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I won't be saying much out loud for the next few days as, while driving home last night from Columbus and The Memorial, my voice went out. I had a cough that would not go away three weeks ago that had just subsided, but the stress of this past week seems to have allowed it to come back from the brink. Perhaps it's strep throat, perhaps it's something else, but I've got yellow phlegm (when I can get it out), no voice, and a persistent cough due to a tickle in the back of my throat. Will see a doctor later - I've held out long enough. 😛

Adam Scott, again, falters in the final round at The Memorial. That makes two years running, boy.

Alan and I didn't get a chance to watch much. They started early and showed it on TV on tape delay.

Adam Scott shot an amazing 62 in the second round of this year's Memorial. Alan and I were there, and witnessed a bit of it, though we were mostly following other players around. We followed Tiger through the first and second holes, grabbed shots of him on the fifth, and then peeled back to get shots of him at the ninth.

We followed Adam from the media room and got shots of him playing the 18th as well as in the interview room.

Later we went to a golf course and played a little - it's too hot here to be lugging camera equipment around. The 2,500 shots I've taken should be good for awhile, though I'm sure I'll get more on Saturday or Sunday.

Played Mystic Rock today. Shot 39 on the front nine with a double bogey at the ninth after a tap-in birdie at the previous hole. I was a bit distracted on the back nine and gave up keeping track of the score after I crunched a drive at the 11th only to lose the ball. It could have gone 400 yards (down a big hill, mind you, and with some cart path help) into the water hazard in front of the 12th green. Someone could have picked it up. I don't know. It vanished, and we looked everywhere for it.

The course remains in great shape, and most of the afternoon I spent working with Alan to straighten out his duck hook. It's a combination of two things: he closes the clubface quickly through impact and comes at the ball from well inside. He takes the club away well inside and gets way across the line (the opposite of laid off) on the backswing.

The fix for Alan has been simple: open the stance a little, push the club away (it feels very outside to Alan, but it's pretty much on line) with his left shoulder, and stop the backswing when his shoulder touches his chin. He also needs to move the grip into his fingers and out of the palm of his hands, then trust that he'll probably hit a little baby fade.

I spent two days in Columbus and am now back in Erie overnight. I picked up The Sand Trap staff member Alan Olson. Tomorrow we'll leave early (again) to play Nemacolin Woodlands (Mystic Rock course, previous site of the 84 Lumber Classic) and then we'll make our way to Columbus, OH to cover The Memorial again. We'll miss first-round action, but it should be worthwhile to play Nemacolin again.

Got up early today (4am) and was on the road by about 4:30. Destination: Dublin, OH, site of this year's Memorial Tournament, hosted by Jack Nicklaus. Dublin is a small suburb in the northwest corner of Columbus, OH, and is a hoot to attend.

Hopefully we can avoid the weather (heat, humidity, and thunderstorms) that plague this event, but the odds of that lie somewhere between slim and none. It won't happen.

I still have only the 13" PowerBook (from January, 2003!) so I won't be posting updates during the week. I will next week, though - and I'll be sure to take a bunch.

Came off without a hitch. I got in some golf at Whispering Woods. I vacuumed the house. We had a cookout. We burned some of the wood that's been piling up. And now we're relaxing inside. A very, very good day.

To me and my wife. We were going to weed this weekend, but it's rained or been yucky since about 11am yesterday. Perhaps we'll be weeding on Memorial Day.

Laurie McGuinness spoofs the Mac/PC ads. I'm always up for a good parody, but these are rather bad. Most of the ads seemingly exist just to poke fun at stereotypes.

In "Money," Mac is paid a dollar for graphic design work. In reality, graphic designers make a good bit of money and, last I heard, Mac users make more money on average than PC users. "Music" must be a Zune thing, but last I heard, even most Zune songs can't be shared and those that can have the "three" limit. And Apple has very different iPod ads, anyway…

The last two are the worst. In "Work," Mac is late for a meeting because he stayed up late doing a website for his cat and is stoned. In "Girl," PC goes on a skiing trip with a girl while Mac mixes music in his basement. When Apple did the "girl" thing, it was about interconnectivity - about how the girl (the digital camera, IIRC) hooked right up, after Mac and PC had created a network. It had a point other than… well heck, I'm not even sure what the point of "Girl" is supposed to be.

Virtually anyone with half a brain should be able to shoot two people standing on a white background. That's not hard. But Laurie is a copywriter, and pushing these ads out there as proof of his skills seems more detrimental than beneficial to me.

Though I don't assign multiple categories to posts here at nslog.com, I do at The Sand Trap in two instances: for "Hot Topics" and "Reviews." The former helps me fill out the "Top Stories" section in the sidebar and the latter simply helps me direct people to our reviews (via http://thesandtrap.com/reviews/).

I discovered in WordPress 2.0.x and 2.1.x that categories were sorted by their category ID (cat_ID) in an ascending order. On posts with multiple categories assigned, cat_ID 4 took precedent over cat_ID 5 or 6 or 99. This precedence exhibited itself in two places: building of permalinks (URLs) and the category list (via WordPress's the_category() function).

I don't care about the latter much, but the former is important to me. I don't want "Reviews" or "Hot Topics" to be used to build URLs, so I set their cat_IDs to 98 and 99 respectively (with a parent category, "Tags," set to 100). All other cat_IDs are lower, and life was good. URLs were "properly" built based on the behavior I saw in WordPress 2.0.x and the behavior continued when I upgraded to WordPress 2.1.x.

With WordPress 2.2, this behavior has flipped around. No longer are categories listed in ascending order, but rather in descending order. This change in the way WordPress behaves effectively changed every URL on my site which has multiple categories. This goofs up things like Pingbacks, not to mention the fact that URLs are no longer the way I want them. The old Permalinks still work fine, but the "new" (and incorrect) permalinks are pushed out by the system wherever it has control over link generation.

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Third time's a charm, they say. Good things come in threes, they say.

Not Shrek. Ugh, was the third version terrible. Absolutely freaking terrible. Bad all around. Far too much (bad) adult humor for kids to get, almost no kid humor, and with a storyline I couldn't have cared less about.

Avoid, avoid, avoid!

Since updating to WordPress 2.2, times reported back to my blog editor (be it ecto or MarsEdit) are incorrect. They're the UTC time and not the adjusted time (-4 for me currently). Since ecto and, I presume, other blog editors pass the time along as part of the XMLRPC statement when they're posted, subsequent editing of a blog entry incorrectly "adjusts" the time. The time(s) listed in the WP-Admin interface are correct.

I've modified almost no core files on this blog - just formatting.php to "fix" broken image uploading - so I have to assume these are WordPress 2.2 bugs. I don't have the time right now to look into solving them, but if someone knows how to do so, please let me know. See extended entry for more…

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Sucked.

So much so that I don't think I'll watch the next year. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was something better than that, for sure.

Toys 'R' Us didn't have any Rubik's Cubes. After watching The Pursuit of Happyness last night ((Specifically, the DVD extra feature on the Rubik's Cube.)) and doing some reading about the methods of solving the puzzle, I'd like to get one. Are they available at Wal-Mart or Target? Or should I just buy online and pay S&H for a $7 toy? 😛

The MacBook Pro is likely to be updated soon, but not before I'd really like to use it: May 28-June 3 and June 11-17. I'll be covering The Memorial and The U.S. Open both weeks and shooting a lot of images. The 12" PowerBook really won't handle the load very smoothly.

What to do, what to do…?