My pal Chris started a blog over the weekend - I’ve been bugging him to do so for quite a while. I’ve know Chris for several years – he used to be an officer in a company that I helped migrate over to .NET. The company got sold, but Chris hasn’t blogged what he does now so I’m not going to spoil the surprise (hint – he did blog about automatic external defibrillators).

So far, Chris is doing a lot of ranting – his favorite pub in Edmonton (which I’ve been to), Amazon Theater, and reselling livestrong bracelets. Personally, I think it’s funny that Chris can build a wearyellow livestrong flair for his blog template, but he hasn’t built an XML flair that points to his syndication feed.

Chop busting aside, I’m glad to see Chris posting. When I first met Chris, I was transitioning from consultant to technical sales, and I’ve learned a bunch from Chris about how business works that has come in very handy now that I work with architects. Chris, can’t wait to see more from you. But when are you coming to Seattle for a visit?

A year ago, I was pointing out how badly messed up the BCS computer system was, denying the unanimous #1 ranked team in the land a shot at the national championship game. This year, USC has gone wire to wire ranked #1 and will face the #2 Oklahoma Sooners for the national championship. Fight On!

Of course, there are those pointing out the fact that #3 Auburn went undefeated creates an “unprecedented headache for the BCS“. Excuse me? What a bunch of crap. The BCS is supposed to make sure there’s a unified national champion – something it failed to do last year I might point out  - by having the top two teams play each other. USC and Oklahoma have been #1 and #2 all year, and they’re playing each other. Sure, it sucks to be Auburn, go undefeated and still come up third. But there’s no question who the top two teams are – they’ve been the same all year.

I’m sure this will revive the yearly “BCS sucks, we need a playoff” talk. Quick memo to playoff people: any college football playoff system is going to screw someone. For example, a 4 team playoff this year (using the BCS rankings) would have been USC, Oklahoma, Auburn and Texas, screwing unanimous #4 ranked Cal. An 8 team playoff would add Cal, Utah, Georgia and Va Tech, but screw Louisville who’s ranked at least 8th in both polls. Even a 16 team playoff – which is virtually infeasible – would screw unanimous #16 ranked Wisconsin. So let’s not pretend this issue will go away by playing more games.

Do I think the BCS works well now? No, even though USC didn’t get screwed this year (not exactly a ringing endorsement). Personally, I think BCS computer system should only be used when the polls don’t agree. There’s just no objective way to measure the relative records of teams that don’t play the same teams. Thus, leave it in the hands of the humans, and use the computers to break ties when they happen. It would have given us a USC vs. LSU championship last year and still had a USC vs. OU championship this year.

We’ve had a good family Thanksgiving this year. We flew to northern Virginia where my parents live on Monday, avoiding the craziness of traveling the day before Thanksgiving. Patrick is such a good traveler! Tuesday, we went to the brand new National Museum of the American Indian with two of my mother’s first cousins and her aunt (I think – hard to keep these family relations straight sometimes). It was great having that part of the family around – I hadn’t seen them since my grandfather passed away back in high school. They were also over for Thanksgiving today, which was fascinating listening to stories of my grandfather’s family as well as their world travels. For example, they recently visited the River Kwai and learned of its history – let’s just say it’s nothing like the movie.

I’ve also seen a bunch of old friends who still live here or flew in to be with family who live here. Last night, Jules made enchiladas en mas for the family and for our good friends John and Barbara and their daughter Elizabeth. John works for a defense contractor these days and Barbara is a stay at home mom. (I hate that term, but I don’t know how else to put it. Moms work hard – they don’t just “stay home”) Rich and Jess, who are in from San Francisco, also stopped by. Rich is a marketing expert and also covers the SF Giants for the newspaper. Today, we had breakfast with Rich and Jess plus Dave and Heather and their son Ethan. I didn’t really know Dave growing up – more of a friend of a friend who I got to know after high school. Dave has worked at the White House since sometime in Clinton’s first term. Rich wore his “Free Martha” t-shirt for the occasion. He also pointed out that Mary Cheney – yes, that Mary Cheney – graduated from my high school a year behind me. It’s a small world.

We’re here thru the middle of next week – I almost always get to the end of the year with vacation to use or lose. I can’t stand traveling the day before Thanksgiving or shopping the day after, so I’m probably going to hang out with my brother while Jules and my mother and my great aunt go shopping. Dad has to work – which seems ludicrous since how much is really going to get done the day after Thanksgiving? Maybe he’ll find time to blog. Next week is more hanging out, though I am taking the time to visit a customer before I head back to the grind.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have a new toy – a Motorola MPx220 smartphone. I’m actually lucky enough to have recently laid my hands on two smartphones. The other was a dopod 515 which was a gift from the organizers of TechEd Beijing. The dopod is nice, but I really dig the MPx220. I’m partial to flip phones, plus the MPx220 has a camera and Bluetooth.

Of course, one of the benefits of having a smartphone is the ability to write some custom stuff for it. There are a variety of tweaks available that are predicated on registry modifications. There’s a registry editor for Smartphone 2002, but I couldn’t get it to install on since my phone is running Windows Mobile 2003. Luckily, there’s OpenNETCF.org with a wide variety of useful libraries for compact framework development. They even have registry editing libraries that work from the device or the desktop. Not sure what else I want to write yet other than an app to download movie times a la the new SPOT watch movies channel, but I’m sure I can think of something!

I’m pretty impressed with the new Photo Story. I’ve been tracking this program since it was a research project so it’s been cool to watch it evolve. However, I did run into something I didn’t like in the new version. Once you’ve built a Photo Story, you can render it to a variety of target profiles. One of the target profiles is for SmartPhone. I’ve recently got an MPx220 so I figured I’d try it out. Didn’t work as Photo Story’s target profile is for SmartPhone with Windows Media Player 10 Mobile which the MPx220 doesn’t have installed. Woops. And you can’t upgrade the device to WMP10 Mobile. Double woops.

While I’m annoyed that I can’t install WMP10 Mobile on my MPx220, I’m more annoyed at Photo Story. There’s no way to build a custom target profile that would work with my phone. I was able to build an encoder profile to convert a Photo Story rendered for the desktop to be converted down to work well on the SmartPhone. Why can’t I just do that inside Photo Story?