Seth Neal (dotCom)

Where I occasionally share my musings.

No, MY name is Seth

Lately I’ve been having a light-hearted twitter fight (with Albert Ma) that I’ve been losing. Its been fun (for me anyway), but it has reminded me the power of a name. Our unique identifier.

Of course, our names aren’t unique. There are no fewer than a dozen Seth Neal’s that come up in a google search (although, admittedly, I spend a lot of time online so I’m most of page 1). And if you happen to have a name like David Brown (like good friend and author David Mark Brown), well unique is the last word you would use for your name.

First names are even worse. Read More…

Why Tyrants Win

(And other mumblings from a Social Media dud.)

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines a tyrant as such:

tyrant |ˈtīrənt|
noun
• a cruel and oppressive ruler
• a person exercising power or control in a cruel, unreasonable, or arbitrary way

Kim Jong-il, Albert Ma, Muammar Gaddafi

If you remember, sometime last week I made the case to unfollow Albert Ma. It was a (futile) retaliatory gesture wielded against an unjust, cruel tyrant. Otherwise known as the Fantasy Football Commisionor of the #lotrasFFL.

Well… Read More…

A Campaign to Unfollow Albert Ma (@albear)

Just so there isn’t any confusion: I consider Albert Ma a friend and a great guy. The following is more a result of my procrastination on this fine Friday than anything else.

Note: If you don’t currently follow Albert Ma on Twitter please do so now so you can unfollow him at the end of this post.

Albert Ma = Kim Jong-il?

By most accounts Albert Ma is a nice guy. By some accounts Albert Ma is the Kim Jong-il of Boise, ID. I’m now convinced he is that later.

Here’s the story.

The Villian

Albert Ma believes in living the lifestyles of the rich and shameless. Admirable (or ridiculous, I can’t remember which). He is also a big fantasy football fan.

The result of these two passions is the Yahoo! Fantasy Football League, #lotrasFFL, where Kim, er… Albert is Dictator, er… Commissioner. Read More…

Boise

Boise. It definitley doesn’t suck.

Or maybe…

Boise. Man, this place is awesome.

I don’t know which it is; but I thought I should just write something down, anything, to make my feelings on the matter public. Boise is a great place to work and live. In fact, people love lists so much I’m going to come up with my top 5 reasons Boise is awesome. Read More…

Da Bears versus The Packers: Greatest Games Ever

Lets not forget that Papa Bear saved the Packers Franchise.

I’m so excited! Sunday January 23rd, 2011 The Chicago Bears will be facing The Green Bay Packers in what is only their second playoff meeting EVER! I SAID EVER PEOPLE!! Keep in mind, this is the oldest rivalry in the National Football League! And probably the best rivalry in all of professional sports. And they have only met one other time in the playoffs. Amazing. And for the record, the Bears won that 1941 meeting 33 to 14 as they went on to win the NFL Championship!

Anyway, all this excitement got me thinking about the 5 greatest Bears vs Packers games in history. Share your greatest games in the comments if you think I don’t know what I’m talking about; here are mine… Read More…

Da Bears, circa Fall 2010

I know.

I over reacted. But you watched the pre-season too, didn’t you? We looked HORRIBLE. Completely hapless. I think I had every right to freak out. And after all the expectations of last year burning up like a super nova before our eyes I wasn’t going to make the same mistake going into the season. Sure, I may have swung a little to far into the Deeply Depressed Camp; but I’m here to announce that I believe we have a really good football team on our hands.

Not everyone thinks so yet. But after tonight they will. The Green Bay Packers were picked by many to win the NFC. And for good reason. They are a tough football team. The focus is usually on Aaron Rogers, and for good reason – he’s good. But they also have a tough defense and pretty competitive Special Teams units. But they aren’t without their flaws. Like the Bears, their Offensive Line could be much better. The O-line is so critical to the success of any team, but especially for teams like the Bears and Packers who want to throw the ball. But the biggest problem the Packers have is the lack of any sort of run game. Right. Its 2010 and nobody in the NFL runs the ball anymore. Well, I’m here to tell you its still important, especially in close games.

So, tonight is Bears vs Packers. The Bears are going to win this game easily if they can convert 40% or better on 3rd down and win the turnover battle. They will still be in the game even if they can’t. Its going to be a good one.

Bears 24 – Packers 17

I ♥ WordPress

WordPress is great. Actually, its awesome. This site runs on WordPress. So do 10 million other sites; or so I’ve heard. A few weeks ago a whole twitter storm erupted over a certain theme that you can buy for WordPress. At issue was how the theme was licensed and whether or not that was congruent with WordPress’s GPL. The short answer is it wasn’t; or isn’t. You can read about what a GPL means here, but the short answer is it means that any software based off of General Public Licenced software also must be GPL’d. I know, its all real exciting.

But there was an exciting part for me! And since this is my site, I get to write about that here! The guy who was behind this theme made the claim in an interview that “he was one of the 3 most important people in WordPress”. Now, he has a lot of users of his theme, but the claim is was crazy outrageous. The guy has a serious case of narcissism (as it turns out, my kind of guy!). So the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, decided to give away some t-shirts and certificates to anyone who ask. I asked… and now I’m One of the three most important people in WordPress too!

…

And then I found $5.

Two Good Friends

On Friday I was reminded of two very dear friends of mine that have recently been on the outs… in fact, it seems like things are turning from bad to worse. It makes me so incredibly sad. In 2006 they almost got married! Or at least that’s what myself and their other mutual friends all thought–or more accurately–what we all hoped! But it looks like any chance of that is just laughable now. I’m guessing I’ll be lucky if I see them ever on talking terms again. Sad.

The whole situation makes me wonder what I’m supposed to do. How do I deal with this as someone who loves them both? Will I have to choose sides? I honestly don’t know…

Creative Conflict

Its funny, when I first signed up for Twitter I was fairly convinced it was worthless. So worthless in fact that I ended up completely deleting my account! 18 months later Twitter was still there and growing and I knew I had missed something so I signed back up and even was able to get my old username and everything. My re-entry into the world of Twitter pretty closely corresponded with our move from SLC to Boise, and as I was determined to make some use out of twitter so one of the first things I did was follow everyone I could find who was from Boise. I probably follow 100 people (or more) from Boise and know maybe 10 of them. But now, in a small way, they are apart of my life (and if they followed me back, I’m apart of theirs).

Da Bears, circa Spring 2010

So… its NFL free agency time. I don’t know how it snuck up on me so quickly… oh yea, its because I’m a Bears fan and we don’t normally do anything the first day of free agency! BUT WAIT! The Bears did make a block-buster trade last off-season for Jay Cutler. Remember, the trade that brought The Messiah to Chicago? I guess that didn’t really work out well. BUT WAIT! It seems when jobs are on the line (Lovie, I’m looking at you) priorities change.

Apparently the Bears are going to make some moves today. I can’t even believe it. But I’m not going to get all excited like I did last off season. My friends and family deserve better. Stay tuned…

UPDATE 7:50am: OK, so I’m a little behind this morning. We’ve already made our first signing! I know nothing about Brandon Manumaleuna or why we think we need him. Although it does seem like this guy is a Mike Martz guy. Martz doesn’t really know what to do with catching TEs which is unfortunate since we have 2 pretty good ones in Greg Olsen and Desmond Clark. Hopefully they remain apart of the Bears future.

UPDATE 12.33pm: Awesome. We just made our second signing. Chester Taylor is a stud and we definitely need a second back. Having both Forte and Taylor as options in the back field couldn’t get any better for a Martz style offense. Both can catch the ball as well as they can run it. Now if only we had an offensive line!

UPDATE 1.08pm: Alex Brown just tweeted “Great day for the bears! Watch out offenses the bears defense will be tough!” which leads me to believe we actually did sign Julius Peppers. Unbelievable. That guy is a monster on the field and with Rod Marinelli as defensive coordinator it could spell big things. Look out, da bears are back!

UPDATE 2.55pm: ESPN is saying Julius Peppers is a Chicago Bear. Crazy.