Also, in sports...

I am watching the NDSU/Minnesota game and it is also amazing and terrifying.

Minnesota, they... they were going to go for it on 4th & 3, but then there was a false start, so they were going for it on 4th & 8, but... but then NDSU intercepted the ball, and... and then one of Minnesota's players decided to grab the NDSU player who'd intercepted the ball by the jersey and fling him to the ground instead of doing anything resembling standard tackling technique and that caused the ball to fly out and be picked up by another NDSU player who continued running it back for a touchdown and when did we start letting Division III teams into the Big Ten oh no

Meanwhile, Indiana is down to North Texas 21-0. >_<

And now I am sick

I am both amazed and terrified every time I succeed in getting off the couch.

Why does my heart feel so bad?

Cholesterol.

FARTBOWL Special Update Post

Ohio State nearly lost to a MAC team today. Iowa lost to the bottom-tier Big XII team.

This will really sting when we barely beat Ohio State and lose to Iowa later in the season.

FARTBOWL

Okay, so I missed last week completely, but I'm gonna make up for that with one of those occasionally-updated posts about today's game.

• Steve Gardiner has some hair.
• Good. A defensive stop. Those make me happy.
• Also, we didn't blow our first offensive series. That also makes me happy.
• I have never seen an opposing player step in to intercept a punt after a fair catch has been called. I hope I never see it again. Anyway, thanks for the field position.
• I think Le'Veon Bell may have just literally punched his way to a first down.
• It's nice to see someone other than Cunningham occasionally getting a reception. Also, touchdown setup. Bell is displaying the same ability he showed early last year to find the holes opened up by the line and go through them.
• WOOOOOOOORRRRRRRTHY!
• I look away for a minute and Maxwell's in at quarterback. What's going on? :(
• Okay, Maxwell's not mobile enough to bring back the Drew Stanton Runs the Ball offense. Maybe that's a good thing.
• Conroy. :D
• Let's not pick up a bunch of holding penalties and fall apart when we get into the red zone, okay, guys?
• Five Hour Energy: it will ruin your marriage.
• The return near the end of the half may not have yielded a touchdown, but I argue that it may have been Keshawn Martin's best in that it was the most representative of his style: he slipped away from three tackles and at least threatened to change directions each time.
• I feel like I kept hearing about how great Dion Sims had the potential to be last year without ever seeing much of it. That was a pretty good catch.
• Even while wearing a baseball cap, Howard Schnellenberger has enough gravitas that he could probably put it in as right guard in a pinch.
• ...and then one of ESPN's talking heads opened their halftime coverage by saying that Missouri's, "deep freeze," where they called two timeouts before a kick at the end of regulation, "work[ed]"... not noticing that it was Missouri who was trying to kick the field goal at the end of the half, and apparently unaware that his network's own commentators expressed befuddlement during the game at the coach's decision to call those timeouts. I am increasingly convinced that Worldwide Pants Incorporated is the real worldwide leader in anything. Maybe it was supposed to be a sarcastic comment and the delivery was terrible?
• Lippett is in on offense! ...but Nichol is wide open. That pass seemed a little loftier than I'm used to. I wonder if Maxwell will be able to duplicate the rocket arm Cousins showed against Northwestern last year.
• Hill is in, we've been rotating Maxwell in and out, we're primarily calling running plays... I'd say we're in garbage time. It's good to be up 27-0 in the third quarter. This is what I was expecting from the Youngstown State game.
• I'm a big fan of going for it on fourth & short, especially when it doesn't matter.
• I'm a really big fan of going for it on fourth & short.
• KEVIN MUMA! :O
• Oh, right. ABC owns the cavemen now. I wish I hadn't been reminded of that.
• We very nearly allowed FAU to make a break into the endzone in the fourth quarter. Instead, we somehow provoked a fumble with an ankle tackle and ended up with a defensive touchdown. Interesting.
• Apparently, fumbling a kickoff out the back of the endzone is a touchback rather than a safety. Good to know.
• According to the commercial that I just watched, Cooper tires are made for people. That's an interesting image. This game is now so far out of hand that I'm paying more attention to the commercials. Maybe I should just flip over to the Iowa game...
• The second thing that I've learned today: Peter Badovinac is our third-string quarterback.
• ...and that closes one of the most convincing victories I've ever seen. Check out the box score. MSU led on first downs 29 to 1. They gained 864% more yards on offense (434-45). I think anyone who was concerned after the Youngstown State game (such as myself) should be feeling a lot better about MSU's chances this year.

It took me a little while to get my suspenders on for Howard Schnellenberger's final game against the Spartans because they're designed to button onto my tuxedo pants, but I was eventually able to jury-rig a solution with some paper clips.

Banana with rage

...is how I feel.

If you figure out what that means, let me know.

R.I.P. HAL 9000/Dinosaur

I ordered it in December 2000. It arrived in 2001. It was nearly top-of-the-line at the time. I wasn't willing to pay another $100 to get a 1 GHz processor, but I did pony up for the GeForce 2 Ultra. It could run any game at any resolution I wanted. I named it "HAL 9000" because that seemed like the most badass name that a computer could have.

Sometime around 2002 or 2003, I added more RAM. I was doing more programming than gaming by then, but the difference was still noticeable.

In Fall 2005, the main hard drive failed. I used the replacement as an excuse to install Windows XP rather than Windows Me. I can't remember if it was then or shortly thereafter, but somewhere around that time, I changed the name to "Dinosaur" in recognition of the machine's advanced age.

Near the end of 2007, possibly on the seventh anniversary of the machine's ordering, I replaced Windows XP with Ubuntu Linux.

In 2008, I bought a new laptop. I still kept the old machine around, but even web browsing had become a chore on it, so it fell out of use.

In 2009, I put Windows back on it so that I would have a native Windows environment available. I bought a wireless dongle and got a couple uses out of it. Most notably, I used it to register my cable modem with Comcast the following year when running the installer from a VM on my laptop turned out not to work.

Sometime in Summer or Fall 2010, the sound card failed. Changing PCI slots and removing the Ethernet card did not help. I don't know why I thought it might help, but I tried it anyway. Prior to that time, the only components that had failed were drives of various sorts. Perhaps it really is confirmation bias this time, but I still regard Dell as a company that has proven itself capable of building a reliable computer when it really wants to.

In 2011, after my most recent move, it began failing the POST. I still kept it around, thinking that I might eventually look up the POST beep codes and fix the problem. Given that the sound card was dead, the power supply jack was so loose that I could kill the power to the machine just by bumping the case, and the GPU fan was making clicking noises, though, I eventually realized that I would have to replace nearly everything. Thesues's ship would never be quite the same.

On Sunday, I took it and the monitor that I'd bought for it to Best Buy to be recycled. It was just a computer.

Happy birthday to me.