Doug Tidwell works for IBM's Software Group Strategy organization, where he's responsible for evangelizing technologies such as Service Component Architecture (SCA), Service Data Objects (SDO) and XForms. Despite his useful appearance, he has been with IBM since 1989. A speaker at the first XML conference in 1997, he is the author of O'Reilly's XSLT, the second edition of which is now flying off the shelves at a bookstore near you. (Procrastinators who begin their holiday shopping on the late side are encouraged to order a few copies now, the better to avoid the last-minute rush.) He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his wife, cooking teacher Sheri Castle, their thirteen-year old daughter Lily and their dog, Domino the Wonder Hound.

Peeps and picks before the tournaments start

Before I begin, a big thanks to dW reader Eddie Welker's kind words for the book. Thank you, your comment made my day.

PeepsFest 2008

This past weekend was PeepsFest 2008 at Market Street Books. I didn't participate in the poetry contest this year, although I'll post a pointer to the poems once they're online. Sheri was a judge of the food and I made the award buttons. We did have a couple entries each in the Peeps Album Cover Art contest:

Sheri's entries:
Abbey Road with Paul as a Peep:		Rumours with Mick Fleetwood (or is it John McVie?) holding a Peep instead of a crystal ball:
My entries:
Nevermind with a Peep instead of a dollar bill:		And my personal favorite, They Might Be Peeps:

Tournament Picks

Mostly I'm posting at the end of a long day just to get my NCAA picks online before the tournaments start. Here they are:

Men's Tournament

Round of 32
East: UNC, Indiana, James Mason, Washington St., St. Joe's, Louisville, Butler, Tennessee
Midwest: Kansas, UNLV, Clemson, Vanderbilt, USC, Wisconsin, Gonzaga, Georgetown
South: Memphis, Miss. St., Michigan St., Pitt, Kentucky, Stanford, The U, Texas
West: UCLA, Aggies, Drake, UConn, Baylor, Georgia (woof!), Arizona and Dook

Sweet Sixteen
East: UNC, Washington St., Louisville, Tennessee
Midwest: Kansas, Clemson, Wisconsin, Georgetown
South: Memphis, Pitt, Stanford, Texas
West: UCLA, Drake, Baylor, Dook

Elite Eight
East: UNC, Louisville
Midwest: Kansas, Wisconsin
South: Pitt, Texas
West: UCLA, Dook

Final Four
UNC, Kansas, Texas, UCLA

Championship
UNC 92, Texas 85

Women's Tournament

Round of 32
Greensboro: UConn, Texas, ODU, Virginia, Auburn, Cal, Georgia Tech, Rutgers
Spokane: Maryland, Xavier, New Mexico, Vanderbilt, Pitt, Baylor, Western Kentucky, Stanford
New Orleans: UNC, Georgia, Kansas St., Louisville, Ohio St., Oklahoma St., Marist, LSU
Oklahoma City: Tennessee, Purdue, Notre Dame, Illinois St., Arizona St., Dook, Syracuse, Aggies

Sweet Sixteen
Greensboro: UConn, UVA, Auburn, Rutgers
Spokane: The Turtle, Vanderbilt, Baylor, Stanford
New Orleans: UNC, K State, Ohio St., LSU
Oklahoma City: Tennessee, Notre Dame, Dook, Aggies

Elite Eight
Greensboro: UConn, Rutgers
Spokane: The Turtle, Stanford
New Orleans: UNC, LSU
Oklahoma City: Tennessee, Dook

Final Four
UConn, The Turtle, UNC, Tennessee

Championship
UNC 97, UConn 88

OK, so I'm a homer. UNC wins it all in both tournaments, joining UConn as the only schools to win both championships in the same year. Be sure to thank me if you use these picks and win your office pool. This is the best three weeks in sports, especially if the Heels do well. Enjoy....

Winners, losers and light bulbs

First, a work-related note:

(Note to self: Need to find a less subtle way of announcing that.) I'll be working with the new feature pack this week...Even if you don't have WAS 6.1 installed, you can download a trial version. The feature pack is based on the open-source Apache Tuscany project.

Momentum around SCA continues to build. I'll post some customer success stories here as the customers go public with them. Suffice it to say that SCA solutions are in production now. (While they're also evidence of the growing impact of the technology, SCA/SDO product announcements from our competitors won't be mentioned here.)

And, uh, speaking of men's college basketball, as I went to bed last night, I thought the Clemson Tigers had finally beaten The Heels in Chapel Hill. Since the dawn of time, since before the invention of Dr. James Naismith, the peach basket and the peach, the Clemson men's team had never left Chapel Hill with a victory. I didn't watch the game, so I thought the Tigers had finally won. The Heels won in overtime in Clemson earlier this year when Wayne Ellington hit a 3-pointer with 0.4 seconds left, so I was afraid this might be the year Clemson won on the road.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I picked up the paper this morning to find that the Heels came back from 11 points down with three minutes left in the game, winning 103-93 in double OT. (The missus read a late score as the final.) If these two teams meet in the ACC Tournament, I refuse to watch that game.

The Heels lost to the Forces of Evil earlier this week, congratulations to the eight or ten Dook fans we really, really like. (dW's Jeanne Murray and family, that's four, our neighbors John and Cam Cline and their kids, that's eight, dW's Barb Wetmore makes nine...and I think we're done.) This is the other side of the joy I felt at the end of the Super Bowl.

From the Dim-Watted Humor Dept.: When I thought the Heels had lost, I was going to share some of my favorite ACC lightbulb jokes as a consolation. But now I'm going to do that anyway:

How many Georgia Tech students does it take to change a light bulb?

12,001. One to hold the light bulb and 12,000 to lift the campus and rotate it around the axis of the bulb.

How many Dook students does it take to change a light bulb?

11. One to change the light bulb and ten to stand around and say, "We change light bulbs just as well as they do at Ivy League schools."

How many UNC students does it take to change a light bulb?

76. One to change the light bulb, 50 to protest the changing of the light bulb, and 25 to stage a counter-protest upholding the light bulb's right to be changed.

(My personal favorite) How many Clemson students does it take to change a light bulb?

None, Clemson doesn't have electricity.

Thanks, I'll be here all week. Be sure to tip your server, it's been a pleasure opening for Ace of Base.

From the "How to Not Delight Your Customers" Dept.: One of my household responsibilities is to maintain the computers we have around the house. A couple of weeks ago the anti-virus software on my wife's desktop machine encouraged us to perform an update. Imagine my surprise when the updated Symantec/Norton software told us we had 15 days to use the software before we would have to pay for it. This was particularly amusing because the un-updated software didn't expire until the end of May. After several hours, I was finally able to get the product key we paid for from the Symantec site. Entering it into the authorization dialog of the now-expired trial software reactivated everything, so our machine is once again protected from the evils of the Internet.

Some thoughts here:

• If you tell me to update my software, I don't expect to be told after the fact that I'm on a trial basis and that I'll have to pay for the update if I can't find my activation code.
• If you have a piece of software that uses an activation code, your updated piece of software should be able to find and use the activation code from the original product.
• If your piece of software is unable to find and use the activation code from the original product, tell me to write it down before I start the update.

Absolutely unacceptable. If the good folks at Symantec and McAfee want to make sales projections for the second quarter, I'm guessing the number of Symantec customers will decrease by 1 around June 1st, with McAfee benefiting from the loss.

Today's Playlist so far includes Schmack! by Steriogram (mostly just "Walkie Talkie Man" from the iPod commercial, repeat repeat repeat), In Utero and Cheer Me Up Thank You from Echolocations.

Today's fun fact: Dr. James Naismith was born in Almonte, Ontario, Canada, less than an hour from the glorious city of Ottawa. My awareness of the number of "American" inventions that aren't continues to grow.

I'm off to the land of WebSphere, have a great day.

The Gift of Donuts

My daughter got yesterday off from school for Dr. King's Day, and today is a teacher workday, so we've had four straight days of no school. I'm not sure my sleep or work patterns were any different, but a day off from school lowers the stress level in the house.

Saturday we got maybe an inch of snow, it was beautiful while it lasted. Lily was able to sled in the front yard for an hour or so. We were hoping for a big snowstorm tonight so she could extend her break, but no such luck. We haven't had any snow here for about four years, so we should be due in another decade.

A special shout-out to our friend Fayyaz Syed of Toronto. He and I have been chatting online for a while on XSLT and other things. When we finally got together at the SCA/SDO briefing in Toronto late last year, he gave me a Tim Horton's gift card. (Fayyaz, I got the CD today, thanks a lot.)

And speaking of donuts, have I ranted lately about how I live in a college town that doesn't have a donut shop? I still can't believe that. For you young people in college out there, do you eat donuts? When I went to school at UGA, there was a 24-hour Dunkin about 10 blocks from my apartment. Milledge Avenue at Prince. It's still there, I checked the Web site. I can't imagine going to school without being able to get good donuts 24-7. If I were a rich man, I would buy a Tim Horton's franchise and go into the donut bidniss. (Note to all twelve of my readers: If any of you buy the franchise rights to Chapel Hill, I get free donuts for life. I thought of it first, you owe me.)

The Heels have had a difficult stretch lately, the mens' team lost a close game to Maryland Saturday and the womens' team lost to UConn last night. Both teams are very good, we're hoping for a joyous March and early April. The weekend's NFL games were good, especially the Gints game in Green Bay. The temperature was -1° F (-18° C, 130 Euros or 53 pounds), the third-coldest game ever. I remember reading about the Ice Bowl as a kid, the temperature/wind chill for that game was -13° F/-46° F. Growing up in the South it was exciting any time the temperature reached zero, so I remember these things. Useful information I don't always remember.

Today's fun fact: The Fahrenheit and Celsius scales intersect at -40°.

I've been working on a fairly complicated BPEL demo using the WebSphere products (WebSphere Business Modeler, WebSphere Integration Developer and WebSphere Process Server). You'll see most of that code here on dW at some point. The Business Modeler is an amazingly powerful and complex tool.

Lily and I spent some enjoyable time at chucknorrisfacts.com yesterday. You should definitely waste some time there, it'll be more fun than whatever you're supposed to be doing. Here are my three favorites:

• Chuck Norris knows the last digit of pi.
• Chuck Norris doesn't own a stove, oven or microwave, because revenge is a dish best served cold.
• Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door.

Good stuff.

Today's Playlist consists of all the things my daughter could stand for me to listen to while she was at home. In other words, nothing. The iPod has been in sleep mode all day.

Tomorrow's Playlist will be whatever I darn well please. I've been listening to a lot of World and Roots music these days, fwiw.

A provocative headline should appear here.

I haven't mentioned it here, but I've been trying desperately to get more hits on my blog. I've offered bribes to the dW staff to get me into the Top Ten to no avail; I've even done things the ethical way by blogging frequently.

I spent the weekend repairing some antique lamps around the house. I'm very happy to say that I succeeded without being electrocuted, and only tripped the circuit breaker once. Along the way, I used some humorously-named electrical components, and was going to use them in the title of today's post. After consulting with a number of level-headed people, we all agreed that a blog heading of "Steel nipples and butt splices" was unwise. I think it would drive some traffic, but it could lead to a résumé entry of, "Built a popular, well-read blog before my unfortunate dismissal from the company."

Remember, kids, always surf safely: Don't search on steel nipple or butt splice without a grownup present. Actually, don't search on them at all...

From the "Two Days Early" Department: A story was released on Friday, March 30th about the Department of Homeland Security demanding that all copies of the movie Tron be confiscated. It seems that some of the special effects were generated using hardware and software from a nuclear fusion project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The fear is that Al Qaeda or other miscreants could learn nookyeller seekrits from the upcoming HD-DVD version of the film. The story has been reported in many places. Here are three of the dozens:

• John Dvorak Uncensored
• Digg
• BlogoWogo

Apparently many people didn't get the joke, despite it being filed under the category Fiction at the source, kuro5hin.org. Beyond the timing of the story, the comment from FBI agent "Lirpa Sloof" (read it backwards) should have been a tipoff. The most disturbing thing to me is that many, many people had no trouble believing the U.S. Government would spend its time and energy conducting raids on your local video store....

Another April Fool's story from The Reg, based on a feature many of us in the technical world have wished for: An Export function that converts your PowerPoint slides to code. Let the marketing and sales folks tell whatever yarns they want, they can generate the code and support it. You sell a lie, you get to maintain it.

The Tar Heels lost yesterday night, 56-50 to Tennessee. They had a late lead but couldn't hold it down the stretch. (Reminds me of the men's team last weekend.) Ivory Latta led the team to two straight Final Fours, but didn't win a championship. The Heels will have a strong team next year, but they won't replace Latta. I'm rooting for Rutgers, although I don't have anything against Tennessee. The Scarlet Knights held LSU to 35 points last night. That's 35 points for the entire game, not 35 at halftime. Anybody who can shut down a Final Four team like that deserves to win a championship.

A factual clarification: I mentioned that the women's team is called the "Lady Tar Heels," that's actually not true. They're called the Tar Heels, no gender-specific adjectives needed. If you look at tarheelblue.com, they're always referred to as the Tar Heels.

I was pleased to see that Oprah's Book Club has selected Cormac McCarthy's The Road. This was the best work of fiction I read in 2006. It's a very bleak vision of the future, but I thought it was very hopeful. There's a kernel of decency in the book that transcends all the horror of the post-apocalyptic world in which the story is set. The book is incredibly well-written, as you'd expect, and there's not a false note in it. You should read it even without Oprah's endorsement.

I can't say anything about the ongoing negotiations, but I'll point out that Oprah will be choosing another book for her book club in a couple of months, and the second edition of my book will be out in a couple of months. But you didn't hear anything from me.

I spent some more time over the weekend looking at Rails, thinking about how ActiveRecord could be implemented on top of SDO. Has anyone out there done this already? I'm always suspicious when I think of something and no one else has done it yet. The challenge in implementing this would be to maintain the conventions and patterns of ActiveRecord in a DAS interface. If you've written this code, let me know; if you've seen it, send me a pointer. Another side project is building an SCA component from a Rails app. I'd like to do that with something more than just a WSDL reference, but I don't think there are any toolkits that support SCA yet.

My daughter is on Spring Break this week, so I'll officially be on vacation starting tomorrow through the end of the week. The laptop is going with me, so it might not be the most relaxing vacation ever. Regardless, getting out of the house for a few days will be nice.

Insensitive Man strikes again...

Our friend Jennette Banks (aka LL Cool Banks) correctly points out that the Heels are still in the tournament...The women's team is in the Final Four. They're also the only ACC team left standing. Last year the Final Four was Carolina, Dook, Maryland and LSU. Maryland won the title, becoming only the second ACC team to win the Women's Championship. The first was Carolina in 1994, when Charlotte Smith hit a game-winning three-pointer with maybe 1 second left on the clock. I do keep track of the women's team, they're just not on TV as often. For reasons I won't speculate on here, the men's team gets all the attention here.

I'm very disappointed in the men's team, I really thought they would win it all. That being said, the women's team has a great shot also. They're playing Tennessee (coached by Pat Summit, the winningest coach in college basketball history), which will be a very tough game. (It's the Final Four, they're supposed to be tough games.) We'll be pulling for them, Ivory Latta is money.

I took my daughter to a couple of tournament games two years ago, but she's just not into sports. (Her mom and I are considering counseling.) Every time Ivory Latta spotted up for a three-pointer, she drained it. FWIW, we sat two rows in front of Coach Williams and the men's team, they were there to cheer on the women. Everyone in that section is probably a millionaire by now.

BTW, why is the women's team always qualified? Why do we say the "Lady Heels" or the "Lady Volunteers"? Why don't we say the "Mr. Heels" or the "Male Heels" or the "Y-Chromosome Cagers"?

To wrap up my apology/rationalization here, I wrote everything above from memory. My apologies to the women's team, they work as hard as the men for a lot less recognition and money.

As an extremely silly person, I'm always happy when I find a treasure trove of nonsense. Last weekend at Peeps Fest I bought John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise, an almanac of entirely false facts. (Did you know that no fewer than 9 U.S. presidents had hooks for hands? I had no idea.) I've been eyeing the book for a while, I got caught up in the spirit of Peepliness and bought it.

If you visit areasofmyexpertise.com, you can find much of this information, including many facts related to Hoboes. Perhaps the most outstanding part of the book is the list of 700 Hobo Names. If my daughter and I drank milk, it would doubtless snort from our nostrils several times when we go through the list. (You can download an MP3 of Mr. Hodgman reading the list at the areasofmyexpertise Web site.) Here are some of the more chortle-inducing items from the list:

• 9. Bazino Bazino, The Kid Whose Hair is on Fire
• 34. Senator Cletus Scoffpossum
• 85. Guesstimate Jones
• 99. Freak Le Freak, the Freakster
• 153. Slo-Mo Deuteronomy
• 166. Dora the Explorer
• 172. Microfiche Roy, the Side-Scroller
• 184. Sausage Patty
• 211. Fatman and the Creature (note: there was no creature)
• 220. Honey Bunches of Donald
• 241. Sir Mix-a-Lot [Didn't you always wonder where he went? Me neither, but it's good to know.]
• 259. Longtime Listener, First-Time Caller

In a celebration of the Internet's ability to bring together people from around the world who have way too much spare time, the site e-hobo.com features paintings, drawings and other graphic renderings of all 800 hoboes (NB: The paperback edition of the book includes an additional 100 hobo names, although "Nick Nolte" is mentioned twice). The links on the names above will take you to the appropriate images. Visit the e-hobo site for all the graphics; keep in mind that many hoboes have several visualizations.

Back to working on my Rails application, I'm going to try to integrate SDO as an underlying data source today....

Go Heels.

Terrible, searing regret

I saw Heels coach Steve Robinson around town Monday, told him how we were proud of the team and what a great year they had. He was obviously disappointed (this was less than 24 hours after the game), but said "that's how the business goes." It reminded me of one of the best paragraphs I've ever read, from Richard Ford's The Sportswriter:

...if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.

Many people talk about the amount of money and resources we put into sports teams, and I think part of it is to see people go through confrontations like that. In the NCAA tournament, especially this deep into the tournament, somebody suffers a terrible, searing defeat that ends their season in every single game. Most of my life is organized specifically to avoid situations like that, and I think most of us are the same way. No, I don't have incredible moments where I reach the highest possible level of success in my profession (like the Heels' players and coaches who won the national title two years ago), but I don't have moments where everything I've been working for is taken by somebody else in front of the whole world. I use a substantial amount of my energy to keep myself out of those situations and stay on an even keel.

The Nike/Michael Jordan "Failure" ad is one of the best ever. Jordan's voiceover ends with the line, "I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." No matter what your circumstances are (soldier, firefighter, police officer, surgeon, athlete, etc.), it takes a lot more guts than I have to look terrible, searing regret in the eye and say, "Let's get it on."

Enough philosophy, on to work-related stuff...

I've spent some of the last few days working with Ruby on Rails, it's a framework for building Web applications quickly. It uses naming conventions, integrated database support and extensive refactoring of common Web functions to simplify Web development. I'm using O'Reilly's book Ruby on Rails: Up and Running, it's a very good tutorial. It's written by the estimable Bruce Tate and Curt Hibbs, reason enough to buy the book. For installation, I used InstantRails. You unzip the package, set your PATH variable, and off you go. (I have Cygwin installed, which includes Ruby. You have to make sure the version of Ruby that's included in InstantRails is in your PATH before the version shipped with Cygwin.) It's a great way to get started.

I'm working with Rails for an article on SCA and SDO. I'm trying to explain how Rails applications can be integrated into an SCA application. I'm working through some technical questions about Rails' ActiveRecord feature...I think it can be used with SDO underneath, although I haven't confirmed that. I also don't think there's much overlap between ActiveRecord and SDO.

ActiveRecord is one of the Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture defined by Martin Fowler. His Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture book is a great reference, you should get a copy if you don't have one already.

I think the key difference between ActiveRecord and SDO is that ActiveRecord encapsulates access to a database. I have some Googling (in case someone's done this already) or hacking (DIY) ahead of me to verify this, but I believe using ActiveRecord to encapsulate access to an SDO datasource would make ActiveRecord more flexible without changing any of the source of your Rails application.

Today's playlist: Afrique En Or, Volume 1, wonderful soukous music from the Congo. (Soukous is from the French word secouer, to shake, didn't know that until I Wikipedia'd it.) Also the new Modest Mouse album and Soundsystem by 311.

Hoya the Destroya

Well, the Heels lost yesterday. When I first saw the brackets, Georgetown as a 2 seed jumped out at me. Just about every analyst I read said that the East Region was the toughest, and the Heels and Hoyas proved it yesterday. I can't say anything bad about the players or the coaches, they fought hard and came within one point of reaching the Final Four. When I turned off the TV in disgust, there was maybe a minute and a half left in overtime. At that point, of the Heels' previous 18 shots, they had made 1. There was some bad shot selection, but Georgetown's defense had something to do with that. Coach Williams drew up a play for a good look at a 3-pointer at the end of regulation, but it didn't fall.

I really thought the Heels were going to win another title this year. My wife and daughter and I are going to Atlanta for Spring Break, and we'll head down there on Tuesday the 3rd. When we made the plans, I made my wife promise that she would drive Tuesday morning if the Heels won the title, because I intended to be enjoying alcoholic beverages and bonfires on Franklin Street till the wee hours. What makes the NCAA tournament great is that somebody's season ends in every game. If Xavier hits one more free throw, Ohio State is gone. If the Heels had hit one of their last 7 or 8 shots, Georgetown is gone. Instead, the Heels are done. It says a lot about our unreasonable expectations that only four teams in the country had a better year, but we're disappointed.

Go Hoyas, I hope they win the tournament. (I really hope Florida doesn't.)

Our next hobby: Who's coming back next year? I'm sure Rayshawn Terry won't be back (he's a senior). For the rest of the team, it's anybody's guess. Hansbrough, Wright and Lawson are all first-rounders (that's a sophomore and two freshmen), with Hansbrough and Wright probably lottery picks. One thing I'm always impressed by: Roy Williams and Dean Smith always supported their players who wanted to leave school early. Two years ago the Heels lost their top seven players, but the coaches hit the recruiting trail and rebuilt the program. My guess is that we'll be in that same situation next year. Somebody should post odds and make book on that. (If you do, ignore all statements such as "I really enjoy school, I think I'll be back next year." I think I'll be back next year, but give me a few million reasons to change my mind and see what happens.)

E Peepus Unum: Market Street Books has posted the artwork for the Peeps Fest Awards. That was the contribution Sheri and I made to the festivities this year. (Sheri was also a judge.) From left to right down the page, the awards are:

Exclamation Peep, for the nicest surprise (aka "This Peeps-based dish looked awful, but didn't taste that bad.") Chef Peep, for the most delicious recipe Peep Queen, for the most beautiful Peep PeepBR, the Blue Ribbon Peep Veep Peep, the Second-in-Command Peep. Should the Peep-in-Chief disappear, the Veep Peep will assume those duties. (The image is The Seal of The Vice Peep of the United States. Hope Dick Cheney has a sense of humor.) Flav-O-Peep, the 3:00rd place Peep. (Based on an actual Flav-O-Flav doll.) Cubist Peep, for the most artistic Peep Party Peep, for the funniest Peep, and The Peeperific Peep, presented for "Personifying the Principles of Peepitude."

The artwork was done with the GIMP. (GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, an open source project. I was pushed into using it when I lost a CD that had some proprietary tools.) The Cubist plug-in is very cool, you can vary the size of the rectangles and other variables. Pushbutton Picasso!

It's back to the land of perspective now....

I can't bear to look | Peeps Fest report

Just a quick post before the Heels play Georgetown...

I freely admit that my emotional state should not be strongly affected by a basketball game. There are millions of more important things in the world, but it's hard to remember that around here sometimes. For example, the brackets first came out while I was at my grandfather's funeral. At the time, several of us talked about how tough it would be for the Heels to beat the Hoyas to get to the Final Four. A good way to change the subject.

With all that said, I don't know if my nerves can stand to watch the game. Call it a weakness.

Mascot trivia: I had always been told that Georgetown's mascot, the Hoyas, meant "rock." According to the Answers.com article on the Georgetown Hoyas, no one really knows what a Hoya is. Elsewhere on the Web we have the Hoya plant and Hoya, a suburb of Tokyo.

Peeps Fest went well yesterday, there were dozens of people and poems, etc. The local newspaper had an article about Peeps Fest this morning. My wife was one of the judges, although she didn't show up in the paper.

In addition to my wife judging the competition, our contribution to the event this year was to create the medals for the winners. As soon as the artwork appears on the site, I'll post a link to it here.

Tim Dolan had my favorite poem, based on the prologue to The Canterbury Tales:

When that Peepe with his sugare soote
The Yellow Dye numbere foure hath perced to the roote
And bathed every tongue in swiche licour
Of which vertu no taste can soothe be purer;

Whan softe fowle eek with sweete skinne
Inspired hath in every mouthe, and tongues have licken
The musheye fleshe and the crustye eyes
Have filled yon gullete with marshmallowye surprise;

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And wende to ferne bookstores in Southerne Village
To speaketh in softe and ryming melodye
The speciale wonder of the yellowe and purple Peepe.

Go Heels.

Bucky Badger's Bummed

Thanks to everyone who passed on well-wishes after my grandfather's funeral. You guys mean the world to me (you know who you are), I really appreciate it.

In my last post I discussed my beautiful bracket. It's still the best bracket I've had in several years, but it's now shot full of holes. After the first round, all 16 of my Sweet 16 teams were still alive. After the second round, only 9 of my Sweet 16 teams are around, only half of the Elite Eight and only three of the Final Four. I picked The Turtle to beat Butler, knock off Florida, then lose to Wisconsin in the Elite Eight. Maryland and Wisconsin both lost. I'm really disappointed in the ACC, it's the first time in many years that we have only one team in the Sweet 16. If we can only have one, I'm glad it's the Heels, but I can't believe Virginia, Virginia Tech and Boston College got knocked out.

In the East and South brackets, I thought Texas would beat USC, setting up a showdown between Kevin Durant and the Heels. I also picked BC to knock off Georgetown. To wrap up my losses, I thought Virginia would beat Tennessee, and I picked Louisville to make the Elite Eight.

I don't want to talk to my SEC-loving brother. He's a Tennessee fan (and isn't ashamed of it--he'll freely admit it if you ask him!) and is happy to see the Vols make the Sweet 16. I mentioned the ACC only having one team in the tournament; what's even stranger is that the football-loving state of Tennessee has three teams (Memphis, Vanderbilt and Tennessee), while the basketball-obsessed states of Indiana, Kentucky and North Carolina only have two teams put together (UNC and Butler).

The Tar Heels looked very good against Michigan State, MSU is a good team and I was nervous about them. If that Carolina team shows up for four more games, they can cut the nets down in Atlanta. If the team that blew a 12-point lead to Maryland shows up, we're in trouble. Hansbrough was a beast Saturday night. Vanderbilt, where I went to grad school, is in the Sweet 16. I would like them to send Georgetown back to D.C. Georgetown and UCLA are the toughest 2 seeds in the tournament by a wide margin (sorry, I don't believe in Memphis yet). That assumes UNC can get past USC and reach the regional final.

Late on Thursday my bracket at ESPN was 13-0, and my ranking was #1. (Tied with thousands of others, no doubt.) As of yesterday night I'm in 1,373,244th place. Guess I'll have to keep my day job for another year.

Today's blog title refers to the stunning upset of Wisconsin by UNLV. I had picked the Badgers to make the Final Four. According to Bucky Badger's entry in Wikipedia, Bucky's full name is Buckingham U. Badger. The mascot was originally a real badger, but the badger was so fierce and difficult to control that it was "retired to a local zoo¹." You can find complete details on the use of the Bucky Badger trademark in The University of Wisconsin Graphic Identity Manual.

I saw two impressive phishing attempts today: One was a Skype message from user Update Manager, thoughtfully warning me that my system was infected with various evil-sounding things. I was offered the chance to click on some links that would "fix" my system, but I declined. Later in the day I got an email from the Apple Store, confirming my order for an 80GB iPod. I hadn't ordered an iPod, so I suspected malfeasance was afoot. The email looked very good, and 99% of the links went to apple.com. The key link to check the status of your order led to an .exe file hosted at apple.xx [I'm not putting the full domain name here]. Scepticism is your best weapon in so many areas of life, and the Internet is no exception.

While I was in Tennessee for my grandfather's funeral, I saw this annoying, offensive sign:

If this sign is in English, Thank a Veteran.

Okay, maybe not a Hispanic veteran. Probably not a veteran who immigrated to the U.S. from a non-English-speaking country. Maybe they meant "Thank a Veteran...of the French and Indian War (1756-1763)." Or "Thank a Veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar (1805)." Or "Thank a veteran of the war between the army of Romulus and the Sabines, whose end led to the establishment of Rome, which in turn established Greek and Latin as the languages of antiquity, leading many hundreds of years later to what we call English."

The world is getting smaller and flatter all the time. If you're entire self-worth in today's economy is based on your skin color, native language or country of origin, you're in for a bumpy ride.

I can't give anything away right now, but stay tuned to osoa.org, the home of the SCA and SDO efforts.

PeepsFest 2007 is this Saturday at Market Street Books. If you can't be there, send me your Peeps poems and I'll take credit for them pass along your contributions to the community. This year's schedule (available at http://marketstreetbooks.com/events.html) includes not a piñata, but a Peepyata. Should be a blast.

¹ If your parents told you this as a kid, would you believe it? I have a feeling the Ol' Buckster went to Badger Heaven instead....

Bracketology

Before I start today's blog, my grandfather, Willard Derryberry, died last Saturday. He had been in bad health for a couple of years, and I'm not sure he recognized me for a year or more. From him I got a full head of hair, ambition and a strong streak of independence and stubbornness. He was also the closet thing to a father I ever had. I won't eulogize him here, but he was a remarkable man.

From the "Aren't Families More Fun Than a Barrel of Monkeys" Department: After the funeral and the burial, we went back to my grandmother's house (she's 84, healthy and feisty herself; she gave as good as she got). You'd think this would be a time of family togetherness, but you'd be wrong. My younger sister threw a temper tantrum and bawled out my aunt in front of a house full of guests. Later that afternoon my mom started a fistfight with my aunt and someone keyed my aunt's car. Finally, my younger sister attempted suicide (for the 900th time) so everyone would feel sorry for her and ignore her behavior. (The Attempted Suicide Show has been in reruns for at least 15 years now, and the number of viewers has pretty much dropped to zero.)

Sigh. If you're out there and your family is normal top-to-bottom, please post a comment here. There must be at least one or two out there....

Okay, on to the subject at hand: To restore some sort of normalcy to life, I've been focusing on college basketball the last few evenings. The NCAA Tournament is the best sporting event in the United States. Does anyone doubt that? How boring would it be if every matchup was a three-game series? The tournament is single elimination. Doesn't matter how well you did in the regular season, if you choke in the tournament, your season doesn't mean anything. (Ask any Kansas Jayhawk fans about that.)

I have the best bracket of my life. At one point on Thursday I was 13-0; I went through the first round at 26-6, and all of my Sweet 16 teams are still alive. My misses were almost all upset specials: Georgia Tech over UNLV (gotta give the ACC some love), Villanova over Kentucky, Holy Cross over Southern Illinois, Gonzaga over Indiana (really surprised I lost that one), and the Creighton Barrels over Nevada (both teams went to OT, but only Nevada continued to play). The only favorite I lost was that I picked (8)Arizona over (9)Purdue.

To my delight, I did pick both of the major upsets of the tournament: VCU (heh) and Winthrop over Notre Dame.

Sweet 16 picks: UNC, Texas, Vanderbilt and BC in the East; Ohio State, Virginia, Louisville and Memphis in the South; Kansas, Virginia Tech, Pittsburgh and UCLA in the West; and Florida, Maryland, Oregon and Wisconsin in the Midwest. And let's rename the brackets. Call 'em the Naismith, Wooden, Rupp and Allen brackets, give 'em names like the old NHL did. Some of the games in the East region are being played in the eastern cities of Spokane, Washington and Sacramento, California. Don't pretend they're regional, just use some interesting names.

Another great thing about the tournament is that there are so many games the first two days. There are 32 games between Thursday and Friday, which means every announcer in North America has a job for a day. You're probably thinking, "With two announcers per game, it must be difficult to find 64 decent announcers." And you're right. Consider some of these nuggets of insight and sports punditry:

• During a replay of a player making a clutch three-point shot, the announcer says, "He must own a plumbing company, because he drains this one." Get it? Plumber? Drain? Seriously, take that act to Vegas. You'll kill 'em.
• Texas A&M has a point guard named Acie Law IV, one of the best in the country. Going into a commercial break, the announcer says, "Things go well when you have the Law on your side!" To quote Todd Hockney from The Usual Suspects: "Did you put that together yourself, Einstein? Got a team of monkeys working around the clock on this?"
• "Oh, my!" Said 38,462 times by Dick Enberg.
• A postgame question to Louisville coach Rick Pitino: "It seems like your team was playing really well in the first half. How did it look to you?" 15 minutes into the game, Louisville led 41-13. If you have three times as many points as the other team, you're probably playing really well.
• "Bob Lewis is a ball player!" I was wondering why he was on the court, thought maybe he was a confused popcorn vendor. Turns out he's a ball player, that explains everything. Glad I didn't have to figure that out by myself.
• During the Memphis game, the announcers used the word "spurt" wwwwwwwwaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy too many times. "This is a great spurt team." "They can really come in spurts." "They can spurt from behind at any time." Of the billions of jokes that went through the heads of the millions of viewers of this game, not a single one can be printed on a family Web site such as developerWorks.

As I was compiling these pithy observations, one source of wisdom seemed to merit its own category. So I'm proud to present The Clark Kellogg Chapter of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations:

• "You have to make shots, because if you don't, you won't win." Apparently the rules of basketball specify that the team that scores the most points wins the game. Wasn't aware of that.
• Clark picked Stanford to beat Louisville. Late in the first half, the score was Louisville 987, Stanford 12. Unbelievably, this prediction was never mentioned again. Louisville won by 835 points, and the game wasn't as close as the final score might indicate.
• "I think double-digit seeds will delight their devotees today." The 28 double-digit seeds went 2-26, but give Clark some props for the alliteration.
• After VCU beat Dook, the analysts were discussing VCU point guard Eric Maynor's performance. Clark's insight: "He got the job done." This was followed by several seconds of dead air until host Greg Gumbel finally realized Clark wasn't going to say anything else.

I should point out that it's extremely unlikely I would have anything useful or coherent to say if I were an analyst. I will also point out that I'm not being paid big bucks to do so. My one original observation: The Louisville-Stanford game featured the Louisville Cardinals beating the Stanford Cardinal. Maybe if Stanford allowed their mascot to be plural they could have stayed in the game.

A minor rant before I go: Enough with the blimp shots already. If you're broadcasting a football game played outside, you are allowed to use a blimp. You can make a vaguely compelling argument that from 3,000 feet you can see formations or something that gives viewers insight into the game. (Mostly it's just tradition here.) However, if you're broadcasting a basketball game (or a football game played indoors), you may not use a blimp. "We're here at the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and these aerial shots are provided by the Goodyear blimp." Those aerial shots are of the roof of the building. When I rule the world, the winning team will be allowed to shoot down the blimp after the game. If you just won a big game, you're going to have a bonfire anyway, so why not start it Hindenburg-style?

I hope you're enjoying the tournament, best of luck with your brackets....

Hoopage Ahoy!

Wellllll, I got the Ajax and SCA paper done, it will be available on the OSOA.org site soon. If you haven't used the Eclipse Ajax Tools Project lately, you should. They have some good Flash movies that show you how to get started.

Apparently there's some discussion that Ajax doesn't need any tools. Yeah, right. Ajax doesn't need to be maintained, either, nor does it need to be integrated with your business processes and back-end systems. In fact, I'd say any Ajax application should be slapped together by someone no more than 25 years old. When that person reaches the age of 25, they should be fired and replaced with another youngster. Junior's first task should be to hack together an equally unmaintainable Ajax application using a different and incompatible Ajax library. (Give Sparky a bonus if he creates his own Ajax library.)

Okay, enough technology, let's move on to the title of today's post:

Yesterday was perhaps the greatest day in the history of the ACC Tournament. Every underdog won, the remaining teams in the tournament are the 9-10-11-12 seeds against the top four, none of whom played yesterday. There was one overtime game (in which Dook got beat) and a double-overtime game. All four games were decided by a total of 13 points. What a day.

For those of you who don't know, all life comes to a stop here in the heart of ACC country during tournament time. This is the most magical time of the year. Especially if your team wins.

Most amusing tournament moment so far: There are roughly two hours in the late afternoon in which there are no ACC games. I flipped over to ESPN2 to watch the Patriot League Championship, in which Holy Cross beat Bucknell. Early in the game they were showing how the men's team had been very vocal courtside supporters of the women's team when they won their championship just a couple of days before. The players showed up at the women's game shirtless, having covered their chests with body paint¹ to spell out "Holy Cross." When the men's game started today, the women's team was at courtside...as one player started to take her shirt off, the camera turned away quickly. (Maybe the director was concerned about a wardrobe malfunction.) While we were wondering if the camera was going back to courtside, my wife said, "Maybe she's the umlaut."

Mascot trivia: The mascot for Bucknell is the Bison. Apparently they feel the word "bison" has no plural form, similar to deer and moose. The mascot for Holy Cross is The Crusaders. Discussion Question: Is that more offensive than the several remaining mascots named for demeaning terms for Native Americans? As always, post a comment, we're always happy to hear from you.

The mascot for Southern Illinois², a team that will be invited to the NCAA tournament (the one that determines the national championship, if you're not familiar), is The Salukis. A Saluki is a dog, apparently an ancient hunting dog from the Middle East, that is supposed to be the fastest dog in the world. And what team just beat the Salukis? Creighton. I know it won't happen, but I'll make my yearly plea for the Creighton Blue Jays to change their mascot to the Barrels. It would make the world a better place. Just think about it.

Was pleased to hear from our dear friend Ms. S.J. Brody of Brookline, Mass. in a comment on a recent post. (She's a member of Red Sox Nation and a Carolina graduate, it's always good to hear from people of quality.) She pointed out that in my comments on the Tyler Hansbrough / Gerald Henderson train wreck, I mentioned Tyler Henderson. I also made that slip in discussing the game with the wife and daughter, not sure what's going on there. Go Heels.

Today's playlist: Heh. We've got hoops from noon till after midnight, the iPod has the day off. Actually, it's on vacation till Monday.

¹ Many people at U.S. sporting events show up without shirts. Let me be absolutely clear: If you're in good shape, you may attend the game shirtless. As an example, an athlete who can spend a couple of hours a day running full speed up and down a basketball court is allowed to go shirtless. Everyone else (my pale, puffy self, for example) must keep their shirts on. Covering yourself with body paint doesn't cover this offense.
² The most famous basketball player from Southern Illinois? Walt "Clyde" Frazier. Never knew that....