盆栽はどこで買える？

会社の同僚が親戚のため盆栽を買ってプレセントしたいそうですが、北東オハイオならどこで買えるかは分かりません。　どなたか分かりますか？　

Browns Beat Saints!

What a great game to watch! The Browns beat the New Orleans Saints with a final score of 30-17. But more than winning, it was the way they won. The offense wasn't great, but it didn't need to be. It needed to be solid and it was. In particular with that long 7 minute drive in the fourth quarter. Mostly Hillis just doing what he does, running and hitting defenders as hard as he can.

And the Special Teams made some great, fun-to-watch plays. Cribbs throwing across the field on a punt return; the punter Hodges faking the kick and running up the wide-open middle of the field for 68 yards. Just not plays I would expect the Browns to call let alone execute effectively. And both lead to points.

And the defense was excellent. Yes we got burned on a couple of plays, but for the most part Brees looked completely confused. He was intercepted 4 times, two being pick 6s, and was sacked 3 times. So while the Saints racked up close to 400 yards of offense, in the end most of those yards were for naught as the Browns found a way to stop them.

I tweeted during the game that for the last two games I have been relatively pleased with the offensive play calling. I wondered whether that represents the impact of Mike Holmgren. And while that may be true, the reality is that I think it's the play of Colt McCoy. Granted, the offense didn't do much in this game. I read over at WFNY that we had grand total of 12 first downs and I know we only had something like 74 yards passing. And 12-13 of those on the trick play where Hillis threw a pass to Colt McCoy. The reality is that we don't really have any wide receivers that keep defenses honest, but we were still able to make a long time-consuming drive when we had to. And that's progress.

But I think the real reason that I've been pleased with the offensive play calling is Colt McCoy. In his first start he reminded me a little of Brady Quinn, or rather a deer caught in headlights. But that didn't last long and he started to show confidence and leadership. He looked that way for the whole Saints game. And I don't remember specifically, but I don't remember a boneheaded play. At a minimum, there were no turnovers.

My problem with Delhomme is not the picks, but the types of picks. Any quarterback is going to have picks. It's gonna happen when you have NFL caliber defenses to play against. What I don't like are the boneheaded picks, like the one Jake had in the first game as he was getting tackled. He's been in the league too long to try and make a pass as he's going down. That's boneheaded, and that's my only concern with Jake. Other than that, he reads the defenses well, can audible successfully.

I also like what Seneca brings to the table. With one exception - his throws to the sidelines are 10 yards out of bounds, not even giving the receivers a chance to catch the throws. Yes, the defense doesn't have a chance to pick it because in most cases the receivers have been covered, but its a waste of a throw. And I saw that multiple times with Seneca.

With Colt, though, I haven't seen a boneheaded throw, and for the most part his accuracy is dead on. Throws to the sideline are where only our receiver can catch it. Regardless of whether the throws have been successful or not, he puts it where it needs to be.

So I'm tempted to say Colt should start for the rest of the season. I hear many commenters say that's what the want so we can determine whether he's a "franchise quarterback". I disagree. We don't need a "franchise quarterback". What we need is a servicable quarterback as we get folks to fill the roster - like the right side of the line, some quality receivers(!!), something for better pass rush and coverage. We have so many holes still that Brown's fans obsession with quarterbacks is annoying.

Colt is more than good enough. But what I don't want is to rush him along and get him hurt. So I'll come down on the side of if Jake and Seneca are healthy Colt goes back to third quarterback on the team.

MHS Soccer Ends Regular Season

Mayfield High School's boys varsity soccer team ended the regular season with a 2-1 win over Lakewood High School.  They ended the season 12-3-1 and are headed to the playoffs where I expect them to do real well if they don't have mental lapses.  If they do as well as I expect, they will run into St. Ignatius in the District Finals again, although I must admit I don't know the seeding or schedule.

More importantly though, Ken actually got playing time in a game where MHS wasn't up by 3 or more goals.  It was still 1-1 when came in to the game. And for probably the first time this season, Ken came is a midfielder.  They had him in as right midfielder.  So he got 10 minutes playing time in a position he hasn't played all season.

And most importantly, he scored the winning goal in a scrum in front of the net.  

Congratulations Ken!

And congratulations to the rest of the team for a great regular season!

Adding Discus to Blogger

Has adding Disqus to blogger gotten any easier?

Maybe, just maybe: http://www.cooltricksntips.com/2010/06/add-disqus-comments-to-blogger-blog.html

Testing from my Neohawk.org Account

I am testing the email posting capability  of blogger from my neohawk.org email account.

This weekend I am looking around at some of the changes related to the Google Apps infrastructure change that I took advantage of for the Neohawk.Org domain.

For example, I logged into my Google Sites site that I use to play around and see what's up with sites this morning.   It has been a really long time since I have logged into a google sites.  One of the first things I notice is that the "announcement" content type now provides an RSS feed.  The lack of an rss feed was one of the major reasons I never seriously considered Google Sites a serious solution to anything.  It was simply a toy.   Now that it has rss feeds at least for the announcements content type that may change.

I can certainly think of possiblities for using sites now.  Since one use case I have certainly doesn't require any serious effort to provide a nice look and feel (sites ability to customize look and feel still sucks, but I guess that's the price you pay for an easy-to-use, highly google apps integrated site).   Unfortunately, that use case requires that we get JANO re-classified as a 501c3.

Oberlin Hosts Kenny Endo Taiko Concert

Kenny Endo, a world-renowned taiko player, along with four other equally talented musicians in a concert that focuses on Traditional Japanese instruments, like fue, shamisen, and koto, as well as contemporary jazz influences, like the vibraphone will have a concert sponsored by a taiko group at Oberlin University.

Sorry for the Noise - Transferring Posts

My apologies if you got a rash of posts via my rss feed.

I try to keep neohawk.org/blog and this blog in sync, but I had let it go for a while.   I need to make a more concerted effort to do this as I think that at the end of the year, I will be completely migrating to this blog for the neohawk.org website.  I have been using byteflow on a virtual host for a few years now and am certainly more than satisfied with it.  But the virtual host does cost money, minimal though it is, which I'd rather not pay if I don't have to.  

Additionally, blogger added the capability to add up to 10 static web pages to a blog which is more than sufficient to handle the minimal amount of pages I have at neohawk.  Moreover, with the transition to the new google infrastructure this fall, I'll be able to use my neohawk.org account to manage the blog.  So that's part of it even though, as I point out in this post, that at least for the time being, it will not be possible to manage blogger from the google apps dashboard.

But in the end, it's one less payment and one less thing I need to manage.   With blogger, I'm just a user I don't need to worry about managing the infrastructure behind it.  It just is.

Actually, this is a pretty big decision.  I have been "blogging" since 1999 though the vast majority of those posts are sitting on DVD.  I started with a simple html web site, but quickly realized it's limitations.  I moved to Zope, and then the CMF (Content Management Framework) for Zope.  I then switched to Plone.  Upon moving to the U.S. I realized that Plone was way more than I needed and it's resource requirements was not something for which I was willing to play.  So for the last 4 years or so, I have been using Django, and in particular Byteflow, a blog system built on it.

I've always like running my own servers, and playing around with new open source software.  These days, however, I simply do not have the time.  And so, in combination of being able to use my neohawk.org domain not only for google apps, but the most of the rest of Google's services, I will make the transition.  

But I won't make it until Google force transitions my google apps domain to the new infrastructure.  So we still have a couple of months before this blog becomes www.neohawk.org.