In a familiar game style, the Hawks went down Saturday. They led at half time but just couldn’t keep it up in the second half. Once again, the opponent (Wisconsin) did poorly in the first half and came on like gangbusters in the second half - particularly in the final eight minutes. Looking at the article in the Daily Iowan, there are quotes like “we weren’t concentrating” and “it seemed like everyone just died”. Again, I say it is because they are asked too much by Steve Alford.
- Commiting 11 turnovers in the second half (compared to Wisconsin’s 8 for the entire game) did them in. Turnovers are a result of not being mentally alert - of being tired.
- In the second half, Wisconsin shot about 54% - tired legs make for poor defense. Poor defense allows easier and higher percentage baskets. Most D1 basketball players can make shots if they are left open.
- Iowa was 40% in the second half - not awful but not good. Again, a tired team doesn’t shoot a good percentage.
The loss drops Iowa to 13-10 (Wisconsin is no slouch at 19-6) and their next three games are on the road (Ohio State [13-11], Indiana [16-9] and Michigan State [14-11]) and ending the regular season hosting Northwestern [10-14]. With Iowa struggling and playing on the road it sounds like a finish of 1-3 to make them 14-13 overall. I don’t smell NCAA and the NIT is outside right now.

My goodness, Steve Alford. You don’t like the fans to leave in the second half, as described here in the Daily Iowan. Perhaps they know something you don’t - like THE TEAM IS TIRED, they are going to wear down and eventually lose if the game is close with 10 minutes left. DUH! Get it through your head! It isn’t the players’ fault. It is a lack of bench development which is the coach’s fault. Too late for this season, but perhaps next year instead of complaining about a lack of bench you could earn your money and develop a bench! And I guess it’s like the Clinton Administration: If you tell a lie often enough people will believe it. Sean Sonderleiter even says the blame is on the shoulders of the upperclassmen. BAH! It is on the coaching staff, in particular the head coach who was unwilling to take a loss or two early to develop a bench he could count on when things got rough in the Big 10.

Here it is again, the Friday Five:

1. What is your most prized material possession?
I’d have to say my wedding ring. I never take it off except when I am working on a car engine.

2. What item, that you currently own, have you had the longest?
That would have to be the LP album “Styx II”. The original record release with the song “Lady”. It was the first record I purchased after I bought my first stereo.

3. Are you a packrat?
For some things, yes; for others, no. We routinely go through our closets and donate old clothes to Goodwill; however, I have computer parts from the early ’90s.

4. Do you prefer a spic-and-span clean house? Or is some clutter necessary to avoid the appearance of a museum?
It is kind of nice to have a clean house, but you could never mistake ours for a spic-and-span clean house. It always has that lived-in look and we like it that way.

5. Do the rooms in your house have a theme? Or is it a mixture of knick-knacks here and there?
It is a kind of mixture. There isn’t any “theme” room in our house at all. In that respect we are pretty bland.

I’m back! Wow, what a great few days. Friday-Saturday-Sunday-Monday was spent getting laptops ready. Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday was spent at the Allsteel National Sales Meeting in Chicago. Allsteel is an operating company of HON INDUSTRIES. No, I did not get my caps lock key stuck; that is the name of the company - all caps. I had also done a lot of prep work getting the software ready to install on the laptops. Life should get back to normal for a while now - if I can find out exactly what normal is (besides a city in Illinois). The training for the software we installed, SalesLogix, went rather well. I heard a lot of positive comments. It should really help Allsteel focus their efforts and get back to where they were a few years ago.

I had asked my wife what she wanted for Valentine’s Day shortly into January. She didn’t have any preferences, possibly going out to eat but not on that particular day. Well, it came down to it and I’ve had to work many hours this weekend - 8am-10pm Friday, 8am-10pm Saturday and 11am-6pm Sunday. Also I’ll have to put in 9am-6?pm Monday. Casey asked one thing of me for Valentine’s Day: to get my blood tested for diabetes. Diabetes runs in my family; I have two brothers on medication for it (one oral, one injections), my mom is on oral medication and her dad was on oral medication for it. So to please her (and I don’t do much that doesn’t please her) I went to my brother’s place tonight; he lives about 10 miles out of town. I used his testing equipment and found that I have a blood sugar level of 86. He says that 70-120 is the normal range, so I guess I am normal. Whew! I didn’t think I was but she wanted me to be sure. Now, I’m sure.

This one might be the last post for about a week. I have a big project at work that will require 12-15 hour days this weekend and then travel to Chicago next week. Hey - I’m not complaining; it’s all part of the job. I just won’t have much of a life other than work for the next week or so.

Guess what? Microsoft issued YET ANOTHER security patch for a known security flaw in the Internet Exploder. (No, that is NOT a typo) Perhaps if they were to extract the browser from the OS like the lawsuit that they LOST told them to do they would begin to get out of such embarrassing issues. This is just one more reason that I use Mozilla. Not saying it doesn’t have any security problems, just that any such problems are easily found in the readily-available code which is constantly being revised. Fixes like this make me sick because I need to maintain IE for other programs on my PC (they will not work with ANY other browser).

Can you believe this? I have a hard time with our country complaining about copyrights in other countries. I mean really, you apply for a copyright with the US government. Does that really mean that you have the same copyright protection in Bolivia? Only if you are an idiot. You have to solicit each government worldwide and apply for the copyright there. Perhaps if this is the case (and I don’t know that it is or is not the case) maybe the governments in question here are more concerned with hard crime instead of millionaires being cheated out of millions. What bugs me most is that they “estimate” their sales losses. Many of these so-called pirates WON’T buy the item in question, so how is it a loss in sales?

After reading this story, my thoughts are “So what else is new?” The government has been squandering money for a long time, why should government spending on IT be any different? Hey, at least it is only about $12 billion! It all goes back to my thoughts that the government has to be told to do without, much like they have told us in the past. I want to wait until we TRULY see budget cuts; not just the government line on budget cuts. Here is an example of the baseline budgeting the government uses: Let’s say spending in a department is currently $100 million (I know, a small department) and is projected to increase by 8% to $108 million but actually increases by 5% to $105 million; this is what the government calls a 3% cut. WRONG! It is a 5% increase! A 3% cut would be 3% LESS spent ($97 million) than the previous year! It’s about time the government backed off on the spending. I don’t like working well into May just to pay off my taxes.

In this article in the Daily Iowan, we get a look at Steve Alford’s world. I would prefer to call it a “reality distortion field”. Let’s break down the interview:

1) He says he couldn’t be more pleased with the effort his players are giving. I agree - they have played very hard.
2) The Hawks have lost 4 of their last 5 games due to second half collapses. Alford attributes this to a lack of offensive patience. WRONG - they lack patience because they are tired, Steve. You won’t use the bench and they lose their thinking skills because they are TIRED. When you play, first you lose your legs then you lose your brains. You cannot play a thinking game when you are tired. You need to get your bench in there more.
3) He points to transition defense as a weak point. He says again, it is due to lack of offensive patience. WRONG - Again, it is because they are TIRED. When your legs go and your head goes, you give up layups. It happens at every level from junior high to the NBA. Tired players give up easy baskets. Fresh players make the opponent work harder for their baskets. Again, get your bench in there.
4) He wants Brunner to play at the pace of a guard to make up for the team’s lack of depth. What exactly does that mean? I haven’t seen any other Hawkeye player put forth the effort Brunner does on a regular basis. Brunner hasn’t played at his early-season level since he got elbowed in the face a few games ago. He hasn’t had time to heal and has been playing hurt. Again, get your bench in there.

If he looks at the timeline stats, he will see his team does well in the first half and as the game wears on his players wear down. It is inevitable in the Big 10, which is known for its physical play. He made his bed in the early season by not developing a bench, and now he has to lie in it. In the Big 10 today, you NEED more than 7 players to make it through the season. My friend Bob asks “What bench?”. At this point it is too late to develop the bench. He needed to do this early in the season and maybe take some lumps so he would have one now. I hope he doesn’t pressure Jared Reiner to come back too soon from the knee sprain. Tired players are bad enough; tired injured players can lead to life-long injuries.

Look at this! This has been my thinking for a while. Since Microsoft is the top dog in the industry and charges top dollar, shouldn’t schools move away from them? Actually, the NEA is a huge bastion of socialism and seeing how MS is monopolistic perhaps they DO work well together!

Weird. I could not get the previous post to work right. I checked in to a lot of things. Finally I checked the Blogger ftp log to see what had happened. I saw a lot of file transfer errors - no such file. Soooo, I fired up FileZilla to check on the files on my hosting server, Machlink. Turns out they changed their file structure without any notification. Once I set the Blogger preferences to the new file structure for the ftp, it worked fine. Geez, I can’t hardly wait until I get a better host. I am really tired of this crap - no CGI scripting, no MySQL support, no PERL support, the admins don’t seem too cooperative when it comes to communication of these things. I am surprised that there is PHP support, what with all the other stuff that can’t be done. I may have to pay for a hosting service but it will be much better than what I have now.