Womanofthelaw’s post told me a few of the New England players we had lost but I already knew about, but the one I hadn’t heard was Pats kicker Adam Vinatieri. I found this article in the Boston Herald pretty interesting. I’ve watched him make a lot of clutch kicks over the years, but I’ll never forget the one against the Raiders in the 2002 playoffs. What a loss for the Pats.
Here’s a summary of what went down in Costa Rica for those who are interested….
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I’ll be back on Sunday, at which point the mountains of Flickr pictures will likely be posted. Internet access is scarce here, which has it’s upsides.
Being all clever, as I thought I was, I arranged for MS and I to go to a “Murder Mystery” train ride last night. I didn’t even tell her where we were going… it was all supposed to be a surprise (or a “mystery” as it were). I read about it online and it seemed like a cool idea. Sweet. I ordered tickets in advance and made sure to alert them to her food allergy so everything would be taken care of. It was filled up closer to Valentine’s Day, so we had to settle for a train a few days earlier.
The NFL playoffs featured some miserable calls this year. I wouldn’t say the officiating in the Superbowl was that bad, but there were a few really close, hotly contested calls that I think exemplify what’s wrong with officiating right now. I think two changes would go a long way:
1) Allow coaches to challenge penalties.
Currently these aren’t reviewable. In the Superbowl there was a pretty light push-off that was flagged as offensive pass interference. I don’t think it would have been overturned, because you can’t push off a guy (even lightly) to get to the ball, but I would like to have seen the coach at least have an opportunity to challenge that call. There are a lot of game-changing penalties that happen throughout the course of the year. Challenging an interference call can be every bit as important as challenging a catch or an interception ruling.
2) Get more cameras in the stadium/on the field.
I’m tired of watching calls, like the Roethlesburger touchdown, that get challenged, reviewed, and there isn’t enough “visual evidence” to decide if they’re right or not (so they stand). Let’s get some more visual evidence! 5 years ago at the Superbowl they used the CMU-developed EyeVision technology, which gave us some pretty amazing perspectives via 30 cameras mounted around the field. What ever happened to that? It’s been 5 years now – I’d imagine it’s even improved, if they wanted to put it to use. I watched Champ Bailey fumble at the 1 yard line against the Patriots in the playoffs, and they couldn’t even tell if he fumbled out of bounds or out the side of the endzone. That’s the difference between 1st-and-goal at the 1 Broncos to 1st down Patriots at the 20… but no visual evidence was there to help out.
I don’t want us to go back to the days when everyone was review-crazy, but I’d sure like to make the reviews more effective. It’s impossible to make all the right calls, so there should be a functional process in place to make sure the wrong calls can get corrected.
I posted some pictures of my weekend in North Carolina. As usual, you have to be marked as a friend in Flickr to see them all.
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Rumor has it there’s a picture of Marysharon in the current issue of Fortune magazine. It’s the issue that talks about the best companies to work for, and she’s pictured under Microsoft. I haven’t seen the issue yet, but if you have let me know.
The Slingbox looks pretty sweet. Plop it atop your TV, and presumably you’ll be able to watch your TV on any computer anywhere via thier proprietary streaming technology. Currently Windows-only, but a Mac version of the player will be coming out this summer.
I’m growing somewhat tired of MythTV… they haven’t updated their website in nearly 8 months and the last major release was over 10 months ago. There are still no decent streaming plugins for it, so although you can watch TV on any computer in the house, you can’t watch it from a coffee shop or anyone else’s house (much less a cell phone)… it needs too much bandwidth. Since I don’t have time to work on a better solution, I may eventually cave in to these commercial options.
Schulte sent me this link with the subject line “hahahahaha”. Having lived here for a whopping 4 months, I think the rain talk is pretty overblown. It rains often but it doesn’t rain constantly. So, it doesn’t surprise me that we’ve had measurable rainfall every day for the last 22 days (and counting) but the fact is that it’s not raining all day every day. Yesterday sucked because it rained on my walk to work and my walk home, but that’s just unfortunate timing. It’s off and on.
This was an interesting quote from the article:
Though Seattle is famous for its rain, the city’s average annual rainfall from 1970 to 2000 was 37.07 inches, compared to 49.71 inches for New York City.
Pictures from Vaughn’s birthday are online. If you’re marked as a friend in Flickr you’ll be able to see them.