Throughout the last couple months frequent visitors of this blog have heard a number of comments about how I had these bookshelves and desks that I was “finishing up” and that’s why the posting wasn’t quite as heavy as I would like.

Well, they are FINALLY finished.

Not “only varnishing left”. Not “only the drawers left”. Not “only have to bring them inside left”. Not “only have to make the computer baby-proofing covers” left. Not “only have to put the floorboards back on left”. Not “only have to clean-up the garage to get the cars back in left”. Not ANYTHING left. I’m DONE!!!

See:

Note that you can click on the pictures to go to my gallery of pictures for those projects, if you are so inclined. Or if you want to see all of my posted woodworking projects go to: http://thecrawfordfamily.net/gallery/Woodworking-Projects

For those of you keeping track, yes, these ran WELL behind schedule. Originally they were supposed to be done in one week’s vacation from May 23rd to June 1st. When I wasn’t even close to done after that week, I worked weekends until my 2nd week off (and I had to dump going to a sailing regatta to do this) from July 19th through July 27th. When I was closing in on final assembly after that week, I was pretty sure I could wrap it up with a strong effort before heading down for my first fall practice on August 9th. When THAT didn’t happen, the promise I made to my wife was that it would be done before the season started. Then it was a promise ot finish it Labor day weekend just after the season started. After that, there were no more promises, just the knowledge that every day it wasn’t finished was a day I was not in the good graces of my family.

FINALLY, 143 days after the cars were first kicked out of the garage, I put the final touches on the project yesterday, the cars are back in the garage and I am back in the family’s good graces!

…and you’ll start to see more blogging.

The San Francisco Examiner is doing a ‘best of’ series and Cal Blogs got its turn yesterday. Excuse Me For My Voice was amongst the 6 picked. They had this to say about us:

The name might tip you off, but if it doesn’t I’ll just say that this is not your standard blog. When it comes to the writing, it’s definitely done with flair. Not only do they hit you with great informative articles, they do it in a way that is never dull. They also do podcasts to go along with their great commentary and photos from the game. This is a great site to live vicariously through these fanatics. Once you’ve read an article or listened to a podcast, you’ll be hooked.

Huh, I never thought of us as a blog that is “definitely done with flair”. If anything I though we were the stoggy old-timers who were the last to fly off the hook. But perhaps it’s our ‘flair’ for the sarcastic and the jovial nature of our podcasts that gives the best of writer that impression. Or perhaps it’s just the name.

The other blogs picked, with the exception of ‘The Bear Will Not Quit’ that I only learned of this fall, and so was not in contention when I picked the blog-roll for this year, are all on the blogroll.

I meant to post this over the weekend, so sorry for the short notice. If you’re in the Sacramento area and want to up your stalker credentials, coming to hear me speak to the Sacramento Grid Club tonight at 6:15 PM should be on the top of your priority list.

The Grid Club is a Cal sports fan club. I guess there are a number around the state. They have weekly meetings to go over the previous game and have speakers come in. They asked me to speak this week. (They must be completely out of qualified speakers. 🙂 ) I’ll be speaking about how I became a part-time sports writer and give my thoughts on the Bears outlook going forward.

Here’s a quick rundown from the organizer, John Boskovich:

We always welcome new members and would love to have folks come to the club as a guest this Wednesday.

The Grid Club’s guest policy is that we invite anyone who’s interested to show up for a meeting or two, in order to check out the club and see what we do. We ask those who are going to come to more than two meetings to join the club. 2008 membership is priced at (what we believe to be a very reasonable) $55 (which includes attendance at all club meetings and also includes $25 off the price of the Tiny Bates Award banquet held in February.)

More details about the Sac Grid Club are available on the website, which is www.sacgridclub.com.

The location of the meeting is at the Sterling Hotel, which is located at the corner of 13th and H Streets in downtown Sacramento. The meeting starts at 5:15 with a review of the Maryland game film.

Come on out!

My analysis of the defensive line during Fall Camp was just posted on BearTerritory.net:

http://cal.rivals.com//content.asp?CID=840508

As an FYI, this is a subscription article. I’d very much encourage people who like what I write to signup with Rivals as I’ll have about 3 articles a week that require a subscription during the season. It’s less than $10 a month which works out to be about $0.75 per article and that’s not taking into account the great articles by Chris and AW as well as access to the subscriber message board (which is by far the best subscription board between all the Cal subscription sites). If you care at all about recruiting or Basketball in addition to football game coverage, BearTerritory.net is the site to subscribe to.

For the financially challenged amongst us, have no fear about this blog suffering. Between the On The Road Home and yet to be named podcasts that Jason, Phil and I will be doing as well as the usual slew of posts including the best live-blogging of road games in the Cal blogosphere (with Jason as our gracious host), we intend to keep this the #2, yet highest quality Cal blog online.

I’ve updated the blogroll for what I think to be the best of the blogs around the Cal blogosphere. Is your blog missing? Well, drop me a line in the comment box.

As a reminder to those new here, here’s my criteria for inclusion in the blogroll:

1. Moral content: The #1 thing to prevent your blog from inclusion on the list is any content that is morally offensive. The most common example of this is frequent swearing. Does it really add anything to a post to say a player is f-ing pathetic? Find better words to describe yourself. Other examples include any suggestions of violence against anyone, this is college football not a war, or personal attacks against players or coaches beyond just their capabilities on the football field. It’s OK to say that Joe “Booya” Ayoob is the worst player to ever grace the Cal sideline and Tedford is a complete coaching moron to have let him stay behind center for as long as he did (even though I’d disagree), but to say you want to rip out his bowels and force-feed it to Tedford crosses the line. Finally, I expect the comment sections being in line with my moral standards and that the comments of the blog’s author on other blogs meet the standards as well (one blogger in particular suffers from this problem). For the comment sections, I don’t expect one to moderate to the degree that all comments meet my moral standards, but that truly, wildly objectional comments are deleted and somewhat to moderately objectionable content is somehow rebutted/chastized.
2. Frequency of posting: I’m only going to link to blogs with somewhat regular posting. Generally that means at least a couple posts a week during the season. I’m not too concerned with off-season posting but someone who is consistent all the time gets extra props.
3. Quality of posts: What this means depends on what your blog is trying to accomplish. If you’re just trying to report news, I’m not going to hold it against you that you don’t have detailed analysis. At the same time, if your goal is news and you’re always a week behind everyone else, well, that’s not very good news. On the other hand, if you’re a game-analyst type guy, I’m not going to hold slower posting against you, but I do expect that your analysis is meaningful. Generally what this means is if when I go to your blog, do I find something worth reading?
4. Longevity: I generally like to see that a blog has been around for at least a year before it gets the nod. This is partially to give me time to judge based on the above criteria and also because lots of bloggers drop off within a month or two of blogging.

After not getting a comment for a number of days I grew suspicious that something was up. So I logged out of my account to see what the blog looked like for average viewers. Sure enough, no comments allowed if you weren’t logged in. Long story short: the upgrade of the blog software changed my settings in a minor way tha prevented commenting by non-registered users.

I’ve fixed that now and comment boxes are open.

I bet just about everyone is wondering what in #$@@$@#! has been keeping me from posting lately. Well, in truth, there’s been a lot of behind the scenes work going on.

Today you’ll notice a new banner for the blog thanks to Jason, and you may also notice that the blog software was upgraded. But those both pale in comparision to the amount of work that has gone into getting the new Pick’Em league ready.

The new Pick’Em league is a lot like last years but a number of changes have been made. First and foremost, the scoring has been simplified. When two electrical engineers walked away with the contest last year, it was a clue to me that perhaps things like logrhythmic bonus points for picking games early in addition to the additional complexity of forcing people to pick scores not winners and a formula associated to how those scores were translated into points, was just too much.

So things are simplified. Now notice that I didn’t say they were simple. While the bonus points system is gone, you’ll still have to pick the score for the game and there’s still formulas to determine who did the best job of predicting the score. That said, picking the winner is now 50% of the score and that’ll make things simplier on their own.

Also added this year is automated e-mail sending that’ll remind you if you haven’t made your picks yet and will give you updates on the league if you so desire. Finally there’s now a method to have your password reset if you forget it and don’t want to be at my mercy to get back in.

In any case, this is your chance to prove that you’re better at predicting games than all the most sophisticated Cal fans out there, and me too. Sign-up on the Pick’Em tab.

Jason has been keeping the blog alive during my mysterious disappearance. Some have speculated that since my Looking Back series ended with Oregon, I must have done something terrible to myself when reviewing the Oregon State game. No such luck.

I’ve just been really busy wrapping my other hobby, Sailing, for the season with a final push to sail and organize regattas. That’s pretty much wrapped up now, so you should see me back in business now.

Here’s what you can expect:

• Blogging and Podcasting from Fall practice starting with next Tuesday’s practice
• A new Pick’Em league (similar to last year with less math involved)
• Wrapping up the Looking Back on ’07 series

That last one is going to be close on finishing before the season starts and will likely take a hiatus until after the season if I don’t wrap it up in time before the Michigan State game.

Those of you who closely follow the blog know while I try to stick to my posting schedules, it doesn’t always come through. However, my last Friday post that said “find out tomorrow” for the next post, was unusually off the mark. Why?

Food poisoning!

I guess I should have known I was in for trouble when the place is called “Wonderful III Too!” but I didn’t. In any case, from Friday night until last night (yes 5 days) I’ve been hating life, particularly life more than about 15 feet from the restroom.

But the good news is that I’m back in action and I’ll get back to my Looking Back posts starting with reviewing the Arizona game Friday night, likely posted Saturday morning.

Ah, the end of Spring ball. It’s a time of peace and tranquility. It’s a time when families get to know each other again. It’s a time when, well, the BearInsider message board becomes a near panic with nothing to talk about besides artificially created flame wars about each other’s mothers.

So to keep the peace, you can expect a steady stream of posts here on EMFMV, including the following:

1. A “Looking back on ’05” series of posts recapping each game (starting Wednesday)
2. An analysis of each 2007 game and what it tells us about 2008
3. My early prediction for each 2008 game
4. Coverage of the SAHPC trial and any progress there (has to be something by mid-June)
5. Improvements to the auxilary pages including updated stadium pages in anticipation of my travels this fall
6. Likely a couple of podcasts with the whole EMFMV crew
7. An updated Pick’Em league page before fall practice starts

Any other requests?

There are a million fun “take this survey” sites that do some analysis or another in a very unscientific fashion. You can add to that list a new one, the “Blog and Website Cuss-O-Meter”:

As a point of comparision, here are the other Cal blogs I visit on occasion:

• California Golden Blogs: 6.2%
• Bear Necessity: 5.1%
• Cal Football Fan: 0.7%
• Oski Talk: 6.4%
• Rose Bowl Before I Die: 6.9%
• California Golden Bear Football: 1.0%
• BearTalk (with Jonathan Okanes): 6.3%
• College Hotline with Jon Wilner: 4.5%
• Sturdy Golden Bear: 8.2%
• Cal Bear Wire: n/a
• Bears With Fangs: n/a
• My Bear Territory: n/a

If you put in a bogus or very slow URI, it’ll give a 0% answer. So the n/a’s are ones I couldn’t get an answer back from as the sites were clearly responding slowly both to my own browser and to the Cuss-O-Meter. Noteworty however is Cal Football Fan, the one site that creates it’s own content that scored lower than me. Surprising was the high pecentage for Sturdy Golden Bear, who generally seemed to run a clean site at their now-defunct page (or at least it seems that way).

For what it is worth, as I said, the above list is all of the sites I frequent on occasion. That means it’s the sites from which I pick who goes on the blogroll. This summer I’ll be re-doing the blogroll and will be including new sites that have proven themselves to be worthy of being on my blogroll. For those who don’t know, I take which blogs I link to very seriously. There are those sites out there that’ll post a link to just about any blog they know of, and while that is a fine way to go about it, it has the downside of the list getting so long it is meaningless and hard to find the good needles in the haystack.

Here are the criteria I use:

1. Moral content: The #1 thing to prevent your blog from inclusion on the list is any content that is morally offensive. The most common example of this is frequent swearing. Does it really add anything to a post to say a player is f-ing pathetic? Find better words to describe yourself. Other examples include any suggestions of violence against anyone, this is college football not a war, or personal attacks against players or coaches beyond just their capabilities on the football field. It’s OK to say that Joe “Booya” Ayoob is the worst player to ever grace the Cal sideline and Tedford is a complete coaching moron to have let him stay behind center for as long as he did (even though I’d disagree), but to say you want to rip out his bowels and force-feed it to Tedford crosses the line. Finally, I expect the comment sections being in line with my moral standards and that the comments of the blog’s author on other blogs meet the standards as well (one blogger in particular suffers from this problem). For the comment sections, I don’t expect one to moderate to the degree that all comments meet my moral standards, but that truly, wildly objectional comments are deleted and somewhat to moderately objectionable content is somehow rebutted/chastized.
2. Frequency of posting: I’m only going to link to blogs with somewhat regular posting. Generally that means at least a couple posts a week during the season. I’m not too concerned with off-season posting but someone who is consistent all the time gets extra props.
3. Quality of posts: What this means depends on what your blog is trying to accomplish. If you’re just trying to report news, I’m not going to hold it against you that you don’t have detailed analysis. At the same time, if your goal is news and you’re always a week behind everyone else, well, that’s not very good news. On the other hand, if you’re a game-analyst type guy, I’m not going to hold slower posting against you, but I do expect that your analysis is meaningful. Generally what this means is if when I go to your blog, do I find something worth reading?
4. Longevity: I generally like to see that a blog has been around for atleast a year before it gets the nod. This is partially to give me time to judge based on the above criteria and also because lots of bloggers drop off within a month or two of blogging.

If you don’t care if you get a link on this blog, that’s fine. But if you do, those are the criteria I judge by. If your blog is not in the above list, consider this post a good place to comment and put your blog’s URL so that I can see if it is one I want to include in the fall.

Hello Bear Fans!

I’m back in business starting today and it looks like I didn’t miss much. There was no court ruling. Cal Basketball has played mediocre enough to make it to the NIT. Spring practice hasn’t started for football. What else is there?

Just so everyone knows, here’s the plan for blogging:

1. I’ll post on the Cal vs. OSU NIT game tonight
2. I’ll post on spring practice and am hoping to be able to go down a couple times to watch scrimages and the such
3. I’ll give updates on the trial and why the ruling is taking so long
4. I’ll take us on a walk down memory lane and the 2005 season (more on this in a sec)
5. Later in the spring I’ll review each of the 2007 games

About reviewing past games, I’m become a big fan of keeping DVD archives of every game. There’s always an excuse to go back and look at the old games. Part of making the DVD’s is to watch my finished product on the TV to make sure there were no writing errors and it plays on my DVD player. Since I recently got all of the 2005 games, I’ve got to go through and watch them all. I figure if I’m watching them, I might as well blog about them.

I’ll be doing the same thing with the 2007 season which I still need to download from my DVR and edit our the comercials. My goal is to do 1 a week of those leading up to fall practice.

I hope everyone is excited for the upcoming season as I am!

The server my website is hosted on just had a major upgrade and as all upgrades do, caused some problems to my website. The most visible of these was that I had to rename the ‘stats’ section of the website to be ‘statistics’ because their new admin features linked ‘stats’ to their stuff. This was stupid on their part, but that’s besides the point of this post.

The point here is that, for the last week or so the stats section wasn’t working. I’ve now fixed the problem and everything should be working as before. Please leave a comment if you see any problems.

Also note that if you added a bookmark/favorite that points directly to the stats page, you’re going to need to update it for the new location.

Back for blogging about Cal in less than 2 weeks.

Today is signing day for football. I encourage everyone to go over to the Cal Rival’s site (BearTerritory.net). AW’s coverage of recruiting at Cal is the best in the business.

As for my comments, today is also Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, a very important time of year for faithful Christians, particularly Catholics, throughout the world. Many Catholic bloggers “fast” (meaning abstain) from blogging during Lent as an act of penance. This year I’ll be fasting from Cal blogging, but will be bringing back to life my Catholic blog to add reflections on this Lenten season and comment on my eating fast (I’ll be following the rules of fasting for the entire season of Lent) as well.

If you’re interested in following that blogging, you can find it at http://thecrawfordfamily.net/blog. Otherwise, expect to see me back here on Easter Day (March 23rd) or shortly thereafter.

As some have noted, the posting on this site ground to a halt for the most part right around the time of the Big Game. While in part posting slowed due to their not being any more games and because there hasn’t been much positive to say, for me there has been an additional HUGE factor: My wife had our third child, another boy who we named Peter. Everyone here should cheer for joy!

While I can appreciate those who don’t see the upside to a Cal blogger going off-line for a month, there are/were some significant upsides:

• My wife managed to hold out past the Big Game so that I could attend with my two boys
• My wife didn’t kill me (thereby ending my blogging) for going to the Big Game less than a week before her due-date and over a 3 hour drive from home.
• Now there will be yet another die-hard fan in the stands every home game.
• I now have 3 potential Cal recruits who will be heavily biased towards the school. So far it appears Peter has the look of a Tight End with the big hands to gobble up anything the QB throws his way. That rounds out nicely the Wide Reciever that our eldest, Gregory, seems destined to be and the Fullback or perhaps Line Backer that our middle son, Andrew, seems built to be.

The additional good news is that Peter is settling into a good sleep pattern now and I am planning on making up for lost blogging time. Here’s a list of things to come:

• Big Game Podcast. (I recorded it on the way home but never posted)
• Thoughts on the SAHPC partial ruling
• Thoughts on Pac-10 bowl games already completed
• Preview of Armed Forces bowl
• Predictions/thoughts for other remaining Pac-10 bowl games

It’s good to be back.

Well, I picked the right time to flee the country, didn’t I? Missed a lackluster win, a rainy loss to USC (which I tuned in via the magic of satellite-based Internet while floating somewhere near Costa Rica), and then was at 30,000 feet during the UW debacle.

So, Big Game week! Love it. At least there’s something on the line for Cal.

Unlike Ken, I’m in the upper deck, row L or something, for the Big Game. So I’ll have a nice view from far away and at an angle. The new Stanford Stadium, for those Cal fans who are going for the first time, is gorgeous. I went there for a match of the other kind of football and it’s shocking how much better it is than the old stadium was. Until Memorial gets rebuilt, we can’t claim slightly-less-crappy-stadium bragging rights over the ‘Furd.

Saw an interesting item on the Golden Bear Football News site, with a 2008 schedule. It appears to be the same one as is posted at CalBears.com. If it’s true, the Big Game next year returns to the pre-Thanksgiving slot, which is good. That’s when the game should be played, in my opinion. This December Big Game stuff? I don’t approve. You want to play football in December, you’ve got two choices: play in a bowl game or schedule a game at Hawaii. Your choice.

Interesting schedule, though. Home game versus Michigan State at the end of August, then an early trip to the Polouse (best weather Cal’s ever had there, I’m guessing), and a road trip all the way to Maryland, followed by a bye week. Three consecutive home games in late September/early October, including the late out-of-conference Colorado State visit. Then one road game, two more home games in late October/early November, two November road games, and the final home game with Stanford.

November 8, 2007 at USC, then November 15, 2007 at Oregon State. Maybe I should firm up my international travel plans now.

UPDATE at 3:45 PM on October 29th: TwistNHook isn’t going to let me off the hook (snicker, snicker)… see the below corrections in bold.

ARG!?! All this time the problem was under our noses! WeI should have known that the Bears had no hope at the Rose Bowl with it firmly planted on my sidebar schedule on the blog. What was I thinking!?! Thank God TwistNHook found it too late.

All insults and disgust can now be put on me for cursing the Bears. (Including taking additional claims of finding said error.)

(I changed it today… but it was far too late)

OK, I needed a day just to de-stress and de-disgust myself. Starting today I’ll do my usual post-game blogging. The podcast was recorded after the game on Saturday and I just need to convert and crop it and the such. It should be up later today. I’ll do a game review/recap this evening. Finally, expect a “all the questions that have gone through my mind” post about reasons I’ve thought may be the underlying cause of the 3 game skid.

After that, on to WSU.

OK, I’m going to give this a try. We’ll see how it goes. I did a test run today for the Boise St. vs. Fresno St. game and technologically speaking it went well. I’m going to have to improve my play-by-play announcing but I think I got into a rythym by the end. I’m hopeful that when I know the players it’ll go a lot better.

In any case, here’s how it’ll work. For those who just want to listen, click on the below object (on the play button once the broadcast has started):

UPDATE: Show has been cancelled due to technical difficulties.

You’ll be able to listen to it from there. For those who want to call in during the comercials, you have two options. You can call a long-distance phone number (724-444-7444) and then when prompted enter the show code (64411). It’ll then ask you for a pin which you’ll have if you’ve registered with TalkShoe (it’ll make it easier for me to recognize you if you call in if you do) or you can bypass that and come in anonymously. The other option is to download the TalkShoe software and use a headset hooked up to your computer to connect in. Either way is fine by me.

Jason has been doing a great job with the live-blogging on game day (for the away games, we’re all in the stands for home games) and he has seemlessly integrated my comments when I’ve participated. There’s a good chance we’ll stick with that plan moving forward, both because what I’m proposing may not interest people and because Jason may decide to continue doing that even if my proposal flies. (I haven’t discussed this with him yet.)

But I’m mulling over the idea of doing something different. After going on The BruinShow last week I was intrigued about doing something similar. My thought was that a midweek show would be pretty difficult and would require coordination beyond what I’m up for this season. However, I’ve also had a tick in the back of my mind that I might have a talent for being a radio announcer despite the fact that I don’t necessarily have a good radio voice (although I do have a radio face if you know what that is 🙂 ).

So here’s what I’m proposing:

I’ll open up a Live-Podcast session like TalkShoe or NowLive about a half-hour before gametime on Saturday for people to listen to on their computers. I’ll call the game, perhaps with Jason or Phil or my brother or one of the guys at California Golden blogs as a co-host (for those listed, let me know if you’d be interested) but have a feature that Starkey can’t give you: comericial breaks and halftime will be a call-in show (and perhaps there will be moments to take calls during the game depending on how things play out). With services like TalkShoe or NowLive you can either make a phone call to get on the system or connect from your computer with a headset.

There are a few things I’m worried about (beyond that I may suck at announcing):

• I’ll be new to using services like TalkShoe or NowLive so may have technical difficulties
• I’m not sure if I can “mute” those calling in so that I can have an orderly call-in show
• I’m sure that I’ll be coming through to you delayed by at least 10 seconds

For those with a DVR, the last one should be no big deal because you can just watch the game a little bit delayed so that I’m synced up with the game.

In any case, before I invested a bunch of time on this, I wanted to see what the interest might be in this. Would anyone listen and/or participate?