You have done it! You have won the series against England. You have brought the overrated, overhyped England back to earth. Reality does suck, doesn’t it you Poms?
All week this week I have read so many articles, snippets and such about the USC-ucla game that the anticipation built up is scary. It has happened in the past where some game that I have anticipated so much for so long has turned out to be a pathetic, one-sided affair, usually against my favorite team.
So I am trying hard to not read much about it and not follow the ESPN Sportscenter ‘USC Chasing History’ reports from Shelley Smith. But it is hard. All the sports websites I follow are talking about the Hollywood clash, the last win before Rose Bowl and similar stories.
I am keeping my fingers crossed because it is a rivalrly game. Anything can happen. Form does not matter. The Vegas line does not matter. It is a question of nerves and handling pressure situations.
Leinart is certainly playing his last game at the Coliseum. Besides, it is his last regular season game. It is of course the biggest game on the USC calendar. Reggie Bush may be playing his last regular season game and the last game at the Coliseum too. Besides, he has the added pressure of sealing his Heisman trophy. It is Seniors day and there will be others on the team feeling the nerves. USC has all the pressure - so many streaks on the line… current win streak, win streak at home, win streak in Pac-10, #1 ranking, etc.
On the other hand, ucla has practically nothing to lose. I mean, being underdogs by 3 touchdowns means they actually can go out there, and lose by that much and it won’t be a surprise. It will actually serve as a motivation for the team to play hard and make a point. They would of course like to be called the team that finally defeated the Trojans. Without all the pressure.
The stage is set for an upset. Will it happen? Will have to wait till 4pm tomorrow to find out.
Meanwhile, fingers crossed and no predictions made.
Without any hesitation, I downloaded the new Firefox 1.5. Don’t see much of a difference first up.
I noticed that the Live Bookmark icon is now going to show up in the address bar instead of at the bottom. Not a big deal to me.
The Tools/Options window has sections clickable across the top, like tabs, rather than on the left. Again, not a big deal to me.
Supposed automatic updates. We’ll see.
Tabs re-ordering. That’s good. I use many tabs and sometimes, when I ‘open in new tab’ and I am trying to keep a track of what I have opened, it becomes necessary to re-order the tabs. I like that option.
What’s up with ‘faster back and forward navigation’? Since when did that become a ‘feature’? Was it too bad in 1.x? I don’t think so. How could they make it perceivably faster? I don’t know.
Anyway, I am going to use it because it is the latest version and I like the product.
I can’t believe it is already Wednesday! Time is moving fast. Very soon, it will be the end of December and end of the ‘holiday season’ :-(
I love the period from mid-November to end-December.
After 5 years of using the same really old laptop, my work laptop was replaced with a newer one. Just got set up with all my stuff on it now. Two things I had to manually install were Firefox (and related extensions that I typically use) and Trillian.
Both of these, I actually wanted to put on a thumb drive so that I could carry them around with the same settings. Then I realized it may not be such a great option because what if I lose the drive? It has happened before! :-)
So here I was … over Monday and Tuesday, backing up my data from the older laptop and putting it on the new one. Then, Firefox. Now, only Trillian remains and am trying to get some nitty-gritty sorted out. I will be all set by the weekend.
I also saw a Detroit Lions game for the first time this season. And I have been reading about how bad it is out there, the booing and stuff.
And I saw it for the first time. Man, it must be tough to be anyway connected to the Lions organization.
I saw Joey Harringtong being booed, but let me tell you this - the offensive line they have, is terrible. Terrible. He was being sacked for absolutely no fault of his. It was not like he was keeping the ball in his hands for too long or not picking up blitzes or whatever. The defense was able to penetrate easily and get to him.
Neither is the coach to blame. He is doing what he can with the personnel he has. He may not be having a good time with the press or whatever, but given the talent on that team on the offensive line, there is not much he can do.
So stop blaming him and ask his GM to step down or be accounted for!
Notre Dame survived Stanford and is in line to get $14.5M! They had to really pull off great drives at the end of the game in order to push Stanford away. It would have been catastrophic for them had they lost!
In other games, LSU/Arkansas proved how overrated the SEC is. The final score was 19-17 whereas USC was able to pile on 70 points on Arkansas. Pac-10 deserves to get some more credit than those East Coast folks from the SEC regions give them.
The same goes with Georgia/Georgia Tech. Georgia, even with their stud QB Shockley back, were only able to put 14 points in the game. Pathetic.
It was good news that VA Tech won - they are too good to miss out on a BCS bowl. Just because of one bad day at the office against Miami should not prevent them from going to perhaps Orange Bowl. Of course, it is not a given yet, because they have to beat Florida State in the ACC Championship.
And I was listening to some radio shows in the afternoon where some expert was making a case for Ohio State and his colleague was making a case for Oregon to get the at-large berth in the BCS. Being in the Pac-10, I would of course root for Oregon, but since the toss up may be between Ohio State and Oregon, I would even more so root for Oregon because Ohio State is another overrated mess of a program. I just hope it is up to Fiesta and they choose Penn State which means choosing Ohio State would not make sense to them and they would have to go for Oregon.
Just noticed the score - Fresno State lost to Nevada! 38-35!
Wow. That is surely a letdown after their big game against USC last year.
Does not help USC at all. They are going to lose some spots in the rankings now and USC’s win against them is going to get less valuable now.
Does not matter much because I have a feeling USC is going to strengthen their position as #1 in the human polls because Texas had an average/bad game.
For the first time this season, I was able to see a Texas football game in its entirety. Let me say one thing without jinxing anything for USC - Texas is beatable.
From the ESPN highlights and stuff that’s written all over the place, my impression of Texas was that they are a machine that keeps rolling over opponents and such. They had beaten Ohio State which is traditionally a tough defense (not sure about it this year though), and Texas Tech which is traditionally known to put up a lot of points and yards.
And then Texas A&M was statistically the worst team in Division 1 against the pass. Perfect set up for Vince Young to respond to Reggie Bush’s Heisman-worthy numbers, right? Well, it looks like he took it for granted that he will have a field day.
Not so fast, Longhorns. The Aggies defense was brilliant in penetrating the O-line of Texas and getting to Young a lot. And on the other side of the ball, they were able to get McGee to do wonders for them and despite losing their running back early on in the game, they were able to stay close and even lead the #2 team in the nation.
I think the Aggies could not believe what they were seeing. In the fourth quarter, they were only one TD (+2 point conversion) away from evening the score! They made a few silly mistakes then, and lost the game.
Texas was truly bailed out by their special teams. The blocked punt for a TD was so critical! Texas A&M just needed some mistake-free minutes towards the end and they would have caused the biggest upset of the season.
In any case, what’s good to know that it is a myth that Texas is invincible.
Brian Lara smashed another fantastic double century. He has been on and off in this series but this innings seems like a gem. I hope to catch some highlights next week on the ICC Cricket World show.
Some more experimentation with Pathan opening with Gambhir, and finally the Indian batting flopped. There were some small sparks with Yuvraj and Kaif but not enough to create a total big enough to put any pressure.
And speaking of pressure, the South Africans truly responded well by getting to the target without any loss of wickets. Its surely a long time since India lost a game by 10 wickets.
Anyway, with the loss of Chennai match to rain, India really needs to win the next match to draw the series.
Maybe I do jinx India by signing up for watching their games. I will not sign up for the next few series :-)
The wife and I were invited to her friend’s house in Sacramento for Thanksgiving dinner. We started in the afternoon and had tremendous traffic throughout and ended up spending about 3.5 hours for the 150 miles!
We still reached on time and were able to help them in getting everything ready. They had invited some friends and their families over and it ended up being a nice, peaceful Thanksgiving dinner.
There was turkey (we are both vegetarians, so we skipped it), and all the standard sides that go with it. And of course, there was pumpkin pie. We stuffed ourselves like crazy and left from there at about 10pm and reached home at 12.30am. There was no traffic on the way back and so we were able to fly through. I do not have a radar detector so I had to keep the speed in check, never mind the Thanksgiving night.
And it is only Friday morning and there is a lot of weekend remaining! Yay!
I am loving this Thanksgiving weekend. It is a good thing that we did not plan to go out of town this time. We went to Sacramento area yesterday, but in general, nothing else planned for this weekend and I am really looking forward to recharging a bit.
I did not get up early for the crazy shopping that goes on on “Black Friday”. I have a list of things I want to buy, but I am ok missing out on the extra 5% discounts. We came back a little late last night so slept in today.
I am watching the Texas/Texas A&M game and looks like a dirty game for Texas. Then there are some small chores I want to get done and probably go out for shopping later in the day.
I have been using Picasa for quite some time now, and have become a big fan of it. Recently, there was a need for me to urgently get some prints of some of the pictures I had in digital form, and give it to someone. I knew that Picasa had some ‘order prints’ feature but I had never bothered to click through it and see what it does.
So yesterday, I selected a label which chose all the pictures I wanted to be printed, clicked on Order Prints and it gave me a choice of 5 providers of prints. Of the five, Ritz Camera and Wal Mart took it one step further and said that I could pick up the prints at their local store within the hour!! Amazing, considering I had 20 or so pictures to print.
I went through the account set up at WalMart.com and uploaded the pictures and checked out of the shopping area and that’s it! Within the hour, it was ready to be picked up at my local Wal Mart. I was simply amazed how cool this technology was.
I have done a similar thing with Kinko’s where I sent something to print to a local store and picked it up from there, and now, it is the same with pictures.
Quite cool! I love it. The ease of Picasa combined with the convenience of one-hour printing.
No, I would never ask anyone to vote for George W. I am talking about Reggie Bush of the University of Southern California Trojans, for the Heisman Trophy.
It was such a phenomenal effort this past weekend against Fresno State! He has had similar performances more than a few times this season and he certainly is the MVP for the team.
Of course, he is competing with his teammate Matt Leinart and that may split the votes. Also, he may be at a disadvantage at USC because he is not the only weapon USC has!
Compare that to Texas, and I would say Vince Young is perhaps the biggest weapon they have, if not the only one.
Update: The uncut version is available on AOL. I could not find a direct link, but I could search for ‘video’ and get to the various acts from there. Check it out if you missed it on TV.
Fresno State was a tougher opponent than Notre Dame. They played hard, and while USC had an excuse of playing in a hostile Notre Dame stadium against ND, they had no such excuse last night against Fresno State at home.
The Bulldogs were ahead quickly and were able to stop the mighty Trojan offense in the first half. But as usual, I was hopeful that the half time magic of Pete Carroll changes things.
And change it did! From 21-13 down at half time, USC quickly jumped to be ahead 41-28. At that time, I started relaxing and assumed that everything is going to be ok and USC is going to have another second half blowout just like some of the earlier road games.
No sir. Fresno State had other plans. They came back with a TD and on the ensuing kick off #5 fumbled inside his own 20! And how expensive was that? It took only one play for Fresno to come back and regain the lead.
Being down 42-41 in the fourth quarter started making me nervous, especially because Fresno was able to score at will. But USC went through a quick drive and scored a quick TD. Went for 2 and did not get it.
Now, I was even more nervous. What if they take up all the time and score with no time remaining? But once again the defense stepped up and created a fumble which was recovered by USC. That drive though still did not end up with a quick 7 points for USC and instead they had to settle for a field goal.
That was a slight relief because then, even if Fresno scored, they would have to convert a 2-point conversion to send it to overtime.
As it turned out, the defense was there again and Pinegar’s throw in the end zone was intercepted. The positive attitude and the fire in the Trojans and the self confidence that the entire team has, showed very subtly when that interception in the end zone was actually returned! And not just a few yards … he ended up at the 40-yard line! He could have just gone down in the end zone and let USC knee out the last 90 seconds or so. But he did not. He took the risk of losing the ball and ran back.
While that was sort of foolish, it did show the character and poise of this team. That was probably a big difference between this game at the Notre Dame game. Against Notre Dame, I think there were some guys who started thinking that they may not win. At home, first of all, you have the crowd supporting you big time. And it did not seem like a single Trojan was having that feeling that USC may lose. Not at all.
And so the streak goes on. One last game now before the end of regular season. ucla is going to be well rested. USC hopefully will get fitter and be ready for the showdown.
No, I am not talking about USC because that streak (those streaks) is still going strong. I am talking about my streak of not getting my car banged up.
Last week, I scratched the car big time trying to squeeze it into our designated parking spot. Usually, I can get it in in one turn and I don’t have to stop and reverse and adjust and come back in.
But we have a new neighbor who does not know how to park well. Their car was parked almost on the white line. They are to our right. To our left is a big pillar.
So as I was trying to turn left into the spot, I realized that I may have touched the other car. And yes indeed, I had touched it. Uh-oh. So to minimize the damage, I tried to reverse the car and I heard some sound and felt some resistance over on the left side at the back. I saw in my side mirror and it was not good. The car was touching the pillar and by this time I knew that there was quite a bit of damage already done.
So I was in a fix. I could not move ahead because I was touching the other car, and I could not move behind because I was scratching the car big time on the left. But in any way, I had to get out of the jam. So I took the chance of scratches on the left side and just drove through into the parking spot. The sound was not good at all and after I got out, I saw the scratches and my heart sank.
The left back door has a dent in addition to massive scratches, and the part of the car between the door and the bumper was also bent to a great extent.
So now, it is on to searching for some Acura body shops :-(
It took some time, but here it is! A fresh new look. Something brighter, something more lively.
I had too many customizations and it was certainly not easy. Thanks to the ‘preview’ feature of ‘change templates’, I was able to keep trying to get everything just right.
Hope it is. Please leave a comment about how it looks, and of course, if something is broken.
Offensive Coordinator Lane Kiffin said the California game was a bad offensive outing for the Trojans. “For all 11 guys, play after play, it was our worst game besides Notre Dame,” he said. “Thirty-five points is bad when your defense gets thats many turnovers. Guys were screwing up on little things. A bad pass route or a wrong read by a running back or a wrong step by a lineman."
Wow, that bad? As bad as Notre Dame? The score and the first half certainly did not indicate it. But of course, his point is good - there were so many turnovers and we did not convert those to points enough.
Hopefully, it will serve as a good motivational call for this weekend.
