What is Will Thinking

So, my buddy Squid Dog and I do this pretty much every year and post the outlandishness here to make it official. Here’s our NFL picks for this season:

Me:
Ready to make some NFL picks and get started on our yearly journey to looking stupid?

Here’s my one bold one – SF wins the NFC West. It’s not that they’ve gotten that much better, but everyone else in that division has taken big ol’ steps backward. Seattle just plain blows, and AZ lost a few folks that I think will prove to be detrimental. St. Louis has exactly one player that I’ve ever heard of (Steven Jackson), and he’s pretty beat after providing all the offense for the past 3-4 years. I wouldn’t even draft him in fantasy with the load he’s carrying.

Squid Dog:
I’m ready! I’m going bold all around.

AFC
Division winners: Jets, Ravens, Titans, Chargers.
Wild cards: Patriots, Colts
Chargers get eliminated in playoff game # 1 because of stupid pealties.
Championship: Jets and Titans. Jets win.

NFC:
Division winners:
Dallas, Green Bay, Saints, Cardinals
Wild cards: Vikings, Redskins
Dallas gets eliminated in playoff game # 1 because of Romo somehow.
Championship: Packers and Vikings. Vikings Win.

Superbowl: Jets vs Vikings. Vikings win.

Oooo, did you see how it came up that Brett plays GB to get into the SB, and beats the Jets to win it? His 2 former teams. I didn’t plan that one at all.

My predictions are money.

Me:
I agree with your Ravens pick since Roethlisberger’s out for a few games due to those pesky rape-in-a-bathroom charges. The only thing that makes me apprehensive is Cincy, who actually won the division last year. I think the Colts-Tits will be swapped from your predictions, unless my weird AFC prediction comes through. Somebody has to win the AFC west, so it may as well be the Chargers.

My one bold(-ish) statement is that Belichick will not be employed by the Patriots this time next year. Tom Brady will continue his transformation into a 6’5″ girl.

Raiders will suck (shocker), which is fine with me.

My weird AFC prediction:
Peyton Manning goes down for the season fairly early, like before any snow games. The backup is so mind-bendingly awful that they look like a pop warner team and get beat by a team that’s really bad. My guess would be KC in week 5.

I’m with you on the NFC, with a few exceptions. No way Favre is winning the Super Bowl. I just don’t think it’s gonna happen, although I see Minny getting to the NFC championship game.

Also, I think Atlanta scoots into that wild card spot instead of the Redskins. Tony Gonzales retires after ATL loses in the playoffs.

Albert Haynesworth becomes a member of the half time show at Redskins games, since he’s been whining about the defense changing and his role in the new scheme. I think he’ll get shot out of a cannon or dive into a small pool or something. Something to get some value for the crazy amount of money they’re paying him.

My weird prediction for the NFC:
At some point in the fall, the east coast gets hit by a big hurricane, which postpones at least one Miami, Jacksonville, and Carolina game. Maybe more.

Will picks Brady, Brett Favre, Chargers, Colts, Minnesota, nfl, raiders, Redskins, Saints, titans

If you’ve been here before, you may have noticed this blog looks a bit different from the last time you were here. I converted it from Blogger to WordPress earlier today, and while it wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done, it’s do-able.

If you’re wondering why I converted, it’s mostly because Blogger decided to drop support for it at the end of next week. You see, this blog has been in existence for four years now (although I don’t think you can technically say I’ve been doing this for four years because I’ve rarely posted for the past couple years). Anyway, when I originally set up my blog through Blogger, it didn’t really give a lot of options for how to set it up. I’ve been using updates via FTP, which Google says is really difficult to support. As such, they’ve decided to drop support for it and force you to migrate to another domain/site and redirect from your original to the new one. Sounds pretty complicated. Since I originally put this blog up on Blogger four years ago, I’ve discovered WordPress. Not to put too blunt a point on it, but WordPress beats Blogger hands down. No comparison. since I was being forced to upgrade anyway, I thought I may as well upgrade to something I liked.

Enough of the why. Here’s the how:

My particular scenario was as this – I had a choice of either being 1.) redirected from my old Blogger site (atleastihavechicken.com/whatiswillthinking) to a new Blogger site  by Google or 2.) starting a new site and basically abandoning the old site. The solution I came up with allowed me to migrate my old Blogger site to a WordPress site at the same location, and keep the old permalinks. This last part was important to me, since there were a few sites that linked to a post from a long time ago that had gained some notoriety. I did not want to break those links.

There are a few steps to this, but the jist is to do the following:

1. Set up a temporary Blogger blog to hold all your posts from the old one
2. Set up a temporary WordPress blog to migrate your posts from the blog in step one – going directly from the old Blogger to a WordPress install DID NOT WORK. This is due to the import tool in WordPress not supporting the FTP updated Blogger blogs which caused this whole mess to begin with.
3. Use the Blogger import tool to import posts from the original Blogger site to the new Blogger site.
4. Use the WordPress import tool to import the new posts from the new Blogger site into WordPress.
5. Make a copy of the uploaded_images directory on your original Blogger site. This is where all the images used in posts have been stored since you’ve had the blog. When doing the various exports and whatnots, all the images are still hotlinked to the uploaded_images directory on the original Blogger site. You need to get a copy of these images if you ever plan to have them viewable again.
6. Set up the correct permalink structure on the temporary WordPress blog in step 2. It will look like this:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

7. Change the post titles in WordPress to match the goofy Blogger ones. Blogger omits the words “the” and “a” and has a maxlength that truncates the complete title
8. Export the posts on the temporary WordPress site using Tools -> Export. This will get you to a point where you download a XML file that’s ready to be imported on the new permanent WordPress site that’s being installed in the same directory as your old Blogger site.
9. Delete the old Blogger site.
10. Install WordPress in the same directory as the old Blogger site
11. Copy over the uploaded_images directory into the root of the new WordPress site, which should be the same as the old Blogger directory.
12. Go forth and make your new WordPress site your own! Now would be an opportune time to do a happy dance.

Will blogging blogger, convert, ftp, google, permalinks, update, wordpress

So, Zach and I got a little carried away after reading this Sports Guy mailbag (4th from the last bit at the bottom).

The gist of it is, put the word “Butt” in front of sports team nicknames and laugh like maniacs for a solid 20 minutes. ** DISCLAIMER – this probably won’t work if you’re a woman, or even slightly mature **

Here’s ours:

1:02:38 PM me: Q: Hey Bill, want to laugh for 20 minutes? Put “Butt” in front of all sports team nicknames. “Pirates”, “Chargers”, etc. Friggin hilarious …
–Beau, Miami, Fla.

SG: Oh, boy …

1:03:11 PM zach: hahahahaha
1:03:15 PM zach: i almost pasted that in
1:03:24 PM me: butt titans
1:03:27 PM me: hahahaha
1:03:30 PM zach: HAHAHAHAAH Read more…

Will Uncategorized butt, guy, oilers, pirates, raiders, simmons, sports

So, my buddy Squid Dog (diehard Packers fan) and I had our yearly NFL picks email swap today. Here’s the conversation

Squid:
I can’t believe Favre was on the practice field within 90 minutes of landing in Minnesota. 2 Year contract too.

Me:
Conflicted, are ya? I seem to recall you saying a couple weeks ago that you’d like to see him play again.

Squid:
Very conflicted. I love watching him play and want him to do well, but with the Vikings? Man.

Me:
Hahaha!

Squid:
I’ll just have to see how I feel when the season starts.

ready to make predictions?

Read more…

Will picks cowboys, falcons, favre, giants, nfl, packers, raiders, ravens, san diego, steelers, tennessee, titans, vikings

Another IM conversation makes it into a blog post. This time between Zach and I.

Read more…

Will Uncategorized celtics, dwyane wade, knicks, lakers, lebron james, manny ramirez, MLB, NBA, NHL, sean avery, stephon marbury, WWF, zach

So I finally broke down and joined Facebook. It took me long enough. Profile link is down at the bottom of this post. I was kind of burned out on social sites after Friendster, Myspace, and the like. That’s not even counting Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Netscape/Propeller, etc.

Anyway, I thought I’d keep a running tally of my facebook status entries. I’ll note below if I thought them up or if they came from one of the status generators, like http://www.generatus.com/

1. “Will is writing the code that makes the whole world sing” – thought of that one myself
Read more…

Will Uncategorized digg, facebook, friendster, myspace, netscape, propeller, reddit, status, stumbleupon

I noticed that these classic Bloodninja transcripts have been disappearing from the net lately, so I thought I’d make a post to keep them in circulation, or at least provide me with a place to easily find them…

Enjoy..

Bloodninja: I lick your earlobe, and undo your watch.
Sarah19fca: mmmm, okay.
Bloodninja: I take yo pants off, grunting like a troll.
Sarah19fca: Yeah I like it rough.
Bloodninja: I smack you thick booty.
Sarah19fca: Oh yeah, that feels good.
Bloodninja: Smack, Smack, yeeeaahhh.
Bloodninja: I make some toast and eat it off your ass. Land O’ Lakes butter all in your crack. Mmmm.
Read more…

Will Uncategorized

Earlier one of our “senior programmers” exhibited some thinking that seemed familiar. If you’ve ever seen the trilogy The Matrix, as most computer nerdy types have, you’ll know what I mean when I mention the reasoning of a machine. Read more…

Will Uncategorized

OK, settle in. This is gonna be a long post, especially if you watch all the movies.

After running across a YouTube clip from The Driver, I decided it was time to do a post that touches the heart of almost every car guy or girl: car chases. I have no idea why movies today don’t have good car chase scenes. I think a lot of the problem is that modern CGI technology gives moviemakers an easy way to fake the incredible stunts that helped make older movies with car chases so great. Call it The Matrix Effect.

Anyway, here are my top five best car chases of all time, in reverse order: Read more…

Will Uncategorized

OK, every year Squid Dog and I make picks about our favorite NFL teams (Packers and Titans, respectively) and every year we try to remember what we picked once the season’s pretty much done. We can never seem to find the email or chat transcript. This year, I’m putting up a blog post. Feel free to add a comment with your own picks.

Here’s ours: Read more…

Will Uncategorized