Rusty's Blog

Okay, I’m 30, now what?

Rusty — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:02:19 +0000

My senior year of high school, close to the time I turned 18, my classmates and I filled out a survey. A lot of it was the sort of thing people fill out in MySpace surveys now: favorite bands, favorite animal, favorite activity. Some of it was about The Future.

There were people who took the survey very seriously and put in an effort to sound cheerful and as hopeful about The Future as possible. After all, their children and their children’s children would read this record of their thoughts, frozen in place for posterity.

Others used the questionnaire as an outlet for their hostility toward the high school experience, packing as much cynicism and sarcasm into their answers as possible. The Future as these folks imagined it was a bleak place, even at its best full of black humor where they were the center of the jokes.

The answers were ultimately printed in the yearbook in little sidebars, typically with the contrasting attitudes juxtaposed next to each other. You can probably guess which approach I took when I filled out my survey. I made frequent appearances in the ‘cynical/sarcastic/pessimistic/bitter’ column.

One such sidebar was titled “Happily Ever After,” where answers to the question “what are your goals in life?” or something similar were printed. The answers were as follows:

Cheerful, hopeful person:“Major in biology, go to med school, and have a career in ER.”

Bitter, cynical me: “Live to 30.”

That answer carried extra resonance because there were people I went to school with who genuinely believed I wouldn’t live to 30.

By my junior year or so, I had picked up a reputation as someone who drank heavily. While I certainly got drunk from time-to-time, this reputation was largely an exaggeration. For whatever reason, I never tried to dispell that myth, and even perpetuated it a few times.

There were also people who thought I wasn’t right in the head. I was a weird, insecure, often angry kid and there were a lot of things I did then that I still can’t logically explain. The committee in charge of a senior awards ceremony wanted to name me “Most Likely to Appear on America’s Most Wanted,” but I asked them not to. So I can’t argue much there.

While I always believed there was mostly no truth to the “Live to 30″ answer, my older, slightly less cynical self knows that tempting fate just for the sake of doing it isn’t always a great idea. I’m agnostic, but I also think if there was a God, He or She would have to enjoy gallows humor, and would pick people like me off just for saying things like that.

So, I’m breathing a little sigh of relief to have outlived my cynical high school survey answer today. And I’m pleasantly surprised to report that if I were filling out a similar survey about The Future now, that at least some of the time I’d be the dorky kid who wrote cheerful things for posterity.

NCAA Picks 2008-2009: week 12 results, week 13 schedule

Rusty — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:13:29 +0000

Has Michigan-Ohio State always been a noon game? Because that would be embarrassing if it’s scheduled then because nobody cares about it.

Almost as embarrassing as it will be when Tennessee closes out the season losing to Vandy and Kentucky, thereby sealing its fate as the worst team in UT history.

WTF 2008?

Here, have a poll:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Results

Week 12
Player	Points
Sara	11
Ben K	9
Carl Lindecrantz	9
Jen	9
Reginald	9
Tony	9
Tony Ventry	9
Alyssa	8
Garrett	8
Griftdrift	8
Rusty	8
Archibald Throngbow	7
rugbyfan	7

The full results spreadsheet for week 12 is here. If you find an error, let me know and I’ll adjust the results.

Overall standings
Player	Points
Rusty	115
Carl Lindecrantz	109
Ben K	104
Griftdrift	104
Tony	101
Garrett	99
Archibald Throngbow	98
Jen	97
rugbyfan	97
Sara	97
Tony Ventry	95
Alyssa	93
Reginald	87

The full overall standings with week-by-week scores can be found here. If you find an error, let me know and I’ll adjust the results.

Week 13 schedule

Wednesday, Nov. 19
Time	Game	Line
7:00 PM ET	Ball State (16) at Central Michigan	Ball State by 7

Saturday, Nov. 22
Time	Game	Line
12:00 PM ET	Michigan at Ohio State (10)	Ohio State by 20.5
3:30 PM ET	Michigan State (15) at Penn State (8)	Penn State by 14.5
3:30 PM ET	Air Force at Texas Christian (17)	Texas Christian by 18.5
3:30 PM ET	Mississippi at Louisiana State (18)	Louisiana State by 5
3:30 PM ET	Illinois at Northwestern (24)	Illinois by 2.5
3:30 PM ET	Boston College (25) at Wake Forest	Wake Forest by 2
4:05 PM ET	Boise State (9) at Nevada	Boise State by 6
6:00 PM ET	Brigham Young (14) at Utah (7)	Utah by 6.5
7:00 PM ET	Pittsburgh (19) at Cincinnati (20)	Cincinnati by 5
7:00 PM ET	Oregon State (21) at Arizona	Arizona by 3
7:45 PM ET	Florida State at Maryland (23)	Maryland by 1.5
8:00 PM ET	Texas Tech (2) at Oklahoma (5)	Oklahoma by 6

Game of the Week

Texas Tech at Oklahoma. Renowned weirdo Mike Leach is Texas Tech’s coach. Here’s why he’s awesome, according to former Tech lineman Daniel Loper:

Coach’s motivational speeches are always the same. He tells very long stories, and you’re never sure what they mean. But he’s a genius. When we leave the locker room, we all know that we’ll have three receivers wide open every play.

Speaking of candidates for the Tennessee job, I was tempted to make the GOTW Pitt-Cincy. Cincy coach Brian Kelly refused to shake hands with Louisville coach Steve Kragthorpeafter he beat the hapless Cardinals last week. Nice. Maybe we need someone in Knoxville who can be a bigger dickhead than Urban Meyer.

How to enter your picks

You read the rules, right?

The short version:

You’re picking which teams won’t cover their spread. You must choose at least one team not to cover unless there is only one game being played that week.
You’re also entering a predicted score for the Game of the Week, which cannot be the same as a predicted score another player enters.

Example:

Florida and Clemson don’t cover. Alabama wins the GOTW 19-14.

If I entered that, that means I think Florida and Clemson either would lose or not cover their spreads, and you then wouldn’t be able to predict a 19-14 win for Alabama.

Quick and easy SVN with Dropbox

Rusty — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:50:11 +0000

Have I mentioned before that I lurrrrve Dropbox? I lurrrrve Dropbox. You install a small program on each computer you want to access files on, the program runs in the background, and you never think about it again. Copy a file to the Dropbox folder on one computer, and it’s there waiting for you in the other computer’s Dropbox folder.

One of the nice features of Dropbox is it offers version control. So if something goes terribly wrong with a file, you can roll it back to an older version.

This set off a light bulb: hey, I could use this as an automagic CVS/SVN style code repository that I would never have to bother logging into and typing a bunch of arcane commands.

If you use the built-in Apache on Mac OS X for LAMP development like I do on my laptop, this is can be accomplished easily in a couple of steps:

Create a subfolder under your Dropbox folder. I called mine htdocs.
Open up the Terminal application, and create a symbolic link to the htdocs folder somewhere where the web server can see it. Your command might look something like this:
```
ln -s ~/Dropbox/htdocs ~/Sites/htdocs
```

That assumes your Dropbox folder is stored under your home folder, and that your Mac OS X built-in web server has a pretty standard configuration where each user has a Sites folder.

If you followed the method I outlined above, you will then be able to access this folder in a browser at a URL that will look something like http://localhost/~/htdocs/

If you want to get fancy about it (or if really long URLs bug you), you can edit your Apache config file to point to a subfolder in your Dropbox folder, but this works for me.

I suspect you could also easily use it to do version control on local MySQL databases by changing the data folder to a subfolder of your Dropbox. I haven’t bothered because I don’t have any data in my MySQL databases that matters much to me.

These tips come with no warranty. It’s possible you’ll run into some goofy permissions issues, but I have yet to.

NCAA Picks 2008-2009: week 11 results, week 12 schedule

Rusty — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:11:36 +0000

I was giggling like an idiot when Wyoming beat Tennessee, because if I couldn’t laugh about this season then I’d be crying.

With another loss, the Vols would set the school record for losses at eight. You’ll read a lot of news articles that will breathlessly describe this team as the worst ever if that happens. Most of these people won’t mention that there are more games on the schedule now than there used to be, and therefore more opportunities to lose.

As I lay out in a post on Rocky Top Talk, I do think another loss cements this team as one of the three worst Tennessee teams of the modern era (which I’m marking as 1926 and after, when General Neyland was first hired). But, I think for this team to be indisputably the worst Tennessee team ever would require it to lose both games.

But what do I know? Let’s turn this over to the wisdom of crowds.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Either way, this is a bad football team we’re talking about here.

Results

Week 11
Player	Points
Archibald Throngbow	13
Carl Lindecrantz	10
Ben K	9
rugbyfan	9
Rusty	9
Jen	9
Sara	8
Tony	8
griftdrift	8
Alyssa	8
Reginald	7
Tony Ventry	6
Garrett	6

The full results spreadsheet for week 11 is here. If you find an error, let me know and I’ll adjust the results.

Overall standings
Player	Points
Rusty	107
Carl Lindecrantz	100
Griftdrift	96
Ben K	95
Tony	92
Archibald Throngbow	91
Garrett	91
rugbyfan	90
Jen	88
Sara	86
Tony Ventry	86
Alyssa	85
Reginald	78

The full overall standings with week-by-week scores can be found here. If you find an error, let me know and I’ll adjust the results.

Week 12 schedule

Note: 16th-ranked Ball State has a game on Tuesday. Including it is not worth giving people less than 24 hours notice to get their picks in. Besides, I can’t take a team that schedules games on Tuesdays seriously, even if they are ranked and even if they would beat Tennessee this year.

Friday, Nov. 14
Time	Game	Line
8:00 PM ET	Cincinnati (22) at Louisville	Cincinnati by 3.5

Saturday, Nov. 15
Time	Game	Line
12:00 PM ET	Indiana at Penn State (8)	Penn State by 34
12:00 PM ET	Ohio State (10) at Illinois	Ohio State by 10
12:30 PM ET	Texas (5) at Kansas	Texas by 13.5
12:30 PM ET	Georgia (12) at Auburn	Georgia by 8
3:30 PM ET	Brigham Young (14) at Air Force	Brigham Young by 4
3:30 PM ET	North Carolina (17) at Maryland	North Carolina by 3
3:30 PM ET	California at Oregon State (25)	Oregon State by 3
3:30 PM ET	South Carolina (23) at Florida (3)	Florida by 21.5
6:30 PM ET	Missouri (11) at Iowa State	Missouri by 26.5
7:00 PM ET	Southern Cal (6) at Stanford	Southern California by 23.5
7:45 PM ET	Mississippi State at Alabama (1)	Alabama by 20
8:00 PM ET	Utah (7) at San Diego State	Utah by 28.5
8:00 PM ET	Oklahoma State (13) at Colorado	Oklahoma State by 17.5
8:00 PM ET	Boston College at Florida State (19)	Florida State by 7
8:00 PM ET	Troy at Louisiana State (20)	Louisiana State by 20
8:00 PM ET	Tulsa (24) at Houston	Tulsa by 6

Game of the Week

This might be the weakest slate of games the entire year. I’m defaulting to Florida vs. South Carolina because of the Spurrier facing his old team angle, and because South Carolina might be good enough to give Florida a little trouble. But only a little.

The only other good news is that a weak slate of games like this sometimes makes for wildly inaccurate lines, which ought to at least make the picks fun.

How to enter your picks

You read the rules, right?

The short version:

You’re picking which teams won’t cover their spread. You must choose at least one team not to cover unless there is only one game being played that week.
You’re also entering a predicted score for the Game of the Week, which cannot be the same as a predicted score another player enters.

Example:

Florida and Clemson don’t cover. Alabama wins the GOTW 19-14.

If I entered that, that means I think Florida and Clemson either would lose or not cover their spreads, and you then wouldn’t be able to predict a 19-14 win for Alabama.

President Barack Obama

Rusty — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:46:10 +0000

Barack Obama. Photo from boston.com

I share concerns about President Barack Obama that some of my Republican and Libertarian/libertarian friends have. High among those concerns, I don’t expect the trend of irresponsible government spending to be curbed under his administration, especially with a possible Democratic super majority coming in the U.S. Senate. I have a philosophical aversion to any party having that much power, and that goes for Democrats too. This prospect does worry me some.

But ultimately, I was unable to look at the past eight years and say, “hell yeah, give me some more of that.”

Not to dwell for too long about just what “that” was, but I believe that as a highly narcissistic country we elect presidents that are symbols of what we think we are or aspire to be. The past eight years demonstrated that symbolism is important, even though it may seem superficial.

And for the past eight years, America the symbol has been a belligerent drunken uncle. He’s blood and you love him. As such, you’d do almost anything for him, even if it means bailing him out of jail after his fourth DUI. You want him to dry up and get on the straight and narrow, you really do. But you resent him and are mortified by his behavior.

I don’t know which relative President Barack Obama will turn America into, but I know at least we won’t be that guy anymore. And even if he makes some decisions I disagree with, I will at least know he didn’t make them because a buddy bet him five dollars he wouldn’t.

He’s a symbol that says we’re optimistic about our future; that we value deliberation and intellect; that we can disagree without hating each other; and that we can do some good in the world without a drunken brawl breaking out. That was enough reason for me to support him, and trumped all of my other concerns.

It’s why I feel relief today and not panic, even though the world offers us many reasons to panic.

Election day over/under

Rusty — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:44:14 +0000

Prize to be determined later, but will probably involve alcohol. If you think a number is too low, take the over. If you think a number is too high, take the under. If you think it’s exactly right, say push.

298 electoral college votes for Barack Obama
53 percent of the popular vote for Barack Obama
57 U.S. Senate seats for Democrats
51 percent of the vote for Jim Marshall in Georgia’s 8th District
45 percent of the vote for Jim Martin in Georgia’s U.S. Senate race

So, for example, if you think Obama will win more than 298 electoral votes, take the over.

You can enter your predictions in the comments like this:
over, under, over, under, push

And if you live in Cobb County, remember to vote Rusty Tanton for tax commissioner! This is how I will run staff meetings.

Update 11:14 a.m. I’ve added a tiebreaker: name the exact minute Twitter first goes down tonight. You can’t pick the same minute as anyone else.

Also, FYI for people who pick “push” on percentages, we’ll round up decimal places five or higher (i.e. 52.3 percent counts as 52 percent, 52.6 percent counts as 53 percent).

Video: Phillip Fulmer’s press conference announcing the end of his coaching career at Tennessee

Rusty — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:25:53 +0000

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NCAA Picks 2008-2009: week 10 results, week 11 schedule

Rusty — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:04:14 +0000

Phillip Fulmer as a senior on the 1971 Vols

We all knew this day would come eventually, but that doesn’t make it any less sad. Ultimately, Phillip Fulmer was crushed by the weight of expectations created by his own success during 30 years as a player, assistant and head coach at Tennessee. He is a class act who gave more to the school than most of us will ever realize, and I hope history remembers him well.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel has a good retrospective on his career here.

Unless something changes between now and 5 p.m., Coach Fulmer will be allowed to coach the Vols for the rest of the season. I’m planning to take a road trip to Knoxville Nov. 29 to catch his last home game if anyone wants to come with me.

Results

Week 10
Player	Points
Archibald Throngbow	10
Griftdrift	10
Rusty	10
Ben K	9
Garrett	8
rugbyfan	8
Tony	8
Sara	7
Tony Ventry	7
Alyssa	6
Carl Lindecrantz	6
Jen	5
Reginald	5

The tiebreaker this week is refreshingly uncomplicated compared with last week. Archibald, Griftdrift, and I each scored ten points. Archibald was the only one of us to correctly pick Texas Tech to win, so he is this week’s winner.

The full results spreadsheet for week 10 is here. If you find an error, let me know and I’ll adjust the results.

Overall standings
Player	Points
Rusty	98
Carl Lindecrantz	90
Griftdrift	88
Ben K	86
Garrett	85
Tony	84
rugbyfan	81
Tony Ventry	80
Jen	79
Archibald Throngbow	78
Sara	78
Alyssa	77
Reginald	71

The full overall standings with week-by-week scores can be found here. If you find an error, let me know and I’ll adjust the results.

Week 11 schedule

Wednesday, Nov. 4
Time	Game	Line
8:00 PM ET	Northern Illinois at Ball State (18)	Ball State by 9.5

Thursday, Nov. 5
Time	Game	Line
8:00 PM ET	Texas Christian (11) at Utah (9)	Texas Christian by 2.5

Saturday, Nov. 7
Time	Game	Line
12:00 PM ET	Georgia Tech (20) at North Carolina (19)	North Carolina by 4
12:30 PM ET	Georgia (14) at Kentucky	Georgia by 11.5
12:00 PM ET	Ohio State (12) at Northwestern (25)	Ohio State by 11
12:00 PM ET	Purdue at Michigan State (17)	Michigan State by 10
2:00 PM ET	Utah State at Boise State (10)	Boise State by 31.5
2:00 PM ET	San Diego State at Brigham Young (16)	Brigham Young by 31.5
3:30 PM ET	Alabama (1) at Louisiana State (15)	Alabama by 3
3:30 PM ET	Penn State (2) at Iowa	Penn State by 7.5
3:30 PM ET	Oklahoma (4) at Texas A&M	Oklahoma by 25
3:30 PM ET	Clemson at Florida State (24)	Florida State by 6.5
7:00 PM ET	Cincinnati at West Virginia (23)	West Virginia by 8
7:00 PM ET	Kansas State at Missouri (13)	Missouri by 26
8:00 PM ET	California (22) at Southern California (6)	Southern California by 17.5
8:00 PM ET	Oklahoma State (8) at Texas Tech (3)	Texas Tech by 3
8:00 PM ET	Florida (5) at Vanderbilt	Florida by 24
TBA	Baylor at Texas (7)	Texas by 26

Game of the Week

Oklahoma State at Texas Tech. No commentary this week.

How to enter your picks

You read the rules, right?

The short version:

You’re picking which teams won’t cover their spread. You must choose at least one team not to cover unless there is only one game being played that week.
You’re also entering a predicted score for the Game of the Week, which cannot be the same as a predicted score another player enters.

Example:

Florida and Clemson don’t cover. Alabama wins the GOTW 19-14.

If I entered that, that means I think Florida and Clemson either would lose or not cover their spreads, and you then wouldn’t be able to predict a 19-14 win for Alabama.

My first campaign promise

Rusty — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:49:21 +0000

There’s now a write-in campaign to make me Cobb County tax commissioner. I’m up to three votes! That’s three hundred percent more than I had this time yesterday!

That I live in DeKalb County is an unimportant detail. I figured I should have a platform, so here’s my first campaign promise, following Jen’s endorsement of me on Facebook:

Happy birthday to Amber!

Rusty — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:33:57 +0000

We started celebrating by eating at Radial, our favorite breakfast spot, this morning. Then I gave her the present I bought her, a robotic baby chick from Thinkgeek (pictured above). Tonight we’re going to have dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. And, you know, anything else she can think of that she wants between now and later.