Friday Water Cooler: Computers

So there I was, minding my own business yesterday, when I started up our relatively-new quad-core computer. And that's when the agony began.

The computer would not come up - it would not recognize the drive. I pretty much tried everything to make it come up - including, tonight, the dreaded last-ditch "put it in the freezer for twenty minutes" trick - and it didn't work.

I have some other tricks up my sleeve to try to get at the data - but now I have to face the probability that a year's worth of photos - irreplaceable - are gone forever. Four Lehigh games, gone. My son's first day of school, gone. God knows what important documents on the computer - gone. Gone!

I could have taken backups, or performed some sort of RAID backup for my hard drive. I even could have kept all me media on a networked drive. But, of course, I knew soooo much more than everybody else. I was too good for backups. It was always something that I was going to do after the season. When I was less busy. When I didn't have more important things to do.

Whether I get the priceless data off of there or not, I learned my lesson.

*****

This week's game will not be televised by Channel 69 or Yahoo! Sports Online, but will be carried by Yahoo! Sports with live audio, taking from the radio feed starring Matt Kerr and Kody Fedorcha on AM 1230 and 1320 of the Lehigh Valley.

If you are subscribed to CBS College Sports XXL, you can get a webcam feed of the game through Bucknell. I've seen these before: they are surprisingly good. You won't get replays, but it works well enough. (Hint: mute the audio of the Bucknell announcers, and play the Lehigh audio instead!) If you're not subscribed to CBS College Sports XXL, you can try to use Channel Surfing.Net to see if they have picked it up, which is free. (No guarantees, though.)

*****

Finally, here are my picks of other Patriot League games from my CSN Way column this week.

Fordham at Lafayette. While Colgate and Holy Cross have gotten the Top 25 love this year from the Patriot League, quietly 5-1 Lafayette has been making an impression. After linebacker Michael Schmidlein helped demolish Harvard 31-18 this weekend at Harvard - making them “Ivy League Champions” after sweeping the Ivy league for the first time in recent memory - they welcome Fordham and the high-octane offense led by quarterback John Skelton to Easton. The hungry Leopards will feast on the Rams, and maybe re-enter the Top 25 as a result.

Schmiddle of the Defense 30, Skeltons In the Closet 16

No. 17 Colgate at No. 22 Holy Cross. It’s not the Patriot League championship game - Lafayette has plenty to say about that - but this is the game that will separate the men from the boys, and both Holy Cross head coach Tom Gilmore and Colgate head coach Dick Biddle know it. Undefeated Colgate boasts the No. 1-rated rushing offense in the nation, with a stable of running backs like Nate Eachus and Jordan McCord, while the Crusaders’ Dominic Randolph boasts the No. 2-rated passing offense in all of FCS. Two powerful offenses, and two very different styles: and once again, playoff hopes on the line -last year, Colgate’s 29-28 win over Holy Cross gave them the Patriot League title. Coach Gilmore has been using this loss to motivate his troops this here - in fact, it may be a large reason why Randolph chose to return for his fifth year - and I think the emotion, and the home crowd, gives this one to the running back Matt Bellomo and the Cross as they take another step towards that elusive title.

Cross Crosses Colgate 30, Biddle Bit By Matt Bellomo 24

Go Lehigh!

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago . Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled. Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season. The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League....

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though? Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me? Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything. Everything. The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who...

#TheRivalry Flashback: November 21st, 1987: Lehigh 17, Lafayette 10

Since becoming an undergrad at Lehigh back in the late 1980s, I first heard about the historic nature of the football team and "The Rivalry" through the stories that fellow students would share. I did not attend the final meeting between Lehigh and Lafayette at Taylor Stadium, which was the final time a football game would be played there. Those that did attend said that was that it was cold. "I remember it being one of the coldest games ever," Mark Redmann recollected, "with strong Northwesterly winds and the temperature hovering around 20. By the end of the game, the stands were half empty because most of the fans just couldn't take the cold. "Fortunately, several of my fraternity brothers snuck in flasks to help fend off the chill."

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