Has anyone ever been part of an audio book rental service (Netflix for audio books)?

I'm considering joining since I commute for over an hour a day and I never read when I'm at home. But I don't know which service (if any) are worth investing $20 a month toward.

There's a whole bunch of services out there, and I think www.simplyaudiobook.com is the biggest...

The worst days in the year to travel by car from Southern California to Northern California are the Wednesday before and the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

The 2 cities with the most traffic congestion in America are LA and SF.

So imagine driving through SF during morning rush hour, traveling south, and then driving through LA during afternoon rush hour on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

Is this the most congested travel experience in the US every year?

I hate the BCS.

Even if Cal beats Southern Miss in our final game of the season, we still might be out of the BCS (and therefore, the Rose Bowl) if either:

1) Texas looks extremely impressive beating Texas A&M, and passes us in the BCS standings (they're only .02 BCS points behind us).
2) Texas loses. Boise State is in position to move into the top 6 of the BCS, since they're # 7 right now. As a mid-major team, Boise State would go to a BCS bowl ranked #6 while we wouldn't, even though we would be ranked #4.

Basically, it means we need Texas to win, but not look that impressive doing so.

Say Texas is leading by 14 points early in the 4th quarter. Do we want Texas A&M to score a touchdown, making scenario #1 less likely? Yes, but this would also make scenario #2 more likely, so maybe not...

And if one of these disastrous scenarios happen, the Rose Bowl would be something like Virginia Tech vs Michigan instead of Cal vs Michigan. The Rose Bowl has never really been thrilled with being a part of the BCS, and if that happened, they might just want to leave altogether...

Of course, if college football had a playoff system, Cal might still be very strong contenders for the national championship...

The process I use to write a blog post:

1) Think of a topic.
The idea I originally had for this post was my top 10 reasons for why I enjoy blogging.

2) Start writing the post.
I had "Gives me something to do at work, gives me a chance to express myself creatively, etc".

3) Change my mind about what I want to post.
I decided I would write about how there aren't many chances to use my creativity at work.

4) Repeat step 3 if necessary.
Only now did I decide to write the post on the process of my posts.

5) Write the post, making formatting changes along the way.
At first, I had italics in this post.

6) Using Blogger's preview feature, see if there's anything I want to change about my post.
I made sure to mention that I usually spend a long time writing these posts.

7) Publish the post, and look at how the post appears on my page.
I noticed that I wanted to format each step in bold.

8) Make edits to the post if necessary.
I decided I needed more white space in my post.

Because of all these steps, it takes me 30 minutes on average to write a post, even though my entries usually aren't very long.

I was in charge of planning another team-building activity at work today. So thanks to the inspiration of Slum Dave, I created a Price Is Right game where teams had to guess the combined cost of 5 different holiday items.

There were 2 rounds, and these were the 5 holiday items in each round:

Betty Crocker Mashed Potato Mix
Campbell's Beef Gravy
Keebler Graham Cracker Pie Crust
Package of Ghiradelli Chocolate Squares
Set of 100 Miniature Christmas Lights

Milka Austrian Chocolate Bar
Good Cook Turkey Baster
Pepperidge Farm Herb Stuffing
Pine Fragranced Candle
Ferrero Rocher Prestige Bell Chocolates

There were 8 teams, and even though I told the teams that they could not go over and win, 7 of the teams went over the actual price of $9.58 for the first 5 items.

Of course, that threw everyone off, and all 8 teams went significantly under the price of $17.25 in round 2. (Only 2 teams made guesses of over $10.)

Amazingly, my plan of screwing with my co-workers' psychology actually worked. (Thanks to Allen and Basile, who helped me determine which items seemed more expensive than they really were, and vice versa.)

The winning teams in each round won the items that they correctly guessed... I'm not sure gravy or a turkey baster is a prize that anyone's dying to get, but I was on a pretty tight budget...

My company uses a software program that we recently developed internally, so there are lots of bugs and things that need to be fixed. The worst part about it is that there aren't enough keyboard shortcuts, so using the software is very mouse-intensive.

I hope I don't get carpal tunnel...

I went to Togo's on Friday with Eun-Sook before we went down to soCal. (We also went down with Sammo, who we picked up on the way.)

Eun-Sook ordered a roast beef and avocado sandwich, but it took the employee a really long time to make it for her. The employee had to go to the bathroom, wash her hands, put on plastic gloves, and explain something to her co-worker. In all, I'm guessing it took her 10 minutes to do something that should've taken 1 minute.

So she gives Eun-Sook her sandwich, but when Eun-Sook gets ready to eat it, she notices there's no roast beef in the sandwich!

So Eun-Sook goes back to the employee, who asks her co-worker to add some roast beef to the sandwich, but he thinks that hot pastrami is cold roast beef. She had to explain the difference between roast beef and pastrami!

We think it was his first day on the job, but still... don't most people know what roast beef looks like?

One of nation's hottest coaches, Tedford will shock nation and stay at Cal

We hope. Please???

I got to work before 8 AM today for a meeting, and that's pretty much the earliest I've ever been to work. Now I know I'm not gonna gain much sympathy from people who get to work at 8 AM at the latest, but I was still really tired.

My morning meeting was over 2 hours long, so I started it with a big cup of coffee. I try not to drink coffee, but today was an exception given the circumstances. Unfortunately, I still almost fell asleep because the meeting was REALLY boring (we were going over our company's product lines and expectations for 2005).

But the coffee definitely affected me. Usually by now I'll have had at least one 30 minute stretch where I feel exhausted, but it didn't happen today.

According to the Social Security Administration, my birth name Thomas, which was very popular in the first half of the 20th century, has become less popular over the last 30 years or so.

1900s: 12th most popular male baby name in the US
1910s: 11th
1920s: 11th
1930s: 9th
1940s: 8th
1950s: 8th
1960s: 9th
1970s: 21st
1980s: 25th
1990s: 27th

In fact, the name has steadily become less popular in every year since 1990.

1990: 26th
1991: 28th
1992: 28th
1993: 28th
1994: 28th
1995: 29th
1996: 29th
1997: 32nd
1998: 33rd
1999: 33rd
2000: 34th
2001: 34th
2002: 36th
2003: 36th

Today was a big release day for a couple products:

Halo 2
1.5 million copies of the Xbox video game were pre-ordered, and walk-up sales will push its first day sales total to $100 million. 7000 stores opened at midnight just to sell the game.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0
Development editions of the Firefox web browser have existed for years, but Mozilla released Firefox 1.0 today, the first version intended for a full release.

So while Microsoft hopes to gain market share in the video game industry, its dominance in the web browser industry is slipping...

I thought I would never do this, but I've started listening to the Jim Rome sports radio talk show on my drive to work. I usually catch the first half hour, which includes Jim's takes on the previous day's events and some listener e-mails.

I used to hate Jim Rome because I felt he was annoying and used too much unnecessary jargon. I've also noticed that he rambles on way too long sometimes, but he's gotten a lot more bearable than what I remember from 5 years ago.

I still don't like listening to callers very much (mainly because I usually have no idea what they're talking about) but my other options at that time are the Sarah and No Name Show (Alice 97.3) or the Howard Stern Show (Live 105.3). So I guess the Jim Rome Show wins by default.

I fought with my sister on several occasions when I was really young, but I've only been in a physical fight once in the past 15 years.

I'm not exactly proud of this, but here's the story.

In 9th grade, a couple of my friends and I were playing Scrabble. Yes, the word game, Scrabble.

My friend Teddy had been irritating me all day. I don't remember exactly, but he was probably trash talking about video games and other things that 9th grade boys care about. Finally I had enough and said something like, "Stop being so stupid." So then he grabs my dictionary and rips off the back page.

We were both sitting on the floor at the time, and so I leaned over to grab my dictionary away from him. But then he leaned away, so I just tackled him and we started wrestling. It wasn't much of a fight, but we really were mad at each other.

And all for a game of Scrabble and a dictionary... what a chivalrous cause for a fight...

Yesterday I was at work until 6:30, and the last hour or so I was tracking the presidential election as if I was following ESPN GameCast for a sports game.

I kept refreshing CNN.com every few minutes to check the electoral vote count and how each candidate was doing in the key states of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. It was kinda fun seeing each candidate take states and watch their electoral vote count move up.

And it was amusing to see how Fox News was eager to claim victory for Bush, while CNN was much more cautious in making their announcement.

Comments found on John Chong's blog, regarding fantasy sports drafts.

I laughed out loud when I read Sammy's analogy between fantasy sports and poker.

(Chongo was studying for his actuary exam at the time.)

Chongo:
this is what i mean! (Tommy) just laughs at me… two nights ago, tommy was in my room, doing a live draft for his fantasy league. so there he was just sitting there… waiting for number and letters on the computer to change and here i am frantically looking for the formula for empirical bayes non-parametric method in the midst of all my notes and past exams. the madness continues…

tommy… i'm coming over everyday when i'm done, just to bug the living daylights out of you.

James Song:
dude… the draft is an important exam too. it's so stressful during the draft because you never know when a player is going to be taken. you have to react quickly (1 min 30 sec) and make a decision on who you will draft if the player you wanted is gone. you have to do all kinds of research before a draft too, which no doubt tommy probably did.

Sammy Sohn:
Chongo, I'm not sure who James is, but he's SOOOOO right. I just had my live draft a few days ago, and that's the closest feeling I've had to being back in school. The draft was on Sunday, and in classic college form, I did VERY little preparation before. I woke up and spent all morning /afternoon before church crunching stats and trying to measure future potential. Even though this was something I WANTED to do, I had procrastinated doing it, just like if it was studying or doing hw.

Then during the draft itself, you're only given 90 seconds to react to other people's picks. Lemme tell you, its very stressful. The draft is like the flop. It doesn't guarantee anything, but if it hits you, you're set and if you have potential, you can build on it. Very important to get off on the right foot.

Now a mere passerby may say, "its only fantasy basketball, What are the rewards or consquences of a poor draft?" They don't understand the far-reaching rammifications this has. We're talking about 6 months of joy or sorrow, talkin trash or being trashed on, resembling the genius of Theo Epstein or the ineptitude of Danny Ainge…character building trials.

Haha, this was a lil longer that i'd expected, but FB is just THAT good. When's your test, first week of Nov? good luck on it…keep shootin dem equations and bell curves outta your arse while I sit here crunching numbers like an actuary until the endda the season.