The man who killed USC basketball star Ryan Francis has been convicted and faces life in prison without parole.

After blogging about it, counting down to it, etc., I actually ended up skipping this morning’s lunar eclipse. I hate to miss such things, but I was exhausted, and after all, I’ve seen plenty of lunar eclipses — and I’ll have a chance to see another one in February — so I decided going to sleep, and cuddling with my pregnant wife, was the more prudent option. :)

Anyway, SpaceWeather.com has an eclipse photo gallery.

…time for the Irish Trojan’s 3rd annual Notre Dame and USC college football pick ‘em contests to begin!

Just like the previous two years, the goal is not merely to predict each team’s final record correctly, but to predict each game correctly, and that’s how the contests will be scored. Final record and margin of victory will be used as tiebreakers.

To enter the contest, simply leave a comment with your name* (or a psuedonym that will adequately identify you to Irish Trojan readers) and your predicted margin of victory for each USC and Notre Dame game. (They’re separate contests, so you can choose to enter one or the other if you wish; you don’t have to enter both, though of course it’s encouraged.) Positive numbers mean you’re predicting a win by the Trojans/Irish; negative numbers mean you’re predicting a loss.

USC’s schedule is here; Notre Dame’s schedule is here. I’ll put a simple text list of all the games at the top of comments, so you can copy & paste that, and then fill in the relevant numbers, if you wish.

The deadline to enter is 3:00 PM EDT on Saturday. The prize, as usual, is good old fashioned bloggy bragging rights.

Good luck! Beat the Vandals! Beeeeat Jackets!

*First and last names preferred, not required. But please, if you have a particularly common name, at least give a last initial or something. I don’t want three "Davids" and four "Andrews" with no last names. :)

Welcome to the new and… well, downgraded… Irish Trojan’s Blog.

As promised, I’ve split the blog in two. The "old" blog remains archived on my WestHost dedicated server (and will soon be on a shared server, once I’ve downgraded my WestHost account), while the "new" blog — i.e., what you’re looking at right now — is actually located on TypePad’s servers. The fact that it appears at the domain brendanloy.com is just a bit of DNS sleight-of-hand; the new blog appears to be united with the rest of the site, including the old blog, but it’s really not. The end result is that the bulk of my traffic will go through TypePad’s servers, not WestHost’s, thus enabling me to stop throwing $260/month down the memory hole every month to keep the dedicated server up & running.

I picked TypePad over BlogSpot because I felt that its features were more robust in several ways. However, I may yet change my mind on that and switch to Blogspot. In fact, virtually everything about this "new" blog is subject to change, from the title and subtitle to the layout and design. Indeed, I intend to change a number of things. But I needed to make the switch now, before my September bill from WestHost comes due. So this will be a work-in-progress, as major changes to my blog invariably are.

Alas, one key feature that TypePad currently lacks is pagination, so you can’t look at "Page 2," "Page 3," etc. Supposedly, TypePad will be adding pagination sometime soon, but until then, if you fall behind on what I’ve blogged recently and want to catch up, you’ll have to use the daily or monthly archives. Sorry about that.

I did manage to hack together a recent comments page, displaying the 100 most recent comments. (Like the rest of the blog, it isn’t paginated, so you’re out of luck if you want to go past 100.) However, I haven’t yet figured out if I can do pop-up comments, which I know people like. For now, the "comments" link on each post on the homepage goes directly to the comment area on the permalink page. Again, sorry about that. I’ll try to fix it eventually.

I’m sure there will be some glitches and problems, so if you experience any technical difficulties, please leave a comment and/or shoot me an e-mail (irishtrojan [at] gmail.com) so I’ll know about it.

Oh, and if you want to read posts and/or leave comments on the "old" blog, you still can. Posts are at www.brendanloy.com/wp, and comments are at www.brendanloy.com/comments.

The Irish Trojan’s Blog has moved from WordPress to TypePad, for reasons that are explained here.

The old blog archives — from April 4, 2002 to August 27, 2007 — are still maintained on this server via WordPress (though the pages you see have been converted from dynamic PHP to static HTML). But everything from August 28, 2007 onward is hosted on TypePad’s servers.

Click here to visit the new homepage!

As I mentioned before, I’m planning to move my blog to either Blogspot or Typepad (mapping the subdomain blog.brendanloy.com to the Blogspot/Typepad servers) so that I can drastically reduce the amount of traffic to my WestHost account and thus downgrade from a $260/month dedicated server to a $15/month shared server. I’m hoping to get this done by Wednesday, and I’m in the process of setting it up now.

Because this plan involves permanently severing the blog’s archives into “old blog” and “new blog,” I’m thinking of naming the new blog something other than “The Irish Trojan’s Blog.” It sort of makes sense to do this anyway, because although I’ll always be an Irish Trojan, that appellation is a less significant part of my identity now that I’m no longer a student at either ‘SC or ND. Anyway, my current tentative choice for a new name is “Ably Nerd On,” which is an anagram of “Brendan Loy” first noted here by Jay Johnson, courtesy of the Internet Anagram Server. I think it’s a pretty good name for the blog, as it’s a rather good description of what I do here in cyberspace — or at least, it’s a good description if you’re willing to treat “nerd” as a verb meaning “to be nerdy.” :) However, Becky hates it. So I’m wondering what others think. To wit, a poll.

Please note, this is a non-binding poll. I’m the dictator of my own blog, and as such, I may choose the name even if everyone hates it. :) However, I would like to know what people think. I’m also curious if y’all have any alternative suggestions for a new name. Feel free to leave those in comments.

UPDATE: Okay, so, everybody hates it. Inspired in part by the overwhelming negative poll results, I’m abandoning the idea. (Hey, even a dictator has to avoid being so unpopular that the people revolt!)

I’m thinking I may just call the new blog “Irish Trojan in Tennessee,” thus maintaining the earlier “branding” while still indicating that something has changed. But I continue to be open for suggestions.

P.S. While “Ably Nerd On” is an anagram for Brendan Loy, the anagrams for my full name — Brendan Loomer Loy — include “Blarneyed Lo Moron.” Heh! Maybe I should use that instead! ;) Or perhaps “Ambled Ornery Loon”… or “Blander More Loony”…

Embattled U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales intends to resign, senior administration officials tell CNN.

Visit CNN for the latest.

Last week, I blogged about the total eclipse of the sun that will sweep across America in ten years. Well, it may be a lot less dramatic and a lot more common, but in just over 24 hours, we’ll be treated to a total eclipse of the moon!

The partial eclipse begins Tuesday morning at 4:51 AM Eastern time (that’s 1:51 Pacific), and totality starts at 5:52 EDT (2:52 PDT). West of the Rockies, the entire eclipse is visible. In the rest of the country, the moon sets at some point during the eclipse — the further east you are, the less of the eclipse you get to see. But everybody in the U.S. gets to see at least part of it. Here’s a map.

Here in Knoxville, we get to see most of the “good part,” when the moon is completely inside the Earth’s umbra, though the sky will be getting lighter toward the end. Totality, as I said, begins at 5:52 AM EDT, and mid-totality is at 6:37. Sunrise is at 7:04, and the moon sets at 7:09. (The closeness in time of sunrise and moonset is no coincidence. In order for an eclipse to occur, the Sun and Moon must be directly opposite each other from the Earth’s perspective, and the timing of their rendezvous with their respective horizons shows that that’s the case.)

The Smoky Mountain Astronomical Society is having an eclipse party at Blount County Library starting at 4:00 AM (seven minutes after the beginning of the subtle penumbral phase, and 51 minutes before first contact with the umbra). I’m planning to go — and as an added bonus, I’m hoping to see my first Iridum flare at 6:11 AM, directly in between the Big Dipper’s “pointer stars” and Polaris. After the jump, a map of where the flare should appear in the northern sky:

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Becky and I recently unpacked several of our boxes of books from South Bend — yeah, the unpacking process has taken a while :) — and filled up our bookshelf. I’m particularly proud of the “nerd shelf”:

Speaking of which, I recently re-read Half-Blood Prince, which I hadn’t read since the day it came out. I had forgotten a lot of its plot, so several things from Deathly Hallows suddenly make a lot more sense now. :) But I’m more perplexed than ever about one thing. So I have a question — but it’s after the jump, because it reveals a major Deathly Hallows spoiler. (I hear there are still at least 3 or 4 people out there who haven’t read it yet.) So… Warning: spoilers after the jump, and in comments.

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Ladies and gentlemen, Trekstor’s latest MP3 player, the i.Beat.Blaxx.

Where’s Al Sharpton when you need him?

(Hat tip: dcl via DaringFireball via Fake Steve Jobs Blog.)

Rumors of my abduction by Unitarian Universalists notwithstanding :), I’m safe and sound in Knoxville after two days of local-area-touring, bluegrass-music-listening, Katrina-presentation-giving, Smoky-Mountain-admiring, Gatlinburg-window-shopping-and-redneck-watching fun with Becky and Adrienne. Here are a couple of pictures from yesterday:

Adrienne heads back to L.A. tomorrow, after which I’ll have a couple of days to work on some logistical matters — including the blog’s big move from a dedicated server to Blogspot — before we head to Buffalo for the baby shower. And then on Tuesday, my job starts! I can’t believe the summer’s already just about over! (On the bright side, college football is almost here. Woohoo!)

As forecasted here (see “PS” at bottom of post, and Comment #6 :), the cyclone-scraped nation of Jamaica has bowed to Reality and postponed its scheduled August 27 election by a week.

In other Democracy-related news, the USofA’s Democratic National Committee’s Rules & Bylaws Committe has voted that millions of Florida Democrats’ ballots will be thrown out if they are cast on January 29 as decreed by Florida’s Republican-dominated legislature, rather than on February 5 (or later) as required by DNC Rules.

(Note: The foregoing paragraph is actually a massively-oversimplified distortion of a complex & important election-Law-vs.-party-Rules story; but what can I tell ya, I’m just feeling Fox-Newsy today. :)

What’s better than a lap dance at a strip club? A lap dance at a strip club that you pay for with a counterfeit $100.

What’s really sad is that you can’t even get a REAL lap dance in Nashville, due to the city’s fairly onerous Sexually Oriented Businesses ordinances. They require a no-touching, 3 foot separation from dancers and patrons at all times. Kinda hard to get an actual “lap” dance that way, I’d suspect.

How would I know about this, you might ask. Well, I just got back from a Continuing Legal Education seminar in Nashville, and well…I picked up a copy of the local alt-weekly while I was there, and they had a pretty scathing article about the whole thing.

p.s. Is the alternate title to this post too crude?

We're with Adrienne (who is visiting from L.A. this weekend) at the Bluegrass in the Smokies festival in Sevierville. Fun!