I haven’t bought or listened to a Nine Inch Nails album/CD since high school, but I do think it’s cool that they’re going Creative Commons with Ghosts I-IV and The Slip.  And guess what?  People are still buying the CDs too.

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I’ve heard people talking about Twitter for months now and I’ve looked at Twitter before and just didn’t “get it”.   But I finally broke down and registered an account to figure out first hand what the big deal is about Twitter.  From what I can see, you just post little snippets like what you’re doing, a link, some random thought or whatever else you want (limited to 140 characters) via their website or your cell phone (sms — text message).  I can see some personal uses for something like that, but am still  undecided on the usefulness of informing people what I ate for breakfast (that sounds like a great way to get a stalker, right?).

Anyway, we’ll see how my “Twittering” goes and I’ll subscribe to the Twitter blog to get some ideas.  If you’ve had experience with Twitter, I’d love to hear your stories and take on it.

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While I think that the Indianapolis Colts made decent picks overall, it does surprise me that their picks were so offensively weighted. But as tradition goes, the Colts tend to go after the best players still available…plus they’re still developing a handful of defensive draft picks from previous years that will probably see more playing time this year.  And they picked up 13 undrafted players as well, so maybe there are some gems in that bunch.

The offensive line needed attention and they clearly addressed that.

And there’s the need to beef up the scoring threats as well since the current crew is getting older and the fact that we lost Ben Utech. And dare I mention Kenton Keith being a complete knucklehead recently.

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2008 PRESEASON

2008 REGULAR SEASON

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Here are the 2008 NCAA Final Four matchups. All games are on CBS and played in the Alamodome (San Antonio, TX).

Saturday, April 5, 2008
6:07 pm EDT (1) UCLA (35-3) vs. (1) Memphis (37-1)
8:47 pm EDT (1) Kansas (35-3) vs. (1) North Carolina (36-2)

Monday, April 7, 2008
9:11 pm EDT (1) North Carolina / (1) Kansas vs. (1) Memphis / (1) UCLA

So we’re still in line for my Memphis over North Carolina prediction in the final.

While this is the first time four number ones made the finals and many are praising the selection committee for that, overall I can’t agree. Yes, you probably have the four best regular season teams, but teams like Davidson and Butler were clearly better than their seedings (just to name a few). Yes, they want the “Cinderella” story line. I get that. And yes, it’s a drawn out task to select 65 teams within the selection guidelines. But when teams should clearly be seeded substantially higher it would seem that something funny is going on or that someone doesn’t know what they’re doing. But what do I know? I don’t even really care about basketball except for tourney time.

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For those of you who care, here are the “Sweet Sixteen” matchups (all games are on CBS, and to my knowledge, Katie Couric is NOT commentating)…

Thursday, March 27, 2008
7:10 PM ET No. 7 West Virginia at No. 3 Xavier
7:27 PM ET No. 4 Washington State at No. 1 North Carolina
9:40 PM ET No. 12 Western Kentucky at No. 1 UCLA
9:57 PM ET No. 3 Louisville at No. 2 Tennessee

Friday, March 28, 2008
7:10 PM ET No. 10 Davidson at No. 3 Wisconsin
7:27 PM ET No. 3 Stanford at No. 2 Texas
9:40 PM ET No. 12 Villanova at No. 1 Kansas
9:57 PM ET No. 5 Michigan State at No. 1 Memphis

I’ll say that overall the matchups seem pretty lame. (Chalk one up for the selection committee.) While there’s a really decent chance that 3 or 4 #1 seeds move on to the Final Four, I’ve still got to root for the Big Ten (even though my Boilers are out). However, I’m sticking by my initial predicting for the final game: North Carolina vs. Memphis with Memphis winning. But what do I know, I only watch college hoops a few weeks a year.

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Jeff put up a good post about Katie Couric doing marketing…and someone thinking that’s a good idea to push some books.

Check it out.

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“The Indiana Pacers announced today they will not increase season-ticket prices for the 2008-09 regular season.”

Is this really newsworthy?

You have the worst attendance in the league, you’re mediocre at best and you employ people who consistently make poor off court choices.  Personally I think that I’d drop ticket prices AND “clean house” for next season, but maybe that’s just me.

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A word of advice to Kelvin Sampson. “DON’T MESS WITH THE STANGER! Or you’re bound to get stung.” (Cheesy I know, but hey, if Emmis can get away with that sort of thoughtless promotion, so can we.)

Apparently Sampson is not a fan of Jeff Stanger, baseball, Bloomington or books. I’m a Purdue grad, but come on, are you serious? Sure, Rick Greenspan might lay down the law and Michael McRobbie will get his first test due to the recruiting violations , but what is their stance on the remarks towards Trolley Dodgers, Jeff Stanger, baseball, the city of Bloomington and the future release of Kansaska? That my friend is the real story.

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I receive a ton of spam every day which usually gets caught by my spam filters, but over the past few days I’ve seen a variation of the same one come through, six of which were in my inbox this morning (I’ll post four examples). What irritates me the most is that the account it came to is not given out to third parties. And of course the spelling errors.

Here’s the main content of the spam messages for eBay item number 190195958868. If you have received this spam as well, I encourage you to report this item to eBay or forward the message to eBay at spoof@ebay.com.

My hunch is that eBay can’t do anything about it since this is clearly not inside of their system (send me an email at…which is outside of eBay’s rules), but they could at least slap some sort of spam/phishing warning on the item itself (Warning: Please use caution…).

Related, check out eBay’s spoofing tutorial (how to spot them, not how to send them).

E-Mail #1…

I have for sale: 190195958868 At your last bid price $120.00 . If you are interested just give me a fast reply on this email address and you will find all the info that you want. Please contact me as soon as possible for more details directly at kroberts40@gmail.com !

Thank You For your Time

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