Eric James Stone

Along with my Uncle Doug and cousin Scott, I was at the Las Vegas Bowl last night to cheer on BYU.  Toward the end of the game, UCLA had gradually chipped BYU’s lead down to one point, 17-16.  UCLA then started from their own 2-yard line and drove down the field, finally calling a timeout with 3 seconds left in the game so their kicker could kick a 28-yard field goal to win.  He had previously made three field goals, two of them from 50 yards or more, so I had little doubt he could make this one.

This was the third BYU-UCLA game I had been to, and the two previous ones had ended in defeat for BYU.  This was also the third BYU bowl game I had ever been to, and the two previous ones had ended with BYU winning.  So one of those two streaks had to break.

I started chanting, "Block that kick!  Block that kick!"  As far as I could hear, no one else chanted with me, but I kept chanting anyway.  (We were in a UCLA fan section, just behind the UCLA band, but about half the fans in the section were BYU fans anyway, as was the vast majority of the crowd.)

You have to understand, deep in my heart, I did not actually believe BYU would block that kick.  I chanted anyway because that’s what I feel I’m supposed to do when a kick needs to be blocked.

To my recollection, no team has ever actually blocked a kick when I was chanting "Block that kick!" until last night.  When it happened, I couldn’t believe it at first.  I’m still amazed BYU won that game.

So, incredibly, my bowl winning streak beat out my UCLA losing streak.

Well, after trying several different hosting companies, I think I’ve found the one I’m going to use: IX Web Hosting.  Their Business Plus package offers just about every feature I need at an affordable price. (Would you believe 1000 Gigabytes of web space?  I had only 10 GB on my previous host.)

One of the web hosts I tested, Startlogic, seemed to have all the features I needed at an even cheaper price.  However, when it came to serving PHP-based pages like my blog, it seemed to take an average of 25 seconds for the page to start loading.  On IX, it’s closer to 2 seconds, which I feel is acceptable.

I also upgraded WordPress to the latest version, which means some of my tweaks to the previous version no longer work.  It seems to have emailed out a previous blog entry when I made a correction, which it is not supposed to do.  It should only email a blog entry once.

My email is all going to Gmail for now.  At some point I may test out the webmail at IX.

I’m also testing out Windows Live Writer, which is offline blogging software that then posts to my blog.  We’ll see how that works.

P.S. I hope that I’ve now fixed the bug that makes it mail out when I change something.  Here goes…

I’m in the process of switching my site to a different server, so my blog and email may be a bit funky for a bit.

I know many of you are fans of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. Unfortunately, Jordan passed away a couple of months ago, leaving the final volume of the series unfinished.

Today, Jordan’s widow and Tor Books announced that they have selected Brandon Sanderson to finish the book. I’m certain they’ve made the right choice. Brandon’s an excellent writer who’s also a big fan of the series, so he’ll do it right.

Congrats to Brandon!

My dad, my two brothers, and I are all football fans. Yet as far as we can remember, we’ve never all gone to a football game together. Or rather, we hadn’t, until last Thursday. My dad managed to get four tickets to see Brett Favre and the 10-1 Green Bay Packers take on Tony Romo and the 10-1 Dallas Cowboys at Texas Stadium.

Here we are:

I’ve been a Dallas fan since shortly after I moved down to Waco to go to law school back in the early 1990s. So after following them on TV for all these years, it was a real thrill for me to see them play in person–and see them win. (I went to a preseason game a few years ago, but it’s not the same. Especially since they lost the preseason game.)

Under my jacket, I was wearing my lucky Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt. Why is it my lucky sweatshirt? Because the Cowboys have never lost a game while I was wearing it.*