And I had a thought … I’m a fan of rodeo. (Animal rights people, all complaints should be directed to /dev/null.) Unfortunately, the lack of journalistically-good coverage of rodeo (or any coverage at all, for that matter) leaves me wanting for information and I suspect I’m not the only one who feels that way.

So I may do that. Or not. Depends on how my current employer feels about it. But we’ll see.

Any thoughts? Anybody? Helloooooo …. can anybody hear me?

We’ve seen it before. Legendary coach at Big State University retires, new coach comes in, he can’t match the successful on-field record posted by the legend. Then he’s gone, victim of a putsch designed solely to please boosters and fans, with a new coach brought in and given the mission to restore good ol’ Big State U. to its “rightful glory.” And you would think that drama will start playing out again at Florida State University this fall after it pushed longtime football coach Bobby Bowden off to the retirement home and replaced him with “head coach in waiting” Jimbo Fisher (at right).

After all, Bowden led the Seminoles to the 1993 and 1999 mythical national championships, 28 straight postseason bowl appearances, 304 wins and 12 Atlantic Coast Conference championships, including the first nine in a row after FSU joined the ACC in 1992. He was universally beloved by the Florida State community, including the fan base. Clearly Fisher —who’s never been a head coach and takes over for Bowden after the legend was pushed out of the job last December — is in big trouble, right? Pretty big shoes to fill going into his first game Saturday afternoon on national television (ESPNU, noon EDT) against his alma mater, Samford University.

Maybe not. In fact, Fisher might be in the best possible position he could possibly be in.

When you consider the legend of Bobby Bowden, you have to consider his entire body of work rather than just the glory years of the 1990s. And while Bowden’s body of work does indeed include all those gaudy numbers I just mentioned, they’re overshadowed by some other, more recent numbers which certainly aren’t gaudy but which certainly are telling. For instance:

• The Seminoles last won the ACC title in 2005.
• Since then, they’ve posted a 30-22 record on the field in four seasons.
• Of those 30 victories, 12 of them were ordered vacated by the NCAA due to an academic-fraud scandal involving several FSU teams.
• Even without that factor, the Seminoles haven’t posted a double-digit win total since the 2003 season.
• They lost three of their final four bowl appearances on Bowden’s watch.

Let’s be frank here: If a coach other than Bobby Bowden or another legend of the game had put together that kind of record, his employers would have no choice but to look at the direction of the program and decide if it was time to make a change. Was Bowden pushed out by Florida State administrators as he claimed last week? Of course he was. On the other hand, as former Orlando Sentinel columnist David Whitley pointed out, he didn’t give the university any choice in the matter. If Bowden had gotten his way he would have coached until he died and there were aspects of the game that clearly had moved beyond him.

(NOTE: It behooves me to point out a potential conflict of interest I have here. Now-retired FSU President T.K. Wetherell is my uncle. Uncle T.K. also played football at FSU, and Bowden was one of the assistant coaches at the time he played there.)

Those down years that sometimes accompany the change from a legendary old war horse to a new, unfamiliar head coach? The Seminoles have already had them . . . under the old war horse. There’s been an atmosphere of uncertainty surrounding the Seminole football progam for several years as the wins stopped coming for Bowden. The on-field product has been off-kilter in more ways than the win-loss record has shown. Most notably, the defense was not the same immovable object it had been in the 1990s and until just recently the offensive line (a Seminole strength during the glory years) had notable shortcomings.

The lack of results and the ongoing questions about just how long Bowden was going to cling to his job had the expected results. Fans, alumni and students’ enthusiasm for the Florida State football program had dropped significantly and the quality of the Seminole coaches’ recruiting classes were slipping as a result.

That’s why this is a perfect opportunity for Fisher, a longtime professional associate of the Bowden family even before he was hired as Bowden’s offensive coordinator and eventual successor at FSU. This offseason has seen a level of community enthusiasm not seen for the FSU football program in a long time. Frankly, this is the first time in several years that fans have been sure exactly what the Seminoles’ direction actually is — a statement that would have seemed unthinkable in the mid-1990s glory years. Last February, Florida State signed its best recruiting class in several years and are on track for an even better recruiting class announcement in February 2011, including Tampa Plant running back James Wilder Jr., one of the top athletes in the class of 2011 according to ESPN.

I can’t think of a “head coach in waiting” who’s had a better opportunity than Fisher has right now. The down years are gone, right? Of course, there’s a trap in there that he has to avoid . . . if the down years are already past and the momentum is already on his side, then he doesn’t dare screw up.

Hmmm . . . now I don’t know if I envy him or pity him.

-30-

NOTE: A previous version of this column incorrectly listed the number of national championships Florida State won.

As predictable as the sun rising in the east . . .

But does this kill the Danica/NASCAR rumors that have been swirling for months? Probably not. Consider this placeholder image that popped up this morning on Danica’s Flash-heavy website (and which has since been replaced by an IRL-appropriate image with a Honda logo):

Hmm … I suspect another announcement is forthcoming.

Possibly the greatest angry-fan rant ever. Well-played.

This morning, the usually-reliable Linux Alive Twitter feed moved a link to a blog item written by somebody calling himself “Ubuman” claiming that Canonical Inc. would release a service pack for Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) sometime next spring. The blog item appears to have quotes from Colin Watson, a senior developer at Canonical, in which he allegedly said that changing some of the underlying components of the OS is not the way to go and that Canonical needs  ” ‘to reconsider the 6-month release cycle, and focus more on stability.’ “

(Now, granted, there’s been a lot of kvetching in the Ubuntu forums and elsewhere about “bugs” in Ubuntu 9.10. And so there was when 9.04 came out. And so there was when 8.10 came out. And so there was when 8.04 came out. And so there was … ad infinitum, ad nauseam. If I had to guess a percentage number of Ubuntu users affected by Ubuntu 9.10′s alleged “bugs” I would probably go less than 1 percent.)

However, as I read the blog post I began to have problems with it. For one thing, it’s not sourced. Yeah, okay, maybe this blogger did the interview himself, but there’s been no announcement of a service pack or something similar, official or otherwise, to that effect. Also, there’s no news items anywhere on the Internet referring to this story … at all. Finally, the fact that this is the only post on the “Ubuman is watching Ubuntu” blog (other than the generic “Hello, world” post used by many blog platforms as a space-filler) led me to suspect that the blog was created specifically to spread a specific piece of disinformation.

Only one thing to do, then. I shot off an e-mail to Colin Watson himself with a link to the “Ubuman” story and asked him straight out: “Is the information presented in the blog correct?”

Watson got back to me via e-mail less than an hour later with this answer:

This blog post is a tissue of lies. There is no truth in it whatsoever, and as you note he didn’t even bother to fabricate a source link. Thanks for drawing it to my attention, but feel free to quote my denial anywhere you think appropriate.

 

Well, this place seems appropriate.

I will point out that Linux Alive normally picks up its content from a Reddit feed and that it’s not that difficult to slip something disinformative into a Reddit or Digg feed. Watson himself has posted a comment on the Ubuman blog denying the report.

I’m sure this is a waste of time, but in case it isn’t obvious (it would be blindingly obvious to anyone who knew me, and of course the blogger didn’t even bother to make up a source link …), none of the statements attributed to me in this blog post were made by me, and they do not represent my opinion in any way.

 

I had also commented on that story to question its veracity but my comment was removed by the blog’s owner. It remains to be seen if Watson’s comment will remain in place.

At any rate, the story about a service pack for Ubuntu 9.10 has no weight to it.

Ubuntu 9.10 SP1 coming in spring 2010 | Ubuman is watching Ubuntu

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
          In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
          In Flanders fields.

Lt. Col. John McRae, Canadian Army
May 3, 1915

–

We Shall Keep The Faith

Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
           With All who died.

We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
          In Flanders Fields.

And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
          In Flanders Fields.

Moina Michael
November 1918

More to come. Eventually.

They use the Flash banner ads to put a URL (which I won’t list here) into your clipboard which claims to check your computer for viruses and other malware. If you go to that website, it requests permission to install a program that checks for malware, then if you click “Cancel,” it switches to a page that appears to use something called “Antivirus 2009 Web Scanner” to look for malware on your PC. It also claims to find it, of course. Then it presents an XP-style dialog box which offers you buttons to remove the spyware or ignore the problem; whether you click the “ignore button” or the “remove all button” (neither are buttons; it’s just a web graphic) it tries to install its “antivirus” program (which is a Windows executable). I rather suspect that they’re not actually trying to install an antivirus program, but instead something more insidious.

If you’re running Windows XP’s default interface, it looks really scary. If you’re running Vista, have changed XP’s window widgets or don’t use Windows at all (Linux, one of the various BSD flavors, OpenSolaris or Mac OS X) … well, it just looks out of place. I rather suspect that my Ubuntu system doesn’t have Spyware.IEMonster.b, Zlob.PornAdvertiser.Xplisit or Trojan.InfoStealer.Banker.s (assuming any of those actually exist) floating around on it.

The Flash clipboard exploit takes control of your clipboard as long as the browser window/tab is open. Copy or cut something else and the exploit re-inserts that address. The only way to stop it is to close the window.

Adobe Flash ads launching clipboard hijack attack
Related thread from Ubuntu Forums

It’s been a very odd couple of days. We’ve been waiting for this piddly little tropical storm to hurry up and pass through, but this has not been the garden-variety tropical storm.

In fact, I’m beginning to think that Screwy Squirrel is driving the bus.

Most storms that roll off the West African coast develop into tropical cyclones immediately. Not Fay; she waited until she arrived at Puerto Rico before she showed any signs of development. And unlike nearly every other tropical storm that tears itself apart on the mountains of Hispaniola and Cuba, Fay kept right on going and finally made it to Florida. But instead of drawing energy from the Gulf of Mexico on the way up, she decided to wait until she’d made “landfall” in the Florida Everglades before she gathered strength.

It makes sense, in a perverse sort of way — the Everglades have more water than land and this time of year that water is very warm. Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Masters had this to say about the unusual phenomenon earlier today:

It does happen sometimes that the increased friction over land can briefly act to intensify a hurricane vortex, but this effect is short-lived, once the storm is cut off from its oceanic moisture source. To have a storm intensify over land and maintain that increased intensity while over land for 12 hours is hard to explain. The only thing I can think is that recent rains in Florida have formed large areas of standing water that the storm is feeding off of. Fay is also probably pulling moisture from Lake Okeechobee. Anyone want to write a Ph.D. thesis on this case? Wow.

And now she’s ground to a halt over Florida, dumping rain. If we were still worried about that drought that we’d been dealing with since (seemingly) the late 1990s, there are no worries about that anymore: now we’re worried about massive flooding.

One piece of good news: Although Fay has sort of followed the path across Florida blazed by Hurricane Charley in 2004, she’s not carrying the 150mph winds Charley did.

It’s been entertaining watching the computer prediction models over at the Weather Underground site, if only because they’ve all been so tragicomically wrong. Fay’s done everything except what the computers predict she will do. As she crossed Cuba, the computer models had her going into the Gulf Coast region and messing up Alabama. Then the predictions moved east. Then they diverged, reunited and started puttiing on advanced trigonometry demonstrations. For a while, they said Fay was going north into Georgia. Now they’re settling on a prediction that she’s going to emerge in the Atlantic Ocean around dawn tomorrow, gather strength from the warm water of the Gulf Stream and turn northwest towards Jacksonville as a minimal Category 1 hurricane.

The National Hurricane Center agrees with that assessment, having recently issued a hurricane watch for the northeast Florida coast.

Or is she? She might be stalling in the Atlantic and turning due west toward Orlando and the Gulf of Mexico. All the models now seem to agree that Fay will re-enter the Atlantic and turn back toward the northwest. Given how off those models have been for this particular storm to date, she could do something really strange like make a beeline for the mid-Atlantic.

I’m just thankful we haven’t seen the tornadoes here that they’ve seen further downstate. Fifty-one houses were hit by a tornado in a small dot on the map called Barefoot Bay this afternoon, with nine being rendered uninhabitable. My heart goes out to those folks; at the same time, I wouldn’t change places with them.

There’s even more tropical fun on tap. A tropical disturbance in the east-central Atlantic which the National Hurricane Center has dubbed 94L is showing signs of development and is making a beeline for my area of Florida.

So … er … Fay, Fay, go away! Don’t come back on any day!

Here’s some links to more Fay coverage:

The Orlando Sentinel
Florida Today in Cocoa, near where Fay is expected to return to the Atlantic Ocean
Daytona Beach News-Journal
The Naples Daily News — Fay first made landfall near Naples early Tuesday morning