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?

First an important public service announcement: Me and my Trident are NOT happy.

In any case, it perhaps looks as though after yesterday’s tragedy that ExcuseMeForMyVoice.com has gone into hibernation. Fear not friends! One can expect the following posts throughout the day (Sunday):

1. Just how disgusted I am
2. Podcast posting (already recorded)… aka Just how disgusted I am, part II
3. Who’s leaving? just what makes a good Cal fan
4. Game analysis/review
5. Reasons to hope despite all evidence to the contrary

Got to finish on a high note…

Just an FYI. Both myself and Ragnarok from The California Golden Blogs will be on tonight’s episode of the BruinShow. It airs from 6-7 PM. You can listen to it from here:

http://bruinshow.com/?p=17

I guess we’ll be up in the 2nd half of the hour.

Just a quick self congratulations to Jason and I: We’ve reached 100 posts! …and it only took 66 days to do so.

Here’s to hoping that we’ll be toasting our 1000th post in a couple years and still going strong.

I had intended to write a Oregon trip recap blog post with pictures and stuff from the trip including a bunch from the GameDay site. I didn’t have the energy for that either. Are people still interested in that or is it too late? I’ll do it tonight if I get sufficient comments desiring it.

Today’s my birthday. And a Saturday. As always, there are baseball playoff games on. And, oddly enough, no Cal game. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time my birthday and a Cal game have coincided.

Turns out it hasn’t happened since 1990, when I was in college and Bruce Snyder was guiding the Bears to their first bowl appearance since 1979. (Copper Bowl! Lack of an MLK holiday be damned!) On October 6, Cal took care of mighty San Jose State by a single point.

Oddly enough, this is the second October 6 in a row on which Cal has had a bye. Thanks, guys. As the attendees to my 30th birthday party discovered (I spent most of the party rending garments over a horrendous Giants playoff loss to the Mets), it’s best not to mix friendly socializing and my sports obsessions. Yes, I know I have a problem.

So, my birthday and Saturday collide again in 2012. Bye week or conference game? I can wait to find out. (Cal does play at Ohio State in 2012, but that game’s scheduled for September 15.)

When I decided to move away from the personal Cal blog at my family URL to a dedicated Cal Bears blog, I had high hopes. Those hopes grew even higher when Jason and Phil agreed to come on board.

Those hopes have been more than realized in the first full calendar month (after going live about a week into August).

In September over 5000 unique people came to ExcuseMeForMyVoice.com in nearly 20,000 visits and over 200,000 total hits for the month. (As a comparison point, my peak month during the 2006 season back at the family URL had just over 700 visitors and 10,000 hits.) All I can say is WOW.

Thank you to everyone who has supported ExcuseMeForMyVoice.com by visiting and commenting.

As always, we love getting good/honest feedback about the site, both positive and negative. If you have some suggestions as to areas we can improve or have features you like that you’d like us to continue/emphasize, consider this post the best place to post those comments.

Well I wondered how long it would take for the new blog to get “found” by the comment spammers. They’re back in force, submitting about 5-10 comment spams a day. It’ll only get worse. I had been filtering them by number of links in the comment, but in addition to that having the side-effect of moderating a couple of valid comments who included more than one link, it also didn’t stop the spammers smart enough to only post one link.

The point of all of this is that I’m going to have to take more aggressive action. I’ve enabled a spam plugin called Akismet which is supposed to work pretty well without requiring any action by the commentors. It works the same way e-mail spam checkers work by comparing comments to known instances of spam. We’ll see how it works. I fear that it’ll either block too many valid comments or not block enough of the spam comments. If you find that your comments aren’t going through, please e-mail me at blog aT thecrawfordfamily d0t net.

If this spam plugin doesn’t work, I’ll step things up to the math based comment filter that requires you to answer a simply math question like “what’s the integral of X squared over the square-root of X where X is unbound?” OK, OK, OK, I’ll stick with whats 3 + 4 or something like that. That worked pretty well over at my old blog and didn’t seem to bother the commentors too much.

Let me know in the comment box if you have any suggestions for how to rid the earth of these digital scumbags.

OK, I know I promised it on the 10th, but I didn’t take into account my vacation over the weekend. Nevertheless, the stats section is now up and running and allows for comparing any of the Pac-10 teams and their opponents. Louisiana Tech is looking pretty strong just based on their numbers…

I’m going on vacation this weekend and may not have internet access until Tuesday afternoon. For some reason my Mom doesn’t recognize that it’s football season and I need to watch the game and post my links! I’ll be listening to the game on the radio and then review the CSTV TV broadcast on Tuesday. I’ll post my podcast and blog reviews Tuesday if I can’t get to them sooner although I’ll try to post based on the radio broadcast sooner if I can.

(An aside to all those who think Starkey is horrible: Get a clue. Starkey is awesome and you’re an idiot.)

Hi, I’m Jason Snell, and I’ve been known to obsess about Cal Football. I’ve been blogging about Cal Football for a few years over at Sturdy Golden Blog and Ken and I thought we’d try to join forces and see how the shoes fit.

The short version of my bio: I’ve been going to Cal games since I was a little kid. My season tickets, in section FF, are the same seats my family has had since I was little. My dad has been a Cal football fan and season ticketholder since the mid-’60s, and he brought me up right. Roger Theder? Saw him coach. J Torchio? Saw him be not a very good QB. The Play? We stayed home because the weather looked bad. But I listened to it live on the radio in my bedroom. In my professional life I’m an editor for a magazine and web site.

Anyway, I’m happy to join forces with Ken and contribute to Excuse Me For My Voice. I hope you’ll all become regular readers of this blog during the football season.

(Photo: Abu Ma’a’fala, Holiday Bowl, December 2006, by yours truly.)

It’s a whole new site, with a whole bunch of new information. Please answer the poll question on the right about whether you like the new site. Any suggestions for improvement are welcome in the comment box.