jimdahl

Since everyone's going to such an effort, any chance of getting each week's in a new thread?

See White out in Grand Forks? thread, and the subsequent Green/White weekend

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Fargo flips over Pancake record

Woohoo, more classes outside!

The MacNaughton is still mathematically possible, if still pretty unlikely. We need CC to struggle so we can make up 4 points across 6 games: UND wins the MacNaughton scenario

If you click on "details" under any team on the rpi page, one of the things there is an estimate of the team's future RPI given a specific number of wins. It's only an estimate because future opponents' strengths can change, it only includes scheduled games (no conference tourney), and it doesn't drop "negative" wins. However, it gives a fairly handy benchmark as to how much RPI can change. For example, Michigan can drop to about .592 if they win 5 of their remaining 7, or to .579 if they win only 3 of their remaining 7. To break .59, UND would need to win at least 7 of its remaining 8. UND probably needs to win 5, maybe 6, of its remaining games for its RPI not to fall by the end of the regular season.

Congrats, and welcome Dr. Kelley! It's an exciting time at UND, and I look forward to seeing what you can do with the opportunities and challenges that await in coming years.

Glad to hear it. You saved me doing a search to find if there were any known bugs in this version of the software's PM system.

A nice reminder from Dave that there was actually a meaningful hockey game played, too.

He claims that the petition and attempt to draft Ruud has nothing to do with it. I've been been on both sides of hiring quite a few times, though have absolutely no familiarity with this industry. At least in my areas it's almost always understood that you don't respond to an offer for at least a day. Frankly, I'd be more surprised by the candidate who didn't take a day or two, especially at a chief executive level (and particularly in this case when all the details of the offer and negotiations are immediately public information).

I don't believe it changed since this: WCHA tie-breakers outline Basically: Head to head Conference wins Goals against (head to head only) WCHA goals for - goals against differential

The McNaughton, though still distant, is a much more realistic possibility than when I first punched this into a comment on Dave's midseason report Load what-if: username: mcnaughton password: cup And tweak from there.

I've always thought it important that the recipient's peak of excellence be midseason, not necessarily just be the best team midseason. Fortunately, this year we get both -- Denver was at #1 in the PWR on Dec. 31.

I'm going out to watch the game tonight, so won't be keeping an eye on the board. I made a few changes that might improve how the board responds if it becomes overwhelmed (as it briefly did last night when the tv coverage died and 1000s of people tried to jump on simultaneously). Since I won't be here watching, please post any errors encountered here so I can review any problems later.

Though the bomb of 1000s (yes, literally thousands) of simultaneous attempts to jump onto the forum last night when tv went out brought it to its knees, it gave me the info I needed to tweak a few things. In particular, the dreaded "IPS Driver" error (which usually means the web server is trying to respond to your request but can't get in touch with the database) should be gone. Though you may now see some other messages (e.g. "too busy, try again"), the forum should now never let itself get so busy that it takes minutes to recover. Though I'll do my best to track them through logs, please post here and let me know about any such errors that you see so I can continue to work to eliminate them.

You're right. I addressed this a couple weeks back in a blog post, and it has gotten only bleaker for Miami's TUC situation since then (as Bowling Green dropped out of being a TUC). At this point, if UNO gained TUC status it would give Miami 4 more TUC wins, giving them an almost guaranteed additional point in all PWR comparisons. If Bowling Green became a TUC it would give Miami a win and a loss, making it almost certain that TUC will come into play for them, but not helping them as much in the comparisons. I try not to be a billboard, but the siouxsports.com PWR details screens (such as this comparison between UND and Miami) were specifically designed to provide the information necessary for this sort of analysis.

I've been keeping a pretty close eye on things tonight, and am tuning this new server a bit (we moved to a new one last Nov.). I'm afraid the struggling about 10 mins ago was my fault, I was tweaking it a bit and ended up making it really busy right at the same time everyone rushed in from their broken tv. I won't try to make more big changes in real-time while it's in such heavy use, beyond making sure it gets back up when it starts to struggle like it did about 10 mins ago, but should be able to use some of what I've learned tonight to make it much more self-recovering tomorrow. It's tough to do this sort of testing without the real traffic, which is why I'm paying particular attention tonight.

You seem to be having about the same reaction Walrus did, so I think my response to Walrus is probably equally applicable. I seem to have erred in my criticism of theories of conspiracies (which are more about level of organization than motive) because it seems to be distracting from what was meant to be my primary point, motives--

Ah, that explains it -- it seems to be geo-targeted to North Dakota. That's why the rest of us didn't see it. I would guess they just bought up a ton of ad space in N.D., and this being one of the biggest sites in N.D. ( ) it picked up a lot of the ad units. I put the URL on the ban list, though it warned me that it could take up to 4 hours to take effect. Let me know if you're still seeing it tomorrow. Sorry again for the inconvenience.

I haven't seen that either, but BigGreyAnt is right -- if you're seeing it in the upper right, it's a Google ad that I didn't intentionally chose. It's always been important to me to try to keep visitors united as fans of the Sioux, so I definitely wouldn't intentionally introduce something divisive or use the community to try to advance a political opinion. I'll look into if I can perform some sort of blocking by category (e.g. politics), but it's not my recollection that I can. What I know I can do is refuse specific ads (I've added blocks for ads from NDSU in the past). If you see the ad again, note the highlighted text and record the URL the ad sends it to -- that's the info I need to block it.

Sorry to ruffle your whiskers, Walrus. You are of course right, you didn't say that. Part of my reaction was to an ongoing theme that some of the comments reminded me of, but that you didn't say. The real point I was trying to make was... I agree that various parties were likely seeking different outcomes and almost certainly did some behind-the-scenes counting and comparing of votes. However, the point I wanted to make is that though different people may have been seeking different outcomes, each is trying to work toward what they think is the best interest of UND (with a dash of self-interest on the side). They just have different ideas what's best.

Whenever a non-UND person is chosen for a UND job, there are whispers here of secret cabals and conspiracies with nefarious anti-UND motives. I've never understood what those suspect motives are supposed to be (Tony paid off the KGB to blackmail O'Keefe to persuade five other administrators to pick a pretty qualified guy instead of the UND guy?) Looking at who's on it, I would guess that each person on the committee voted for who they thought would be best for UND. That different people have different opinions on who's best isn't a surprise, and doesn't lead me to suspect anyone's motives. Differing opinions are probably attributable to (1) them having information we don't, and (2) different people placing different weights on each attribute (e.g. experience at a national D-I university weighed more heavily than UND ties, in contrast to some fans thinking the latter more significant). Of course, it's an attitude like this that keeps me from getting invited to the secret conspiracy meetings.

The message board should render fine on most modern devices. Other parts of the site will render fine on advanced devices (e.g. iPhone), but "degrade gracefully" on browsers that don't fully support Javascript. For example, the dropdown menus become long lists of the options that would have been available in the dropdown menus on a more fully feature browser. If you're just trying to get scores in a hurry or just read the message board, the mobile version was designed for phones with minimal web browsing capability, displaying only low-bandwidth text.

You're forgetting that this is no big deal for Minnesota. While UND only gets Gopher week twice a year, for Minnesota every week is Gopher week. Every Minnesota opponent thinks they have a big rivalry with the Gophers and plays up to them, but to the Gophers each week is just another opponent who thinks they're the Gophers' rival.