10 Thoughts for October 26, 2014

1. Football: Did you happen to watch the end of the Philadelphia - Arizona game on Sunday?  In the final 3 minutes of the game, one team went almost exclusively into prevent defense while the other went the opposite direction and mostly rushed 5 and 6 players to pressure the quarterback, including the final play with 1 second left.  Guess who lost.  Yes, the team that went prevent defense lost.  And that's why USC keeps losing.
2. Football: Sticking with the Arizona Cardinals, I still remember the pundits who'd said (ESPN anyone?) that Carson Palmer was a mediocre quarterback who could help mentor the young quarterbacks expected to take over the program.  Ha.
3. Football: All those pundits (ESPN anyone?) who said that Geno Smith was improving at the end of last year and would take the Jets to the playoffs this year, look really dumb now.  Three interceptions thrown in 10 minutes of the game against Buffalo and he was yanked.  The Jets at 1 - 7, are not yet eliminated from making the playoffs, though.  LOL.
4. Football / Science: When I was in middle school, I really wanted to play football.  My mother declined, stating that, in order to have a life after football you'd need to have a brain intact.  That was 32 years ago.  How prescient, seeing as today, we now know just how much damage many football players have done to their brains, even those who did not make it to the pros.  I love to watch the game, but I also hate seeing when those players walk off the field wobbly, aware that their future is cloudy at best.  This tough and uneasy cognitive dissonance over concussions sits with me every season -- knowing that the cognitive dissonance exists, does not relieve it, of course, but instead, I accept life as messy and that I'm stuck with my dissonances.
5. Science: The Sun has produced a lot of X-class and M-class flares in the last seven days.  At one stretch, there was one X-class flare a day for three days.  Right now there are a couple of M-class flares.  Not much of a light show, though, because the region of these flares is not pointed towards Earth.
6. TV: Last week, I walked past Grimm's David Giuntoli at the Pearl Safeway while I was there to grab a bottle of Chloraseptic for my sore throat.  Yeah, he's not 5'-11", and I'll just leave it at that.  Watched the season opener, and love the fact that they keep using Fuller's -- a blue collar coffee shop, that is a link to the Pearl District's true past.  You know, they never really resolved the zombie thing in Nick, from last year.
7. Furniture: Did you notice the new additions to IKEA's online catalog?  The Bekant series is almost exactly like the Galant series desks and legs, with one big exception: The Bekant includes bases with powered adjustable heights.  They're not cheap, but they're still much cheaper than what you would normally pay for powered adjustable height desks.  Only problem: Just three stores in the US have them in stock.  I can imagine though, that a lot of people will want to buy the bases and have their own table tops built and attached.
8. Software: The other week, my Google Play Store credit was about to run out, so I finally decided to go ahead and get the SketchUp Viewer app for Android.  The name is misleading really, because you can't view SU models saved in your Android device, but rather, you have to upload them to your SU account, and if you don't want anyone else to see and download them, you have to place them into a private collection.  I'm a little bitter that, after having paid my $95 annual maintenance fee for SU Pro, they ask me to pay $10.  The reviews from users in both iTunes and Android are very low, including my own.  For $10, all of us expected a lot more than just a simple viewer that is less useful than when you access the same content via desktop web browsers.  I mean, you know, I still have faith in the team that they'll keep improving and adding features to this, to make the $10 worth it, or otherwise turn it into a free app and refund everyone who paid for it, but right now it's a crappy app.
9. Software: One really awesome, free app that I would have paid money for, is Wacom's Bamboo Paper.  If you have a tablet and a stylus, it's a simple app to draw sketches with.  Its limitations are what makes this the perfect sketching tool -- if you carry around a sketch pad, you don't usually lug a full set of color pens, pencils, etc, but rather, you carry a small set of most-used colors and tools.  It's not meant to be a Photoshop app for tablets, but a sketching app, as in sketching ideas or capturing the spirit of a scene in front of you.  It does not have layers; instead, you layer things as in the real world when you're sketching with paper and pen / pencil.
10. Weather: It's funny how fall hits Portland.  A strong storm or two will come at some point in October, and thereafter the daily high temperature will not break 70, and instead steadily decline.  I think we just hit that point last Wednesday when it nearly poured 2" in a day, followed by Saturday's wind storm that knocked out power for a lot of people (not me!).