Saturday was all about the Drake Relays. KC and I left for Des Moines about 8:30am and got back home about 10:00pm, so it was a long day; but WHAT a day! For those of you that don’t know, the Drake Relays are held every year on the last weekend in April. It is one of the major track and field events in the nation. This particular weekend there are two major track and field events, the Penn Relays and the Drake Relays. This year, as in many years past, the Drake Relays hosted many of the athletes that will compete for the NCAA championships and the Olympics. Yes, that’s what I said – the Olympics.

We get our seats through KC’s brother Randy, and they are very good seats. Third and fourth rows at the end of the first turn. When athletes take their victory lap, we can reach out and “slap five” with them (am I dating myself with that expression?) as they go by. In the races and relays where runners have to stay in their lanes, we can hear the grunt of them starting. I could even see some of the fancy stick-on nails that some of the women runners had on. One of my favorites is watching the shot put; and they have world-class shot putters there. Our seats have us only about 25 meters from the shot put ring. We are even closer to the high jump and it was a great competition for that.

The Saturday session, as it’s called, was once again a sellout of 14,000. That means rain or shine the Drake Relays has been a sellout on Saturday since 1967 – 40 years. It was a beautiful day; I’m not sure what the high was but at 7:00pm when we were leaving town one of the bank displays read 77°. It was sunny and pleasant all day. Also, since I missed the Drake Relays last year, I got to see the remodeled stadium and man, is it ever nice! I’m certain the athletes appreciate the great facilities to compete. The only drawback is that the wind was a bit too strong – it wasn’t really noticeable but it was enough to disqualify the sprints that used the south-bound straightaway. (like the 100m dash, the 200m dash, the 100m hurdles, etc.)

Some of the names that did very well:

• Alan Webb broke a 25 year old record for the mile run by running it in 3:51.71, beating the old record by 3 seconds.
• 39 year old Jeff Hartwig broke his own Drake Relays record set in 1998 by pole vaulting 19′ 1/2″.
• Jeremy Wariner, who won Olympic gold in Athens in the 200m and 400m, took second in the 200m to Marvin Anderson despite running a 20.57.
• Amy Acuff, a Drake Relays darling, took second in the high jump to Kansas State’s Kaylene Wagner who cleared 6′ 2 1/2″.
• Christian Cantrell, another Drake Relays celebrity, only put the shot 71′ 3 1/2″; a far cry from his put last year of 72′ 6″, but still enough to win.
• Des Moines’ own Lolo Jones won the 100m hurdles with a 12.77, but it can’t stand as a record because of the wind.
• The Minnesota women’s 6400m relay ran the fastest time in the world with a 19:07.75.
• The Baylor men became the first team since 1944 to win all four sprint relays: the 4×100, the 4×200, the 4×400 and the sprint medley.
• Brittney Riley of Southern Illinois set a new Drake Relays hammer throw record of 237′ 11″. She absolutely shattered the old record, besting it by 31′.
• Joey Woody, another Drake Relays favorite, didn’t do well in his 400m hurdles. In his “interview” he cited new child, new job (assistant track coach for the Iowa Hawkeyes), and new location for why he hasn’t trained as hard. The crowd still loved him!

I figured out what was going on with the theme, and as a result I’m now using it. Let me know what you think. I’ll be getting it to my Wiki soon (and also to WPThemes).

Well, at least in my lifetime, this will NEVER happen again: At three minutes and four seconds after 2:00AM on the 6th of May this year, the time and date will be 02:03:04 05/06/07. Even if you were born between now and then it’s unlikely this will happen again – it only happens once every century. (Thanks, Bob!!)

And no play makes BillH one tired Jose. Well, it’s something like that anyway. Friday I left once again for the ATL. The week before it was install networking equipment and lead training. This time it was bring their network into our Active Directory. We use Quest for that and it works pretty well; however, even Quest admits that you should expect to do 10% of the computers by hand. I think it was a higher percentage because of two factors:

• They had a lot of laptops that went into hibernation mode. This means that while they were recognized as there by Quest that they didn’t actually run the tool because they were hibernating.
• They have five remote sites and Quest doesn’t necessarily work well over a WAN link. Yes, it is supposed to, but again we had a number of hibernating laptops as the remote sites are showrooms that have field sales folks there who have …. laptops.

It all led to a lot of work making sure that all the local permissions migrated but the personal profiles used were the same, printers migrated, Citrix apps migrated, network shares migrated, and the DNS and DHCP information all migrated.

I got there about 4pm on Friday. The hotel where I stayed was about one and a half blocks away, so I didn’t need a car to go to and from the worksite. It seemed like all we did was work and eat. Get in about 8am Saturday, work all morning, eat lunch, work all afternoon, eat dinner, work late, walk to the hotel and pass out from exhaustion. Then repeat the whole process on Sunday. Monday, we got there at about 7am (remember, now, this is Eastern Time and I’m used to going to work at 9am Central Time!!) to help the early arriving users if there are any kinks. And there always are kinks, no matter how well you plan.

Monday night at 7:45pm, my flight took off and I headed home. I’m still kind of in a funk, but hopefully after another night or two in my own bed things will seem better. It didn’t help that I was on a tiny regional jet, not on an exit row or a bulkhead row, and me and the guy next to me were the two biggest guys on the plane (and it was full – no empty seats).

Happy Birthday, Vickie!

I stumbled across this article and it was pretty jaw-dropping. It’s all about LeBron James’ house that he is having built outside of Akron. Well, you know, it’s a pretty paltry 35,440 square feet. He might run out of room. (If you haven’t figured it out, I’m being facetious here) Hell, the walk-in closet measures 40′ x 56′ and is two stories high. (That’s larger than my entire HOUSE!). He’s got a great room, a grand room, a three story aquarium, a bowling alley, a recording studio, a theater, a casino and a barber shop. And it comes with a six car garage! Heck, he doesn’t have a house – he’s got a mini-mall!!! THIS is what happens when someone has too much money and doesn’t know what to spend it on!

Yeah, that’s what I (and a number of others out here in cyberspace) call Microsoft’s web browser. Not the Internet Explorer, but the Internet Exploder. Why, you ask? I’ll tell you why. I’ve been designing my next theme for the past two months. While my spare time is at a premium, I do have some and I enjoy the challenges brought on by trying to design a blog theme that I haven’t seen before. My problem is that the theme works perfectly in Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera and Amaya. Of these, Amaya is 100% W3C compliant. The rest are close, but not 100%. The problem is, while all these other browsers are W3C compliant, the Internet Exploder is not. As with most things, Microsoft has taken the W3C standard and done it’s typical “embrace and extend” and warped the standards. It has…. ahhh, never mind. I won’t get Microsoft to change its mind simply because I’m hollering here. They haven’t been compliant since Internet Exploder 1.0 and now at Internet Exploder 7.0 they STILL aren’t compliant. Anyway….

Going back to my original rant, in all the other browsers my new theme is working perfectly or with glitches so minor that it doesn’t affect the theme. In the Internet Exploder (versions 6 and 7) the theme doesn’t look or act anything like the other browsers. It goes off the width of the screen, it doesn’t lock certain elements in place on the screen so they are not scrollable, it doesn’t create the content area right, it doesn’t make the sidebar visible at all, and it doesn’t display transparent PNG files properly. What a rip. The problem is that a lot of the traffic that goes through my site is Internet Exploder. Using last month’s statistics I had 140,145 hits on my site. Of those, 30,722 were not generated by a bot of some sort (kind of depressing, huh? 78% of my hits are by bots…) Of the non-bot hits 16,284 (53%) were by Internet Exploder 6, Internet Exploder 7 and RSS readers that use IE. The other 14,438 hits (47%) were by compliant browsers, mostly Firefox and Mozilla. So if I use the theme I’ve been working on, I will immediately alienate over half of my visitors… and I don’t want to do that. So, I’ve got to keep plugging away at the theme and hopefully it will work out before summer. After all, it IS a spring theme.

It’s been in the news a lot, almost to the point of dominating the news. So I thought I’d throw in my 2¢ worth…

I need to preface this by saying that I find what Don Imus said about the Rutgers womens’ basketball team thoroughly disgusting and completely uncalled for. I think very highly of C. Vivian Stringer, the head coach of the Rutgers womens’ basketball team; I have ever since she was the coach of the Iowa womens’ basketball team. Not only is she a great coach, but a great person. One of the reasons she chose Iowa when she decided to move on from Cheyney State was the fact that one of her daughters has meningitis and the University of Iowa’s medical college is one of the best in the nation. She is still admired by many Iowans (not just the Hawkeyes) for the great things she did on and off the basketball court here.

Now while I think what Imus said was terrible, anyone who has listened to him for more than the 10 second sound byte that has been in the news for the past week or so knows that this is FAR from the first time he’s said something so completely idiotic. HELLO!!! He is one of the first “shock jocks” on radio. Howard Stern still had short hair and was a conventional DJ when Imus was making inflammatory remarks (and stupid ones at that). He has a history of saying things like this on all kinds of issues. Here’s a short list of things like this he has said. No one will ever accuse Mr. Imus of being shy, reserved or politically correct.

My biggest problem with this entire ordeal is the fact that he was fired. Yes, he said something really stupid (again, he has been doing it for over 20 years) and has said worse things in the past. I am not at all against him being reprimanded or fined or whatever; but to lose his job over THIS? I think that was overreaction. (Sirius will probably pick him up as they did with Howard Stern) Now, since CBS owns radio stations, the next step would be to ban all music that uses the same type of language. Oh, wait! That’s right. We can’t do that because that music is an artist’s expression, right? Never mind that gangsta rap is where you find 99% of that kind of language and that gangsta rappers are almost all African-American. Isn’t it strange that African-Americans can refer to themselves in these terms but others can’t? Isn’t it funny how self-proclaimed African-American leaders like Rev. Jessie Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton can look the other way when rappers like Nelly say these kinds of things in their “songs” and they get worked up into a foaming frenzy when Don Imus says them on his radio show? They are HYPOCRITES!!!

I am in no way, shape or form in favor of ANY of this crap. The excuse for music that these kinds of “artists” spew should be brought under the same scrutiny that radio DJ’s are. Race is NOT the issue here, dignity is. Calling someone or some group derogatory names is ALWAYS bad; it doesn’t matter if you are doing it in a song, a poem, on air or in a “joke”.

Happy Anniversary, Doug and Susan!

Happy Birthday, Susan!

After being interviewed by the school administration, the teaching prospect said, “Let me see if I’ve got this right:

• You want me to go into that room with all those kids, correct their disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse, monitor their dress habits, censor their T-shirt messages, and instill in them a love for learning.
• You want me to check their backpacks for weapons, wage war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, and raise their sense of self esteem and personal pride.
• You want me to teach them patriotism and good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, and how to register to vote, balance a checkbook, and apply for a job.
• You want me to check their heads for lice, recognize signs of antisocial behavior, and make sure that they all pass the state exams.
• You want me to provide them with an equal education regardless of their handicaps, and communicate regularly with their parents by letter, telephone, newsletter, and report card.
• You want me to do all this with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, a bulletin board, a few books, a big smile, and a starting salary that qualifies me for food stamps.

“You want me to do all this and then you tell me…

Yup, I’m in Atlanta. I’m staying at the Georgian Terrace Hotel and I’ll “say” it out loud – I’m impressed. The room isn’t a room at all – it’s a suite. I’ve got a kitchen here as big as the kitchen in my home. I’ve got TWO closets in the bedroom. I’ve got a short couch and easy chair around a TV in one area of the main room and a table and four chairs in the same room and it’s not crowded. It’s definitely one of the nicest rooms I’ve stayed in.

I’m down here for work. My flight landed Monday (an hour and a half late) and then I promptly rented a car and drove to Knoxville, Tennessee. Yeah, that’s right I drove almost 200 miles after flying to ATL. Tuesday, I did some training in Knoxville and installed some equipment (a 24 port network switch, a Cisco router, and a Lantronics device) there in the morning and drove to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and did the same training and installed pretty much the same equipment there. Then I hopped into the car and drove until I was too tired to drive any more and got a hotel in what turned out to be Covington. Today I got up and went to Augusta and again did the training and installed the equipment.

There was a glitch in this whole thing as a server that was to be delivered to Atlanta was delivered instead to Augusta. So…. I picked up the server and will deliver it tomorrow to the Atlanta office in the morning before heading to Albany to do more training and install equipment only to head back to Atlanta again. Then, Friday, I’ve got two training sessions to lead. The necessary equipment is already in place. All this is to get a company we just purchased ready to join our network. Yeah, like you are interested, huh?