The Hopp Stop

• A blogger installed a SSD hard drive in his 2009 13″ MacBook Pro. This is exactly what I did (replacing the optical drive so that I now have a 100GB SSD for the OS and a 1TB regular hard drive for my files), and it’s easily the best computer upgrade I have ever done, well worth the money. My computer is so much more responsive, it’s almost unbelievable. Moving to an SSD really opens your eyes to how much the storage system serves as a bottleneck in today’s computers. I went with an OWC SSD, as the reviews were all glowing.
• This week’s NY Times Magazine has a long article on Oregon’s high-speed football offense.
• Burrito Justice is up to his usual cool work in San Francisco, putting together some resources on the Cone of Invisibility for Mission/Bernal residents, in which the BoA building blocks the Transamerica Pyramid. One note from the end of the post: there used to be a quarry on top of Bernal, evident in one of the photos.
• The NY Times has an article about increasing use of rabbit ears to get HDTV. I’ve actually been using a $40 HDTV antenna (complete with rabbit ears for VHF frequences, as well as quasi-futuristic ray gun part for UHF frequencies–or perhaps it is the other way around) for a month now, and it works quite well, especially since I can connect it to my TiVo for DVR usage. There is some susceptibility to interference if you move the antenna or sit by it when watching, but it’s tough to complain given the monthly price ($0). We’ve also been using Netflix streaming and Hulu Plus to get our TV fill, and have purchased some shows via iTunes (e.g., Mad Men). The only thing missing is live sports, which would be covered if Cablevision was an ESPN3 partner–then I could watch live sports on my Xbox 360.
• Road trains in Europe? Sounds pretty good to me, as it means more efficient utilization of roads without road infrastructure investments. I expect that automated driving will involve a mesh network between cars, not communication with the roads, given the cost of building out a smart road infrastructure combined with challenges of keeping it current.

Thanks to Every Day Should Be Saturday for this hilariously scathing takedown of some football-oriented country crap rock from Kenny Chesney.

A sample paragraph:

He sucks, and most things do, but when he dips his toes across into the realm of football they deserve to be chainsawed off at the nearest convenience. The entire song is supposedly about football, but it’s really about how Kenny Chesney should be bound and gagged, bundled into an uninsulated rocket filled with honey badgers, and shot into the sun. Oddly enough, this is what we think every Kenny Chesney song is about. Hm.

DBag alert!

For the first time since graduation in 2000, I caught Big Game in person this year. Jim Harbaugh has turned around the Stanford program in a big way after a 1-11 season in 2006, the last year under Walt Harris. Coming in to this year’s game, most Cardinal fans were very optimistic: Stanford had just beaten Oregon and USC in consecutive games, exerting their will on the opposing defenses, and Cal would be without Jahvid Best, their best player. Unfortunately, things did not work out as we had hoped, but I had a good time nonetheless with my friends Siedel and Cynthia.

Some photos from the day (click for larger versions):

Siedel and I with our styling fraternity Big Game shirts from 1996 and 1998, respectively. We sold these as fundraisers.

We met up with some old friends, who were also former players, at a tailgate next to the stadium.

Cynthia poses with a Weenie.

I was able to get some good shots of the game action with my telephoto lens.