Pool basketball is awesome

Who doesn't love pool basketball? I found this video posted on Yahoo's Ball Don't Lie blog, and holy cow do I want to do this, despite the very real risk of breaking my neck.

Summer is awesome. Isn't summer awesome? Last night the wife and I spent a few minutes reminding ourselves what the coming Idaho winter will be like, and it made us sad. But then we remembered that it isn't winter yet! It's August! And I can still do stuff like jump off my deck into my pool with my buddies! If I had a pool!

Wednesday thoughts

1. I forgot to mention that as part of the Internet-TV-is-the-only-TV plan, I downloaded a free app from the Android marketplace called myRemote that allows me to control my computer from my phone over wifi. I generally use it to control the mouse for Netflix or Hulu videos, and it works really well. Easy to set up, and did I mention it's free?

2. The wife sent me this chat a earlier this morning: "OK, we are getting a flat panel tv and installing it high on the wall ASAP." There was a bit of an incident where the toddler almost pulled our 19-inch tube TV on top of himself, but an epic roll kept him from being harmed. May be researching HDTV's here in a couple weeks. Recent trips to Walmart have informed me prices keep falling, which is nice.

3. There are severe rumblings that BYU is planning to go independent, like Notre Dame. Andy Katz over on ESPN.com posted a big article on it earlier.

BYU is moving closer to leaving the Mountain West Conference, becoming a football independent and re-joining the Western Athletic Conference in all other sports by a Sept. 1 deadline to withdraw from the MWC for the 2011 season, multiple sources said Wednesday.

"I'm not sure how it could stop now unless BYU gets nervous," said one source with knowledge of the situation.

The Cougars have been exploring the possibility since in-state rival Utah left the Mountain West for the Pac-10 earlier this summer.

Well. I'm not sure how to feel about this, and a lot depends on how the details shake out. This article also says BYU will be playing four to six WAC teams per season as part of the deal, which is extremely underwhelming. I thought playing SDSU and UNLV every year was bad... to downgrade to Idaho and San Jose State would just be depressing.

However, independence also means BYU would keep all the money it gets from bowl games, and might allow for a TV deal involving a new BYU sports TV station.

Reports are there will be a press conference tomorrow, where a lot of details will be revealed.

More then.

So far, so good

Last night I installed the new video card. This took way longer than it should have, as the people who design cases for Compaq are morons.

Then, after putting everything back together, I installed the drivers and whatever so the new card would work. That was pretty easy. I then ran the S-video cable from the desktop to the computer, and nothing happened. I fiddled around with the settings on my new video card (which, again, is new, and therefore entirely unfamiliar to me) and after about 20 minutes, got the image on my computer screen to show on the TV screen, as well. Hooray!

Tested it by watching a few minutes of Burn Notice on Hulu, and it looks fine. Not great, but fine. Today I signed up for a 2-week trial of Netflix (technically our second free trial in about three years) and since we have a Wii, we will be able to stream some high-quality stuff that way.

I've been searching for ways to watch college football and NBA games on the internetz for free. I have had some success, but I'm open to suggestions if anyone has experience in this area.

Tonight we may actually cancel the cable, though now that I think about it, we're not caught up on our shows that are on the DVR, and that may take a few days.

Making the leap

It's time.

Mandi and I are going 100% internet television. Assuming this works, we're canceling the cable and using our desktop computer to stream our shows to our 19-inch tube television (great wedding gift; thanks, Julie, Brooke, Eric, Amy, and everyone else I'm forgetting!)



I bought this card off Amazon, as it comes with a 7-pin S-Video output port (and it can also run some of my games a bit better than the stock card that came with the desktop).

And then I bought this cable to connect from the card to the TV. While the TV has an S-Video port, I figured going RCA on that end should be fine.

With the great improvement in internet TV, from Hulu to ABC.com, I think this can work. Sports obviously will be a problem, but for BYU and Jazz games I can go to my in-laws' across town.

I'll be setting it up tonight, and will post updates.

Wish us luck.

Historical photography

The above photo was created by an alice at www.mymodernmet.com. For the project, she apparently took photos of modern-day sites in Europe and Russia and then inserted photos from World War II to match up. I find the pictures absolutely astounding, and they have really helped me grasp the realities of WWII in a way I hadn't before. See more here.

The above photo is part of a collection owned by the Library of Congress and posted on The Denver Post's website. They are some of the only color photos taken during the Great Depression, and like the WWII images, these help me connect to a time in history I felt far removed from. Something about seeing people in real color, as opposed to black and white or pictures colored after the fact, makes them a lot more real.

I love History, and even minored in it in college. I am enthralled by any information about pretty much any era in any part of the world, and while I know many people don't share that same enthusiasm, I think it's important that everyone have the context of knowing where we came from and what humans have done in the past. We can learn a lot this way.

Less than six weeks to go

A reminder of what happened in BYU's opening game last season.

Old Spice meets BYU

This wins the internet. Nicely done, BYU students involved.