I Like Kragthorpe

I know bad. I'm a lifelong Cincinnati Bengals fan. So trust me on this.

Steve Kragthorpe is not bad. He's outstanding. C'mon Louisville, let's show some intelligence, fortitude and foresight. Stick with this man.

Following a tight loss to arch rival Kentucky, there will be many calling for Coach K to move on. That is a mistake.

The Louisville team, left in shambles following coach Bobby Petrino's ill-advised Faustian dalliance, is showing resolve. The team is playing spirited football. Better yet, the offense isn't dependent upon a handful of weapons (quarterback Justin Burke completed 15 passes to six different receivers for 245 passing yards).

Sure, the Cards have dropped three straight games to the Wildcats. But the Wildcats are enjoying the success that comes from building a program properly. Kentucky endured difficult seasons while Coach Rick Brooks rebuilt the program (decimated itself by the previous administration's mismanagement).

Louisville, whether you wish to admit it or not, has had to deal with the ramifications of its previous coach's annual lust for other coaching positions. Analysts, too, agree Petrino's recruiting classes failed to materialize.

Those are not Kragthorpe's sins. The man is rebuilding the program. Give him time.

Any knowledgeable sports fan knows a game is not won or lost as the result of a single play. That's why the Bengals last-second loss last week wasn't the fault of blown coverage on a single play. It was the culmination of a series of failures (inability to convert third downs, passing a field goal snap over the holder's head, etc.) that spelled doom that day.

The same is true of Trent Guy's fumbling of a punt return attempt late in yesterday's game. When asked about it, Kragthorpe became animated. "Don't say a word about Trent Guy because that guy's a stud."

Coach Kragthorpe has his player's backs. Now it's time we cover Coach K's back.

Why Mechanics Are Artists

It's no secret many people feel good mechanics are like artists. I've always felt that to be true, especially when it comes to my own computer troubleshooting and repair efforts. Now, thanks to my book club having selected Matthew Crawford's Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into The Value of Work as it's next read, I know why.

Crawford quotes English philosopher Iris Murdoch as describing good art as seeming mysterious "because it resists the easy patterns of the fantasy." Explained differently, Murdoch writes "Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision."

This is where the word idiot comes from.

In Greek, Crawford writes, idios means private. Rather than serving a public role, in which an individual gets outside him or herself to grasp a public role, "which entails, or should, a relationship of active concern to others," an idiot is not involved. Crawford argues the point, specifically in this case, using an example from Robert Pirsig's wonderful Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Crawford continues, stating, "But getting outside her own head is the task the artist sets herself, and this is the mechanic's task, too. Both, if they are good, use their imagination 'not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real.' This is the exhilaration the mechanic gets when he finds the underlying cause of some problem."

To be a good mechanic, Crawford concludes, one must possess attentive openness and constantly be open to the possibility that they are mistaken. It's kind of counterintuitive, but I believe he's spot on.

"I've got to knock it to the ground"

So says Cincinnati Bengals cornerback Leon Hall.

You think?

You be the judge.

I'm embarrassed to have been at that game, to have been a witness to such futility and to be a fan of such inane, decades-long incompetence.

Beware Child Monitoring Software

Boing Boing today lists a story I originally saw break on other sites earlier this holiday weekend. Web monitoring software designed to help protect children is actually collecting information from children's chat sessions and selling it to market research companies.

Sentry and FamilySafe are the two brands at the center of the storm. Parent company EchoMetrix developed a data-mining tool called Pulse to help businesses better tap into the data its software collects. Using that data, marketers could explore the mindsets of children and youth, presumably to aid marketing efforts. For example, the Web monitoring software captures communications from public and private chat sessions to help determine how teens feel about movies, games and other trends.

This is one more reason to avoid software-based Web filtering and monitoring applications. Other reasons are: they're expensive, they rob system resources and slow performance, they cause incompatibilities with other programs and they're easily circumvented.

Better solutions are hardware- or network-based. While not every home can reasonably implement a business-class content-filtering router, Open DNS offers everyone a simple, free service that can block most children's access to inappropriate material. For more information, visit Open DNS on the Web.

E*Trade Ads

In honor of my opening an online stock trading account, I give you this:



No, I don't know where I've been...