Square Galaxy

Today I was looking through a Safeway (grocery store) ad, and they had a little section in their multi-page ad titled,”Essentials.” I found some of the things there a little interesting. This is what Safeway considers essential:

• Goldfish Crackers
• Handi-Snacks Pudding Cups
• Boost Nutritional Energy Drink

I must be doing pretty bad because I’ve missed out on those essentials for quite a long time.

I found this line in my HP job offer which I found to be kind of overwhelming:

You will be working for the TSG ESS BCSD HSTD Staff Department in the Business Critical Server Divis (BCSD) Organization.

That acronym soup is worse than what I found working at Intel. Funny…. um, almost.

Today Apple announced the Mac Book Air and new ultra-slim laptop computer. Weighing only 3 pounds, this notebook is like someone flattened a Mac Book. Here are a couple of deal breakers for me with the Mac Book Air:

• No user replaceable battery
• No Firewire
• No DVD player (or optical drive
• No built in Ethernet connector
• $1800 starting price
• Only one usb port
• Only 1.6GHz processor speed (the slowest Mac Book is 2 GHz)
• Only a 4200 RPM hardrive (pretty slow)

On the other hand, it is a cute little computer that would be quite a bit more comfortable hauling around all day in my backpack. I am still. however, exceptionally worried about the built in battery. I’ve had two batteries on my iBook be recalled because of their poof-potential. I would hate to have to go through the trouble of servicing my laptop or watching it explode if ever the battery were to explode.

Just before Christmas, I wrote my favorite sister missionary a letter on this nice piece of colorful paper which I had to fold like a bazillion times just to get it to fit in the envelope. I sent it to Salt Lake City to be included in a “pouch” full of correspondence that is sent to her mission all together.

It bounced.

I got it back in the mail as unable to be forwarded along because it didn’t meet current pouch restrictions.

This is kind of a big deal for me because I’m really quite horrible at writing letters, and this was the first letter in a long time that I was sending her. For me to write a real letter is a real deal.

Apparently letters that go through the pouch need to be as normal as possible, and that means one normal piece of typing paper, tri-folded normally, with two normal pieces of tape to seal the paper shut with the ends open.

What got me was the message on the return to sender label which said, “Contact your bishop for further details.”

On the first day of 2008, Georgia football beat Hawaii in the sugar bowl, 41-10. Normally, a team from the a conference like that WAC isn’t even invited to play in a BCS like the Sugar Bowl. However, Hawaii’s undefeated season won them that rare opportunity this year, even though they never played an opponent that was nationally ranked.

Had Hawaii won, it would have made a strong argument that any team that can go undefeated should go to a big-time bowl. Hawaii’s loss, however, suggests that a football program needs to do more than simply go a season without loosing. Consider this Sugar Bowl story quote from Rivals.com writer Steve Megargee:

Usually when a top team from a BCS conference faces an upstart from a less established league, the BCS program is going to win. Even in a year as crazy as this one.

BYU isn’t one of those teams blessed to belong to a BCS conference. In order for BYU to ever play in a bowl games like the Sugar Bowl, BYU will have to be ranked as one of the very top football teams in the country (probably top-10). That ranking will be even more difficult now that Hawaii, ranked number 10 before their loss, has shown that simply being undefeated isn’t proof of a great football team.

BYU is going to have to do more than play great and win all their games. BYU will have to do that against other teams that are considered great.

Good news comes from the fact that even though the BYU’s Mountain West Conference isn’t a BCS conference, 4 of the 5 teams from the conference that played in various (smaller) bowl games won those games.