Some free advice—if you plan on asking someone to marry you, don’t tell Chris Myers unless you want him to inadvertently propose to your girlfriend on national TV on your behalf.

Mobile’s Fox affiliate needs to boost its digital signal—it’s the only channel I can’t get indoors at the hotel. And, of course, it’s also the only one I want to watch tonight…

My quick assessment of the winners and losers from Nick Saban's acceptance of the Alabama head coaching job:
Winner: Nick Saban. $32 million over eight years, guaranteed, is hardly chump change. Particularly in Tuscaloosa.
Loser: families of Alabama recruits. $32 million over eight years, guaranteed, is hardly chump change. Look for a downgrade from Cadillac Escalades to Honda Pilots for recruits.
Winner: The SEC West. Saban brings a high profile to a division currently only notable for the novelty of its coaches (Croom, Orgeron) or the novelty of their leadership structure (Arkansas, seemingly now run by the Springdale High School PTA instead of Houston Nutt).
Loser: LSU and Les Miles. Way to get upstaged the day of your last conceivable BCS bowl under Les Miles.
Winner: Alabama high school football players. Your options are now significantly upgraded over Tommy Tuberville and Sly Croom and UAB's coach of the week.
Loser: Sly Croom. Increased probability of playing on Sundays in 3-5 years or playing for a black coach. You do the math. Plus Saban has his dream job for the rest of Croom's likely career.
Winner: Ed Orgeron. Doesn't compete with Alabama for many recruits, and now has a new chip to play with Louisiana kids: the Les Miles death watch.

The panel I am allegedly the discussant on is exactly four days away, and I have received all of one paper thus far. I suppose that makes the job a tad easier than usual…

In other news, I booked my flight for the APSA Teaching and Learning Conference and my shared hotel room for Midwest at the Palmer House, so I guess I’m going to have a busy spring between three conferences and the two branches of the job hunt—both academic and non-academic.

Relatedly, my public new years’ resolutions:

1. Lose weight (ok, this is a perpetual and perpetually-broken one).
2. Get two more articles accepted by September, even if they end up in the crappiest peer-reviewed journals on the planet.
3. Get a tenure-track job, a job guaranteeing at least two years, or (failing those) find something better to do with my life.

I wish my readers a happy and prosperous 2007.

So, I made it safe and sound to dad’s place in Ocala… anything exciting happen while I was offline?

I made it safe and sound today to Marianna, Florida, the beyond-halfway point on the way to dad’s in Ocala, aka Stop Two on the grand holiday roadtrip. The drive from Memphis was about as boring and uneventful as always, save the semi-typical traffic backups south of Birmingham on I-65 and taking Alabama 271 from I-85 to US 231 instead of that slow-ass US 82/231 loop in Montgomery.

If, as my good friends on the left argue (quite plausibly, I might add), Iraq was not linked in any way to the 9/11 attacks, what are we to make of the AP consciously linking the conflict in Iraq to the 9/11 attacks in its latest ‘body count’ dispatches? Here are your choices:

1. The AP has bought into the Bush administration’s false consciousness of a 9/11-Iraq link.
2. The AP has a right-wing bias in its reporting.
3. The AP had to “balance” reporting of the Saddam Hussein appellate decision in order to create the appearance of fairness.
4. All of the above.

If you chose the last option, you too can write for Salon.com.

I recently finished reading my copy of Ars Technica editor Jon “Hannibal” Stokes’ new book on computer architecture, Inside the Machine; overall, I’d say it’s a pretty good semi-technical introduction to the field, but there are points at which Stokes seems to gloss over important details. Two examples: in one chapter he discusses “SPRs” without ever seeming to define the term, and there is no reference to the term in the index; he also seems to underplay the register-starved nature of the x86 ISA (which lagged behind its CISC contemporaries, the Motorola 680×0 series, much less the PowerPC RISC processors that competed with the Pentium and beyond) and the degree to which the Pentium and its successors had to work around that limitation. There are also the requisite number of typos and goofs for a first printing of a book. But overall, I enjoyed the book, which after all is aimed at the typical Ars Technica or AnandTech reader more than the budding computer engineering student.

Sunday’s Commercial Appeal has a lengthy article by Scott Cacciola profiling the latest iteration of the Great Cannon-Armed Hope to arrive in Oxford, ex-Texas QB Jevan Snead. Snead has at least one thing working in his favor: the cajones to mess with The Orgeron:

He felt comfortable enough with Ole Miss head coach Ed Orgeron and Werner to play a practical joke when he called them from Morris’ office to say he was committing.

“Thanks for the visit, you all were great, but I don’t think I got enough out of this weekend,” Snead recalled telling them before pausing—a big dramatic pause. “So I’m going to have to ask you to keep me around for four more years.”

Morris estimated that Orgeron and Werner whooped and hollered on the other end for close to 30 seconds. Yes, they were excited.

If nothing else, Snead’s recruitment probably puts the kibosh on the Cannon Smith era beginning anytime soon, if the latter’s felony drug arrest hadn’t already done so.

The SPSA paper is here for the morbidly or otherwise curious.

After a last-minute grading emergency, I finally escaped St. Louis and got to Memphis, a.k.a. stop one on the grand road trip.

Now, hopefully stop three won’t sink into the Gulf of Mexico between now and SPSA… (þ: BigJim).

I think it’s time for a new New Year’s Resolution. Instead of my annual resolution to lose weight—which feels like tilting at windmills these days—I hereby resolve to stop being as much of a perfectionist, particularly when it comes to my research. I will now make things good enough, send them out, and hope for the best, rather than trying to anticipate and address every last objection some anal reviewer might have to the piece.

The moral of this resolution, of course, is that I should have sent out the strategic voting paper months ago, rather than continuing to fiddle with every last detail. So I shall end my fiddling, stick the latest results in the current draft, and send the damn thing out before Christmas.

(This is easier said than done, I suspect, although I’m told committing to these things is an important step in ensuring they get done.)

I upgraded my PostgreSQL installation yesterday, but my Mac seems to insist on launching the old version of PostgreSQL instead. I think I have it fixed... but we'll see soon.

My former boss and NC gubernatorial candidate Mike Munger saves me the trouble of having to write a lengthy post summarizing my feelings about the Duke lacrosse debacle at this point.

To me, there are two different dimensions to the situation that Mike correctly points out. On the one hand, the known and proven conduct of the team at the party—putting aside the unproven allegations of sexual assault—represents a complete lapse in judgment by the players and their ostensible leaders (both among the students and the coaching staff). Those actions, along with the subsequent embarrassment of the university, could justifiably be punished by sanctions up to and including the disbanding of the Duke intercollegiate men’s lacrosse team.

On the other hand, the blatant race-baiting of district attorney Mike Nifong and his supporters, particularly in light of the absence of any credible evidence that a sexual assault took place (despite Nifong’s early assertions to the contrary), is also worthy of condemnation. His demonstrated, repeated inability to engage with the logical inconsistencies and facts surrounding the case make our current president look like a card-carrying member of the “reality-based community” by comparison. The man is a menace and a demagogue, not to mention an embarrassment to each and every citizen of Durham County, and my faith in democracy is shaken by the number of Durhamites of all races who keep voting for the idiot.

Except for a few stragglers, my grading is over for the semester. I didn’t have a lot of laughs, but the student who wrote that one of the issues supported by Joe Biden was the genocide in Darfur easily won the “bad sentence structure leads to exactly the wrong conclusions by the reader” award. (Other sources inform me that, in fact, Sen. Biden is opposed to the genocide in Darfur.)

Or, as Ryan put it once to Dwight on The Office, “I don’t think that means what you think it does.”

I find that it takes about 17 more steps to accomplish anything in WebCT than in Blackboard. Mind you, I’m still not entirely sold on either as a content management system, but at least Blackboard worked without requiring me to do stupid things like “Update student view” on a regular basis. Not to mention that its grading system worked about 70% right, as opposed to WebCT's which manages about 40% on my scale. (I still had to calculate final grades using a spreadsheet formula with Blackboard because of my bizarre insistence on weighing exam grades based on student performance, but at least it could do a quiz average trivially... instead of making me produce a formula for that too, which appears to be WebCT’s approach.)

If it weren’t for the hassle and the FERPA issues, I’d just run Moodle on my Mac mini and be done with it.

I now have a campus interview tentatively scheduled for mid-January at a southern liberal arts college. More please.

I’m back in St. Louis for about four days before embarking on the 3rd Annual Underemployed Academic Grand Holiday Roadtrip featuring stops in Memphis, Ocala, and the site of SPSA (in 2005 and 2007, New Orleans; in 2006, Atlanta). The song, as they say, remains the same.

In the meantime, I have two phone interviews to take care of, along with about 100 items to grade (between tests, papers, and extra credit assignments), five job applications, and probably a couple items to get as part of my last-minute Christmas shopping. Oh, and laundry. There’s always laundry.

Today I consider the value of Texas’ “10-percent” admissions plan over at Outside the Beltway; read and comment over there.

As a reminder, all of my OTB posts can be found here.

Go vote for EconTalk, Econlib’s podcast, in the 2006 Weblog Awards. I’m told that it’s for a good cause: beating Slate.

Update: Alas, EconTalk came up short.

Steven Taylor has launched three new, more narrowly-focused blogs focusing on sports, Columbian politics, and science fiction. So go forth and read them.

I’m not sure where in my application materials someone at a teaching institution got the impression that I’d prefer a position in a research-oriented department (although I doubt it was in anything I wrote, nor in my letters of recommendation), but since potential employers are apparently hanging on every syllable that appears on the blog, let me reiterate a few points:

1. Beggars can’t be choosers, particularly in March, when I accepted my non-tenure-track positions at Duke and SLU.
2. I have never taught a graduate-level class, despite having opportunities to do so.
3. In six semesters of full-time teaching, including spring 2007, I have carried a three-course teaching load in all but one: my first semester at Duke. At Millsaps, my effective teaching load was higher (an additional directed readings course each semester, along with supervising an honors thesis).
4. If I didn’t want to teach, there are ample research opportunities in the private sector for someone with my skills and interests with far better job security and remuneration. And, by definition, I wouldn’t be applying for your job that requires a lot of teaching and advising.

I now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.

Leopold Stotch explains how to buy student worker loyalty. I suppose that’s slightly more ethical than selling desk copies on Amazon or to the textbook buyers… and at least more altruistic.

Mom and I went to see Stranger Than Fiction this afternoon after lunch at Huey’s; the movie was really great, and Will Farrell is actually quite talented in a relatively low-key role that finds him as the object of the humor rather than the cause of most of it (as was the case in Talladega Nights and most of his earlier work). Plus having what amounted to a private screening at the Malco Paradiso was quite nice.