I modified my program I wrote the other night to do two things: First, it now uses the IBlogExtension API, so any plugin that supports that will be able to be selected to blog with. Now I just need to make the plugins load dynamically, and allow me to select which ones to use. Second, it gets categories from my blog using the XMLRCP interface.

This is much, much better than directly accessing the database!

So let's put the new posting tool through a test, and get my week 7 picks posted.

• Buffalo 6, Baltimore 20 (-5.5): No surprises here. Buffalo is not a great team this year.
• Detroit 28, New York Giants 13 (-6.5): I was happy to see this one. Harrington looked pretty good, and I think quite a bit of that had to with Roy Williams being back in the line up. He gives Harrington confidence. Plus, a running game helped.
• Philadelphia 34 (-7), Cleveland 31: Philly won, but not be enough for me. I go back and forth on whether they are better than Minnesota. I think they probably are, but Cleveland isn't all that good, and the Eagles barely slipped by them.
• Jacksonville 27, Indianapolis (-9) 24: Did anyone pick Indy to lose this one? Their offense looked unstoppable up to this point. I guess their defense is going to be their downfall again. New England should thank them.
• Tennessee 3, Minnesota (-6.5) 20: Minnesota continues to roll, even when Culpepper has an average day. Without McNair, the Titans are just an average team.
• San Diego 17, Carolina 6 (-3): Finally - an upset I picked! I called this out last week, and was pretty much right on.
• St. Louis 14 (-6). Miami 31: This is why the NFL is so hard to predict. St. Louis was supposed to be back on track after beating Seattle, and then the lose to Miami. Whoda thunk it?
• Chicago 7, Tampa Bay 19 (-7): Chicago keeps going farther downhill. Maybe their 13-3 season a couple of years ago was a fluke.
• Atlanta 10, Kansas City 56 (-3.5): KC has started the season, but a few games late apparently. Eight rushing touchdowns. That's impressive. I should have picked this - it is an odd week, and that means Atlanta plays poorly.
• New York Jets 7, New England 13 (-6): New England keeps their streak alive, and the spread is matched, meaning it's a wash for me.
• Dallas 20, Green Bay 41 (-4): Green Bay laid the smack down on Dallas. This may be too bold, but I think Green Bay will be in the playoffs.
• Seattle 17 (-7), Arizona 25: So Seattle was hyped to be the best team in the NFL. They were on the way to a match up of undefeateds with New England. And then it happened. St. Louis came back, and beat them. Then they lose to New England, and now Arizona. And suddenly, Holmgren doesn't look like the hero he did in the early part of the season.
• New Orleans 31, Oakland 26 (-3): I can't think of anything to say about this game. Neither team is going anywhere, so it was a fantasy football game only.
• Denver 6 (-6), Cincinnati 23: I thought this would be a blow out, but I figured the Bengals would be the ones on the losing end. I guess it just goes to show that parity is alive and well in the NFL

It's good that I don't use real money for this. Here's my cumulative stats:

I'll be back in a day or two with some more picks.

Ever had a problem you have been thinking about for a while and couldn't come up with a solution, and then one day, it hits you? And it's so simple, you wonder how you missed it? I had that today.

I have been trying to figure out how to get a WYSIWYG editor for my blog. I tried Newsgator's posting, but Outlook's HTML output is pathetic. I'm not sure how .Text handles it, but b2evolution rejected about half of the posts I tried.

So my solution is to post directly to the database with a small app I built. Right now, the tool is very infantile. The category is hard coded, it only supports one category, it's hard coded to a particular user and blog, and the connection string is not dynamic. So there's some work to do still. It also doesn't ping any blog update sites. So I'll either figure that out, or figure out the XMLRPC interface that b2evo uses.

But the point is, I can now make much prettier posts!

Nope. That's the answer I finally found to the question I asked when I first heard about it being included in C#.

Brian, in the comments to one of his posts on the Sagestone blogs has some nice info about using NASA's World Wind software's STRM mode. Lots of people are having troubles getting that part to connect, and Brian found a way to get it offline.

Brian, by the way, is the other half of Tourney Logic.

Jason Clarke's post about Scoble's link blog is getting some good feedback, and I think he's doing a great job of refuting the comments. 

I tend to agree with Jason on this one. Reading blogs wouldn't be nearly as useful to me if I couldn't get all of the content delivered to me in one place. If I have to click on a link and wait for the browser to load (or select the item and wait for the content to load), then I lose time. I used to visit 10 or so websites per day to get my news. If it wasn't covered there, I didn't see it right away. But if you syndicate the content to me, then I can follow a lot more. The sheer time savings is huge. I let my aggregator sit all day Sunday, and when I got around to reading the items, I had 1,000 unread items, and I filtered through them in an hour or so. I couldn't do that if they only had partial content feeds.

If you want partial content feeds, I think you need to make better titles. Plus, who says the first 50 words gets the essence of what the post is about? You want partial content feeds, then you should offer a summary of what the content is going to be about. Tease me into wanting to take the time to open a browser.

If you don't want to, then either offer full content feeds, or expect me to unsubscribe (or never subscribe in the first place). My litmus test is this: if I see ... at the end of the content in the rss feed, then I don't even bother subscribing.

Oh yeah, Jason, congratulations! You're the first person to link to me in a post. Obviously, you're very forward thinking! (Scoble's link blog doesn't count - that's not "personal linking"). I'm convinced my blog is the way of the future! ;-)

I added a couple of new things to the site tonight that I thought are worth highlighting. First, I added my contact information to the left side: email, MSN id, AIM id, Yahoo id, ICQ id, and a Skype Me link. Why? In case someone wants to get a hold of me.

Scoble has his info on his blog. He's got his cell phone. I won't go that far - yet. Kunal has his MSN Messenger id listed, and I've contacted him before. He was very helpful! So I figured I would list mine. I'm online (and signed in to most of the services) about 8 - 12 hours a day, so I'm pretty easy to get a hold of.

If you have a question or comment for me, feel free to contact me. And if you just want to say hi, go for it!

UPDATE: I forgot. I added ratings to the posts, so you can rate them from the site (no RSS rating, yet). Thanks Newsgator!

A friend recently invited me to into his LinkedIn network, and I accepted. Since then, I have added a few more people to my connections.

You'll have to check it out yourself to get an idea of what it's for, but basically it's like Orkut for the business world. I know a couple of people who are actively using it to find a job, which is one of LinkedIn's selling points - find jobs, or as an employer, find employees.

If you check it out, and like it, either let me know your contact info, and I'll invite you, or you can sign up and invite me into your network.

I use Skype for work quite a bit, and try to stay on top of the newest releases. The software is fairly reliable (I have a very weird error - it only happens after I enable and disable a second monitor AFTER I've suspended my laptop. I get range check error), and the idea that the latest version exposes an API is intriguing. What can you do with it? What can't you do with it? Could I write a completely different UI for it? Could I build a hard phone around it, and use that for an IP Phone? Can I build IM into my own software?

Anyway, the site offers very limited documentation about what the API is - the change log says there's an API, and that's about it! Well, at least that I found initially. Doing a search on Google revealed quite a bit more. There's a document out there that's part of the NDA, but is easily discovered.

It looks like you can do quite a bit. The first is part of how a USB phone can use the API. The second is what third party software can do. And it looks like you can place calls, IM, view a user profile, and probably some more stuff. You can even have two apps use the API at the same time.

This could get interesting. Documentation for the API is expected to be released in November, and some companies are quietly working on easy to use API wrappers to allow Skype to be used through Java and web apps.

Don't ask me why I keep posting about podcasting. I really don't know. But here's an idea I've kicked around for a while, that I think Podcasting could help out.

First, how the connection came through. Two people: Rory Blythe and Carl Franklin. First, Rory said Podcasting is a means of syndicating binary content - that's all!. Then, Carl said It's a subscription-based delivery mechanism (albeit simple) for any kind of file. So there's the background. Syndicate any type of content.

So what's my idea? Use this for TV. Right now, even with TiVo, you need to know when a show is on to record it. You can then watch it any time. But what if you knew CSI was released at 8:00 PM every Thursday, and even though you can’t get to a place to record it, you know it will be delivered the next time your TiVo checks for updated content? You subscribe to the "CSI feed" and when a new show is released, you get it automatically. Yes, you can watch live if you want, but if you don't, you just download it later.

It's kind of the idea of video on demand that most cable companies are starting to offer, but on a much larger scale. Will cable companies ever go for it? I don't know, but I think one day, the demand for this type of technology will be high, and it'll be difficult to ignore.

One more point. Think podcasting won't catch on? I don't think that's the case. People already do this, just not in an automated fashion. You can download the Bob and Tom show as a subscriber and listen to previous episodes. Rush Limbaugh does the same thing. I'm sure there are others.

One more idea to make podcasting easier to use. A radio with built-in Wifi. When you park it in your garage, it connects to your home wireless network and downloads podcasts from your home computer. Make it easy to set up, and now you have podcasts delivered to your car automatically. I'm sure anyone with a PC in their car (I've seen CarPCs quite a bit lately) could do this right now!