Just before going through airport security, I took inventory. I'd made a rookie mistake: I left my car and house keys in my checked bag. On the bright side, I keep a backup car key in my wallet on the advice of ddmerillat. Assuming the power's on, I can use the garage door opener to get into the house. Whew! Does the redundancy of the checked keys mean my luggage will come through safely, or does the redundancy ensure that my luggage won't make it?

As previously documented, I had to ship my defective hard drive back to the vendor. As part of my lunch yesterday, I visited a local shipping emporium. Employee A handed me a small box, eight inches on all sides, which was plenty large for the intended cargo. I taped it up with the provided packing tape and filler, completed the form, and returned to the counter.

By that point, another customer had entered. He got to the counter just before I did with his monstrosity. It was a bass guitar in a hard case. He may have started with a single cardboard box around the hard case, but he'd chopped it down some and bound the whole thing up with a combination of twine and duct tape. As he cut me off, he looked at my little cube and quipped "you call that a package?"

( Yes, yes I do. )

Gosh, it sure was nice to have a new computer! Friday night until three, Saturday for almost the entire day and well into Sunday morning. Rise of Nations, Trackmania Nations, Portal, full-screen HD video that didn't skip. Truly, it was paradise.

Late Sunday morning, though, Windows reported hard drive trouble. Seagate's test program reported failures on the SMART test, and both the short and long form drive self tests. Tonight, the drive wasn't even working enough to erase it before returning it. This makes me profoundly unhappy. Fortunately, the only data to be concerned with is passwords for web sites and some software product keys. Unfortunately, that ain't nothing.

I'll ship the drive back tomorrow, but this vendor doesn't do cross-shipping. If I'm lucky, the return/replacement process will have a new drive back to me in less than two weeks. Argh, argh, argh. If I walk into Best Buy tomorrow, $100 will get me a Western Digital with similar speed and capacity, which is only $10 more than I spent on Mr. Defecto. The problem is that I won't have any time to get everything reinstalled until next Monday. Verily, I say argh.

Monday, I ordered all of the parts for a new computer. With the exception of the video card, it all got assembled Wednesday night. I borrowed a video card and was able to boot Ubuntu from a live CD to verify some functionality. Sadly, the motherboard's network device is too new for Ubuntu 9.04, and 9.10 doesn't come out until next week. Sigh! Thursday night, the video card arrived and I installed it. Tonight, Windows 7 OEM arrived. Woo!

( Installation observations )

I'm posting now so I can shut down the laptop and start really using my new desktop. Whee!

Back on NFL roster cut-down day, I predicted that the Bills would go seven and nine due to Dick Jauron's tenacious seven-and-nineness. At the time, I advised disregarding Jauron's partial season as the interim head coach for Detroit, since it messed with the purity of the 0.4375. Now, I think, is the perfect time to revisit that season. If the Bills fire him before next weekend's scheduled pummeling by the Jets at the Meadowlands, Jauron can remain the model of consistency, with one-and-four records in both of his partial seasons and remain exactly seven-and-nine for full seasons.

The NFL aims for "parity", which they hope will keep all teams somewhat competitive occasionally. To this end, they have revenue sharing and salary capping and a very slight adjustment—one-eighth of the games—to the schedule of each team based on the previous year's performance. Sometimes, parity looks like a joke, like 2007, when the league featured the 16-0 Patriots and the 1-15 Dolphins. Today, there were some flashes. For a stretch during the four-o'clock games today, all three games (Jets @ Saints, Cowboys @ Broncos, Bills @ Dolphins) had scores of 10-0. Later, I noticed that the Jets and Bills were both trailing 17-3 at the same time. At the end of the game, the Bills and the Dolphins are now both at 1-3. If you squint your eyes hard enough to ignore the comparison of within-division records and the recent history of the two teams, you could almost call it parity!

( Food and football: wings vs. popcorn. )

Very shortly after I sat back down with my bowl of wing-flavored popcorn, Terrell Owens scored a touchdown, his first in a Bills uniform. Yes! That was precisely the kind of thing I'd had in mind when I started the sauce. It was only after the game that I was reminded that T.O. once left a note on his locker telling reporters to "Getcha Popcorn Ready". In retrospect, the timing was almost creepy. Almost.

Football 1: Today was the day that NFL teams are required to cut their rosters down to 53 men. The person given the job of summoning a player to his firing is known as "the Turk". While trying to find the origins of the name, I realized that I could play Rise of Nations as the Turks in honor of those given the unpleasant task of sending young hopefuls to their doom. Hours later, when I finally sat down to play RON, I forgot, and left it on random. Random turned out to be quite serendipitous: it picked Turks! Speaking of Turks, I feel bad for ousted Bills offensive coordinator Turk Schonert, who probably now wishes he'd never been promoted from quarterback coach last season.

Football 2: I've only been interested in football since the beginning of the 2007 season. That year, the Bills went 7-9, a repeat of 2006. Last year, the 5-1 start looked great, but it turned out only one of those wins was against a playoff team. As the season wore on and the Bills got swept by the division, I started to joke that they'd finish 7-9. I wasn't sure who they'd beat in the last few weeks to notch that last win, and Denver was a pleasant surprise. When head coach Dick Jauron's contract was extended after three consecutive 7-9 finishes, I joked with fellow fans that we were in for a fourth great year of 7-9 football. I got curious to see what exactly Jauron had accomplished before Buffalo. Let's skip his brief, mid-season replacement tenure in Detroit (squarely in the middle of the Millen era, no less) and go back to Chicago. There, he won four different NFL Coach of the Year awards for the 2001 season, when the Bears went 13-3 but lost their first playoff game. His regular season record was 35-45 over five seasons. My jaw dropped when I saw those numbers. His average record was . . . wait for it . . . exactly 7-9. In 2003, the last year he coached in Chicago, the Bears went 7-9. That extends his current streak to four seasons. What are the chances he won't make it five?

Football 3: For the five seasons starting with 2008, the Bills have moved one home game per season to Toronto. The NFL schedulers get to decide which game that is. Last year's Toronto game was an embarrassing loss to the Dolphins. This year, it's going to be a Thursday-night game against the Jets. Thursday games are broadcast only on the NFL Network, which Time Warner doesn't carry. The team's primary market gets to simulcast the NFLN coverage, but Rochester is a secondary market for the Bills. Even if the game sells out, I almost certainly won't get to see it. I would not be surprised to hear that Buffalo's offense (third OC in three years! Woo!) will run into Rex Ryan's defense like a very painful simile, so maybe it's merciful.

I stopped by the Verizon store to complain that my phone was often spontaneously shutting itself off in my pocket. The tech slapped the phone around a bit until he got it to fail. He swapped batteries and confirmed that the problem was with the phone and not the battery. Since I pay the monthly insurance whatsit, he replaced the phone. The good news: he was able to transfer my photos and phone book. The bad news: he wasn't able to transfer my texting history or my speed dials. When I realized that my speed dials were missing, I downloaded the "sync your contacts" application and ran it, expecting it to restore my backups from the network copy. Instead, it transferred the phone's copy to the backup site! I went to the web site and discovered that I was too optimistic by half; the web site doesn't have a field for speed dials at all. Urgh!

Verizon's web site lets you redownload applications lost in a warranty-covered phone switch provided the applications are less than a year old. The only non-free app that qualified for me is Sudoku. They've apparently replaced the one I've been playing since December with a complete rewrite. The old one was a little ugly, but it had simple, responsive controls and good readability. My biggest complaint was the Japanese theming in spite of Sudoku's American roots.

The new Verizon Sudoku has lots of zany features, including a "compete against everyone else" mode that compares your time on a specific daily puzzle with everyone else. That's clever, but the core game screen is less readable, with fancy, shiny black numbers on a dark red background. Worse, the cursor is a super-bright yellow. Worst, the thing is constantly stealing the cursor to perform little animations to congratulate you for completing a row or a column or a box. You can't fill in numbers or move the cursor while it's doing the little dance, but they don't pause the clock. When you finish the grid, the animation takes several seconds, and the animation time is counted as part of your time to complete the puzzle! Idiots! Sudoku is a pencil-and-paper game. Let me play it like one!

Why would Sarah Palin resign her governorship?

• She's Mark Sanford's Argentinian lover.
• She shot a man in Juneau just to watch him die.
• She's urgently needed to console Norm Coleman.