 Well, the college football season is f i n a l l y over. I am back to my purist stance, although it was all very exciting having football to watch this week, it was much better when we had the season end on New Year's Day. Compress the schedule, get rid of the crappy riff raff bowls, have the final four bowls and then it is done. Too much eating this way, among other things, and how weird to have "the big game" on a working weeknight... and meanwhile it's all happening, quite a day in the technical blogosphere...
My comment on last night's game; it was better than we had reason to hope, given that it ended in the middle of the first quarter when Texas QB Colt McCoy exited after a hard hit. But it wasn't that good; considering we were watching #1 play #2 there sure were a lot of dumb plays.
And so it is time to switch to pro football; speaking of which, my friend Yogi and I have scored front row seats for the San Diego Charger's playoff game on Sunday Jan 17, just like we did last year. (You may be jealous, but keep it to yourself.) We don't know who they're playing yet, the algorithm is complicated but I believe it could be Cincinnati, the Jets, or [a rematch from last year] New England. Yay. 
Apropos, Kottke notes the rise of the punter. "Are NFL punters the most valuable defensive players on their teams? Punters think so...and so do an increasing number of coaches and teams." In the Charger's overtime win over the Colts last year we watched the Bolts' Mike Scifres have what might be the best game of any punter, ever; as I noted:
He averaged 52.7 yards for his six punts; all six were inside the 20, and four were downed inside the 10. One 67 yarder cleared the returner's head by thirty feet before landing inside the five and spinning back like a nine-iron. And with the game on the line in the fourth quarter, he stuck a 51 yarder right into the coffin corner, pinning the Colts at the one.
 Yippee the Palm Pre Plus is out (do we call it the P3?), on Verizon along with little sister the Pixi Plus, so now Palm graduates to the largest cell network from the smallest (Sprint). The Pre+ has some nice enhancements, including a new hotspot capability that allows it so serve as a WiFi gateway to the cell network, but what's really important is that they opened their development platform all the way, and this has enabled Adobe to develop Flash. Wow. The smartphone playing field has shifted again. I love it!
[Update: Engadget's hands' on report. They like it, among other things the keyboard is better.]
John Gruber engages in some Tablet Musings; he thinks it will not run Flash, and I agree. That could be an Achilles heel but a client runtime like Flash routes around an App Store's walled garden.
Interesting: in addition to the HP "slate" announced by Steve Ballmer yesterday, there's another which will run Android instead of Windows. And Android will presumably morph into Google OS?
 At the CES show ongoing just now in Las Vegas 3D television is all the rage, but MoneyCentral thinks it will flop. Bsst! That's so wrong, those guys did not take the blue pill [yet]. As the Economist notes, we'll have Avatar in the home... as soon as they get rid of those geeky glasses...
Did you note? The awesome Grand Canyon Flyover did not violate the inverted pyramid rule; it got going right away. Nice. But not nice, this video was originally posted on Vimeo, from where it could not be embedded! How lame is that? So I had to use ClipNabber to download the video and then upload it to YouTube. Probably violated all sorts of laws, too. Why oh why didn't the Vimeo people just make the viewer embeddable? Lame.
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