Apparently, the AP has told the NCAA to stop using it's poll as part of the BCS rankngs. (found via The Post Game)

I'm not sure how well this will hold up, but if it does, it could signal and end to the BCS, and the beginning of a playoff. A playoff could still use the Bowl sites for the games, but the playoff would be a much better option than the current system.

Now how do we make this happen? Auburn has to win big, and Oklahoma has to beat USC. Probably won't happen, but if it does and they go to a playoff, I see a new product: The Tourney Bowl Manager!

I've never used NHibernate, but I am interested in any of the free O/R mappers out there. Scott Bellware has a nice post about his decision process to end up with NHibernate, including a few mini-reviews of other O/R mappers.

He wasn't sold on it at first (because it was an alpha), but says trying it out was "one of the best hail mary calls" he's ever made. I've been happy with the little I've done with OJB.NET, but I may have to give NHibernate a try now.

I've got almost 40 items marked to blog about, so I'm going to have to start combining them to get through them all!

First, Ryan Farley has a post about setting focus to an ASP.NET control. In his comments, I said I'd rather see this as a server control a lot like the DefaultButton control. He mentions a base page, which would work - I always use a custom base page, even if it doesn't do much of anything. My experience has been that I eventually need it. I still think a server control is a better way to go with this one - low impact to most projects.

Then, Mark Duant has a post about disabling a button after it's already posting back.

Both of these are common problems in ASP.NET development, and both provide great solutions!

So once again, with the first game being tomorrow, I'm posting my picks before I post my results. At least with a holiday coming up, I'll have time to relaz a bit. Maybe even watch a game or two. Anyway, here's my picks for this week.

• Green Bay vs. Minnesota (-3): Green Bay is a team on a mission. It will be a high scoring game, and Green Bay will win it.
• Oakland vs. Kansas City (-8): Hmm. Larry Johnson can run. He steps right in and takes Holmes' place without issue. Oakland won't likely stop him this week either.
• Denver (-4) vs. Tennessee: Denver should be able to take this one easily.
• Baltimore vs. Pittsburgh (-5): Pittsburgh wins, but it will be close. Don't be surprised if it's a late field goal for the win.
• Chicago vs. Detroit (-6): Detroit wins, but not by 6. They never play blowout games against Chicago. They're always close.
• New York Giants vs. Cincinnati (-6): Can Eli Manning continue what he did last week? He actually had a pretty decent game. I think he will.
• San Diego vs. Indianapolis (-7): This one has the highest over/under at 57 this week. Indy's defense isn't great. LT could run for 200 yards. And while the Chargers defense isn't horrible, Manning will break the TD record.
• Houston vs. Jacksonville (-7): Jacksonville will win this one.
• Carolina vs. Tampa Bay (-3): Carolina has come on strong of late, and Tampa Bay won't stop them this week.
• Atlanta vs. New Orleans (-4.5): I'm surprised that the Saints are favored. Shocked actually.
• New England (-2) vs. New York Jets: New England will be upset, and will take it out on the Jets.
• Buffalo (-11) vs. San Francisco: Buffalo will win, but not by 11. It's Christmas! No blowouts for Christmas.
• Washingon (-2) vs. Dallas: Dallas at home isn't the favorite against the Red Skins? That's not right.
• Arizona vs. Seattle (-7): Will the world right itself and allow Arizona to return to it's losing ways? I think so.
• Cleveland vs. Miami (-7): I understand that in beating New England, Miami became the first 2 game winner to beat a ten game winner, but does that make them a star team now? Favored by 7 against the Browns? No. They won't cover that. Or win.
• Philadelphia vs. St. Louis (-3): Wow. No Terell, and all of a sudden Philly isn't a favorite? I guess they figure now that the NFC is wrapped up, they will start sitting guys down. I'll still take the Eagles.

I'll probably post last weeks results a little later. Maybe even next week. Who knows.

I'm way behind on my blogging, but I thought this was a nice post. It talks about the different environments to develop in: Corporate Development, where you have a lot of overhead and support of existing legacy applications, Pure Software Development Companies, where you have a lot of resistance to changes in architecture strategy, and Consulting Development.

He says consulting companies tend to have a rigid adherance to requirements, which is true. Consulting companies get paid for what they say they will deliver. Nothing more, and nothing less.

The main reason I found it interesting? Consultants tend to get a bad rap, and it's nice to see someone agree with our development philosophy.

If you haven't been following Dave Burke's .Text modification series and are interested in how you can modify .Text, you really should check them out.

First, he implements HTML emails from .Text. Then he lets you subscribe to comments on a blog post - a nice solution to the problem of how to know when someone replies to a post I made a comment on. He has a post about one click comment deletion, but then later offers up a better solution: Captcha!

And as if that wasn't enough, his latest is about podcasting and rss enclosures!

I hope he keeps them coming. I am watching them with interest, and hope to use at least the rss enclosures one over at the Tourney Logic Blogs so I can attach items to my posts there. No podcasts, but things such as a .cs file with any code I post.

I got a contact about a site with some Google Deskbar plug-ins. Like I said, I uninstalled that (along with the Google Desktop Search) when Microsoft's new deskbar came out, but if you're interested, here's the site.

Please follow Carl Franlin's lead. I'm already 18 hours behind, and only have a couple of days to catch up this week and next. I don't need any more added to my backlog!

For some reason, I just can't bring myself to delete a podcast without listening to at least some of it. So for my own sanity, take a holiday break!

NOTE: I'm just kidding. Keep 'em coming. I'll catch up in January.

Ryan Rinaldi has a warning for you about HttpHandlers, and using them to track file downloads. Basically, IIS loads the file in question into memory if ASP.NET is set to handle that file type.

That means using HttpHandlers to serve up podcasts would be bad...

Shawn Morrissey, over on the ASP.NET weblogs asks about cross-posting, and what is the best way. He talks about a server side solution that based on categories, posts your post to another blog. Then he talks about how you can use w.bloggar to do the same thing client side.

Personally, I use my own blogging tool that allows me to post to multiple blogs at the same time. For a while there, I was posting to four blogs at a time: My personal one, my GeekDojo one, my Sagestone one, and my Tourney Logic one. I have reasons to post to each one.

I post just about everything to my personal one. Why? Well, that's where you go to find out who I am - not just from one perspective.

I post technical content to GeekDojo. It offers me a larger audience than my personal blog does - or at least a different audience. I blog to get readers, but more importantly, I blog to provide content (and potentially, an answer) to those who want it.

My goal with the Sagestone blogs was to drive traffic to it. We just started them recently, and by posting my relavent technical content there, the traffic will increase. And it worked - Scoble linked to me over there, and my readership there has been higher.

We just started the Tourney Logic blogs to get our name out there, so I post technical and sports content over there to get some traffic. It's worked there so far. Of course, my link blog being there helps too!

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I don't think a server side solution is the way to handle cross posting, but I guess that depends on your situation. I post technical content that I don't necessarily push to my work blogs but are in the same category as posts that I do syndicate to my work blogs. Allowing me to select at time of post client-side is a better option to me. That's how my tool works. As for categories, that's also handled client-side. When I post, I get a dialog of categories pulled from each blog, and choose which ones I want.

As for pinging, I think that's a server side task, but I can see doing that client side too. Either way, it seems to be others picking up my blog and linking to it, or google finding it as a better traffic driver than pinging servers.

Oddly enough, this post will only be available here. It's not being syndicated to multiple places.