I have used some of the shorthand that originated in chat rooms. Like LOL (laugh out loud) and ROTFL (rolling on the floor laughing). The Onion has put together a great list of chat-room shorthand — always good for a laugh, aren’t they?

Both Wartburg and Coe lost today. Wartburg lost ot Linfield 52-15 at McMinnville, Oregon. Linfield holds the record for the longest streak of winning seasons in the history of college football at 47 consecutive seasons. (Central College in Iowa has the NCAA longest consecutive seasons string at 42. Linfield’s are split between NAIA and NCAA.)

Coe lost to St.John’s of Minnesota 45-14. St. John’s has the highest winning percentage of all time in DIII football at .693. Pretty awesome at any level.

Last year’s Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl participants (Mount Union and Bridgewater [Virginia]) are still in the hunt to reach the NCAA DIII title game again.

Well, the Hawkeyes beat Tennessee State tonight. Tennessee State had previously lost to Fisk University, a preseason unranked DIII school not even getting any place votes. The good news is that they beat them big. The bad news is that they played them at all. Playing poor teams is a double-edged sword. If you win, you were supposed to. If you don’t win big then what is wrong? God forbid that you should lose. Oh well, their next game is Florida State. We’ll see a bit more then.

OH – MY – GOD !!! Oklahoma State 38, Oklahoma 28! I was kind of looking forward to Iowa playing Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl. Could get a lot of good banter with RObyn. But now, who knows what will happen?

The Lakers won last night. Samake Walker is on the IL; perhaps they will find that they can live without him and trade him off. He is an offensive liability out there, shooting under 40% from the field on shots less than 10 feet from the basket – most shots under 6 feet. He plays poor defense and hasn’t seemed to get better with them. It’s time to give Madsen and Medvedenko his minutes and see who comes up. Madsen can’t shoot much better but at least realizes it and doesn’t shoot much. Medvedenko doesn’t shoot a lot better but is younger and has scored a ton before he got to the NBA. I’d like to see what Medvedenko would do with his minutes plus about half of Walker’s minutes. Couldn’t do any worse.

Just got asked by my best friend Bob and his wife Norma to go to the Iowa Hawkeye basketball game tonight. The Hawks aren’t going to be much in basketball. Too many incidents and departures to overcome. Anyway, tonight would be a game they have a pretty good chance to win: Tennessee State Tigers. Not that I think they will, but they should. Home game, Ohio Valley lower division team, oh well…

Hmmm, Microsoft changing their Licensing 6 price points to counter Linux. Well let’s see; we have an agreement with Microsoft at work and we pay almost $400 for Office 2000 Professional and $150 for a license for Windows XP (which we won’t touch; we install Windows 2000 which is an option at this point). Sounds like it is about $475 more per PC than Linux and StarOffice. Of course, Microsoft will tell you that it is bad to switch to Linux. The question remains, though, why are they dropping prices by 33-107%? Makes one wonder.
I know of a small business in the area that was a Microsoft shop until they changed to Licensing 6; at that point they made a clean switch to Linux – server and workstations. After a bit of initial training issues, they have not suffered at all with the change and in fact have saved money in the process. They purchase PCs without an operating system and have their tech install Linux.
Granted, this is a small system, but it would work in larger networks as well. I’m not convinced that Microsoft is the way to go in the future. I demonstrate this with my home PC. There are three pieces of Microsoft software that I use. They are:

1. Windows 2000; I don’t use Linux at this point because it won’t recognize my scanner, my wireless mouse scroll wheel and my print sharing device.
2. Microsoft GIF Animator; I use this only to set the transparency color on a GIF for web use.
3. Microsoft Internet Explorer; I have to keep this up to date because of two other pieces of software:
   • Grisoft’s AVG Antivirus – it uses IE for the update process
   • MAX’s HTML Beauty – it uses IE for the preview of the web page coding that I do

To browse the internet, I use Mozilla. I just downloaded and installed the latest version, 1.2. No popups, blocking ad banners within the page, secure browsing. Also includes email, newsgroups browsing, IRC and composer. I have also installed the Calendar add-in.
I use OpenOffice for my office suite. It can read and write to MS Office apps of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I haven’t had any problems working with documents and sending them to work and back. Overall a great product.
Oh, so you want to chat and all your friends have AOL-MSN-Yahoo? I use Trillian. It talks with all three as well as IRC and ICQ. I chat on AOL and MSN as my kids each use one but not the other.
My point in all this is NOT to be an advertisement. It is that we don’t need to be dependent upon Microsoft and their monopoly. A lot of people don’t like the fact that Microsoft won their court case and have been decreed to NOT be a monopoly. They aren’t doing anything about it, though. There are literally hundreds of alternatives to Microsoft software. All we need to do is use it; that is the only way Microsoft will stand up and take notice – when the money stops flowing.

Wow! What a feast! Al and Sue hosted – they prepared the turkey, gravy and stuffing. Casey and I brought the pies. Roberta and Goyf brought the dessert sides (jello and fluff). Howie and Vickie brought the main sides. I can’t believe I ate the WHOOOOOLE thing! Of course it was a great time visiting and eating. Hope all of you had as great a time with your Thanksgiving as I did.

Happy Thanksgiving. Seems we spend a lot of time in this country hacking away at what made it great; sort of chinking the armor that is our way of life. I am thankful to live in the USA, thankful for my wife and kids, thankful for the freedom to choose how to live my life. We will gather at my brother’s house around 4pm today to feast in celebration of thanks for all things that are possible in this great land of ours.

Had cleanup day at work. We get to wear jeans as long as we clean out our cubicle. I didn’t have that much to clean because I haven’t been in the cubicle that long – only a few months. I did help some of the other folks, though. And I got to wear my Eckos. The boss sprung for Subway so we all gathered for lunch. Also got the profit sharing checks today. How much better could a day be?

Today is cleanup day at work. Been working on cleaning up my little cubicle. Also offered to help a couple of folks down the row that have a lot of stuff to clean up and move. I am sort of taking a break now but don’t have a whole lot more to do with cleanup, so I can help them all this afternoon.

Also, the profit sharing checks have arrived. We have some people who have been with the company for a long time that remember the profit sharing check to be a lot bigger, percentage-wise, than it is now. Hey, I don’t know about that. I DO know that when I taught I did not get a profit sharing check – you can only get a profit sharing check if you are in a business to make money and then you actually have to make money. Ah F$%#, I won’t get any of this money anyway. It will all go to one or the other kid’s college tuition. Oh well, it is nice to get the check anyway; the kids won’t be in college forever!

Bree surprised the heck out of me at work today. I was downloading drivers for a new printer our company is now purchasing in order to prep them to access from the support intranet site (I do that with all drivers for our printers) and she came up to me. I have a smallish cubicle and she just kind of appeared out of nowhere. I was happy to see her but surprised. She then told me that she just didn’t want to be alone at home. So… she waited and we visited while I finished prepping the drivers for intranet access. Then we went to Blain’s Farm and Fleet to get a headlamp for her car (the driver side had burnt out this week) and when we got home I replaced the headlamp for her. All in all a nice “welcome Home” for her.