Here’s what’s happening with us in Upstate. We’re settled. The apartment no longer smells of smoke (it was the AC filter). Work is great, though I have to remember I’m new (especially in department meetings). Ben is liking school, and they’ve finally put him in a reading group… with third graders. Miles still gets homesick from time to time. He once wouldn’t come in from the car because he wanted to, “go home.” He told his grandparents he was getting on a plane to come see them. That’s the toughest part. Brooke’s doing well considering we have one car and the weather (rain, not snow) is forcing me to drive to work. We’re looking for a hobby for her.

Apple computers are great for doing simple things. If all you do is check email, write a paper, etc., you’ll probably never have any issues. But, as soon as you try to do something “different,” you run into a sea of confusing error messages and hoops to jump through.

For example, I wanted to install the GIMP (an open source image manipulation program) on my new MacBook. Googling led me to this page, which had a GIMP package for Mac OS X, but it required X11 (a popular Unix windowing environment). Thinking I already had X11, I downloaded the GIMP, but it didn’t run. It told me I needed X11.

So, I go to Apple’s site, find this page, download the X11 installer, only to find it won’t work with my version of OS X. But there’s hope! It says:

“Note 10.4 customers can install X11 by using the Tiger DVD installer disk.”

Ok, I have my install disks… Where is the installer? Hmmm. I use the “Install Bundled Software Only,” but then it takes an hour to reinstall all the applications I already have (and doesn’t solve my problem). So, back to Google I go to find this page.

It turns out that the installer is “hidden.” You have to scroll down to find the “Optional Installs” package and then use that to install X11. This is so typical of Apple’s approach: Hide the expert settings so as not to confuse those who don’t know. While this may not bother the elite who would probably download the X11 source code and compile it themselves, those of us, mid-range power users are left scratching our heads.

This weekend’s college football lineup offered the usual “Sacrificial Lambs” (as NPR put it). Small schools play at the big boys’ stadiums for a big payout. I remember an announcer saying after one such game ended with the home team predictably crushing their opponent, “Well, one team got the win they needed, and the other will get that new weight room.”

Some may not have noticed that college football, apparently trying to convince people the insipid bowl system is here to stay, has renamed their divisions from I-A and I-AA to the “Football Bowl Subdivision” and the “Football Championship Subdivision.” The unforeseen consequence of this may be that the divisions’ names no longer imply a difference in quality. Yesterday, this point was emphasized as the two-time defending champion of the FCS beat the #5 team in the FBS.

If there was ever an argument for why we need a playoff in college football, this is it. If the mantra of the BSC cronies, that “every game counts,” is true, then Michigan needs to drop out of the Top 25. The truth is that ever game counts only if you’re not in the six colluding BCS conferences. The truth is, in all sports, “anything can happen.” This is why we love basketball’s March Madness: upsets that count, cinderellae who are remembered even if they don’t win it all, and the fairness of every conference champ getting to dance.

Moving to a less-important upset, but one that demonstrates the snobbery of the “haves” in college football, Virginia came into Laramie, Wyoming and got whooped. Asked about playing at over 7,000 feet above sea level, before leaving cozy Charlottesville (600 feet above sea level) the Virginia coach commented, “It is what it is. [Wyoming] is playing at the same altitude.”

Are you kidding me? Are the sports medicine majors at Virginia so bad that they couldn’t tell the coach that the human body acclimates to high altitudes? Of course, the BCS schools (no matter how bad they are) are so superior to the “mid-majors” that they should beat them under water, so why worry about altitude.