Don't Back Down

In the North Carolina 4AA Semifinals, the Independence Patriots took on the West Charlotte Lions for bragging rights of the city, and to see who would represent the Western half of the state next week in the championship. It was also a rematch of their game earlier this season, where the Lions did well, but ultimately they couldn't stay with the Patriots for the whole game.

In the end, it was a game for the ages. The Big I, which routinely scores dozens of points per game and humiliates their opponents was played tough by West Charlotte, and this one came down to the final seconds.

Read "Independence Beats West Charlotte, Heads for Number Eight" »

The first quarter of the 2007 season for the Carolina Panthers ended with a 2-2 record. Probably not as bad as it could be, but not as good either. The second quarter started with two victories, and at 4-2, things looked good. But then the bye week came and things went bad quickly. Two quick losses left the second quarter with a 2-2 record, and at the end of the first half we were 4-4.

Would things get better or worse in the third quarter? If Jake Delhomme was playing, then chances are decent that it gets better. Though many don't like to admit it, Jake is one heck of a fourth-quarter player. His third quarter may not be great, but the second half is where he shines, and he can play with the best of them, ugly passes and all. Unfortunately, Jake is gone for the season, Vinny Testaverde is aging by the minute, David Carr seems to be a total bust and for whatever reason, the coaches don't want to play Matt Moore. Who knows what will happen.

Read "Carolina Panthers: 2007 Third Quarter Review" »

The numbers are in, so what can we learn? After a monstrous opening weekend, which saw some 100,000 riders over the two-day free preview, the first day of paying riders (last Monday) saw somewhere between 4500 and 5000 "passenger trips", well short of the estimated 9100 per day during the first year. To be fair, it's the first day, and you have to give people a chance to step up to the new patterns - but that's pretty far off the mark.

Notably, if the ridership is so low in the opening days, that means the numbers will need to be made up somewhere in order to meet the average. It's also worth noting that that is a "weekday average". I haven't been able to find a good number for weekend averages, but you would have to assume that it would be lower. Naturally, on a Panthers home game, it might be higher, but other than that, there really isn't a lot of reason to use the train - and other cities severely curtail transit on weekends, so it seems logical.

Read "One Week of the Lynx Blue Line" »

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of overpriced fundraisers. Just look at the Girl Scouts. I mean I'll eat some cookies and all, but the way they sell those overpriced boxes of heaven is just ridiculous. Why don't they just ask for the money? I don't mean to pick on the girl scouts. Really. They aren't alone.

When I was a kid, I came home with all sorts of things from school that I dutifully schlepped around the neighborhood, thinking that I was doing everyone a monumental service. Was it really so bad? Probably. These days, our kids bring home all sorts of overpriced crap, then they are made to feel bad when the teacher announces that they can't have a pizza party until everyone turns in a purchase.

The other day I received a phone call from the firefighters, not wanting to miss out.

Read "Firefighters Sell You Tickets You Won't Use" »

The power just went out for the second time in recent memory. It actually stayed out for a few minutes, which is unusual. In fact, I really thought that it would be gone for a while, so I had just shut down the computer. It didn't quite get through the whole power-down cycle before the power came back up.

Before you wonder how I was doing all this with the power out, I have a UPS, so I normally just ride it out. In this case, it didn't seem like I'd be able to do so, so I shut everything down and was getting ready to do something else. Then the power came back on. As mentioned, this is the second time in recently that the power has gone out for more than a second or two. The last time it was out for hours.

Read "How Often Does Your Power Go Out?" »

Over on Learning Movable Type, Jaclyn asked why she wasn't able to get tags imported to a new MT4 installation. While Movable Type 4 includes an entry's tags in the import specifications, and also exports those tags when saving the data, no prior versions have exported the tags, even though tags have been natively supported since MT 3.3x. Luckily, it's easy to get them.

First, make a backup of ImportExport.pm from your original Movable Type installation, which is the Perl module that handles the export. Do this because you want to make sure that you have a good copy, just in case something goes awry. Put this backup in a safe place, and work with the copy of the file, just in case. Ready? Good.

Read "How to Export Tags from Movable Type 3.3x" »

On Saturday night in Wake Forest, the Independence Patriots, fresh off one of their closest games in recent memory, a 10-8 victory over West Charlotte last week, fell victim to New Bern, 28-17. The season that started with head coach Tom Knotts wearing a shirt with a large number 8 on it ended in much the same way (though he hid the shirt under another).

When the Patriots lost to Cincinnati Elder early on to bring an end to their 109-game winning streak, you knew that something was different. It just wasn't the same. When they lost to Butler late in the season, the winds of change were blowing. But the team still had a chance to keep one dream alive - the shot at a record eight straight state titles. Unfortunately, fate had other plans.

Read "Independence Patriots Miss Chance at Number Eight" »

Some of you may have noticed a problem with your online RSS feed aggregator, such as Bloglines or Google Reader. This had to do with the formatting of the Browser Friendly feed from FeedBurner (not their fault, I was trying something new, and I'll explain it soon so you can learn from my mistake).

Anyway, the problem was that some web-based aggregators weren't able to see the feed as a valid one. If you read the feed in your own browser, or via email, you should have been okay. I'm not sure about desktop aggregators, but they probably would have had the same problems as the online ones. The end result is you may get a bunch of updates, but things should be flowing normally again. Sorry for the disruption.

One of the reasons I like pair Networks is the shell account. I don't always need shell access, but it's really useful to have it when I do need it. Much better than the alternative - needing it and not having it. One question that comes up when you start talking about shell accounts is accessing the thing. For users who are used to Windows, it's a legitimate question - it's just not something that you're typically exposed to.

What you'll need is PuTTY - a great little application that allows you to connect to an SSH server. SSH stands for "secure shell", and that's how you login to most shell accounts. There are some that will allow you to do so with a standard telnet client, but that's less than secure, so don't do that. The only problem with PuTTY is that you have to type your password every time you need to connect. That's not a bad thing if you don't do it often, but if you disconnect and reconnect a lot, it can be a royal pain. Enter Pageant (available at the same page as PuTTY).

Read "Using Pageant with PuTTY at pair Networks" »

Since it's my birthday, I thought I'd talk about something that really bugs me about gift cards.

As I'm filling up at the gas station, I look up and see a sign that reads "Give the gift they wont want to regift". Yes, that's right - a gift card for a gas station. Now first let me say that I'm not a huge fan of the gift card. Sure, I like getting them alright, because I can go get what I want instead of having to deal with what someone else thinks I want. I understand their appeal.

I also understand the appeal as a gift-giver, because you don't have to put a lot of thought into the gift, and I think that's why I don't like them. Basically it means you don't have to think about it a lot. You just go to the store and get a gift card, and you're done. In a busy world, it's very convenient. Heck, a lot of stores even offer you a selection of gift cards for other stores. It's the very epitome of lazy shopping. The hard part is determining which card to buy.

Read "Have Gift Cards Gone Too Far?" »

With the holiday season in full swing, it is probably a fair assumption that many of you are going to be purchasing - or receiving - a movie in the coming weeks. If not, then there is a good chance that you will go out and see one this weekend or the weekend after that. Movie distribution is a monster - I have no doubt that illegal music distribution is probably more widespread, but that's only because it's typically faster to download a file that is a couple megabytes in size than it is to get one that is a few hundred megabytes (or a couple of gigabytes). With broadband continuing its slow march, that is only going to continue to change.

Of course, I understand that burning a music CD is easy because you can then take it anywhere - it's not quite the same with movies. Part of the fun is going to a theater and watching it on the big screen. But with home theater systems becoming more and more common, and most computers these days having their own DVD burners, another domino falls - illegal movie distribution is only going to become more of an issue. When you consider that even a matinee is much more expensive than it was, it won't be long before movies are as popular to download as music, if not more.

Read "Are Torrents Outpacing Legal Movie Distribution?" »

I haven't done a lot of work with Apache Tomcat previously, so when someone asked if they could install Movable Type, I had to do a bit of digging to see if it was possible. The answer is actually yes - but it's not the most intuitive installation. Most steps are fairly simple, but making the pieces work can be challenging.

Getting Perl up and running under Tomcat isn't difficult - just dropping the files into a directory seems to make them work. But to make Movable Type work, you need more than just Perl - you need MySQL. That's where the trouble comes in and things get a little dicey.

Read "Install Movable Type Under Apache Tomcat" »