Why did Team USA win Group C? I’m not talking about the “player’s true grit”, but how do you decipher the point system.

I did some research into FIFA’s scoring rules and thought others might want to know. First, the teams get 3 points for a win, 1 point for a tie and 0 points for a loss. After the three games you add up the points and the team with most points wins the group! OK, so the USA got 5 points and so did England.

Then what?

The next thing to look at is “Goal Differential”. You take the number of goals your team scored and subtract the number of goals they had scored on them. The US scored 4 (really 6 if the referees were good, but that’s another discussion…) and was scored on 3 times for a +1 goal differential. So the team with the highest GD wins! Well, England, scoring 2 and being scored on once, has a +1 goal differential as well.

Try #3?

So, step 3 is to look at the total number of goals scored. The US scored 4 goals and England scored 2, so finally, we have a winner! Soccer is easy!

Now we play Ghana who was #2 from Group D. They actually tied for points with the Socceroos from Australia, but Ghana’s +0 Goal Differential beat Australia’s -3.

However, this is an EOL (End Of Life) product for Logitech, so they do not actively support it. The last time they did, Windows 7 was not yet out, so they have no Winodws 7-specific drivers available. They do have 64-bit drivers for Vista, but their heavy install program doesn’t even want to run on Win7. There is a way to get around this, and I posted the full details on the Logitech help forums. However, I found there is a much easier way to it (Note: This is for Windows 7 64-bit only):

1. Download the driver. Logitech wants to give you a 30MB install app, but all you really need is the drivers out of them, which are in this 214KB zip file: voip64.zip
2. Unzip the contents. You will get a folder named voip64. Remember where it is.
3. Plug in the QuickCall to a USB port. You will notice Win7 try and install drivers, but the speakerphone will just blink green and red lights…
4. Open the device manager.
5. Expand the “Sound, video and game controllers” section
6. I don’t remember exactly what Win7 will call it, but look for a device that says something like “Speakerphone (disabled)” and right-click on it.
7. Choose Update Driver Software
8. Choose Browse my computer for driver software
9. Now browse to the voip64 folder you extracted and use that
10. You now have working drivers!

While the speaker and mic work great, there are limitations:

• The answer call, hang-up, and mute buttons don’t work. Workaround: Use the on-screen controls of Skype or other audio software.
• The volume knob doesn’t work. Workaround: The volume slider in Windows will control volume, as will the control in Skype and keyboard volume buttons.
• The LEDs don’t work. Well, it’s a lot better than them flashing red and green!
• Remember, it’s only $10!

4999.9 miles...

...and 5000.0 miles!

5,000 miles on my LeMond Buenos Aires. The bike computer went on before I took the bike home from the shop and it has worked flawlessly every ride. Never even replaced the battery. The bike has performed very well. It is a comfortable long-distance machine. With the steel frame and Ultegra components, it should be easy to get another 5,000 miles. I figure that 5,000 miles translates into about 300 hours of time in the saddle. Not too bad!

Some of the events that we’ve done:

• Reach the Beach. My first century.
• Tour de Blast. Twice (once fun, once cold and wet…)
• Seattle to Portland. The first time was my first double-century. The second time my first over-night bike event.
• Mid-Summer Duathlon. My first du.
• Monday Night PIR Race. My first road race.
• Lyle Pearson 200. 200-mile relay bike race in Idaho.
• Blue Lake Triathlon. My first tri.

Add to that lots of weekend rides with Meg and other friends, and many miles commuting to work. Fun times! I hope I can get the next 5000 in much faster…

• No minimum order (I only wanted to print one for now)
• Great photo reproduction
• Not too expensive

After looking at the options, I decided to go with the Photo Book from Adorama. They basically print everything out on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, just like getting prints from Costco, then bind it. Their binding is pretty neat, as each page will open flat, so you can have an image cross the page fold. Great for panoramas.

Their creation tool is flash based and completely online. It was great and not-so-great. The tool itself worked well. I was able to upload over 350 full-res photos with no problem, then place them on the page, scale, position, and add type without many limits. The only issue was that being web-based, there was always just a little delay in things. Also, to get things lined up exactly at the pixel level took a bit of time. If I were to do this again (and I do think I’ll make a year two book next year), I think I would create large images in Photoshop for each page correctly sized for the book size I’m using, edit things in Lightroom, then place the Lightroom images onto the page in Photoshop. Then just upload the 50 (or whatever) pages and be done. That would give more flexibility, but wouldn’t allow me to do changes from any browser.

The quality is great. Adorama has a color profile for their process, and that was used. Cost really isn’t that bad. The 50-page 8×12 album I got was (don’t look Meg) $77.88. That works out to a per 8×12 cost of $1.56. The Costco (my go-to place for almost all printing) is only $1.49 for a single 8×12. That means for $0.07 a page, Adorama is binding it into a book. I’d call that a steal.

The only other bad thing is shipping. When you go to check out, selecting 2-day or next-day shipping says “in before 1:30PM M-F shipped the same day”. Great, I said, and ordered the 2-day shipping. After a couple days, my order still said processing, so I contacted their support. They said, “Your photobook order is in processing at the moment. Please note that it is a 5 – 7 business day turn around for books no matter what shipping option is chosen.” Keep that in mind…

Here are a couple pictures of the book I made. I just got a bevy of LED key chain lights, so you also to see some of my first “Painting with Light” pictures:

Swiftcurrent Reflections was started using Blogger. It was quick and easy. Now you can have blogger host your blog, like Meg does (anyone with a name.blogspot.com address does this), they can host your blog with a domain name you purchased (so you could have everything on their server, but instead of using crazyblog.blogspot.com, you could just use crazyblog.com; that URL would just point to their server), or you can do what I did and have your own server, and Blogger would FTP all the files to it. Now, “my own” server is a bit misleading. I bought hosting capability through 1&1. I have been using them for over four years now and am happy with their service. I acutally only have one server space through them, but swiftcurrentphoto.com, billanderson.name, and andersonupshaw.com all point to the same server, they just have thier root in different directories. Sneaky, huh?

OK, so now what about Wordpress? It is designed to run on a web server that has PHP scripting ability and MySQL installed. Almost any web server has this, as does 1&1. Setting it up was easy. Just download the .zip file from Wordpress, un-zip it, use the web-based control panel at 1&1 to setup the MySQL server, update just one test config file from the Wordpress download with the MySQL info, then upload that batch of files to server. Done. Blog is running.

While I did this at a remote server, the process would be the same if you had a server in your house. While I leave a couple of my computers on 24/7, I really don’t want to be worried about uptime. I don’t have a static IP address either. While I use dyndns.com, that’s not the best for a server. And then there is bandwidth. I don’t want to be streaming a movie and then have a number of people hitting my blog at the same time (I doubt that would happen in my case, but still…) and killing my movie. Plus, Comcast has usage caps… I’ll stick with 1&1.

More questions? Comment away!

…because I am moving to Swiftcurrent Reflections 2.0. Hopefully, everything will stay the same. http://billanderson.name will still take you to the right place, and I hope you wont even have to change your RSS feed, for those cool cats who use RSS readers, but if you don’t see any updates for a week or so, check back here and resubscribe.

Technical Mumbojumbo: Since January 2005 I have been using Blogger, the Google owned blogging tool. It’s easy and gets the job done, but it always had problems FTPing data over to my server. People who host their blog right on Blogger’s servers, like Meg, don’t have this issue.

My solution? Start running Wordpress. This software runs right on my server and has a lot more flexibility and options than Blogger. It’s more complicated to set up, but will hopefully be worth it in the end.

Hopefully, everything just doesn’t explode…

Rachel & Jeremy build a house!

Next, you head over to the temple. Make sure you take off your shoes, and remember where you put them

Then listen to some music while you get your prayer on

After you are on the level with Buddha, you might as well check out the traditional lantern exhibition, as it is right there at the temple

More photos and videos here.