10 Thoughts for October 8, 2014

1. *Finally* got my refurbished 4TB Hitachi hard drives last Friday.  The set up would have been easier if the "initialization" hadn't stalled and required restarting the process.  Also, it bugs me that Xyzel limits passwords to 14 characters.  That's dumb.  Figuring out how to work the access, going over the options, and setting it up took over an hour, as a result of the little hiccups.  Now, it's all about transferring stuff over, and the slog is, well, typical -- transferring 2TB of data is very slow on a wireless network.
2. The NY Jets are 1 - 4.  The Geno Smith era looks to be coming to a close.  When your quarterback starts yelling back epithets at a fan, you know he's not going to make it in the NFL.  That's on top of the incident earlier this year where he had a run in with a flight attendant on Virgin Air.  Then we found out that he missed a team meeting in San Diego, blaming it on the time difference between east and west coasts (b'cause you know, at 6:00pm east coast time, it's 3:00pm west coast time.)  For all the criticism fans had for Mark Sanchez, he never lost his cool or his optimism and always supported the team.  When they let Sanchez go, it was a diversion from the fact that the NYJ have had trouble getting a quality offense put together, whether it was the running back, the o-line or wide receivers.  When they brought in Geno Smith, they made Sanchez the scapegoat, but it didn't make the Jets any better.  They've reached the bottom of the Rex Ryan era, having lost 4 games in a row and failed to score in a game for the first time since 2012, the year of the Tim Tebow experiment.  The whole team is junk at this point, from the owner down to the players.
3. From the NYT: "On Saturday, People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper, suggested that the Occupy movement was part of an effort to subvert its power across China, and likened the movement to a “color revolution,” the party’s phrase for anti-Communist insurrections."  You think?  They don't call it a pro-democracy demonstration for nothing.
4. Well that's weird: Following the first case of Ebola in the US, suddenly from one end of the country to the other, everyone thinks they've got Ebola.  I think some Americans have gone Ebola-nuts.
5. ESPN asks whether Tom Brady or Peyton Manning has had the better career -- not who's the better quarterback -- and apparently most people believe Manning has had the better career.  Apparently having 1 Super Bowl ring trumps 3 in the minds of most Americans.
6. Russell Wilson just keeps getting better, doesn't he?  Monday night, he put on a show of the prototypical dual-threat quarterback, by passing for 201 yards and running for another 122.  He did all that he could to help the Seahawks overcome the 13 penalties for 90 yards that cost them three touchdowns.
7. I trashed my Nexus 7 last week; bought a brand new 2012 replacement with 32GB and HSPA+ for $125 last week; yesterday it arrived.  After going through the 4 operating system updates and reloading all the apps, I have to say that I'm pretty happy.  I wasn't motivated to get the N7 FHD 2013 model or wait for the Nexus 9, as I really love the pogo plug wireless charging base with my first-gen Nexus 7.  Really, it's far more ideal than the wireless Qi charging system as the Qi wireless is significantly slower (uses 1A or less compared to the 1.5A of the base dock).
8. Some lingering thoughts about USC's loss at home to ASU. USC had overwhelmingly better talent, but the overall scheme and the execution and lack of adjustments showed that Sark and company were outcoached and outclassed by ASU's sideline.  That is why I'm extremely pessimistic about USC's chances in Tuscon, and that someone will have to be fired before the end of next weekend.  Normally I believe in letting coaches have an entire season to be judged by, but that loss was so egregious and horrible, that everyone knows that the coaching staff is on the hot seat right now.
9. Listening to Justin Wilcox speak, I am losing even more confidence in the defense.  He's preaching individuals to step up and don't be afraid to make a play, but to me what I saw was a lack of communication and a failure of player discipline to know what their assignment was (and following through).  When players step up to make a play, they're often abandoning their responsibility which leads to very bad things.  If you do that against a spread offense like Arizona's, only bad things will result -- I really think that USC will either get throttled or get into a shootout down in Tuscon.
10. Head of PAC-12 officiating, Tony Corrente resigned today.  It's not that he was personally in error, but all that he'd done had zero impact on the quality of officiating.  I've seen phantom personal fouls, ticky-tacky holding calls, and damn if they didn't completely screw up the sideline encroachment penalty against USC in the Stanford game -- if anyone noticed, ASU's Todd Graham made a living in the white zone but he wasn't warned or penalized.  Frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing PAC-12 commissioner Larry Scott resign, too.  He never stood up for USC against the NCAA's biased COI.  When it came to the expansion of the league, he really screwed up by not getting a couple of Big-12 teams to join alongside Colorado.  And when it came time to negotiate with carriers, he held out against Dish Network.