped in Tomb Raider 2. We were hoping that he would follow in Lara's footsteps but he chickened out.

Anyways, the draft was held online using Yahoo and I had the eight pick and Lucy had the first pick. Obviously, she picked Holmes. I was hoping that Edge would fall to me at eight but miraculously Duce was there so I snatched him up. In the second round I picked up T.O. and in the third Chad Johnson was staring me in the face. My following picks were Bulger (it was between him and Brad Johnson), TJ Duckett, Reggie Wayne (Cane!) and Lee Suggs. The rest of my team is listed below. I think I did pretty well for a fourteen team league. We'll see who pans out and who doesn't. Good Luck to all!

1. D. McAllister
2. T. Owens
3. C. Johnson
4. M. Bulger
5. T. Duckett
6. R. Wayne
7. L. Suggs
8. J. Plummer
9. T. Calico
10. F. Jones
11. M. Stover
12. J. Morton
13. M. Anderson
14. A. Bryant
15. Buffalo

We'll it's that time of year again, Fantasy Football time! When the common man becomes a general manager and head coach to win cash and fabulous prizes! Since I know some people in my leagues are reading this blog I cannot divulge my strategies but I can give some resources. ESPN has posted some great articles on rankings and drafting strategies this year. They also have a fantasy football radio show. Click on the fantasy link at the top of the page.

My other favorite source for information is fantasysource.sportingnews.com. This is the site that I use for player updates and team information. They've got a great interface and you can modify the home page to track your players. It costs $20 for a year subscription but I think that it's worth it.

I will give this tidbit, if you've got the first pick go with Holmes. :)

If you're like me (man do I pity you) you love the Harry Potter series. We'll the folks at Ain't It Cool News have linked to a J.K. Rowling interview transcript. Here's a peek:

"I thought that I would give you something though, rather than get to the end of today and think that I have not given you a lot. There are two questions that I have never been asked but that I should have been asked, if you know what I mean. If you want to speculate on anything, you should speculate on these two things, which will point you in the right direction. The first question that I have never been asked—it has probably been asked in a chatroom but no one has ever asked me—is, “Why didn’t Voldemort die?” Not, “Why did Harry live?” but, “Why didn’t Voldemort die?” The killing curse rebounded, so he should have died. Why didn’t he? At the end of Goblet of Fire he says that one or more of the steps that he took enabled him to survive. You should be wondering what he did to make sure that he did not die—I will put it that way. I don’t think that it is guessable. It may be—someone could guess it—but you should be asking yourself that question, particularly now that you know about the prophesy. I’d better stop there or I will really incriminate myself. The other question that I am surprised no one has asked me since Phoenix came out—I thought that people would—is why Dumbledore did not kill or try to kill Voldemort in the scene in the ministry. I know that I am giving a lot away to people who have not read the book. Although Dumbledore gives a kind of reason to Voldemort, it is not the real reason. When I mentioned that question to my husband—I told Neil that I was going to mention it to you—he said that it was because Voldemort knows that there are two more books to come. As you can see, we are on the same literary wavelength. [Laughter]. That is not the answer; Dumbledore knows something slightly more profound than that. If you want to wonder about anything, I would advise you to concentrate on those two questions. That might take you a little bit further."

Yesterday, Lucy and my parents flew into Chicago for a small vacation. We plan on seeing three Cubs games, one of which we just saw. Cubs win 5-1. Tonight when we were at the game my Dad receives a call from his sister. Turns out that there is two storms headed toward Florida. One of the storms, Hurricane Charley, has the possibility of hitting South Florida on Friday. Great. I'm a couple thousand miles away on vacation an a hurricane is headed towards my house. Yay. I can't do much about that now. I can only pray that this storm does a flyby and misses us. Meanwhile, I've got to calm down Lucy. Lucky me.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 has been released. It is installing on my machine right now. You can find it at www.windowsupdate.com.

Friday night after work I popped into the Apple store for the wired-wireless-bridge-USB-print-server-analog-optical-audio-source-thingie and lo and behold they actually had iPod Mini's in stock! I couldn't pass that up so I got a silver one and it rocks. My Dad and I was bowling in another tournament yesterday (I've been doing that a lot huh?) so I brought it along. Once we got to the center my Mom confiscated it and practically drained the battery.

I almost forgot, I did pick up Doom 3 on my way home from the Apple store (EB was next door). Damn, is it impressive. The playability? It's ok. The visuals? Wow!

I did try to set up the AirPort Express this weekend and of course I couldn't get it to work. When I get it up and running I'll post the helpful links on the 'ol blog.