Mmmm... Brackets. Mmmm... Beer. [Where the Hell Was I?]

March 14, 2004

Mmmm... Brackets. Mmmm... Beer.

All right. I think we're almost there with this whole 'blog moving' bag o' crap. It hasn't been easy, and it's taken a tubload of fricking time, but I can see the end, finally.

Our little bloggy friend has survived two server moves in the last two weeks, plus a migration to Movable Type. All the old archives, and then the old comments, were ported over. Extras, like the 101 ~~Things~~ Posts, Punchline Fever!, and Quantum Terminology were ported from my local server. And finally, painfully, eye-crossingly, all the internal links to other posts were changed to point to the new versions. Whew!

Now, all I've got to do is recover a few comments (and get them working again) on the 'extras' pages, and pick up a couple of MT tricks to make maintenance easier. Then -- finally, then -- I can work on getting some new features built around here. In the meantime, I'll try to keep everything held together with the rubber bands and chewing gum I'm using now.

(And yeah, I realize that nobody really gives a damn. But I did all this crap, dammit, and somebody's gonna hear about it. You just happened to be closest. Tough luck, dude.)

Okay, on to something more interesting.

(And how hard could that be? A seminar on the intricacies of federal tax law would be more interesting than that last shit. Hey, at least I said, 'bag o' crap'; you don't hear that kind of thing from the IRS.)

So, I suppose I should have a go at talking about the NCAA basketball tournament. Many of you will already know that the 'March Madness' tourney brackets were announced this evening. Some smaller percentage of you will actually give a rat's ass. For me, of course, it's very exciting, seeing as how I'm a big basketball fan, and my favorite team is in the tournament.

(Which means that I do give a rat's ass, I guess. Assuming I had a rat's ass in the first place. Or knew where to get one -- do they sell those at pet stores, maybe? Everybody's always running around yakking about rat's asses, but frankly, I don't know where the damned things come from. Maybe you're supposed to get the whole rat, and lop the ass off yourself; I don't know. Seems like a lot of frigging work.)

Anyway, my Syracuse Orangemen are a number five seed this year. For those of you unfamiliar with how this whole hoops hoohah works, the teams are seeded one through sixteen, times four brackets. One seeds are at the top, and play the scrubby sixteen seeds at the bottom of the barrel. So a number five seed is pretty good, and gives the Orange a good chance to win a couple of games before bowing out altogether.

Of course, for those of you unfamiliar with the Orangemen, all that seeding crap goes out the window. Last year, they were a number three seed and won the whole damned thing. A few years ago, they were a two seed and lost in the first round. That's why it's called March Maaaaadness, you see. It's maddening.

In any event, the next couple of weekends are going to be chock-full of basketball around my house. And beer, of course. Basketball and beer. The big tourney calls for some brewskis, right? And after that, it'll be time for baseball. And, um, well, beer, too. You can't sit in the stands at the old ball game without a nice cold beer. And then there'll be football. Gotta have beer for football, what with the cold and the sports and the watching and all. And hockey -- well, you get the idea.

But for now, it's basketball. Sometime in the next couple of days, I'll download a bracket and pick the games; then I'll donate it and ten bucks or so to whoever's running the stupid office pool this year. I'm not gonna win or anything; it's just a hopeless, meaningless ritual that I have to go through. Like making the bed in the morning, or showering, or paying taxes. Ridiculous, when you think about it, isn't it?

All right, that's enough for now, I think. I'd better go have a look at that bracket now. I've got a lot of coins to flip to get that puppy filled out. Go, Orangemen!