This is short of ridiculous. You might remember last year when Florida State University discovered an academic cheating scandal centered around an online class that many of the schools athletes were taking. Upon discovering the clear violations, FSU fired the staff involved, suspended the athletes, and self-reported to the NCAA. Pretty much everything you’d hope a school would do in a similar situation.
The self-imposed sanctions FSU levied were no slouch either. Football players were benched for 4 games, including a bowl game, five scholarships were removed, and the athletic program was put on probation for two years. Florida State was attempting to make a statement that this was a serious offense and as such they were going to take it seriously.
Despite finding no additional violations or lack of institutional control, yesterday the NCAA decided it wasn’t enough. Six more scholarships were canceled, another four years of probation was tacked on and the school will have to vacate wins from games ineligible athletes participated in during the two year period in question. The exact number of games that will be vacated is currently unknown, but there is fear that both the 2006 and 2007 football season could be completely lost which would leave Bobby Bowden fifteen games behind Pterno, rather than one. On top of that, there is a possibility that at least one of the three consecutive men’s track and field National Championships could be lost as well.
More than likely this whole issues stems from a number of years ago when FSU president TK Wetherell threatened to sue the NCAA when they informed FSU, and other schools, that use of Indian themed mascots was defamatory. Wetherell, with the support of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, threatened legal action against the NCAA and eventually the NCAA’s entire push disappeared with no action by any school. The NCAA has had it out for Florida State ever since and finally got an opportunity to extract some revenge.
Frankly this is absolutely ridiculous. When FSU self-reported and imposed their own consequences they were praised for handling the situation so well and cleanly. But then comes in the NCAA and says, yeah, you did good, but we’re going to take it a few steps further. What’s this say to other schools who decide to self-report in the future? How about this: “Don’t bother. You’re better off sweeping it under the rug and hoping no one finds out because no matter what you do the NCAA will drop the hammer.”
Or, as TideNOVA on EPSN put it:
This is basically setting up a precedent for all colleges. The feeling is “come forward and cooperate, you will be punished harsher” and as with USC and Bush and Mayo “don’t cooperate and deny, you will get of scott free with no investigation.”
FSU does not yet know the number of wins they will be forced to vacate, but they have said any number will be contested. This is a long ways from being over.
Ok. Let’s start this off with a quick refresher. The favicon is the simple little icon that shows up next to the domain in your browser window, in your bookmark list, or your RSS feed reader — you should really be using one. Start by subscribing to my feed.
It’s really a simple thing. A little graphic that makes the site unique. But for some reason sites still do not use them. I hate these sites. I loathe them. I wish them would burn in the fiery pit of the internet. It says they’re boring and unoriginal. Or that maybe their web designers just don’t care.
You know, if you have a small website that doesn’t have a lot of traffic, then I get not spending the 33.8 seconds it takes to create a favicon and add it to your site. It makes sense. It’s obviously not worth your time. And I get it if you have your site hosted on something like Blogger or WordPress.com or LiveJournal and you’re stuck to their default favicon. That makes total sense to me.
What I don’t get is big time sites who don’t seem to care. American Express, I’m calling you out. You’re a huge freaking credit card company trying to become a bank so you can cash in on some of that sweet government money. Why don’t you spend some of it on a graphic designer who knows how to make a favicon. I mean, you’ve got music on your front page. Which is totally awesome especially considering this is the MySpace age and all, but really? No favicon. And I pay you money? Come on. It really angers me every time I need to pull up my account.
And you know what Weblogs, Inc sites, like TUAW and Engadget, is it too much to ask for you to get the RSS favicon going? It really makes your site’s feeds look like crap and completely unappealing. I mean, you are owned by AOL News so it makes sense that you don’t have enough money to hire a quality designer — does anyone even use AOL anymore? — but for real, just put some effort into it. Or continue to be lame. What do I care?
Am I blowing this out of proportion or what?
“How many of you losers are going to Caylee’s memorial?” I was listening to the Philips Phile while driving home from tennis last night and Jim Philips asked that very question. The rest of the Phile asked what he meant. Jim explained that everyone who’s going to the public memorial are losers who just want to see themselves on TV.
He’s right.
But the real losers here are the Anthony family. Here’s the thing, it’s a very tragic thing that the little girl was killed and a memorial service is necessary for the family to have proper closure. But why in your right mind would you open the memorial to the public and have it at a church that isn’t your own just because it seats 5000 people?
All along this whole ordeal the Anthony family has explained that they want their privacy yet all along they hold press conferences and prayer services in their front yard. All of these things merely beg every nut job and, as Jim Phillips put it, loser in a 75 mile radius to show up and voice their opinion. And all throughout the ordeal they have done just that. People have gotten into fights with the family, showed up in costume, and gotten arrested for their 15 seconds on the local news media.
Now the family has decided to have a massive memorial service inviting every one of these “losers” to attend, not to mention having it broadcasted live on TV. You can’t have it both ways. The family should have had a small, private memorial service at a private location. The fact that they didn’t do this just shows that the Anthony family themselves are the real losers.
The sad thing is that while the memorial service should be about the little girl who died, instead its going to be about the family’s desire for a large service and all the nut jobs who will show up and camp out in the parking lot, which opened at 4:00 am. It’s a shame.
Jim Philips was right.
This whole thing started about a month ago. I purchased a new XBox hard drive to replace the almost full original 20GB drive. The problem was that the new hard drive didn’t have any means of transferring the content from the old one. Seeing as how a friends hard drive came with such a cable, I found this odd. I borrowed his cable, but apparently cables are only made to work once — because in the sense of preserving resources and not wasting money on useless production costs, this makes perfect sense. This is where things started to go bad.
This is what I've been waiting a month for.
I called XBox, using the friendly 1-800-4MY-XBOX phone number. The number obviously dropped me off in a phone bank in India. No big deal. The guy seemed friendly enough. He explained that indeed the cables only work once but he’d be happy to have a Data Migration Kit (that’s Microsoft speak for fancy USB transfer cable) sent to me free of charge. I went through all the details with him and he gave me a fancy reference number. Enter problem two.
The reference number is a nice gesture, but for the life of me I was unable to find any place on support.xbox.com that allowed me to enter a reference number and find out the status of my “order.” Whatever, the guy said it could take up to 4 weeks to arrive. Ridiculous, I know, but it’s Microsoft. What else is new?
Unfortunately the story escalated today — rather three days ago when this was actually written. Bored, I called Microsoft back to check up on the reference number. Guess what, the order was never actually processed. There was some sort of “error” that caused the order to not be placed. Instead of fixing the “error” nothing was done about it. So here I am, still without a cable and a brand spanking new reference number for a new kit. Of course, I still have no ability to check this number without calling India back, but hey, at least they gave me that number.
You know that digital tv transition, the one that every time you’ve turned on the news in the last year and a half you’ve been reminded it’s coming? You know how you’re so thankful because there’s only a few more weeks until the end of the countdown? Well evidently you might need to get accustomed to seeing the countdown for another few months. I know, it sucks.
They're going to need a new clock.
Evidently there isn’t any money left in the program designed to give people $40 gift cards to buy the things. You know, the program that began LAST JANUARY with a set amount set aside? There’s now a waiting list and Congress is considering putting off the transition date until June so they can get these people their free or reduced cost digital boxes.
Here’s the thing, if they didn’t request their gift card six months ago then oh well. Those are the breaks. If you don’t pay for cable/satelite/IPTV then go buy yourself a digital box, or don’t and read a book instead. The last thing the government needs to be doing right now is shelling out additional money to people who waited to the last minute. If that’s the case, I might as well go collect an unemployment check for the sixteen years of my life I didn’t work. I’m entitled to that too, right?
Give me a break. Obama has vowed to go through the federal budget line by line eliminating useless programs. Let’s hope he starts by refusing to add additional money to a program that people have been adequately warned about. You waited to long? Oh well. Get over it.
Update: Despite the Senate voting for and extension to the transition, the US House voted the bill down thus killing any hopes to prolong the thing. Thank. You. God!
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