Pre-season/recruiting:

It can hardly be argued that Kiffin has put together a fantastic staff, and despite getting off to a late start, their recruiting efforts were fantastic, bringing in a pile of fantastic young players such as Bryce Brown, Nukeese Richardson, David Oku, Janzen Jackson and more. Not only did he bring them in, but several of them have already started to develop successfully by getting a lot of meaningful game experience in every game this season. The next few years are looking pretty good with regards to talent.

Week 1: Western Kentucky

The started off the season on the right foot by absolutely destroying the Hilltoppers (what a great name for a team, isn’t it? Well, I like it anyway) 63-7. The Vols seemed to play well in nearly every aspect of the game. The defense looked impenetrable, the offense looked much improved over last year, and Jonathan Crompton looked like an actual SEC quarterback, throwing five TDs (although he also threw two interceptions, but we’ll get to that more later). It was a good way to start the season, but it *was* against about as weak of a Division 1 team as you can come by. No offense to Western Kentucky, but they have a long way to go to be able to compete at all in D1A college football.

Week 2: UCLA

The Vol Nation came back down to reality during and after the UCLA game. Despite the fact that the game was at home, and the team and fans were riding the high from the previous week, the Bruins came in and made us look like the team we’d just beaten the week before. Despite a great effort by the defense, Jonathan Crompton regressed to his previously known self and threw three interceptions, and even the running game couldn’t get hardly anything going. The team almost couldn’t convert at all in the red zone (with one exception), and generally looked completely impotent on offense against a solid, but not exceptional UCLA defense. I feel like this was the “I see” moment for coach Kiffin where he realized just exactly what he was dealing with in Crompton: a QB who, despite playing fairly well in practice, struggles with playing consistently under real, live, game-time pressure. Now, how was the new coach going to deal with this?

Week 3: Florida

“Florida week” is a sacred time in Volunteer country. Its arguably the biggest week of the year for Volunteer football most years. This year was no exception, other than the fact that almost everyone, including and especially Florida, was expecting a bloody, ugly blowout. Coach Kiffin and his staff this week were forced to figure out a game plan to deal with the number one team in the country. How would they do it?

Well, they came up with a pretty good game plan as it turned out. With the Vols passing game practically incompetent, they came up with a plan to play old-school, cram-it-down-their-throats, grind-it-out football in an attempt to keep the pressure on Florida by keeping the ball out of the hands of their offense. The plan almost worked. Tennessee’s defense held the Gator’s offense to their lowest production all year, while their running game put enough together to keep the game close. Unfortunately, they just couldn’t convert in the red zone a couple of times, keeping them from pulling off the unlikely upset. Despite all of that, it was at least an encouraging loss for Tennessee who showed that they have what it takes to compete with the great teams in the NCAA. It also showed that this coaching staff knows what they’re doing, and knows how to put together a good game plan. Now to move forward.

Week 4: Ohio

Knowing that “grinding it out” was never going to last in the SEC, coach Kiffin and staff went to work this week trying to figure out how to get a successful passing game working, and trying to figure out what would work for Jonathan Crompton to be productive with this offense. The game against the Bobcats featured an awful lot of passing on both sides of the ball, which turned out to be both good and bad. Jonathan Crompton completed only 50% of the 34 passes that he threw, most of which were in the first half, including two TDs and an interception. Not great to say the least, but he at least showed signs of being a bit more comfortable throwing the ball. He lacked the “deer in the headlights” looks that he had shown in previous games from the backfield. The offense went back to the running game in the second half to secure the win, but overall it wasn’t pretty. Another highlight of this game was that Ohio threw 52 passes for 312 yards against the Vols in this game, highlighting some weaknesses in the Vols defensive backfield. That, along with losing their valuable middle linebacker Nick Reveiz for the season to a knee injury, put the Vols in a precarious position heading back into SEC play against Auburn the next week.

Week 5: Auburn

Auburn came into town undefeated on the season, looking like a team much improved over last year under another first-year head coach Gene Chizik. Coach Kiffin, moving forward with his knowledge that continued success in the running game could only remain when offset by at least a decent passing game, he returned to the air in this game, with mixed results. Auburn’s defense appeared resolved to shut down Tennessee’s strong running game, seeming to almost “dare” the Vols to throw the ball. Jonathan Crompton, in my opinion, started to actually show signs of life and competency in this game, throwing for 259 yards, two TDs and no interceptions, despite getting almost no help at all from receivers who gave the impression that they’d just recently transitioned from offensive line positions. The receivers were running sloppy routes, dropping passes that were right on the mark, missing key blocks that ended up costing the team points, fighting with coaches (Brandon Warren was ultimately dismissed from the team as a result of what was reported to be an insubordinate exchange with the receivers coach on the sideline during the game, a move that I personally thought was a smart one on the part of the coaching staff…there’s no room for that kind of behavior on a successful team) and sometimes not even paying attention and looking for the ball when passes were thrown to them (one had a pass bounce right off his helmet because he wasn’t even looking for the ball…what’s up with that?!).

The defense, again, held their own, holding Auburn to their lowest offensive production of the year, but with an offense that was completely unable to put anything together at all, despite Crompton finally doing his part, there was little chance for the Vols to pull off a win. Auburn left with the victory.

Week 6: Georgia

Tennessee seemed like they were finally able to put all of the pieces together this week against Georgia. Despite the fact that Georgia has been struggling so far this year, the Vols were *completely* dominant in every aspect of this game with the exception of special teams (which were horrible at best). Jonathan Crompton, for the first time in his career in my opinion, finally looked like the SEC quarterback that he is, against a legitimate SEC opponent. He was 20 of 27 for 310 yards, four TDs and only one interception (a tipped ball that was, admittedly, thrown a bit behind the receiver who actually got both hands on the ball, which, in my opinion, should have been caught…any pass that a receiver can get both hands on can and should be caught, thrown behind him or not, but that’s just me). He got a lot of help this game from receivers who looked like they’d been ridden pretty hard in practice this week, running good routes, catching passes, and even making plays after the catch. That combined with another great running game by both Montario Hardesty and Bryce Brown, and the result was a pretty impressive offensive performance. The best I’ve ever seen by the Vols.

The defense also played a great game, only allowing Georgia’s offense to score three points on a 53 yard field goal (that would’ve been good from 65 by the way…Georgia’s kicker has a bomb of a leg, nice kick), and taking three turnovers away from the Bulldogs.

The only real weakness in this game was the special teams. Georgia scored ten points on their one field goal, and an interception returned for a TD. Had the special teams been able to perform at all, they might’ve prevented the kickoff returned for a touchdown, and the punt blocked out of the end zone for a safety, and this could’ve been a REALLY embarrassing defeat for the Bulldogs at 45-10.

Where are we at?

Considering this high-level look at both the performance of the team and the coaching staff overall, I see steady signs of improvement each week on both parts. If, and I do mean if…this team has a strong history of inconsistency…they are able to stay the course and continue to improve in this manner, 2009 could prove to be a very successful season for the Vols, and a fantastic head coaching debut for coach Kiffin. I truly believe that if this team can carry this momentum with them down to Tuscaloosa in two weeks after their bye next week, and play like they did yesterday against Georgia, they have a very legitimate shot to beat the number 2 ranked team in the country, Alabama.

Conclusion

Another good recruiting class for the Vols next year, hopefully with a QB that can get off to a bit faster of a start than Crompton has the past couple of years, and I really believe coach Kiffin can restore the Volunteers to their rightful position at or near the top of the SEC within the next couple of years. We’ll see what ends up happening, but I think that at least all of the pieces are in place for that to happen. Go Vols!!

We were back in Dayton this weekend and got a chance to catch up with a bunch of friends we hadn’t seen in a while, and Ben was showing me some of the work he was doing with Less. I said to him, “I thought you were doing ColdFusion development…how is it that you’re using Less…I thought it was a Ruby on Rails tool?” He corrected me. Its a tool that runs on top of the Ruby language, that parses “less” files and spits out CSS files. So you just write a .less file, run Less against it, and it generates a CSS file that you use in your web site. Oh wow I thought…COOL!

So I decided to see if I could get it to work on Windows (he does his web development on a Mac). Turns out, it was much more simple than I thought it would be…

I did a Google search for Ruby on Windows, and it took me to RubyForge where I found a link to download the Ruby One-Click Installer for Windows. Downloaded and ran it. Ruby was installed in about four minutes (it actually took a LONG time to run, longer than I expected), and then it was done.

Then, based on the documentation on the front page of the Less web site, I opened up a command line, and typed in “gem install less”, and 30 seconds later, Less was installed. I was immediately able to create a .less file and generate a CSS file from it. Nice! Pretty sweet little tool for writing CSS, I’m very impressed with it so far.

Any self-proclaimed fan of punk/metal owes it to themselves to check this out. The Crucified RULES!

The common theme across most of those entries seems to be all of the “fallacies” in those commercials. You know, all of the stuff thats *not* being said in the message of the campaign…

What I find most interesting is how the people/organizations voicing those complaints didn’t seem to have any problem with all of the fallacies that were being thrown the opposite direction for the past coupla years in the ads in the “Get a mac” campaign. There was an awful lot of untruth going on there as well.

Frankly, as much as I LOVE my mac, its refreshing to *finally* see Microsoft waking up and fighting back. As consumers, I think we’ll all end up benefitting in the end (in price and quality), no matter which camp we live in.

UPDATE: OK, I guess I was further behind on my blog reading than I thought I was. The articles I’m referring to seem to be further back than I originally thought. For examples of what I mean, see here and here.

All of that is exactly why it was so painful the other day when I noticed that the earpiece volume button on the side of the phone had broken off. I could no longer adjust the volume of the earpiece or the speakerphone. This really needed to get fixed.

So, I took it in to the local Apple Store to have them take a look at it, after having to setup an appointment with their “Genius Bar”. I still think its kind of a hassle to have to setup an appointment to get technical support for a problem, but I guess its just the way they do business. Not that big of a deal really, just something to keep in mind.

One thing that I will definitely say needs to be improved with regards to their process for customer support for iPhones: they NEED to figure out a method of being able to transfer data from one phone to another when they encounter situations in which they need to replace a customer’s phone. I had a whole bunch of data on my phone that I hadn’t backed up in about a week, and the only way I could retain that data was to go back home, backup my phone, and setup *another* appointment at the store to go back in and have my phone replaced. All because they don’t have a good means of transferring data from one phone to another. Nearly every other cell phone in the world on any carrier has the ability to do this, there’s no good reason that I can think of that a company like Apple with the best phone on the market can’t figure out a way to be able to do this for their customers. But…I digress…

So I went home, got my phone backed up, and headed back the store a second time. This time, they replaced my phone and all was well with the world…Until the next morning.

The next morning, my new (refurbished…yet another pet peave…its ridiculous to me a phone that I just paid full price for less than six months ago gets replaced with a used/rebuilt/refurbished one, and I let them know it too…but again, I digress…) phone just stops working, out of the blue. Some random error messages that mean nothing to me, other than the fact that I can’t use my phone anymore, flashing on the screen. Another trip to the “Genius Bar”. Fun stuff…

So, they replaced this new phone with another refurbished one. I bring it home, restore all of my data again, and all is well…finally (after half of my beautiful weekend has been wasted inside the Apple store).

Fast forward to this evening…

Phoenix is running around the house in an unusually good mood, and I wanted to capture that beautiful smile of his with the camera on my phone. So I pull it out of my pocket and fire up the camer….huh? Nothing but random colored bars dancing across the screen in my camera viewport. What the #$%@!! At this point, I wanted to be really furious, but thats something I’ve been working on lately, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

The guy that gave me my *second* refurbished phone was the “Head Genius” at the store, and told me to call and ask for him directly if I had any other problems with this phone (apparently this kind of thing is “extremely rare”…imagine my luck!). So, I gave him a call. I told him about the problems I was having with the camera function on my “new” phone, and he told me he’d call me back later and let me know what he could do.

He called me back a little bit ago. I was very pleased with what he had to say. After talking over my situation with “the powers that be” he said that he had obtained approval to go ahead and get my phone replaced with a brand new one.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate that, despite the fact that there has been some hassle in getting to this point, this company (Apple) at least knows when enough is enough and handles a situation by taking care of the customer. Thats a LOT more than I can say for other companies I’ve dealt with. Its the kind of customer support that has earned Apple a loyal customer in me.

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit. — Robert Louis Stevenson

In the market for a computer? Do not…I repeat DO NOT purchase a DELL. In January of 2006, after four years of faithful service from my Alienware desktop workstation, I decided that I needed a computer upgrade, and that I was tired of being tied to a stationary location for my computer. I wanted the freedom that comes with mobility. So I decided to buy a laptop.

My wonderful wife, being the financially responsible woman that she is, decided to help me find a good deal on a computer that would also suit my needs. Back then, Windows Vista hadn’t yet been released, but we knew it was coming soon…and I wanted to be able to upgrade. Being a software developer, I also had fairly resource intensive requirements in a computer. I also wanted this computer to last me for a while, so it wouldn’t be out-of-date within two years. All of that meant that I needed something with some top-of-the-line components that would last a while, and that would prepare me for being Vista-ready.

We looked primarily at Alienware and DELL. I was leaning pretty heavily toward wanting to get another Alienware, since I had had such a great experience with them in my desktop, but DELL was offering us a slightly better deal with a little bit more flexibility in pricing (Alienware pretty much wasn’t budging on their prices at all…DELL was willing to wheel-and-deal a little bit…they threw in a free laptop case with the deal too). Ultimately, DELL won out. Not without some assurances though…

When we were negotiating components and pricing with our DELL sales rep, I was abundantly and explicitly clear on exactly what I wanted. I wanted something that was upgradeable in the future in case I ever needed to do that, and I needed something that gave me the flexibility to be able to re-install and/or re-configure the operating system on the computer at any time I wanted without voiding the warranty or support agreement. I already had several copies of Windows XP Professional that I planned on using, and I even explained to them that I didn’t need the OS that came on the computer, and that I planned to install Windows XP as soon as I got the computer. I was assured that this was no problem at all, and would in NO WAY affect our warranty or support agreement.

I should’ve known better than to trust a salesman…

We ordered the DELL. To make a long story short, it has been BY FAR the WORST computer I have ever had the displeasure of using, let alone owning. Since owning this computer, my wife and I have become intimate friends with the infamous blue screen of death. He’s been a nearly daily visitor, no matter what operating system was running on the computer. I had problems when I was running Windows XP, Windows Vista AND Windows Media Center Edition (the factory restored image)…it just didn’t matter…there were problems with it no matter what was running on it or what we were doing.

Oh, and we *had* to revert back to the original factory installed operating system configuration, because anything other than that was NOT supported by DELL…contrary to what our sales rep told us when we ordered the computer. Don’t mess with what they give you pre-installed on your DELL…it WILL void your warranty, and you won’t get technical support. What? You want to upgrade to the latest version of Windows you say? Suuurrreee you can do that…but ONLY with DELLs help at the rate of $200 for upgrade service. At this point, here is my understanding of what you can/can’t do with a DELL purchased computer: don’t TOUCH ANYTHING on your computer. Just use what they give you on it, and don’t change anything. Whatever you do to it might just be something out of their control, and they can’t be responsible for supporting that. Quite literally…I can’t tell you how many times a DELL technical support rep has tried to blame the problems I had with this computer on some random piece of software I installed. It doesn’t seem to matter how common it might be, or how many hundreds of thousands of people around the globe install and use it on their computers every single day…if it didn’t come pre-installed from DELL and is not part of their factory configuration, that’s out of their control, and is most likely to blame for your problems, and they can’t help you. Sorry.

Sometimes it would crash while doing something…uummm…complicated…you know, like watching a YouTube video. Other times, it would be something as simple as scrolling in a web browser or text editor. Didn’t seem to matter, there was no rhyme or reason, it would just crash randomly.

The thing that sucked about it the most? Anytime we would call DELL for technical support to try to figure out what was causing the problems, they would walk us through the process of running their stupid little diagnostics utilities (I could run them in my sleep by now) and every single one of them would pass. As you might guess, DELL didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with the computer, because their stupid little diagnostics tests passed. Who cares about the fact that the computer would crash to a blue screen at least every other day (usually every day at least once if we were using the computer  much at all that day), that has no bearing on anything…if our diagnostics pass, there must not be anything wrong with it, right? Brilliant.

So a couple of months ago, the day I had been hoping for for so long had finally come. Not exactly sure what caused it, but for some reason, the computer just stopped working altogether. Just, one morning, we tried to turn it on, and all it did was make some god-awful banshee screeching/beeping noise. I thought…FINALLY…its finally broken for good and they’ll replace this piece of garbage! So we called them up…and of course had to go through all of the stupid little diagnostics again…none of which were even accessible at this point…the thing just flat out didn’t work at all. So they finally said, OK…we’ll send you a box and you can send it back to us. So we got the box, and sent it back to DELL.

A week later we got it back with a receipt saying that they replaced the video card. Two hours after turning it back on and starting to use it again, it blue screened on us again. Sweet. Awesome. I LOVE this computer.

Knowing that nothing was going to get done about it anyway, we didn’t bother calling DELL about the problem. We just continue to use it, saving often, expecting it to crash any minute.

Then the other day, the display starts showing everything all garbled. Half of the screen isn’t even readable anymore. Bad video card? Bad screen? Who knows. Something *else* wrong with this piece of garbage computer. We’ve spent…I dunno…wasted HOURS of our lives over several different days in the past week trying to get someone…anyone…at DELL technical support to get this thing fixed (we *did* pay a LOT of money for this thing…including a good chunk of it dedicated to making sure we get technical support for it). We’re still waiting on a phone call from some local technician to come out and replace the screen on this thing for us. Who knows if it’ll ever happen. I wasted almost an hour of my life on the phone tonight, talking to three different DELL technical support people, JUST trying to find out if anyone was ever going to contact us about getting this fixed, only to find out that it was annotated in our account, right in the notes of the case number that I provided to all three of them, that we should be getting a call from a local technician sometime tomorrow. We’ll see.

Bottom line…I will never again purchase a DELL computer, nor will I ever recommend to anyone I know that they ever consider buying a DELL either. I recommend to YOU, dear reader, DO NOT purchase a DELL. As a software engineer at a major media company, I will never recommend that my company purchase DELL computers either. There are just too many other much better options out there. Its just not worth it. Don’t do it.

To start things off, we give a huge praise to God that we’ve finally closed a deal to sell our house up in Dayton. It was a real relief to get out from under what was becoming a real financial burden. Its such a huge relief to have that behind us now.

On a similar note, we actually ended up purchasing the townhouse that we started out renting when we first moved down here. That was kind of out of left field for us, but about a month or so after we moved in, our landlord approached us to see if we might be interested in buying it from him. After discussing the pros and cons of such a move for a week or so, Crys and I decided that it would be a better deal for us overall to purchase it, and he was offering us a pretty good deal on the place, so we accepted his offer and now own the townhouse we’re living in. The main pros in this is that our mortgage payment is ultimately lower than our rent payment was, the fact that we’re building equity in what will eventually be a rental property for us (we’ll see how that goes), and now we’re not under any kind of time constraint (lease) to get moved out of here once we find a house or plot to build on. We can stay here as short or as long as we need to. Overall its a win/win situation for us. Another praise.

Another exciting happening is that Crys has gotten her business, Pure Promotions Inc., off-the-ground and up-and-running. She’s doing marketing and promotional consulting and materials primarily focused on small businesses. So if you know of anyone that owns their own small business that might need that kind of work, give her a shout! 

My work has been going great. I really enjoy working at Scripps and am starting to get more and more acclimated and involved in the real meat of the stuff that I’ll be working on. There’s still so much to learn though. I’ll be doing a lot of systems integration work using Microsoft’s BizTalk server, which I’ve never worked with in the past, so I’m learning a lot every day. I’ll be going to training in Boston next month (Crys will be heading back up to Dayton that week too) for a five day crash course in BizTalk (drinking from a fire hose) and will most likely hit the ground running when I get back from that.

Hunting season has arrived here in Tennessee (back in Ohio too actually) and I’ll be heading out after some deer with my bow here in a couple of weeks. I probably won’t have the opportunity to get out as much as I did last year, but hopefully it’ll be enough to bring home some fresh venison. Wish me luck!

Last time I updated I had mentioned that we had found a church that we liked, Northstar. We attended there for about four weeks or so. They’re a great church, but after those four weeks, we found ourselves feeling like we weren’t really being challenged there spiritually. The people were nice, we enjoyed the style of worship and the fact that it was smaller than many churches around here, but ultimately, it just didn’t quite feel like that was where God was leading us to make our church home.

So, one day as we were driving home from Kingston along Pellissippi Parkway, we noticed a sign on the side of the road for a church called Faith Promise church. The sign and location looked intriguing, so we decided to see if we could find out more information about it. We found their web site and did a little bit of reading and really liked what we saw of it. We listened to a couple of sermons available online by their senior pastor and REALLY enjoyed what we heard (I actually felt more challenged by what I heard in those sermons online than I had by anything I’d heard at Northstar previously). Based on that information, we decided to check it out.

We’ve now attended there four times and have really enjoyed it so far. We attended their monthly GroupLink meeting the other night to start the process of getting involved in a small group there. We even went so far as to trust them to watch Phoenix is child care…WOW that was a big step for us. The idea of handing over the second most precious thing in my life (Crys is #1, Phoenix is #2) to a nearly complete strange was really difficult for me. It has worked out pretty well so far though, he’s done just fine aside from being a little bit fussy, and it lets us focus better during the service. So anyway…will Faith Promise be where we end up making our church home? I think its still too early to say for sure, but so far its looking pretty good.

So that pretty much wraps up the first couple of months here. So far we’re lovin’ it just as much as we thought we would.