Words I sometimes need to hear

Today's simultaneously inspirational and depressing quotation comes from an e-mail exchange between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell. At one point, Gladwell speculates about the reason for some professional athletes' apparent lack of work ethic (emphasis mine):

"This is actually a question I'm obsessed with: Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so? Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?

"The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare."

I want to respond to this, but I fear that if I start writing, I might not stop—and that's not in your best interest, even if it might be in mine. So I'll just say that these words are deeply challenging to me and leave it at that.

Update your feeds

I've had a couple people tell me that the old RSS feed for my blog no longer updates since I switched from sjaustin.blogspot.com to www.sjaustin.com. The old URL will redirect to the new one, but the old feeds are no good anymore. So if you haven't yet updated, take a moment and do so now—the links are in the sidebar.

Thanks for reading!

My latest favorite Facebook ad

The guy's expression is priceless.

Big rig

A few friends and I went down to the East and Alexander stage of the Rochester International Jazzfest tonight to see Joe Bonamassa, who was opening for Medeski Martin & Wood—a free show.

Joe's rig included an impressive pedal array and an even more impressive amp setup. He was playing through four 100-watt heads: a Marshall Silver Jubilee, a Category 5, a Carol Ann, and a Two-Rock. These were powering two 4x10 cabinets.

Here's a crappy cellphone picture I snapped of the setup:



Some ridiculous tone, and let's just say loud enough that my ears are still ringing a little three hours later.

Force is away

This post is about Ultimate (a disc sport for hippies). Specifically, I'm writing up a description of a defensive strategy called the force so that the team I captain can learn it better. Although descriptions of the defensive force abound on the Internet, I find almost all of them to be too complicated for brand new players to understand. So I'm taking a crack at it myself, and hopefully it will be more helpful.

First, a simple diagram that shows a vertical stack, which is the offensive formation used in almost all rec league games (click to enlarge, or better yet, open the image in a new window or tab):



Setting up the force

Blue, the defense, has decided to "force away," which means they are trying to force red, the offense, to the away side of the field. (In our league, the home side is the side where the bags and chairs and spectators are, and the away side is opposite.) The force is accomplished by one person at a time: whoever is marking the handler—in other words, whoever is defending the offensive player with the disc.

In the diagram, you can see that the defender on the disc has turned her back to the home side of the field. She will hold her arms wide and low and do everything possible to prevent the handler from throwing to the home side. At the same time, she will allow the handler to make any throw to the away side—because that is the direction of the force. She's forcing the disc to the away side. When she sets up her defense, she should yell, "Force is away!"

So what do the defenders in the stack do when the force is away? As you can see, they are all standing on the away side of the players they are guarding—the opposite of their teammate who is marking the disc. Why do they stand on this side?

Because they trust their teammate to prevent any throws to the home side.

Assuming that the player marking the disc does her job, there is no need for the stack defenders to worry about the home side of the field. Therefore, they stay on the away side to make it more difficult for the handler to complete the only throws he can make—throws to the away side.

So remember: if you're marking the disc, you face toward the force side, and if you're defending in the stack, you stand on the force side.


Break!

When the force is away, as in this diagram, the home side is called the "break" side, because the handler will have to "break" the force in order to throw to this side. When you are forcing against the handler, you may hear a teammate yell, "No break!" This lets you know that an offensive player is cutting to the break side. When the player you are marking in the stack cuts to the break side, make sure to let your teammate who is marking the disc know.

It is crucial that we don't allow the offense to break the force. As you can see from the defensive setup in the diagram, one completed pass to the break side would set up the offense for an easy series of throws to their goal—because all the defenders in the stack are on the force side!

In the event that the offense does break the force, the defender should yell "Broken!" so his teammates know to hustle and catch up to their marks, who are all sprinting toward the break side in hopes of that easy goal.


When to force

Usually, when a team is first learning the force, they will choose one side and force in that direction for the whole game, sometimes switching the direction of the force at halftime. After the team understands the force a little better, they can and should change it as needed.

The general goal at the rec level is to force the other team's handlers to use their forehand throw, because a new player's forehand tends to be less accurate. In the diagram above, blue is forcing the red handler to throw a forehand, assuming the handler is right-handed. If this is the reason for the force, you'll need to switch the direction of the force after every point, because the teams switch sides.

Occasionally, the force will switch mid-point. At the rec level, this is pretty rare, because it causes confusion. But if the handler is very close to the home sideline, it wouldn't make sense to force away. So if the disc ends up on the sideline opposite the direction of the force, it would be appropriate to change the direction of the force to take advantage of the situation.


Other resources

Wikipedia's description of the force: Helpful and concise, as Wikipedia often is.

The Ultimate Handbook's page on defense: The UH is a good site, but it tends to be a little more advanced than might be helpful. (For one thing, they assume that cuts come from the back of the stack, while almost all rec teams cut from the front.)

Thinking about MobileMe?

Last week, Apple announced their new push syncing service called MobileMe. It looks like it will be really fantastic for both Mac and PC users, especially those who have (or will have) iPhones. MobileMe replaces the much-maligned .Mac service. It will cost $99 per year, which is quite reasonable—think of it as $8.25 a month to keep all your contacts, email, and calendars up to date on every device you own—but there is a way to get it a little cheaper.

Remember that MobileMe replaces .Mac, and that Apple will upgrade existing .Mac members at no additional charge. As many people know, the cheapest way to get the .Mac service has always been from Amazon.com, which sold it at a discount ranging from 20 - 30%. If you know you will want MobileMe, the best thing to do would be to buy .Mac from Amazon now (current price is $77.49) and get the upgrade in a few weeks when MobileMe formally debuts.

Shiny and new

Well, my blog suddenly feels all growed up.

After slapping up a rough draft of the banner a few days ago (see the previous post for details), I have made a few tweaks and now have a final (for now) version. In addition to the change in the images, you may notice that the URL now reflects my actual domain, which is www.sjaustin.com. Blogger is still powering and hosting the blog, but I recently learned that you can use your own domain. Since I've owned sjaustin.com for a few years but never really done anything with it, I decided to make the switch.

If you're pulling my blog's feed, I don't think you'll notice anything new, but if you have any trouble, the "Subscribe to P.F." section in the sidebar should be accurate and up-to-date. Perhaps someday my domain will host something more complicated than a Blogger-powered blog, but I am actually quite happy with what Blogger provides free of charge. And now that it's using a "real" domain, it seems like home for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for reading, friends. I mean that.

My new 80/20 banner

There are people in the world who would decide to make a new banner for their blog, and they would come up with an idea, spend many hours perfecting it, then tweak everything to get it just so, and only then (after a period of days or weeks) would they dream of publishing it. And there are other people in the world who would decide to make a new banner for their blog, and they would get an idea late at night, immediately set to implementing it, get it about 80% right, and then publish it—flaws and all—knowing they can always come back and fix stuff later, and in the meantime HEY PRETTY BANNER.

I am definitely in the latter camp.

It's not ideal, but hey, it's up there—which is more than you can say for the blog banners currently being designed by people in the first group. (And I think we can all agree that First Groupers are colossally annoying, right?) Any suggestions for the final 20%? I'm fighting somewhat against Blogger's limited template options, all of which disagree to some extent and in some way with the banner as I've put it together. But I'd still like to hear what you think.

Three more reasons to use Safari

1. Resizable input fields: In Safari, web forms have the resize indicator, so you can enlarge the size of the input field, as these two screenshots demonstrate (easier to perceive if you click to enlarge):





2. Drag and drop uploads: No more browsing your computer's hard drive to find the file you want to upload. When a browser form asks you to choose a file to upload, like this:



don't click the "Choose file" button. Instead, drag your file to the spot where it says "no file selected" and drop it there. This is especially useful for those of us who work from our desktops.

3. Merge All Windows: a really useful feature for times when you find yourself with multiple open windows that you'd like to consolidate into one. Simply go to Safari's Window menu and select "Merge All Windows" to turn each window into a tab in the frontmost window. Even now that Safari has a bona fide single window mode, this feature is still really helpful for stuff that is supposed to pop up into a new window—such as video players and the like—but that you might want to tuck into the window you're working in.



Note that this is even easier if you map a keyboard shortcut to the command. As you can see, I've set Command + Shift + 1 to activate this feature, but by default there is no keyboard shortcut. Note also that "Merge All Windows" puts everything into the frontmost window, so if you want to tuck away that video player, make sure you bring your main window to the front before you invoke the command.

And a final word about all this: Yes, I know that you can do some of these cool things in Firefox with add-ons, which the Internet Illuminati have decided shall no longer be called extensions, perhaps to avoid confusion with the hair thing. The "merge windows" feature, for example, can be achieved in Firefox using the Tab Mix Plus add-on. Two reasons this is irrelevant to me. One: tweaking Firefox with lots of add-ons will eventually make it slower. And more importantly, two: I generally just want the best possible stock user experience out there. I understand that not everyone agrees with me on that point, and that's okay. That doesn't change the fact that Safari is the best browser on the planet, right out of the box.

Great deal at Amazon MP3 store

Allison Krauss + Union Station's album Lonely Runs Both Ways is on sale for $3.99 (not sure for how long) at the Amazon MP3 store. Thought you might like to know.