I spent a lot of time over the off-season thinking about whether I wanted to continue this blog. Who was I writing for? Who was benefiting? What’s the value? Is it worth my time?

Frankly, CGB has sucked a lot of the fun out of casual blogging. They’ve got more posts about more things by lots of good writers who have lots of good things to say and are often very good writers. There’s just no way I can compete. At the same time, I’m not interested in a big group blog. I’ve got certain standards and issues I’m not willing to compromise. So the way I see it, I can either hang up my hat or I can re-adjust to a format that’s not trying to compete with CGB.

Here’s how I intend to do that:

• “One man’s opinion”: The years of working for Rivals got me in a rut of trying to make sure everything I said was 100% defensible and being very cautious with my words. That’s in the past. This blog is now just “one man’s opinion” and you’re going to get ALL of it. To be clear: As a devout Catholic I find verbal charity and treating the players with respect and honor to be of the up-most importance, so you’re not going to see trash talking. You’re also not going to see a lot of rebutting other opinions or getting into protracted back and forth arguments with anyone. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, including me… so this is where you’re going to hear it, ALL of it.
• More off-topic posts: I’ll be posting more of my personal thoughts on things outside of the Cal Bears. Two things I won’t be covering are religion and politics. I’ve learned that those need to be separate. But you will see more off-topic posts about various things that interest me. My family, cool articles, whatever. I’m sure 80+% of the posts will still be Cal Bear related, but there will be more variety.
• Doing less: Sorry, no pick’em this year. No stats page. No edited podcasts (although I think Jason and I will continue to do our mid-week podcast and my OTRH podcast is likely to continue in un-edited form). More grammatical and spelling errors. Just simple posts that I can get up quickly with less effort. My goal is 4-5 posts a week plus whatever un-edited (at least on my end) podcasts result.

So, with that introduction, here are the posts to expect this week:

• Ode to my ’97 Jetta
• I donated $1200 and I didn’t even get a lousy T-Shirt
• Excited about the return home and my new seats
• 4 new Pac-12 coaches, playing 3 of them
• Road trips: Going to all but 3 this year

GO BEARS!

Thanks for the comments of concern about a lack of posts. It’s nice to know our commentary is desired. It’s been a busy off-season for me and frankly I haven’t felt like I’ve had anything meaningful to add to the conversation of Cal Football.

Well, that’s not quite true… I had a fair amount to say about the spring game, but it was also a busy time and it is too late now.

Looking at the packed calendar for the summer and knowing the lack of meaningful news between now and fall practice, We’ll be back when fall practice starts.

Because post-season games are not in the Pick’Em league, the league wrapped up last Saturday. A big congratulations goes out to repeat winner NoBetterThanSolid, the first repeat winner since DuckAndRun won the first two years. NBTS didn’t start out the season well, but played strong down the stretch to take over the lead. Another late surger: Ted Miller.

Of course nobody ever beats the Betting Line (Vegas ALWAYS wins), but we won’t include them.

Here are the players who won individual weeks:

• NoBetterThanSolid: 3 week wins
• kencraw (that’s me 🙂 ): 2 week wins
• cpoff: 2 week wins
• kwest80: 2 week wins
• ChrisNguon: 2 week wins
• philip: 1 week win
• jsnell (co-blogger): 1 week win

Thanks everyone for participating!

For those who have tried to comment recently and were unable to, I apologize. WordPress did its really odd thing where the discussion settings revert automatically to a fairly restrictive policy. It reverted sometime between 11/5 and 11/15 and I fixed it today. Never have been quite sure why that happens. The worst part is I don’t notice it as it only affects people without a login to the site, so until someone says something, I’m oblivious. In any case, comments are now re-enabled.

I know this is a first, a Cal home game at AT&T, but I’m looking for advice in regards to parking from people who have driven to AT&T for either Giants games or for the Emerald Bowl and didn’t park in the “official” lots (which are reserved for donors).

Originally the plan for my family was to take the ferry in, but as with all things public transit related, their pricing is not very family friendly (I’ve found transit options are usually priced to be competitive with driving for 2 people when considering the hassle factor). The ferry has “event pricing” that is more expensive than their usual fares. It is $15 round-trip per adult and $9.50 per kid, under 5 free. So for my family it’s $49 (2 adults, 2 kids, 2 free). For the Presbyterian game, I’ll have 3 adults, 2 kids, 1 free so it’ll be $64. All of a sudden driving in and dealing with the traffic doesn’t sounds so bad. Frankly, it’s disappointing because I’m a big fan of public transit and getting cars off the road for big events. But in the end, I only have so much money in my budget and public transit is not THAT high on my list of preferred charities.

So, who’s parked around the park? Any gems of lots? Anybody used parkwhiz.com and their reservation feature (is it TRULY a reservation)? Anybody familiar with the Townsend garage? Is $27.50 a good deal? What sort of pricing should I expect?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Many of you who play the Pick’Em probably noticed that the scoring was all out of whack. There was a very insidious bug that was very hard to track down. It’s fixed now.

For those of you who haven’t signed up, you can still signup and be competitive. Because the EMFMV league is based on averages not totals, you’ll be scored on the averages of the games that start after you signup.

I had to take advantage of the cool weather this morning to get some work done in the shop. I’ll have the OTRH podcast and a couple of follow up posts later this evening and tomorrow.

In the mean time, vote in the poll.

The college football season starts today, so today is your last chance to signup for the Pick’Em League without any penalty (of missing the 1st two games).

Signup NOW:
http://excusemeformyvoice.com/pickem/

Jason and I will be recording our first regular mid-week podcast shortly, but I’m debating this year whether to continue my On The Road Home podcasts. For those of you who listen, you know I record them on the way home from the game. It started back when I was traveling to all the road games for Rivals, so I had lots of time in the car. It also gave me an opportunity to make available audio from the post-game interviews with the players and coaches.

Now that I’m no longer doing that, I’m wondering if they still have value. I’ve still got plenty of time in the car, coming from the Sacramento area, so that’s not the issue. But they take a lot of work once I get home as well. Because I’m driving while I record them, the post-processing of editing out the pauses (and the “what in God’s name is your problem!?! stay in your lane butt-wad” comments) and the such take over an hour. With a beautiful wife, 4 kids, a more than full time job, and lots of commitments at Church, my time is limited. That’s time that could be spent doing additional blogging instead, above and beyond what I already do. So please answer the poll on the sidebar with your thoughts of how you’d like me to spend my time for EMFMV:

1. Keep them the same: Pick this if you like the Podcasts and wouldn’t want them to change.
2. Go shorter: Pick this if you’d like me to continue, but with a shorter format (which would also reduce my editing time), probably in the 5-10 minute range.
3. Go unedited: Because I know I’m going to edit them later, I speak differently than I would otherwise. The reason that you hear no “ums and ahs” is because when I’ve got nothing to say, I’ll just shut-up for a minute or two until I gather my thoughts. I could instead just do a true stream of consciousness with no editing. The quality of the comments would be a bit lower and I’m sure there will be more stuttering/ums, but I think I could do OK.
4. Shorter and unedited: Pick this if you kinda like the podcasts but think they’re too long and want me to spend as little time on them as possible while still having reasonable content.
5. No OTRH podcast: Pick this if you’d prefer I focus my time/energy on blogging and perhaps doing a video review of the game (something I’ve thought of doing instead of a podcast).

Thank you for your feedback to help us make EMFMV a better site. I’ll decide whether to record one for the Fresno State game on Saturday around 10 AM before I head down, so get in your vote before then.

Sorry I got a slow start on this, but the Pick’Em league is ready for everyone to sign-up. Do it quick because the first game (UC Davis @ ASU) is on Thursday, just two days away!

Either click on the link on the header bar or go to:
http://excusemeformyvoice.com/pickem/

Yet again we’ll have the Betting Line and Ted Miller to compete against. Mr. Miller has been exposed as being nothing special when it comes to predictions… the Betting Line on the other hand, he’s pretty unstoppable.

My biggest complaint BY FAR with wordpress is how after various upgrades, it disables commenting for non-admins. It’s particularly troubling because I never realize it, as I can comment as an admin.

Nevertheless, it was brought to my attention again that commenting was disabled and I’ve re-enabled it. Comment away!

The webhosting service that we use is having major problems this weekend, starting Friday afternoon. It started with the whole thing being down. They’ve slowly brought things back up, but as of right now, I still can’t write files, including my program code.

What that means in practice is:

• If you input scores after Friday afternoon they might not have been entered.
• The game data is out of date because my scripts can’t write the data to the disk.

We’re working to get it back up and running…

UPDATE at 11:30 AM Monday… Everything is finally back up and running. Let me know if you see any problems.

We independently posted on the same news within an hour of one another here (Jason) and here (me) and somehow managed to have almost ZERO duplicative information.

It may look like we’re masters of coordination… I can assure you, we’re not.

I’m not sure how this keeps happening, but the comments got disabled at some point again. I know I haven’t been doing it, and I doubt Jason has. I haven’t even done a blog upgrade recently (although I did do some plug-in upgrades, perhaps one of those?).

The worst part is, I can’t tell that they’re turned off. Since I’m a logged in user, I can comment. But of course only a couple of us have accounts, so most of you can’t comment. In the future, if you see that commenting is disabled, please e-mail me at:

blog AT excusemeformyvoice DOT com and let me know.

In any case, they’re re-enabled now… comment away!

For all of you who participate in the Pick’Em league, a minor change to let you know about:

I’ve slightly changed the format of the tables where you enter your scores. I’ve done two things:

1. The rows are shorter so it’s more compact on the screen.
2. I put each score next to each team, instead of “away@home” followed by both entry boxes, it’s away (entry box), home (entry box).

Both changes are meant to help with the same thing: user error where people are swapping the scores for the two teams. I’ve gotten a number of minor complaints about being frustrated with making that mistake. By way of hypothetical example, imagine someone, oh I don’t know, put 17 for the Nebraska score and 30 for the Washington score instead of 30 for Nebraska and 17 for Washington like they meant to. They’d be pretty frustrated, that imaginary person, don’t you think? I’m definitely not making the change now because of this theoretical person who made such a stupid mistake and would be in 4th place instead of 9th if I’d, errr, they’d, entered it right.

Nope, making sure that never happens to “them” again, that’s got nothing to do with it.

Just an FYI that the stats section is working. It wasn’t working right away because the place I get my stats from changed their formatting and I had to rework my scripts to parse everything differently. Now I have to do some additional future proofing work, as well.

For those who haven’t used it, the reason I do my own stat page is because I get opponent stats for comparison’s sake. So, let’s say you’re looking at, oh I don’t know, Nevada, and you want to know whether their nation leading 592 yards a game is impressive. Or perhaps the Bears nation leading defensive yards. How do we know if it’s meaningful?

Well one way is to see how many yards Nevada and Cal’s opponents have been giving up or putting up respectively. When you see that Nevada’s opponents are giving up nearly 500 yards a game, it takes a little bit of the heft out of their stats, as for that matter does the fact that Cal’s opponents are only gaining 209 a game.

Really these stats mean more 4+ weeks in when there are more opponent numbers to balance things out, but even now, it gives a comparison point, albeit a bit weak, to work from.

Check it out by clicking on the “Stats” link on the header or going to http://excusemeformyvoice.com/statistics

The ExcuseMeForMyVoice Pick’Em league is ready for people to sign-up for the 2010 season.

Those who have participated in the past know that our league is unique in two ways that make it worth adding to whatever other fantasy/pick’em leagues you’re in:

1. You pick ALL Pac-10 games, both conference and non-conference, not games for the top-25 or other contrived group of teams. Let’s be honest, we’re Cal fans and we know the Pac-10 best. One’s ability to pick the winner of the Tennessee Tech @ Arkansas in week 1 and likely the Indiana State @ Cincinnati (Cinci being a team that you won’t get to pick for week 1, but at virtual #26, will likely be in the poll week 2) in week 2, doesn’t impress me. If it doesn’t impress you either, this is the league for you. Plus I’d like to be in a league where I get to pick the Cal game even when Holmoe is coach.
2. Scoring is not based on the spread or on confidence points, but instead on predicting the score accurately. You don’t just pick a winner, you predict the score, which adds another dimension and gives bragging rights for picking the exact score.

For those who didn’t need the sales pitch, the lone change this year is that I finally got the notification e-mails working so you’ll be less likely to forget to make a pick, something that is a bigger disaster with our scoring system than with traditional leagues. I’m 98% confident we won’t have a repeat of the 2008 debacle where most of you got a flood of 20-50 e-mails when the old system broke down. I also changed the way I get the game data that will no longer impact page load times, so the site should seem snappier, particularly on game days.

Sign up now by clicking on the “Pick’Em” link on the top or by going to:
http://excusemeformyvoice.com/pickem/

UPDATE at 10:30 AM: Login’s from last year won’t work. Everyone has to sign-up fresh each year. Of course you can re-use the same login info from the previous year, but you do have to sign-up again.

I know things have been quiet here on EMFMV for the last month or so, but now that the season is getting close you should expect to see a lot more action… but not for a couple more weeks.

I’ve got a big regatta that I host every year in early August (this year it’s 8/14, so closer to mid-August) and that really consumes my time in July and early August. Once that’s done, then football becomes hobby #1 (behind God, family and job of course, that’s why it’s a “hobby”). So, starting 8/15 expect to see the following:

• My game-by-game predictions (for what it is worth, I was 8-4 last year, missing USC, ASU (what was I thinking there?), OSU and UW (still ticks me off), but bravely predicted the loss to Oregon, the win over Stanford and Arizona even though they were unfashionable at the time.)
• Looking back posts for the last 3 2008 games (I’ll do the 2009 mid-season like I did for most of 2008 before I got overwhelmed by the reporting gig).
• Podcast from Jason and I
• New Pick’Em league, much like past years

Jason always takes an off-season sabbatical, but he should start posting sooner rather than later and get back into his regular flow.

Looking forward to a great season…

Kat brought it to my attention that the comments had been effectively turned off. One had to have an account to comment and since we give readers no way to create an account, nobody but Jason or I could comment.

This happened to my other blog which also uses the wordpress software. When it happened there, I assumed I had made some mistake and accidentally enabled that “feature”. Now that it has happened on this blog I’m convinced that what happened is that some wordpress upgrade reset some portion of the settings and that was the result.

The worst part is that Jason and I were blind to it since we’re always logged in as users so that we can write posts. The result is that I’ve been fat, dumb and happy yet wondering why nobody has commented in the last couple months.

In any case, comments are now re-enabled. Enjoy!

Now that I’m just a regular blogger, here are some posts you can expect in the next week or two (in no particular order):

• Final podcast of the year from Jason and I
• My thoughts on our obligations as Cal fans
• Thoughts on firing Alamar
• Thoughts on Tedford and what needs to change
• Early thoughts on 2010 potential
• Commentary on Pac-10 bowl performances
• Ranking the conferences bowl performances

There will be more in the off-season as well. I’ll finish off the 2008 looking back series that sputtered during the year (possible subject for comment section, should the 2009 looking back series be during the off-season or should I do it like this year with matching the 2009 looking-back post with the upcoming 2010 games?) for one. Plus, I plan to round out some other sections of the site like the stadiums section now that I’ve been to all 10 of them.

Keep checking back in for new posts…