Any local folks submit panels to SxSW?

I know that the rails envy guys did - vote/support them here!

I just set up an account. My gamertag is alexUCF (feel free to add me!). I tried playing some 12 year olds in grand theft auto, but I can't seem to live for more than 30 seconds at a time ;)

I did beat some kid in guitar hero on easy mode though. Sucker.

Kathryn had to work late the other night, so I decided to put a domain Gavin and I have had to work as a little experiment in news gathering. UCFinsider.com is a blog/news aggregator on our favorite college sports obsession.

The UCF/Orlando Sentinel sports staff stuff was (or is, depending on who you ask), for the most part, rather silly. It did get me thinking on a particular aspect of the giant media shift going on though, and that's how people gather and digest their news.

One of the lines that's been repeated by some fans and by a couple columnists at the paper is how badly UCF needs the Sentinel. If it's not for the Sentinel, "who else is going to cover you?". The amount of fans echoing the sentiment is rather slim, but it seems to be pretty popular amongst other newspaper columnists. The truth is probably in the middle, but thinking about how I gather my news on UCF, there is no one source that sticks out. The notion that if one paper decides not to cover a specific subject, it'll go unreported, seems incredibly out of date.

UCFinsider.com, for now, doesn't include the Sentinel. It's more of a test really and isn't anything more than that. I wanted to see if I could stay on top of the program thoroughly without feeling the need to visit OrlandoSentinel.com -- something I did quite a bit of last season. It'll still show up syndicated columns occasionally, but I'm cool with that. This is anything but scientific, and once my curiosity on the subject is satisfied, I'll likely add the Sentinel into the mix anyhow (The site is intended to be about all of UCF, not just sports).

So far? It's working really well. The site is probably listing about 20-25 UCF related links every day, none of them from the Sentinel. I'm finding the coverage from other mainstream newspapers to be very strong, well rounded and diverse. Both the Miami Herald and Florida Today have surprised me with great articles in the last couple of days. I want to leave the Sentinel out for at least the first game to see if there is decent enough coverage the next couple of days. It's against SC State, so if it works for that one, it'll undoubtedly work well for the rest.

The site automatically creates two posts per day -- one at 7am, and one at 4pm. It was tempting to make it ajaxy/real time, but this way it should fit into most folks work schedules a little less aggressively ;). It uses the same sources as Google News with the addition of UCFAthletics.com, Rival's free content, Scout's free content, UCFSports.com UCF Fan Forum ('hot' threads only), select UCF related blogs/fan sites, and select national level college football blogs. I plan on adding NCAAbbs.com's C-USA forum, YouTube, Social News conversations (if Digg's talking about technology created at UCF, I want to read it), and more blogs as I find them. I'll probably also start including information on UCF sports alumni -- Kevin Smith, Asante Samuel, Daunte Culpepper, Brandon Marshall, Mike Walker, Atari Bigby -- etc. I'll probably also try to make the design of the site suck less ;)

Any suggestions / comments? Let me know.

Yikes.

Let me paraphrase: "I will systematically disarm our country. Walk softly, and carry absolutely no stick at all."

He sure did look and sound good saying it though. This may be the fodder McCain's camp has been looking/waiting for.

This past weekend, Kathryn and I shot out to the Bahamas for a quick little get away. Nassau's definitely a place where you have to have something planned to do, I think, but overall we really enjoyed it. We went out there via the weekend cruise that Royal Caribbean has up in Port Canaveral on the 'Sovereign of the Seas.'

Atlantis Hotel and Casino is a ridiculously cool place. I'm a sucker for salt water aquariums, and man do they have a killer one. They have a stingray in there that's probably 8 or 9 feet wide. We played a little bit of black jack while we were there as well. With the proximity to florida, I'm not exactly sure why I would want to go to Vegas anymore. The only thing that's probably missing are the shows, if you know, you're the show tune type. The room rates seem to be a little pricey, but I'm sure they run specials like every where else. As is, it's cheaper to do the cruise route and just hang out there.

We hit up Stingray Adventure also. Basically, you get to snorkel around with stingray's, hold them and feed them. They're all de-barbed, which really takes a lot of the adventure out of it ;) Good times though, and certainly a lot more hands on than Sea World.

I could totally see us doing this again at some point. The ship set sail at 5pm on Friday and was back by 7am on Monday. Perfect little weekend get away and it was cheaper than flying somewhere and staying in a hotel room.

Interesting read suggesting that we are in the midst of a deflationary period, not inflationary or stagflation.

Well said, with a few specifics on where he takes issue with the paper.

Saw this over on the JibberJobber blog. Figured I might know some people who could appreciate it ;)

Enough about Obama. He changes his mind too much. McCain? McCain actually died in South Carolina back in 2000. That's just Bob Dole in an old man costume.

I'm voting for T. Boone Pickens, who as Gavin pointed out, not only looks Texan, but also has the best Texan name ever. Additionally, he seems to have a somewhat coherent energy policy. What more reason do you need? He's not shy about admitting he'll make a boat load of cash by it, but who cares? Someones going to make some coin and it might as well be the guy from the Simpson's.