Update: I’ve done an analysis of a playoff game, it’s certainly worse than expected. Take a look at the findings…

I recognize that football, particularly the National Football League (NFL,) is a for profit organization. But, there comes a time when the commercialization surpasses the product. Congratulations NFL, you’ve made it to that promised land. I’ve never been a big pro football fan, but would tend to watch it when the college game is in hiatus. I simply cannot do it anymore. It used to be a game with periodic breaks for advertisements. It’s now a very long series of advertisements with some breaks for football.

Combine that with a bunch of multi-millionaire snot nosed brats vying for attention, announcers attempting to be entertaining (they’re not,) sloppy play, low effort, and pedestrian officiating and you get an unwatchable product. Even with digital video technology to advance through the ads and a mute button, it’s still bad. Maybe I’d feel differently if I really cared about a team in particular, but I don’t think so. The frightening part of this is that the college game isn’t far behind in reaching this threshold…

The blog cawsnjaws has done a great job breaking down the commercial to content mix for NASCAR races. I’m inspired and will attempt this sort of analysis on an NFL game and college bowl game over the holidays.

After that little experiment, goodbye NFL. Perhaps I’ll check out a game again in a few years. I have to believe I’m not the only one who feels this way and that can’t be good for business.


20 days until OSU plays for the national championship
Ohio State’s 2006 record: 12-0 Next up: Florida 1/8/2007
Tune: Stuck in a Moment by U2
Technorati Tags: NFL | Advertising | Unwatchable Product | Mike Harding Blog

The Energy Information Administration (part of DoE) has launched a new website that provides a comprehensive overview of energy consumption, production, and distribution across the US, with deep dives into each state. It’s pretty cool (though there is room for improvement as the Imperial Valley in California is missing as a geothermal producer for example.) It seems to use much of the same data from the Electric Power Monthly report and much more aggregating it into a more consumable format. It’s certainly a great start.

When clicking around a bit, one of the things that struck me was that California, with 12% of the US population is responsible for only 2.2% of carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide emissions and 0.2% of sulphur dioxide emissions in the US. While the share was wildly disproporitionate, the absolute tonnage of emission is still enormous. The image below shows a summary of California, click the picture to get the detail that goes along with the image.




21 days until OSU plays for the national championship
Ohio State’s 2006 record: 12-0 Next up: Florida 1/8/2007
Tune: Rivers of Babylon by Sublime
Technorati Tags: Energy | Reports | DOE | Mike Harding Blog

Back in October, Western GeoPower (TSX: WGP) announced their intent to rebuild a power plant on the site of old “PG&E Unit 15” commencing operations in 2009. This is interesting in that there was a plant on that site producing 65MW from 1979-89. By resizing the plant to 25MW (net,) Western GeoPower believes that they’ll get 50 years of operation from the site producing some 200,000 MWh per year.


24 days until OSU plays for the national championship
Ohio State’s 2006 record: 12-0 Next up: Florida 1/8/2007
Tune: Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Cowboys by Willie Nelson
Technorati Tags: Energy | Geothermal | Electricity | Mike Harding Blog

AKA, another term for a very foggy day. Since I wrote the entry about how nice it’s been, the weather has been terrible (apparently I do have some massive unknown power to affect weather by tempting fate, but I digress.) Here are a couple of images, before tempting fate:



As you can see lovelier than one has a right to experience in North America during December. Now, after tempting fate (same shot, add fog and drizzle:)



Be careful what you comment on, you might possess these amazing powers too!


25 days until OSU plays for the national championship
Ohio State’s 2006 record: 12-0 Next up: Florida 1/8/2007
Tune: Gumbo by Jimmy Buffet
Technorati Tags: Coast | Weather | Fog | Mike Harding Blog

…knowing Princess Diana was neither murdered nor pregnant.

Puh-leaze!!!! Does anyone really care about this stuff? I mean, she was killed in a car accident nearly 10 years ago, why is this still news?


25 days until OSU plays for the national championship
Ohio State’s 2006 record: 12-0 Next up: Florida 1/8/2007
Tune: How many licks? by Lil’ Kim
Technorati Tags: News | Irrelevant | Waste of Time | Mike Harding Blog