bamatone.net

Original URL: http://bamatone.livejournal.com/288960.html

It's that time of year again, woooooooo! We've had to deal with MLB and preseason NFL for too long! Now we get the bread and butter: college football.

Not on the schedule below, but the 2009 CFB season really kicks off on Thursday, Sep. 3, where we have South Carolina at North Carolina St. After that is #16 Oregon at #14 Boise St. Both of those games are airing on ESPN.

Some notes: The shitty SEC game of the week has historically been shown on Jefferson Pilot (JP), which became Lincoln Financial (LF), which became Raycom. This year, the new SEC Network will carry these games. The same station that brought you JP/LF/Raycom should also bring you the SEC Network game. And yes, there will be an HD broadcast.

I will now begin listing Big 10 Network games on the schedule, as many folks get this channel standard now.

I will not, however, list Fox College Sports Network channels. Most people won't get these stations, I doubt my readers care much about the shitty west coast games anyway.

As usual, I will include MLB, as well as anything else of interest that happens on Saturday. (Which, of course, means no NASCAR.)

I remember making a new plan for how I was going to use rankings in the schedule this year, but I can't for the life of me remember it. So for lack of any other great idea, I'll use the AP Top 25. I didn't use it last year because it's not a part of the BCS rankings, but I think I'm going to actually use it for that very reason this time. Screw the BCS.

Ole Miss is easily the team with the most inflated ranking. Watch them go down quickly. Notre Dame could take the field with 9 players and still be ranked in the Top 25 each season. And if you didn't notice, Old Man Holtz predicted ND will reach the BCS Championship game. Someone forgot to take his reality pills.

And without further ado... The schedule!

[My Opera readers can see the schedule here.]

I'm traveling down University Blvd. in downtown Tuscaloosa, trying to get to Pearl Garden for lunch. Anyone living here knows the city has been doing a bunch of construction downtown as they build the new courthouse, etc. In past months, parts of Univ. Blvd. have been closed off completely, forcing us to find weird routes around it.

So anyway, there I am on Univ. Blvd., right around where the Water Works office used to be. I have a stop sign - the temporary kind that just sits on a weight and can be moved around by construction teams. Oncoming traffic has the same type of stop sign. But the road that cuts across Univ. Blvd. at this particular intersection is completely closed due to the construction.

I have illustrated the situation for you:

Can someone please explain to me why there's a need for stop signs here? There's obviously no traffic heading in a perpendicular direction across Univ. Blvd. Nor will there be for some time. I understand they want us to be cautious and slow down here, but why not just post some lower speed limits and one of those big signs with phrases like, "PEOPLE WORK HERE."

And yes, I did just spend 30 minutes creating this masterful work of art in Microsoft Paint.

Original URL: http://bamatone.livejournal.com/287387.html

Each year, I'm faced with the boring task of creating calendar events in Outlook for each of Alabama's home football games. It's not too time consuming since there are only around 7 or 8 games. But starting two seasons ago, I also began doing it with home baseball games. That gets quite redundant. Fast.

This season I wanted to also include the home soccer games. Too much! Eventually I noticed that rolltide.com offers downloadable .csv files that you can import into Outlook. Woo! After looking at it, I realized it's easy to manipulate the file to import the schedule exactly as I want.

This is how the .csv file was originally structured:

START_DATE	SUBJECT	LOCATION	START_TIME	END_TIME	DESCRIPTION
8/13/2009	Alabama Soccer vs. Mercer	Tuscaloosa, Ala.	5:00 PM	7:00 PM	For more info visit rolltide.com
8/15/2009	Alabama Soccer vs. Clemson	Tuscaloosa, Ala.	1:00 PM	3:00 PM	For more info visit rolltide.com

And so on and so forth. After importing this the first time, I then had to go back and change two things. First, I have a category called "Sporting Events" that I use for sports because it's red and easy to see in the calendar. Second, Outlook automatically set me as "busy" for all of these events. So I had to go back and categorize all the events and set myself to show as "free" during them.

As soon as I was done doing all of this, I realized it was a damn snap to just edit the .csv file and re-import the schedule. All I had to do was add a couple of columns, like so (I removed the DESCRIPTION column):

START_DATE	SUBJECT	LOCATION	START_TIME	END_TIME	CATEGORIES	SHOW_AS
8/13/2009	Alabama Soccer vs. Mercer	Tuscaloosa, Ala.	5:00 PM	7:00 PM	Sporting Event	Free
8/15/2009	Alabama Soccer vs. Clemson	Tuscaloosa, Ala.	1:00 PM	3:00 PM	Sporting Event	Free

It's not important what you name the columns. When you import the .csv file in Outlook, you have to map the fields. Drag START_DATE over to Start Date and drop. Wash, rinse, repeat for the others.



Voila. I now have the Alabama home soccer schedule imported. This whole process might sound sort of convoluted, but this was much, much faster than creating each calendar event one by one. And I will be a very happy person when it comes time to import the baseball schedule.