Starting a new job in February

Today after 4 1/2 years, I turned in my resignation at Craftsmen. As of February 1st, I will be working at Georgia Pacific as a Graphics and Packaging Coordinator. I am pretty excited about this opportunity and the work that I will be doing. In my current position I deal mainly with lithographic and digital printing. In my new position I will be coordinating flexographic projects and doing graphics filework for it as well.

The option is back at GSU

As of Monday, the triple option is officially back in Statesboro after a 4 year hiatus. It was announced last week that Jeff Monken will take over as head coach of the Eagles (<–click to read history). Jeff Monken is currently the slotbacks  position coach and special teams coordinator with Paul Johnson at Georgia Tech. Monken has been with Paul Johnson’s coaching staff for 13 years. This includes 4 years at Georgia Southern helping to lead the Eagles to 2 more National Championships running the option.

Up until 4 years ago, we have run the triple option almost since the beginning in 1981, winning all 6 of our National Championships running it. The option was part of our tradition at Georgia Southern. When run with discipline, it’s ridiculously hard to stop, is fun to watch and does not require top recruits we tend to lose to much larger schools running pass heavy offenses.  With it, Paulson had the best home record in the country. Other teams feared us and few teams walked away from Paulson with a win. Then, for some strange reason at the end of the 2005 season, the AD, Sam Baker, decided to fire head coach Mike Sewak (who was the offensive coordinator at GSU under Paul Johnson and is currently the offensive coordinator at Georgia Tech under Paul Johnson again) who was 34-14 in 4 years at GSU and took us to the playoffs 3 of those years; and scrap the option because “no one uses it anymore”.  Maybe it was Sewak’s poor academic performance, maybe it was his break with Erk Russell or because some of the players were getting into trouble….whatever the reason, they ended up firing a good, up and coming head coach that could have really taken the program places with a couple of more years of learning under his belt.

Then began the downhill slide of Georgia Southern football that includes only the 2nd and 3rd losing seasons we have ever had. The offense became boring, predictable and unable to put points on the board. During this time, Paul Johnson is running the same offense at Georgia Tech (and Navy before that) and having incredible success with it, proving the option works at any level of competition. So, outgoing president Grube (still angry about remarks Hatcher made about academic standards affecting recruiting) and Baker decide to fire Chris Hatcher an hour after his last game (who was running a passing offense like they wanted 4 years prior) after only 3 years and only 2 recruiting classes and return to the option. I think Hatcher had too much competition from the larger BCS and other FCS schools for the recruits he needed to truly make his offense work, however, I also think Hatcher got a raw deal and should have had one more year to fully prove himself. Incoming president, Dr. Keel, maybe the master behind all of this and Baker maybe sent packing soon after Keel takes over in January…but only time will tell if that is true and that’s all beside the point. Now Monken is bringing the option back and with it a piece of Georgia Southern’s tradition. To me, it’s the most exciting thing that has happen in GSU football since we broke App State’s home winning streak in 2007. Hopefully the school administration will be patient and give Monken a chance to bring back another piece of our tradition….another National Championship.

Vitas What?

Check out about 2:35 in this video. You’ll know it when you hear it:

What note is that?

How to create MP3 ringtones for free using Apple iTunes

Since Tammy and I both got new phones not too long ago, I decided to get a bluetooth module for our computer so we could transfer photos and such wirelessly from our phones to our computer without all of the proprietary USB cabling for each phone and junk software. This also allows us to upload our own ring tones. I did a little research and you can actually make your own MP3 ringtones using iTunes and it’s free. Just make sure your phone can read MP3’s as ringtones (most can).

First you want to set the import settings to something the phone can read and play easily. Go to preferences (On a Mac Apple Menu > Preferences, on Windows Edit > Preferences). As shown in the screen shot below, on the General tab, click the Import Settings button. Make sure your using the MP3 encoder, then in settings, select Custom.

Change your Sample Rate to 22.050khz and Channels to Mono as shown below.

Click OK and close out the preferences pane.

Now, pick out a song you want to make a ringtone, listen to it and determine what 30 second or less clip you would like. I chose Flare by Relient K. Write down the start and end time of that clip. Once you determined what section of the song you want, do a Get Info on the song. You can do this by highlighting the song and right clicking or on the keyboard using CRTL+I in Windows or Command+I on a Mac. In the info pane, you want to click the Options tab as shown below.

Put in your start and stop times you wrote down. This is considered non destructive editing which means that it does not change the original file, so you will still have the complete song intact. Just remember to go back and uncheck the Start Time and Stop Time boxes when you are done so iTunes will play the whole song.

I did a 25 second clip to be safe. Please note that iTunes uses time codes not just the number of seconds, so remember to complete the time code.

Now play it to double check that it is playing the clip of the song you want. If you are satisfied with it, right click (CRTL+click on a single button Mac mouse) and select Create MP3 Version from the sub menu (as shown below).

Please note, selecting Create Ringtone will lead you the iTunes store and prompt you to create and purchase the ringtone from Apple of the song you selected. You can do this, but then it isn’t free.

iTunes will encode and create an MP3 using the settings we entered earlier. Then, just select the resulting MP3, click and drag to your desktop, as shown below.

Then transfer this to your phone via bluetooth or USB. Please note that some phones have size limits for ringtones. For my phone (a Samsung Solstice) the limit is 300k. Just check the size of the MP3 on your desktop before uploading to your phone to make sure it is under the specified limit for your phone.

After you are done, remember to go back to preferences and change your iTunes import settings back to their original settings and to also deselect the Start Time and Stop Time boxes in the info pane.

Upgraded to Windows 7

I got my free upgrade disc in so, this weekend I upgraded to Windows 7 from Windows Vista. I chose to do a complete reformat because I wanted to eliminate possibility of something going wrong . I had to back up my data, reformat and reinstall all of my programs, so all of that took several hours, but it’s worth it.

Click image above for original size image

Windows 7 is definitely a lot better performance wise and is starts up in about half the time. The tool bar takes a little getting used to  for me because it looks like the dock in OS X, but it works differently. Overall, it seems very stable, visually pleasing and runs like Vista should have.

Here are my sub scores from Windows 7. Windows 7’s max sub score is raised from Vista’s 5.9 to 7.9

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9550 @2.83GHz – 7.3
Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB – 5.9
Graphics Intel(R) G45/G43 Express Chipset – 4.6
Gaming graphics 1695 MB Total available graphics memory – 3.6
Primary hard disk 405GB Free (466GB Total) – 5.9

Not bad.