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My main memories of Dan Marino are of him in commercials for Isotoner gloves. It wasn’t until a couple years after that association was cemented that I learned he used to be a quarterback. But that doesn’t matter – if I see a picture of him my first thought is of Isotoner gloves.

Which I suppose means their advertising worked. Kind of. I never bought their gloves, but I certainly remember their ads.

And that brings me to today. I’m betting that the kids around the age of my youngest are going to remember Peyton Manning as the Nationwide guy.

And no, I will not buy Nationwide insurance either.

Based on the popularity existence of last year’s article predicting bowl games in haiku form, I present to you this year’s all-haiku bowl game predictions. Still America’s only all-haiku college football bowl game predictions.

These are listed in order of date (earliest first). Some picks are whom I think will win, and some picks are whom I want to win. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide which is which.
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As the saying goes, when you have a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

In my case, I got an angle grinder earlier this year, and now every problem looks like too much metal.

The angle grinder is much more fun than a hammer. The kids like seeing the showers of sparks.

So far, the angle grinder has helped me replace ball joints, brake pads, struts, and shocks. Plus it sharpened my mower blades.

Also note: the angle grinder will take care of a variety of problems with nails too.

I had Google setup as my default search engine for the Safari browser on my iPhone. I edited the link so that it disabled the autocomplete function, which gave a bunch of search suggestions as you were typing. I did not like that, mainly because my kids will use my phone from time to time and some of the suggestions were inappropriate. Plus I felt it was distracting and contributes to ADHD.

It was easy enough to disable – just add a string of “complete=0” to the URL and you’re good to go, just a plain search engine with no too-eager-to-please additional help popups. See my previous blog post on the topic of disabling Google autocomplete for details.

But Google changed something on Thanksgiving. I looked up something and noticed that Google was throwing possible search terms at me. “Is this what you meant to type?” “Maybe this?” “Look, a lot of people are searching for these words, would they interest you?”

No, Google, I am not interested in what other people are looking up. If I were interested, I would search for that.

At first I thought I opened the plain Google URL. So I made sure to use the special link. But no, the special link didn’t do anything anymore.

I poked around on the internet, but there were no suggestions. Changing the settings using the link at the bottom of Google didn’t do anything either.

I figured I might as well try Bing. Alas, Bing also wanted to tell me what other people liked searching for.

Lo and behold though, the Bing settings let me disable that. And it worked. I have set my default search engine on my iPhone to Bing.

Now when my kids want to look something up, I do not have to worry about hearing a question along the lines of “Dad, what does such-and-such mean?” Or even worse, not getting asked that question and having them click the Google suggestion.

I’m not a fan of Microsoft products, but I will gladly use Bing since it’s behaving like I want my search engine to behave.

The College Football Playoff committee has produced this year’s selection of teams, which means that a lot of people are unhappy.

In my case, I should be happy, because the team from down south is not in the playoffs. But the committee didn’t learn its lesson from last year.

And that lesson, that I mentioned last year but apparently the committee didn’t read, is that they shouldn’t place the 3rd-best team from a conference into the national championship playoffs.

One could argue that Alabama is the 3rd-best team in the SEC. And yet they have been selected as the 4th-best team in the country. Why not Auburn, the team that beat them and won Alabama’s division?

I’m not going to go on an Alabama conspiracy theory – I just think the committee is taking the wrong things into account.

They favor minimal losses over conference championships, and I take the opposite view.

I thought the debate in the committee would be between Ohio State and USC – both two-loss conference champions. I personally would have chosen USC, because OSU already lost to Oklahoma so we have an idea of how they would have done in the playoffs.

I like the idea of teams playing significant non-conference games, and I think the committee’s direction undercuts that. If they are going to reward minimal losses and ignore conference championships, it’s in teams’ best interests to setup a favorable schedule.

Plus, with the limited games, there is limited cross-conference comparison, so it’s hard to tell if a two-loss PAC-12 champion is worse than a one-loss Big-12 champion. Maybe the PAC-12 is tougher this year. Maybe Oklahoma would have another loss if they had to play Notre Dame. Now we won’t know until after all the bowls are done if USC should have been the fourth team in the playoff.

I do hope that Clemson will blow out Alabama, to give yet another sample point to the committee that a team that did not make its conference championship game should not make the national championship playoff.

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I heard someone use the phrase “that took forever” and although it never bothered me before, now it does for some reason.

That reason is that if something really takes forever to complete, then it can’t have completed, therefore the phrase can’t be in the past tense.

Acceptable uses are “taking forever” or “takes forever”, but never “took forever”.

I like to do things, and I like to use the internet to help with instructions. Usually they’re helpful, sometimes they’re not. One gripe that I won’t go into here is that videos are not the answer to everything.

One thing that all my searches have in common though, is that a page from ehow.com will appear in the search results. You can save yourself a lot of time if you just always avoid visiting that website. I have made that mistake enough times that I know better now. And I am passing that knowledge on to you. Learn from my mistakes.

In case you’re wondering what the problem is, I will summarize every eHow page:

How to Fix Your Widget

Step 1: Get your replacement parts
Step 2: Get the broken widget, remove the screws holding it together, and open it up.
Step 3: Remove the bad parts
Step 4: Put in the new parts
Step 5: Close the widget and tighten the screws holding it together.

You’re done!

Lest you think I’m being generic and leaving out details for my example, I’m not. The eHow pages that I’ve read are all like that – they don’t provide any details on the specific procedure I was looking for.

I’m my cases, I’ve usually tried to do the obvious stuff and got stymied by something that was not cooperating and then I look to the internet for tips unique to the particular item.

Other websites are more helpful – Instructables, just about any forum-type site, etc. Those all provide useful details. But eHow and its cousin Wikihow and also Justanswer I have found to be useless.