It’s the second weeeked of the new premiership season, but the first time that Arsenal are on Fox Soccer Channel.  I’m pumped and may even wear my new Fabregas jersey, even though he’s still out with injury :(  Go Gunners!

In other news, it’s been a very busy two weeks.  Work has been filled with setting up new computers, going into the ceiling to wire cat5e cables to rooms and moving other employees computers and desks in a massive office shuffle.  It’s all in preparation for 3 new employees starting over the next 2 weeks.

When I get home there’s no shortage of sporting options.  There’s the Olympics, NFL preseason, MLB baseball, EPL soccer, etc.  It’s been particularly disappointing to see the US Track & Field team underperform after watching them at the Trials here in Eugene. Phelps was quite exciting, even though the west coast never gets to watch anything live.  So, I had to avoid all media outlets during Phelps’ 8th gold medal try and then watch the 3 hour tape dealy on NBC.

The fantasy baseball playoffs are approaching fast.  There’s only one more week fo the regular season and I’ve been holding 5th place for quite some time.  The top 6 make the playoffs, but i wouldn’t mind slipping into 6th so that I could avoid the 1st place team, who I’m losing to this week, if I make it to the 2nd round/semifinal.

3 weeks ago was Lollapalooza and it was a great weekend to be in Chicago.  Great weather and great music, what more do you need?  Radiohead were that Friday night’s headliner, playing all the new songs and other classics from In Rainbows and providing a great light show throughout.  Saturday night was Wilco,  who played a very nice set while tricking out their suits with Hello Kitty patches and lots of other stuff.  Sunday night was NiN, who I had never seen before.  They had a great rock show and a very cool stage setup that included a screen that comes down in front of them that Reznor can manipulate with lights.  Their bassist is JMJ, aka Beck’s bassist, and he definitely added a lot to the set.  All in all, great headliners choices so that made it easier to avoid Kanye and Rage Against the Machine. A few other great shows during the days were: Girl Talk, Explosions in the Sky, The National, The Foals, Bloc Party and The Black Keys.

The weekend also gave me the opportunity to see TDK at the Navy Pier IMAX late in the morning on Sunday.  It was fantastic and IMAX really helped the action scenes.  I’ve now seen the movie twice and it is easily the best movie I have seen this year.  I really noticed some of the screenplay subtleties the second time around that gave hints to things that would happen later on.  Ledger’s Joker is truly great with so many memorable scenes: the bank robbery, the pencil trick, the Nurse uniform, the interrogation, it’s goes on.

The Netherlands v. Russia

The Dutch have been the hottest team of the tournament so far, easily winning all 3 group stages matches in the brutal “Group of Death” (France, Italy, Romania).  Russia secured a place in the Quaters after finishing 2nd in Group D, behind Spain, by handily beating Sweden on Wednesday.

It’s the 41′ and the play has been fairly even.  Each side have had a few scoring chance.  Russia has had the most chances, although some have been long range shots (30-35 yards).

Since starting to type, the Netherlands had an edge-of-the-box chance but the shot was straight at the Russian keeper.  It looks to go into the half drawn at nil-nil.  I see at least two goals during the second half, and hopefully it won’t end in penalty kicks like yesterday’s match Croatia-Turkey match.

It’s been almost a year since I upgraded Wordpress’ back-end.  I haven’t modified my custom theme since my blog uses the same theme as the rest of my site.  I’ll probably make a new theme this summer.

In the coming week I’ll do some short reviews of my recently-viewed Netflix movies.  Over the last few months I’ve seen 19 movies on DVD.  Some were repeats, some were inspired by Oscar nominations and some were older movies I found through Netflix’s suggestion service.

The fantasy baseball season began last week with a live draft through Yahoo’s Fantasy Sports site.  I think I ended up with a pretty solid team.  I consciously took some risks with younger players (James Shields, Evan Longoria, Jeff Francoeur) that have well-projected upsides combined with veteran keepers (Magglio Ordonez, Derrek Lee, Carlos Beltran).  I’ve also done a lot more research/fun reading over the past year on baseball statistics.  That includes reading some baseball analysis blogs: FJM, McCovey Chronicles and Sabernomics, reading Baseball Prospectus (subscriber for 1 year) and listening to ESPN podcasts.  I even did some analysis of the fantasy league I’m in with Helpdeskers using Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA statistics.  My pre-season team looks to be middle of the pack and Mahrens is my first week opponent.  My PECOTA analysis projects me to win 9-1, but you know statistics, “throw ‘em out the window” paraphrasing Joe Morgan.

Arsenal took a 1-0 lead against Chelsea with half an hour to.  And it’s a Sagna near-post header.  Almunia has been great in goal as well.  Chelsea responded in the 73′ with bullet from 15 yards by Drogba.  Drogba whipped in a second at the 80′ mark from 6 yards out.  It was a long free-kick pass and Drogba wasn’t even marked.  Arsenal end up losing and they drop to 3rd place in the table.  Manchester United beat Liverpool 3-0  earlier this morning, stretching their 1st place lead and Chelsea takes over 2nd.  The race to the finish should be quite intense.

The NCAA tournament has left my bracket in tatters. I knew Oregon probably wouldn’t win, but it was a homer pick.  My sleeper Final Four pick was Pittsburg (4) who didn’t even make the Sweet 16, losing to Michigan State last night.  Some of the Pac-10 games have been very watchable though, namely Stanford v Marquette and UCLA v Texas A & M.  Washington State blew Notre Dame out of the water, holding them to 41, even though most analysts predicted Notre Dame to win.  They had predicted Notre Dame would have a similarly stingy defense, but they must not have seen any Wazoo games this year.

The Thanksgiving weekend is almost over and it was a very nice 4-day break. It’s over just in time for me to fly to San Jose for software training, where I’ll be learning TeamTrack, another application I will need to administrate. San Jose is quite close to San Francisco, so I’ll be able to visit Oculon on his new home turf. I may even drive by the Google’s headquarters for giggles.

As referenced in teh title, Arsenal beat Wigan in a very close match to take the top spot from Manchester United. Arsenal were without Cesc Fabregas due to suspension, and it showed, but they still prevailed with a great run and header by Gallas in the 83′. Rosicky finished it off for a 2-0 victory. The win was made even more enjoyable when I read that Man Utd lost to Bolton!!?!? Now Arsenal is 3 points up and still have played one less game than the Red Devils.

In Fantasy Football, my team slipped again and as I watch this week, both of my starting QBs (Bulger and Garcia) have gone down and are out of the game. In a two QB starting league, I will surely lose. By the end of the weekend, I’ll be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. Now I’ll just get to enjoy the games on TV and wait for the college bowl games.

Readers and viewers can look forward to a new workspace video, as I will be moving   again at work.

It’s been a while since the last blog post. The Fall TV lineup has been in full swing. So, I’ve been watch lots of 30 Rock, Heroes, Weeds, etc.

In sports land there has been the MLB playoffs. The Cubs lost to the Diamondbacks, who look even worse since the Rockies swept the Diamondbacks last night. Who knows if the Cubs will ever get it together. Their hitters always seem to be swinging for the fences, which does no good against the Brandon Webb’s of the world. The pitching is Carlos Zambrono (volatility) + Lilly, Hill, Marshall (mediocrity). The bullpen isn’t very good. Maybe Hill and Marshall will get better, but this hitting (Soriano, Lee, Ramirez) has probably already peaked, even though Ramirez will have more years left than Soriano and Lee. It’s almost like Boston Red Sox-lite. They don’t spend enough money to get the great pitching and good role-hitters, but have the few power guys (Ramirez, Ortiz, Lowell), at the same positions too. Problem is, Boston-lite won’t win the World Series, and it won’t get you out of the NLDS.

Onto better news…

My fantasy teams are starting to turn around. I had some bad luck early in the year with Bulger under-performing, and then injured. I made some trades to be better in a few weeks, and now I have a bye week. After that, barring injury, like always, I could make a run for the playoffs after being down 1-4 after week 5.

College football Saturdays, NFL Sundays are great. I have to balance that with the EPL. But the English have been off TV for two weeks with Euro ‘08 qualifiers and a weird TV schedule. This Saturday was quite crazy in college football with the #1 and #2 teams losing. Now Ohio State, South Florida and Boston College are 1, 2 and 3. I don’t think any of those three would beat LSU or Florida.

Finally. The biggest news of all. The new Radiohead album In Rainbows was released through digital download only. You choose the price, so it’s been getting more press than normal. I got the download after buying the disc box (vinyls: LP + B-sides, cds: LP + B-sides and artwork), so I paid a flat $80 fee. I’ve listened to the album about 15 times now and it is pretty great. Like all of the other Radiohead greats (OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac) it doesn’t get old. It ranks up there with Neon Bible and Boxer for my favorite albums of 2007.

6:30 AM PST.

I usually wake up at this early during the weekdays, but not the weekend.  Today is not just any Saturday, it’s the start of the English Premier League!

With the wonder of Fox Soccer Channel I can watch two, 2, TWO, live matches this morning.  The first match is between Manchester City and West Ham.  This isn’t likely to be the highest quality of games as both teams were in the bottom flight last year.  Analysts have predicted that both will probably do much of the same this year and some have even said that West Ham will be relegated.  The Hammers probably will be relegated because the only thing that saved them last year was Carlos Tevez and he went to Manchester United.

The next match is the real one to watch, Liverpool at Aston Villa.  Liverpool finished 2nd in the Champions League and 3rd in the Premiership last season and they should continue with similar, top-flight success.  Aston Villa were hanging out in the lower-to-middle part of the table for most of last season and finished in 11th.  Many analysts are predicting a top-6 finish since Patrik Berger is back and ready to play.  So, I’m really looking forward to this match.

FUTBOL! GOAL!

I said that I’d write about backups yesterday, but the backup saga continues into today, so I’ll give you updates on that and fantasy baseball, maybe some movies…

Work, the backup:

Like a good, responsible IT department, we have a backup system in place. Backup the servers and few peoples shared folders. We were using Veritas Backup Exec 9.1. Our old tape drive was an Ultrium LTO-1 , which has a 100GB/200GB, only getting 200GB if the data is completely compressed. Our company has added three new servers since I’ve been here and there will probably be more, in addition to 6 existing servers.

So, to accommodate all of the new data, we got an LTO-2 tape drive 200GB/400GB of storage. Now I had to get this to work with the old software. Background: Symantec bought Veritas in late 2004. I tried the handy dandy steps of turning off the OS and the backup tape enclosure, switching cables and turning things. Voila! (I thought) Windows Server 03 recognizes the new hardware and the Backup Exec software can see it too. Problems arose, as I assumed they would, when I had to write to new tapes in the new drive. It wouldn’t work, and gave no hints in the error message.

So, call support, which is now done by Symantec. I get routed through the phone tree to ‘legacy’ Veritas support, leave my info and wait. Problem is, backups run every night, as they should. Now I get to switch the hardware back right before I leave and hope that it works, and it does. In the mornings, I switch things over to the new hardware and wait for support, when no comes, repeat the process.

It takes THREE days for ‘legacy’ software support guy to call, and then I have to boot people from the server so that I can reboot the server at will. We try some steps: 1) uninstall drivers 2) shut down hardware 3) switch hardware 4) reboot 5) install drivers 6) reboot Doesn’t work. I email application and event logs, wait for his call back. Takes two more days, that means more switching to the old hardware for the backups to run. During the wait for his call back, I suggest upgrading to the newest, fully supported version of Backup Exec, version 11d.

We get the software, install it, switch hardware, reboot, now the hardware doesn’t show up, hmm. Was it the new software that isn’t working or the hardware? I investigate on late Friday night and Saturday and discover that with all of the cable switching, a pin has bent. Try to repair the pin, it breaks. Now I have to find a 6 ‘, external SCSI cable with 68 pins to 50 pins. There are none in Eugene, or Salem, so I drive to Fry’s in Portland, 2 hrs away, buy two cables, drive two hours back, replace the cable, the hardware shows up again.

The new tape drive still won’t write to the new tapes, so I wait for more Symantec support. Support tells me to try the same steps as before and change the backup jobs’ configuration, it works! Well, sort of… I can now back up the local server and some shared folders, but not other server’s drivers. Hmmm. I call support again, they tell me that you have to have a ‘Windows Systems Agent’ to backup remote server drives!?!!? With the Veritas version, there was an unlimited remote agent license, but now each server needs a license, and there are specific licenses for Exchange Sever, SQL, etc. This means that the backup saga will continue until we shell more money.

Fantasy Baseball:

This week I play Blernsball All-starts and go head-to-head with MAN Morton Dexter Beals, aka Oculon. Last week I barely lost to the place team, but still moved up to 7th place. The Blernsballers are in first, but statistical evidence (Joe Morgan’s most-hated words) shows that I should have done than I have- see dsjoonation. Let’s make it one for the ages and meet again in the playoffs Oculon!

Movies:

I haven’t been watching much of the Netflix with the long hours and new episodes of Entourage, but I finally got Pan’s Labyrinth in the mail and was I glad. Guillermo del Toro directs this Spanish civil-war fairy tale and it is easily my second favorite movie of last year, only beating out Cuaron’s Children of Men. Cuaron and del Toro are two of three famous Mexican directors, along with Alejandro González Iñárritu, making movies today.  del Toro seamlessly blends Ofelia’s fairy-tale world of fascist escapism with the brutal reality of Franco’s dictatorship.

Set in a mountain village, Ofelia and her pregnant mother come to live with Captain Vidal, her mother’s new husband.  Resistance fighters are living around the village and Captain Vidal is trying to starve them out with a strict rationing policy.  Ofelia is about 12 years old and is still full of curiosity of fanciful thinking.  As she wanders into the woods and the labyrinth behind the barn, her imagination takes over and she sees fairies, a faun named Pan, a magical toad and a pale monster.  As the movie progresses, Ofelia’s fantasy world feels more and more real and the resistance fighters come to a head with Vidal.  Multiple times I heard myself saying, why doesn’t she does do X.  But, the story is true to the characters and doesn’t change their actions or thoughts just because it might be more logical to a grown-up.  On top of the great story, direction and acting, the special effects feel perfectly in place.  Overall, 4.5 out of 5

Sunday mornings usually entail watching excessive amounts of pro football analysis, provided by ESPN and FOX. Today is a little different though since I am without a TV for my reality and fantasy needs, no jokes people. So, I am stuck with using Yahoo’s online video fantasy analysis, which is mainly provided by Brandon Funston. Most of my fantasy options are closed off since I’ve got three players on a BYE and I’m not dropping Frank Gore, even if he fumbles twice a game.

In non-fantasy news, group projects continue. My last test was Wednesday and boy was it a mother of a time. Database Management II is a challenging and interesting course, but there wasn’t enough time in an hour and a half, not to mention 50 MINUTES, for this test. For DB nerds out there: 10 mc, 3 short answer using an ER diagram, 2 difficutl SQL statements, draw an ER Diagram from a client rqmt, normalize to 4NF a 1NF table, and some more stuff. So, thank goodness its a small class and that test will have to be curved.

In fun news, my boss and a former co-worker got married yesterday. Now there’s on honeymoon in Disneyworld, so if anyone sees them roaming around Epcot, shout out: ‘HEY mark and reka!”

Well, I’m off to the Airliner for 1.50 slices of pizza and a salad while we all watch football. How much better can a weekend get? Oh wait, the Hawks lost, but that was expected, even if there apparently a horrendous call made. For details and development in the latest Hawkeye screwjob, keep posted to Oculon

In case you just crawled out a hole… it’s rivalry week! That means the suckas from Ames are coming to itown (not an apple trademark) for a whuppin’. Our star QB Drew Tate will be taking the field after sitting out week one with an abdominal strain. The Syracuse game was quite a scare with Jason Manson starting at quarterback, but all is back to normal and Iowa will win. There are a lot of staters coming into town this weekend and I’ll be showing a couple of them a good time downtown and elsewhere. The game is at 11 am, only 3 hours away so get ready everyone!

In other news, I don’t like reading. This is not in the literal sense, where I would be opposed to the sighting of words on print or screen and those words’ comprehension. No, I mean that I don’t like books. Books are passe(accent!) and reading them should be optional. In related news, I don’t like humanities courses. Moving on!

My business courses are going well. I especially enjoy my database management course with one Faiz Currim. Faiz is an excellent teacher and we’re just getting to the point where we’ve covered all of the material from the introductory database course. Soon, we will be entering new territory and my mind will be blown again by awesomeness and usefulness and creativeness involved in database work.

I am ready to watch some football people. So, in the words of GOB, “C’mon!”