OpenOffice Impress

In two weeks I'll be giving a talk at the 2010 American Chemical Society National Meeting. Today, I started putting together slides for that presentation, so I opened up OpenOffice Impress to start making it. Now this is the first time I've used v3.0+ of the software, and when I opened it up I was initially encouraged by what I saw. One of my gripes about v2.4 was that it did not apply my system theme colors to the application window. I don't like bright things, so I use a dark theme:

So it's pretty nice that now Impress is pulling in my system colors. In fact, it's really cool because now my presentation by default starts with a dark background and light text! Just the way I like it. (Note: the following was done using OpenOffice 3.2.0.7 on openSUSE 11.2 x86_64 with KDE 4.4 using a modified Obsidian Coast color theme):

I've made the title, but I don't know if the font should maybe be a little bigger. To check this, I want to throw the presentation up in slideshow mode and move back about 10 feet from the screen. That should help me tell how large it is:

Wait, what? Now I have a white background, but the text is still gray! That is absolutely terrible! Now I could almost understand if it would change the background to white and the text to black. It would still be dumb, but to change the background color silently but not the text color is beyond worthless. The appropriate behavior here would be to make the actual presentation use the same colors that I see on my screen, no matter what they happen to be. So this sucks. No good. Instead, I'll change the text color to black:

Now I've highlighted the text and selected black as the text color. But the text on the screen is still light gray! What does the slideshow look like?

Oh, so now the text color is fixed, but that isn't reflected on the "edit" view. How is this acceptable behavior for any sort of supposedly WYSIWYG editor program? Especially a program that makes slideshows, which, by their nature, are intended to be aesthetically pleasing. How am I supposed to make a decent presentation if I can't see the colors? I suppose I could just keep opening the slideshow view every time I want to change an element of the presentation, but that's terrible from a usability standpoint. In case you're wondering, applying a presentation theme (or "Master Page" as it's called in Impress) doesn't help. The colors are not displayed in the "edit" view, only in the full slideshow.

Now you'd think that if the program is now trying to apply system colors, there would be some easy way in the program to disable this. Firefox, for instance, has a "Use system colors" checkbox that allows you to disable system colors from being used when no color is specified in the HTML. I have not been able to find a similar option in Impress. The colors dialog would task me with making changes to all of the colors used in the program manually:

With this sort of interface to the program, I find it unusable. I had to fire up my VirtualBox and use Microsoft PowerPoint (ugh), because it at least allows me to see what I'm actually doing to the presentation as I make edits. It really makes me sad, because I want to use open source software. And most of these things actually work quite nicely, but for some reason OpenOffice 3.0+ fails to properly handle system colors. I should not have to change my system color scheme or manually change application color settings to make the application usable.

OpenOffice Writer does something similar: it displays a normal text document as light text on a dark background. However, when printing the document, it prints as black on white, which is somewhat sensible. However, it should really just abandon the system colors when it comes to showing a WYSIWYG document on the screen, since failing to do so breaks the WYSIWYGness and confuses the user.

What I'm Reading and Watching

It's been an intense week. Everyone in my family (including me) has alternated being sick, and work this week was incredibly busy. So I haven't had much time or energy for blogging. But there have been a number of interesting links I've come across this week, and so I thought I'd share some:

• Slashdot: Ars Technica Inveighs Against Ad Blocking- The tech site Ars Technica recently implemented an experiment in which they blocked their site's content from users using AdBlock Plus for 12 hours. Comments on Slashdot are very interesting because they highlight the balance of economic interests in running an Internet publication. If you try to charge people to read your site, then people will go elsewhere. If you try to make money with ads, people won't click them and will block them. But somehow you've got to figure out how to pay your writers. Tough problem.
• The Cult of Originality- An illustrated article by artist and filmmaker Nina Paley discussing the nature of creativity. Her argument is that there is no such thing as originality, all artistic expression is derivative. It's a pretty interesting read, and really challenges the notion that anyone can "own" creative ideas. In turn, it challenges the nature of copyright, which seems to place a high value on the creation of "original" artistic works, and locks those up so that they cannot be freely shared.
• TechDirt: Utah Wants To Own State Microbes; May Demand Royalty On Any Products Developed- The title pretty much says it all. Apparently the state of Utah believes that it is owed money if anyone makes commercial use of products derived for microbes found in the state. Talk about a money grab....
• Raheem Brock Released by the Colts- It blew my mind when I saw Raheem Brock tweet a few days ago that Super Bowl XLIV was his last game in a Colts Uniform. I've heard that he asked to be released, in spite of the fact that his contract was not up. Maybe he thinks he can make more money in free agency during the uncapped year, or maybe something else was going on behind the scenes. It's sad though, because he is really great at connecting with football fans, giving us an inside look into the Colts locker room. He'll be missed.
• Google Gesture Search- This is a neat little application I put on my Droid. It allows you to draw letters on the screen to search your phone (and everything else that the phone searches- in the Droid's case, it will also search Google and nearby locations). Pretty handy to go long with voice search and the normal keyboard search.
• Tostito's "And Then There Was Salsa" Commercial- I just saw this commercial this morning. It's a really beautiful advertisement, and looks amazing in HD. I think it's a very effective ad because it's not annoying, has a lot of character, and (most importantly) makes me really want some chips and salsa! Edit: On Vimeo, this video is even more awesome! Lagged a bit for me, but was still cool.

Twitter Users Weigh in on NBC Olympics Coverage

NBC has failed hard at this whole Olympics thing. I, along with many others both locally and around the internet, have been vociferously complaining about their coverage the entire time it's been on. Why did they watse precious primetime on a feature of Mary Carillo going through Mounty training, especially while there were LIVE events going on? Why do they fail to realize that people want to watch the games, not NBC personalities sitting behind desks or in chairs? Why do they fail to realize that people want to watch the events LIVE, not on a tape delay? Why do they fail to realize that people want to stream more than just hockey and curling live online? Why do they fail to realize that no one wants to download and install yet another proprietary video plugin (from Microsoft, no less) and then be forced to turn over the account information for their TV service provider before being able to watch said meager online streaming offerings? I do not know the answers to these things, except that the company is completely out of touch with what its viewers actually want. It frankly insulting, It seems as if they're saying that they know how people need to watch the Olympics, and it needs to feature constant crappy feature pieces instead of the Games themselves. It's as if they think it's still the 1970's and families all sit down in front of the TV to receive the day's "truth" from the news station. I hope they never are able to broadcast the Olympics again. Moreover, I wish some other company would show them the proper way to do it.

Not only has the coverage been insulting to viewers this whole time, but tonight they apparently cut off the end of the closing ceremony to show off their program "The Marriage Ref" (I didn't see this because I actually wasn't subjecting myself to the masochistic exercise of watching their pathetic programming). Now the concept of that show is idiotic enough: to allow celebrities to act as arbiters of ordinary couples' ridiculous, exaggerated marital conflicts in some kind of bizarre parody/reflection of the average American's obsession with celebrity relationships. But they had the temerity to stuff this down the throats of the countless viewers who were forced to watch their miserable network in the first place because of the asinine "exclusive broadcast rights" concept surrounding Olympics coverage in this country.

The Twitterverse seems to agree:

And more:

Congratulations, NBC. You have capped your Olympics coverage with an action that represents the culmination of all of your failure during your Olympics "coverage." The only saving grace is that I no longer have any reason to watch their channel, at least until football season returns. How much longer before their contract for Sunday Night Football runs out?

Dinner Disappointment

Last night, Debra and I decided to cook a reasonably nice dinner. We had put a frozen whole chicken in the fridge a few days ago to thaw, and so we wanted to roast it with some potatoes and carrots for a nice dinner. Since she's a little squeamish about this for some reason, I pulled out the innards and removed the kidneys, then washed the whole thing inside and out with cold water. I coated the chicken inside and out with olive oil and a french herb rub. Debra cut up some onions and garlic, and we stuffed those inside the chicken to give it some more flavor. We then added chopped potatoes and baby carrots, drizzled those with olive oil and seasoned them with the same herb mixture. This all went into a roasting pan with a grating on the bottom. Then I covered it with aluminum foil, and put it in the oven at 350 degrees (F) at about 4:30.

It was a 5 pound chicken, and needed about 1.5-2 hours to cook all the way. The house smelled amazing, and since neither of us had eaten lunch, we were both salivating. At about 6:20, Debra had a bad feeling. She looked up online how long it takes a chicken to thaw and how long the meat keeps in the refrigerator after thawing. As it turns out, a whole chicken takes about 5 hours per pound to thaw in the fridge, and keeps for at most 2 days after being thawed. Thinking it would have taken much longer to thaw, Debra had placed the chicken in the fridge on Monday, and it was now Saturday. Everything we read suggested that after 2-3 days, the risk for food poisoning increased dramatically. It had been about 4-5 days.

So we couldn't eat the chicken we had worked so hard to make and that smelled so good. We took it out and threw it away, along with the vegetables that had come into contact with it. Thank goodness for Little Ceaesar's $5.00 hot pizzas. Debra picked one of those up, and we ate pizza along with our roasted potatoes and carrots.

Dinner fail.

Phone Search

Today, Debra and I went out in search of phones. Our contract with AT&T has recently expired, and we wanted to survey the current mobile phone scene and see what we could get. Basically, we decided that we wither want to get smartphones with internet access, or just get simple phones with a basic talk and text package. Being a grad student means that we don't have a whole lot of money to shell out, but if the smartphones are good enough, we can budget for a more expensive monthly bill. So basically, if we're going cheap, I don't much care about what phone I get. But if I'm going to pay a lot, then I want to make sure I get an awesome phone.

We looked primarily at three phones today: the Blackberry Bold 9700, the HTC Pure, and the Motorola Droid. The first two were at AT&T, and the Droid (of course) was at Verizon. The costs of all three phones would be the same: about $100 each after rebate. The service plans from AT&T and Verizon would cost about the same as well. I should mention that we inquired about the iPhone (not that I would ever buy one, but if Debra wanted it I would have winced and allowed her to have it), but rejected it because with the iPhone, we would not be able to use the 15% discount on the service plan that I get for being a University of Illinois employee. So forget that. The Nexus One seems awesome, but we didn't see anything about being able to buy a family plan with two of them and the cost was significantly higher.

Here are my impressions of each phone:

Blackberry Bold 9700

This phone seemed pretty solid. The keyboard is a little easier to use than the one on my current phone, the Samsung Blackjack II. Another big improvement over the Blackjack II is the trackpad: it felt very smooth and responsive. Scrolling was smooth and easy, although I imagine that it would still be annoying to scroll through a page that is very link-heavy. The model phone I used did not have a SIM card, so I couldn't test the browser or anything that required access to the network. I've heard that people who have Blackberries are pretty happy with them, but this phone didn't seem to have enough for me to really want to pay a lot for it.

HTC Pure

Ok, this phone was terrible. For starters, it runs on Windows Mobile 6.5. If you know me, you know that Windows isn't exactly my thing. My Blackjack II runs Windows Mobile 6.1, and it's nothing really to write home about. But this thing was miserable to use. I don't know if it was just that the phone takes 5 minutes to get going fully, but after it booted up the interface was so sluggish and unresponsive that I immediately disliked it. In the couple of minutes of using it, I had trouble trying to scroll the application bar from side to side to access the phone's functionality. The onscreen keyboard did not appear to rotate if the phone was held in landscape position, and I had a lot of trouble typing the letters I meant to hit. If there was text auto-completion, it didn't appear as I was trying to type in the "Notes" application. The touchscreen and UI responsiveness were so bad for me that I was already sour on the phone when I noticed the hideous flip-style clock on the homepage (clearly visible in the image above). Why would you waste processor cycles rendering that ugliness, when the UI is already sluggish as is? Ugh. No thank you.

Motorola Droid

Now this phone was nice. There's so much about this phone that I didn't get to play with, but in the couple minutes I had with it I was very impressed. The interface was intuitive and smooth. Touchscreen input was accurate, typing was easy (especially in landscape mode), and the auto-completion was a nice touch. In fact, the touchscreen keyboard was so nice, I forgot to try out the physical keyboard! The deep Google integration is excellent (probably second to the Nexus One) for someone like me who uses quite a few Google services. Since KDE 4.4's Akonadi personal information database plays nicely with Google services, I can keep my phone and laptop calendars synchronized via Google Calendar for instance. This is certainly a phone that I would be happy with.

From my limited testing of phones today, I've whittled my options down to 2: get Droid phones and pay the higher service plan rate, or give up on smartphones and go with a much cheaper service plan. Is the Droid worth it? Anyone have experience with this phone, or any advice in general on this?

NBC Olympics Rant

NBC's Winter Olympics coverage has been an epic failure, even moreso than their Summer 2008 coverage. I've been consistently frustrated with it during the games thus far, but yesterday's horrendously terrible excuse for a broadcast really put the icing on the cake.

So yesterday, I was watching throughout the day, and was entertained by the biathlon. Good stuff. Then, they show us the Russia vs Czech Republic hockey game. All right, whatever. It was a good hockey game. But at the same time, Bode Miller was winning a gold medal in the super combined. Yet, for some strange reason, I am not seeing this event on live TV. Why? Why?! Alpine skiing events are very exciting, and when you have an American competing in such an event with a legitimate shot at the gold medal, I should be seeing it LIVE! But no, instead I get to see a hockey game that I really don't care about.

Then, their evening news broadcast comes on, and I hear: "we're going to tell you how Bode Miller did during today's super combined event. Spoiler alert!" So I immediately ran to the TV and turned it off. You'd think that they would WANT people watching their television programming, but no. They refuse to show the live event, and then go ahead and tell you the results before they actually air the event. And it's not like I could have gone online to a streaming broadcast. More on this soon.

Fast forward to the evening, prime time broadcast. You know, that time when they're supposed to give us their best programming because everyone is supposed to be watching. Instead of giving us live events, they're showing the taped runs from the alpine skiing. And not even in their entirety; they only want to show you the Americans, the medalists, and a couple of other random people they decided to do stories about. Like watching the skiing? Too bad. You only get a few skiers. Then we go out to the bobsled event, but in the middle of the first run, Bob Costas breaks in and urgently informs us that they're taking us quickly to the end of the US-Canada hockey game. Wait, what was that? You mean the US-Canada hockey game is going on live AND WE ONLY GET TO SEE THE FINAL 30 SECONDS?!!!! WHAT ARE YOU THINKING????!!! Of course, they have Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth telling us how hugely important this game was, what a rivalry it is, and how electric the atmosphere was. AND IT WASN'T ON NBC?! No, it was on MSNBC, which those unfortunate enough not to have cable or satellite service can't even watch. I have MSNBC, but NBC wasn't kind enough to even inform me that the game was on MSNBC, so that didn't do me any good, now did it? In principle, I could have streamed it live on the computer. In practice, though, I could not.

Now, it would be great if the evening show was mostly a highlights program with some live events and feature pieces sprinkled in, but only if I could go online and stream events live! But no, they don't want to do that. They'll let you stream curling and hockey only. What? Why? Why not stream everything, or at least several different events a day? They say they think streaming will cannibalize TV viewers. Right. Because not letting me watch what I want to watch really makes me want to tune in to the broadcasts. But I guess they can do that if they want, since there is no competition! If I want to watch the Olympics, I have to go to NBC. Because of that artificial monopoly, they don't have to suffer for their refusal to let me watch what I want.

To top it off, they started the broadcast tonight with a completely pointless and irrelevant intro of Bob Costas flying into the Broadcast Center on a waterplane. Why are they wasting my time by showing his arrival? Since I'm forced to watch their miserable broadcast to get Olympics coverage kind of live, I want to see the games! Not Bob Costas talking to Al Michaels from an airplane, not stories about various athletes. The games! Ugh.

If there were some real competition, then maybe I could actually vote with my eyeballs. If CBS, FOX, and ABC were all broadcasting the Olympics, I could drop NBC in favor of better coverage (assuming any one of them would do better, which is questionable at best). Or at least they would all be trying to outdo one another, and likely one of them would do the radical thing and SHOW LIVE EVENTS!

Ah, it feels much better now that I've got that off my chest. Well, at least until I look at the TV and see yet another story about some athletes instead of live Olympics action. Like right now. Grrrr.

Windows World

For the last 2 years, I've been using Linux almost exclusively on my computers. I still have a Windows XP virtual machine for Igor Pro, which is software we use in my research group for data analysis and plotting (it runs reasonably well under Wine, but there are enough minor irritating bugs that I'd rather run it on Windows. I've also tried QtiPlot, but I haven't had the time to learn it well enough to replace Igor). But unfortunately, in the laboratory, our computers all run Windows. That's because in the early days of our group, when data acquisition software was being written, they did everything on Windows and in a platform-specific way. So I still have to revisit the world of Windows in the laboratory.

Today I came to the realization that my Windows IQ has dropped substantially since I quit using it a couple years ago. I received a piece of software from a company to operate a temperature controller from a computer. I installed the software, but when I tried to run the software, I got an error message about having the wrong version of a dll file. I assumed that the company had shipped the wrong version, and so I contacted them about it. They got back with me this morning and told me that their engineers had a solution: reboot, uninstall, and reinstall the software. Sure enough, that did the trick, and now the software works. It's been so long since I've needed to do such things to get a piece of software to work that it didn't even occur to me to try those things....

Spying with Webcams

My oh my oh my. There are times when individuals and groups make poor decisions, and there are times when decisions are made that smack so strongly of incompetence that they make you question your faith in humanity. Reports that broke out yesterday about what happened with school-issued laptops in a suburban Philadelphia school district, if true, certainly bring school administrators into the latter category.

Laptops issued by the school came with webcams. No big deal, right? Oh, did I mention that administrators decided to install software on these laptops that allows them to remotely activate and view those webcams at any time? And that they decided not to tell students about this when they were given the laptops? Yeah, somehow I'm guessing that this might lead to problems. The rationale behind this, at least according to the school district, is that the software is intended to allow them to recover the laptops in the event that they are stolen. More on this later.

So here's the recipe for success:

1. Issue laptops to high school students.
2. Install software that allows someone to remotely view the webcam without knowledge or permission of the computer operator.
3. Allow students to use these as personal computers (read: computers will be open and be used in, say, the students' bedrooms)
4. Activate webcam
5. ????
6. Lawsuit!

Now, this situation all sounds kind of fishy. I'm not sure if I believe the story as reported in the article linked above. I'm not sure if it's because the situation sounds so outrageous, or if I don't trust the student who's raising the big fuss. Allegedly, one day this student gets called into the office to be disciplined for "inappropriate behavior" at his home, and is shown evidence for this behavior in the form of images taken from the laptop webcam. If taken at face value, everyone involved from the taking of the picture to the end of presenting it to the kid is an absolute idiot. You cannot, with any claim to intelligence, think that it is either justifiable or acceptable to take a picture of a kid in his own home and use that picture to discipline that kid at school. There are problems with this on so many levels that I'm not even going to attempt to break it down.

Let's look at the article in more detail:

While declining to comment on the specifics of the suit, spokesman Douglas Young said the district was investigating. "We're taking it very seriously," he said last night.

The district's Apple MacBook laptops have a built-in webcam with a "security feature" that can snap a picture of the operator and the screen if the computer is reported lost or stolen, Young said.

But he said "the district would never utilize that security feature for any other reason."

Riiiiiiiiiight. No one is ever going to abuse this "security feature." Brilliant.

A statement on the district Web site said the lawsuit's allegations "are counter to everything that we stand for as a school and a community."

PR speak for "if we find out who's responsible for this, heads are gonna roll!"

The suit says that in November, assistant principal Lynn Matsko called in sophomore Blake Robbins and told him that he had "engaged in improper behavior in his home," and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam in his school-issued laptop....

It does not say what improper activity Robbins was accused of or what, if any, discipline resulted.

It's best not to speculate on what "improper behavior" one might observe by viewing the contents of a male teenager's webcam while he thinks he's in the privacy of his own room.

Blake Robbins, answering the door at his home, said he, too, could not comment. With a mop of brown hair and clad in a black T-shirt and jeans, he smiled when told the suit had earned him a Wikipedia page and other Internet notoriety.

The way this is reported makes me wonder whether this is all a stunt to get attention. As if Blake somehow discovered this software and learned what its purpose was, and made up the rest of the story. But since he implicated the principal, you'd think this would be pretty easy to confirm.

Families in the 6,900-student district reacted with shock. Parent Candace Chacona said she was "flabbergasted" by the allegations.

"My first thought was that my daughter has her computer open almost around the clock in her bedroom. Has she been spied on?"

You'd think administrators would have thought about this. If she, or any other student, has been spied on in this manner, wouldn't there be charges about making child pornography? Having videos or images of minors undressed seems to fall under this category.

Virginia DiMedio, who as the Lower Merion district's technology director until she retired last summer helped launch the laptop initiative, said yesterday: "If there was a report that a computer was stolen, the next time a person opened it up, it would take their picture and give us their IP [Internet protocol] address - the location of where it was coming from."

She said that the feature had been used several times to trace stolen laptops, but that there had been no discussion of using it to monitor students' behavior. "I can't imagine anyone in the district did anything other than track stolen computers," she said.

DiMedio said the district did not widely publicize the feature "for obvious reasons. It involved computer security, and that is all it was being used for."

So many things wrong here. First, if you want to get the location of a stolen laptop, why not install a GPS unit that can be remotely activated if the computer is reported stolen? It might not be standard hardware, but it's a little less problematic than relying on a photo and an IP address. It's not like an IP address is a particularly accurate indicator of a location anyways. Second, do they really believe that something like this is not going to be abused? I have another post in the back of my mind about some of the IBM commercials on TV that is related to this, so I'll post more on this idea at a later time. And finally, you have the "security by obscurity" problem. What's the obvious reason for hiding this functionality? If it's only going to be used in the event that a laptop is stolen, wouldn't it be good for the laptop owners to know about this feature? Oh, but then they would know they there's a possibility that they're being spied on at any given moment. That's the only "obvious reason" I can see for not notifying the students' families about this feature.

In a published policy statement, the district warns that laptop users "should not expect that files stored on district resources will be private," and says the network administrator "may review files and communication to . . . ensure that students are using the system responsibly."

This is perfectly reasonable. Chats, files, programs, emails, etc. are all things that the school can monitor to be sure that the laptop is being used appropriately. The problem with taking a picture with the webcam is that the person photographed may not even be using the computer at all! We don't know what the "improper behavior" was, but assuming it wasn't an inappropriate use of the computer, then this policy doesn't apply. For all we know, he was doing something in his room with the computer open, and someone took a picture of it. If he was taking inappropriate pictures of himself with the webcam and the school found them, that would be another story.

So, in conclusion, if this story is true (and I'm not convinced that we know the whole story, so it'll be interesting to see what more comes out of this), then it's absolutely stunning how any group of people could have approved such a program. I'm glad that the FBI is investigating this, because there really should be criminal charges if this story is true.

Science Nerd

In the lab lately, I've been doing high resolution cavity ringdown spectroscopy on the ν2 band of H3+. We have a pulsed supersonic ion source, and we're trying to determine the temperature of the ions produced by that source so that we can interpret results from some dissociative recombination experiments that we recently did at the Test Storage Ring in Germany. So, in just this first paragraph, you might have already caught the sense that the work I do is very difficult to explain and not very exciting to someone who's not involved in the field of physical chemistry. So when I get excited about the results I get, it's difficult to find a forum in which I can share my excitement with others who will either understand or care.

On the way home today, I was sitting on the bus, looking out the window and reflecting on what happened today. By the end of the day, the data that I had were looking very nice, but I had one more data point to acquire. The first four data points fell on a line, and so I calculated what the last data point would need to be to also fall on the same line. When the last data point came in at exactly the right place, I knew that I had an interesting result. On the bus, I looked at my reflection in the window saw a big stupid grin on my face as I was thinking about it. I just wanted to get up and shout: "The distribution is thermal! The rotational state distribution is thermal!" That was one of those moments when I was acutely aware of just how much of a freaking nerd I am.

I'm still giddy about the result.

Post-Football Lull

This is about my least favorite time of the year, at least when it comes to sports. Football is over. That's normally depressing enough, but this season for the first time I'm dealing with the Colts having lost the Superbowl to the Saints, which adds another level of dreariness to this time period. Sure, college basketball is in full swing, but for whatever reason I just don't get into it until March Madness. Even then, I just don't have the attention span for it. The NBA is going on, but that's only slightly more entertaining than golf. Yawn.

At least this year, we've got the Winter Olympics. Unfortunately, NBC seems to believe that not allowing events to be streamed live will generate more interest in its nightly broadcasts, which is a complete crock. To me, the appeal of watching a sporting event is completely lost when the action is not live. If I see the winners' names scrolling across the bottom of the screen before I've seen the event, I tune out. This happened yesterday with the men's downhill event: I saw on the ticker and on the news broadcast that Bode Miller took the bronze. That completely ruined their broadcast of the event for me. There's no excitement, no anticipation, no suspense. In short, no reason to watch.

But despite the Olympics, sports are pretty much dead to me until April, when baseball season starts up. Baseball is nowhere near as exciting as football, but I must admit that there's a certain appeal to the 160+ game season. You see players work through hot streaks and cold streaks, and any given game can be won by either team. There's always the excitement of a no-hitter, or, as was the case last season, a perfect game (Mark Buehrle). Plus, watching pitchers late in games under pressure can be pretty entertaining as well. Here's hoping that this year can be the Cubs' year (ha, Cubs fans have been saying this before every season for the past 102 years, and ended each year disappointed).

Any suggestions on something to follow for the next two months?

Superbowl XLIV Reaction

People have been asking me lately what I thought of last week's Superbowl, as a Colts fan.

It took a couple of days to want to think about it again, but the game struck me as being very strange. Both teams were mostly successful on offense, yet the defenses did not give up big plays. The result was that each team had few possessions, and the team that won was the one that made the most of their possessions.

Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning (18) looks for a receiver to pass to against the New Orleans Saints during Super Bowl XLIV at Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida on February 7, 2010. (Ben Liebenberg/NFL.com)

Consequently, the Saints' ability to recover on onsides kick to begin the third quarter was absolutely huge. This effectively gave them two more possessions than the Colts had, since they opened and closed the first half with the ball. It's rare in football that one team winds up with two more possessions than the other, and the Saints took advantage of those two possessions by scoring 10 points on them. The game's final margin was 14, and effectively ended when the Colts, trailing by that margin, could not punch the ball into the end zone with less than 2 minutes to play in the 4th quarter.

Regardless, the Colts had opportunities to win the game without needing extraordinary effort. Three plays stick out in my mind. The first I believe was in the first half. Drew Brees overthrew Jeremy Shockey and nearly everyone else. The only player on the field with an opportunity to catch the ball was Colts safety Antoine Bethea, and although the ball hit him in the hands, he couldn't come down with the interception. I don't know how big of an effect this would have had on the game, because I don't remember which drive it occurred on (and I generally don't watch replays of games the Colts lose; it's one of my quirks). But if this was during the second quarter, then it would have been very critical.

A second play that would have had a large impact was Pierre Garçon's drop of a Peyton Manning pass on third down early in the second quarter. Up until that point, the Saints had been completely unable to get anything going offensively or defensively, and trailed 10-0 (or 10-3; I'm not sure). The ball was well-thrown, Garçon was wide open, and he just couldn't haul it in. A conversion there may not have lead to a score, but it would have changed the dynamic of the second quarter, during which the Colts only ran a total of 6 plays.

And of course, the third play was the onsides kick. It's been interesting to observe this season how opposing teams have feared the Colts offense, and especially Peyton Manning. It is what inspired Partiots coach Bill Belichick to attempt a 4th-and-2 conversion from his own 30 yard line leading 34-28 late in the 4th quarter. He figured that converting would end the game, and failure meant that the Colts may score quickly enough that the Patriots might have an opportunity to win it in the end with a field goal. It's also the reason Rex Ryan and the Jets were so deflated at halftime of the AFC Championship Game despite having a 4 point lead. Manning had just completed a quick 4-play, 80-yard touchdown drive on them, and they just knew that it was over.

Going back to the onsides kick, if the Colts recover and go on to win, then Saints coach Sean Payton looks just like Belichick. The NFL analysts would all be talking about how much the Saints feared Manning and the Colts offense, but instead, the Saints recovered and he is hailed as gutsy. That's to be expected. Nevertheless, the Colts were not exactly caught off-guard like the Cardinals were when Green Bay kicked onsides this year in an NFC Wild Card game. The ball bounced directly to Colts WR Hank Baskett, who couldn't handle it. It then bounced directly to a Saint, who also lost the ball. Baskett dove into the pile and, the replays show, grabbed the ball. Then the massive pileup happened, and he apparently had the ball taken from him at the bottom of the pile. Another missed opportunity.

This is not to say that the Saints didn't earn it, or that they didn't miss any opportunities themselves. Indeed, when the Colts stopped the Saints on the goalline late in the 2nd quarter, on the 3rd down play of that sequence the Saints RB (was it Pierre Thomas or Mike Bell?) saw an opening and tried to make a cut, but the turf gave way under his foot, and he fell. Missed opportunity. But for the most part, the Saints did a great job capitalizing on their possessions, and when an opportunity for an interception arose, they were able to make the play. The interception was good fortune on their part. The CB guessed that the route was going to be a 4-6 yard square-in on 3rd and 5. Because the Saints were blitzing on the play, he expected the quick throw rather than a double-move. Manning was well-protected, and oftentimes on 3rd down the Colts will go for a deep pass against the blitz. But not this time. The CB beat WR Reggie Wayne to the ball, and the rest is history.

The Saints played a great game, and the Colts played well too. But ultimately, the Saints took advantage of more opportunities to make plays in the game than the Colts did, and that in my mind was the difference. It's going to be a long offseason, but I think the Colts will be in good shape for next year.

Hello, world!

With the recent launch of Google Buzz a couple of days ago, I became inspired to participate more in the social web. So I'm making my third effort at maintaining a blog. Previous attempts were halfhearted and, admittedly, pretty weak. I think once I wrote a post entitled "Ode to Chocolate Milk." Yeah, let's not go there.

If you don't know me personally, my name is Kyle Crabtree, and I'm currently a graduate student at the University of Illinois. I work in Ben McCall's lab, where we study molecules and ions that are expected to be important in the chemistry that occurs in space. I'm married and have two children: two boys ages 4 and 1.

What's this blog going to be about? Well, I am not entirely sure. My interests include computer programming (both application and web development, though I'm an amatuer at both), science, technology, and sports. I imagine that many posts will be on those topics. I'll probably also share about experiences as a father of young children, and whatever else comes to mind.

Oh, and about the title of this blog, "Crab Shack". Throughout my life, I've had a variety of nicknames based on permutations of my last name. Anyone else with the last name Crabtree probably knows what I mean. Depending on the time and place, I've been "Crabs," "Crabdog," "Crab Bisque," "Crabnuts," and a variety of other names that I've since forgotten. "Crab Shack" (and the similar, though confusing "Crab Shackle") was one of these, and seemed the most appropriate for the title of my blog. I'll admit, I did consider "Crabnuts" for awhile, but thought better of it.