Here's a good behind the scenes look at the comradery amongst the players on the Steelers Defense.
Just last week I sent in my final car payment and I just received the title in the mail. This leaves Jenn & I without a car payment (as Jenn paid off her car earlier in the Spring.) It's a nice feeling to get out from having a monthly car payment. I guess the timing of paying off the car comes at a pretty good time, as I can know put the bulk of that money away each month. It'll also help me to pay off all the Holiday bills next month in a more timely fashion.
There was a lot of discussion last night on whether or not Santonio Holmes scored a TD against the Ravens last night. However, it appears like there's a real lack of understanding of the NFL rulebook by the media, so I'm going to quote the NFL rulebook:
Rule 11 Scoring
Section 2 Touchdown
Article 1 It is a touchdown (3-38):
(a) when a runner advances from the field of play and the ball touches the opponents’
goal line (plane); or
(b) while inbounds any player catches or recovers a loose ball (3-2-3) on or behind the
opponents’ goal line.
I've bolded the important part. Notice that the rule says as long as "player" is on or behind the opponents goal line, it's a touchdown. There's nothing in the rule book that says the ball must break the plane on a catch. It specifically states this is the case for a "runner", but in the case of a receiver it states "any player catches or recovers a loose ball on or behind the opponents' goal line."
I don't think there's any doubt that Holmes clearly had two feet in the endzone when he caught the pass. However, the only thing being brought up by the media has been that the ball has to break the plane—which doesn't appear to be the case.
I must confess, I was unclear of this rule as well, but most fans learn the rules from listening to broadcasts, which in the past they've always declared the ball must break the plane of the goal line.
I had to look this rule up after hearing the refs ruling after the review. If you listen to his ruling, he specifically doesn't mention anything about the ball breaking the plane—just that the receiver had two feet down with clear possession of the ball while being the endzone.
Anyway, there's much debate about this ruling yesterday and the Ravens fans are up in arms about the call. Hopefully this rule adds some clarity to the situation.
NOTE:This quote comes from the 2006 NFL Rulebook (page 79), but I can't find any rule changes that indicate this rule has changed over the past two seasons, so I believe this ruling is still accurate.
I had a great view of this play in person on Sunday and it completely jacked me up. Notice how Harrison turns his head and locates Roy Williams trying to set up a block and then completely blows Williams up. Harrison is playing lights out football—and has been for the past two years. He should be the Defensive Player of the Year this year.
Over the weekend, Jenn & I took our annual trip to Pittsburgh to see the Steelers play. We meet up with our friends Bob & Tina (from Indiana) once a year to see a game at Heinz Field. This is a trip we look forward to all year.
We drove over to Pittsburgh on Saturday, in the middle of the first winter storm of the season. While the weather wasn't that bad, we drove by dozens of car accidents on I-70. Lots of cars that spun off the road and a few multi-car accidents. We even detoured off I-70 briefly due to traffic being completely halted. We ended up jumping on SR-40 (old National Rd) for a few miles to get around the traffic jam. Fortunately we got to Pittsburgh and back without incident.
[UPDATED: Thursday, December 04, 2008 at 4:36:59 PM]
I have a weird problem I'm running into again, but haven't been able to find a fix. In FF2, when I place a <div /> over an <input /> element that currently has focus, the blinking cursor shows up through the top layer.
I put together this little video to show off the problem:
Here's a working example of the bug. If you open the page in Firefox 2, you should see the cursor blinking in the middle of the word overlay.
Does anyone know of a fix for this problem?
I thought I've blogged this tip before, but I saw someone else mention it on a mailing list this morning. If you ever want to remove the time portion in a MSSQL Server, you can do this by removing the decimal portion of the date/time stamp.
SQL Server stores date/times as a numeric value where the integer portion of the value represents the number of days since epoch and the time is represented by the decimal portion of the value. This allows us to cast a datetime field as a float and then round down to the nearest integer:
We first convert the datetime to a float:
We next use the floor() function to round down to the nearest integer: