Rusty's Blog

Say what you will about Michael Scott, but he would never do that.
- Jim Halpert on The Office

When Tennessee shitcanned its second winningest football coach in school history near the end of last season — a man who gave almost 40 years of his life to his university — it signaled not just a change in personnel, but a radical change in philosophy.

UT was one of the last holdouts of an era when coaches were grown at home, and stayed at home. The new era is one of mercenaries, ushered in by the hated Gators and Crimson Tide, but one that was inevitable with rising expectations.

It should never be a surprise when a mercenary does an about face and turns his sword toward the last bag of money when the next bag of money comes along. And while it is never a surprise, it still can be shocking when it actually happens, as it was last night.

So I don’t blame UT athletic director Mike Hamilton for hiring He Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken. He was just trying to give UT fans what they were asking for and did the best he could with the available information and pool of coaching talent. If you’re not careful, your school will give you what you ask for too.

Here are the final results. Many apologies for the misfire a couple of days ago. As I plan to do when anything else goes wrong this year, I blame He Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken.

Also, thanks for playing. It’s been a lot of fun.

Tiebreaker

The final tiebreaker, which ended up not being necessary, was “How many points will all 10 SEC bowl-bound teams score in their games combined?” The answer if you’re curious was 262.

Advanced Google Analytics and WordPress integration presentation from WordCamp Atlanta from Rusty Tanton on Vimeo.

This is a video of the presentation I gave at WordCamp Atlanta on January 9, 2009 about integrating Google Analytics with WordPress. I’ve made a few updates to the slides and code samples since I found out afterward it’s against Google’s terms of service to track visitors by name.

I didn’t get to attend the opening sessions of WordCamp Atlanta because the weather was horrible and we didn’t want to drive home in it in the dark last night, but I’ll be there today.

Due to aforementioned weather, the schedule has been pushed back an hour today, which means my presentation on advanced Google Analytics-Wordpress integration starts at 11 a.m. instead of 10 a.m. now. Here is the Google Doc I’ll be referencing, which also links to some code samples in case you’re having trouble deciding which session you want to attend in that time slot.

If you didn’t buy a ticket, the good news is due to the weather the organizers will now accept walk-up registrations when they hadn’t planned to before. You’ll need exact change though (the registration page says they’re $55, so I’m presuming that’s how much they still cost).

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Here’s our full set of wedding photos. There are captions when you click through.

All photos taken by Thomas Strickland.

Back in November, some friends took me to Mardis Gras, a strip club just barely inside the perimeter, to celebrate my birthday. A couple of the guys who joined us there were friends with one of my high school friend’s little brother. They hadn’t spent much time with me since high school.

“What the fuck happened to you?” one asked me after I tipped one of the strippers on stage and came back to my seat. He was having trouble believing I wouldn’t say or do something insulting or mean as a matter of course.

My circle of friends when he knew me was ruthless in the verbal abuse we doled out to each other. To get by without taking the brunt of it required a quick wit and an occasional hint of menace. He did not have a quick wit, and as such was frequently on the receiving end of taunts.

I don’t feel like I’m a whole lot different now than I was when he knew me before. Yet it was obvious to him that I am a totally different person now than I was 12 or 13 years ago. He was right. Change can be sneaky like that.

But sometimes change isn’t sneaky. I’m now married, own a home, and am planning to be a dad in the not-too-distant future. I was none of those things as recently as 2008. And now going into 2010 I’m perfectly content to be all those things.

So it’s been a unique year, in that some fundamental life changes have happened more suddenly than I’ve been accustomed to. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time reflecting on them, as I’ve been content to just enjoy the ride.

I feel fortunate the year treated me so well when it hasn’t been kind to many of my friends and acquaintances.

And I’m grateful for the people in my life I can rely on to do what they say they’re going to do. This would all be a lot harder without them.

Marriage and Pistol licenses through this door (photo by Thomas Strickland)

After bandying about several ideas for a wedding ceremony — including standards like Vegas and one which involved us wearing custom ponchos and smashing a vodka-soaked watermelon with a sledge hammer Gallagher-style — Amber and I had settled on just going down to the damn court one day without telling anybody. It was the path of least resistance in terms of both money and effort.

May 9, 2010 will mark the five-year anniversary of us hooking up.^* We consider May 9 our most important anniversary, and as such thought it would be a good day to get married. The problem with May 9, 2010 is it’s a Sunday. So that wouldn’t work since there’s no one in court on Sundays.

After that, we asked our accountant whether there would be a tax advantage to marry this year or next. He ran some numbers and found it wouldn’t make much difference.

Next we decided we should just pick a day we were both off work and go ahead and do it.

We both had the week between Christmas and New Years off, but we were in Augusta the 24th through the 26th. Then I was at my parents’ house the 27th. Then the tree guy was coming on the 30th. Then I was going to the Peach Bowl the 31st.

So that left the 28th and 29th. My parents were married Dec. 28, so that was appealing to us, but Amber’s sister^** Crystal wanted to come to town and couldn’t come that day, so that whittled the day down to the 29th.

Read the rest of this entry »

This footage is from my grandparents’ 1961 trip starting in Jekyll Island and ending in Jacksonville, Florida where they watched Georgia Tech and Penn State play in the Gator Bowl on December 30, 1961. Penn State won 30-15.

To give you an idea of how long ago 1961 is in football years:

• Joe Paterno was still an assistant coach for Penn State. It would be another five years before he was named head coach.
• Georgia Tech was coached by Bobby Dodd, and was still a member of the SEC. It would be another three years before Tech defected from the SEC due to Dodd’s dispute with Alabama coach Bear Bryant.

I’ve broken a single 400-foot reel of 8mm film into three parts due to YouTube’s 10-minute limit on uploads:

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Part 1 (6:53)

The trip down. This might be boring to you, but it was interesting to me. Lots of footage of roadside signs, old cars, and what a lot of locales between Jeckyll Island and Jacksonville (Camden, Georgia is the one I could recognize by name, but there were others) looked like at the time.

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Part 2 (9:15)

Warm-ups, pre-game show and 1st half. See if you can recognize the coach stalking the goal line in warm-ups. I don’t think it’s Bobby Dodd, but I could be wrong.

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Part 3 (7:48)

Halftime show, 2nd half, fans’ exit. I love the floats, they’re like something out of a movie. Then seeing the Ramblin’ Wreck exactly as it is now ties the whole thing experience together for me as something real. Tell me if you think that’s a young Joe Paterno walking with the Penn State mascot before the game starts back up. I think it might be, but I can’t tell.

Atlanta’s first Wordcamp Atlanta, one of a series of conferences focused on all things WordPress, is coming next month.

I will lead a session on advanced Google Analytics integration with WordPress. Here is a tentative set list, with the caveat that the schedule hasn’t been released yet. I don’t know what my block of time looks like, so this list may be condensed or expanded depending on how much time I have:

• Advanced Segmentation: pass information from WordPress into Google Analytics custom variables so you can segment page views by author name, visitor name, category or whatever else you can think of
• Conversion rates: use goals and funnels to track what percentage of your visitors are leaving comments, signing up for your email newsletter, buying your ebook, etc.
• Tracking Javascript applications: add tracking to visitor interactions in your Javascript applications, or intercept Javascript events added by WordPress plug-ins and add tracking to them
• Campaign integration: automagically generate campaign IDs for your posts, track them across RSS, Twitter, Facebook, email and more
• Custom reporting: make sense of all this new information

This session will be oriented toward programmers with a heavy focus on coding and implementation strategies. I’m presuming you have experience with at least some of the following: WordPress theming, Google Analytics, HTML, PHP and Javascript.

Hope to see you there! WordCamp Atlanta will take place Jan. 8-9 at ATDC. Tickets are available here for $45.

Your final picks are due Tuesday, Dec. 22. It would be so sad if griftdrift blew his six-point lead the last week. Maybe even sad enough to make Timmy Tebow cry…

(was that not the greatest moment in the history of television?)

(why are all the videos of this some dude with a camcorder recording his TV + a bunch of “annotations” that are actually ads for celebrity gossip blogs?)

Enter your picks

Tiebreaker

How many points will all 10 SEC bowl-bound teams score in their games combined?

Remember to enter your answer to this question in the comments section, and to make sure your answer isn’t the same as anyone else’s.

Last week’s tiebreaker was “How many passing yards will Nebraska’s defense give up against Texas?” Sara’s answer of 298 was closer to the actual total of 184 than Carl’s answer of 315 was, making her the week 14 winner.