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I am announcing my Football Fan Free Agency. The Miami Dolphins have not assigned me as a Franchise fan, so I am available to dabble in the Free Agent Market. If you want an additional super fan for your team I am open and ready to hear why I should be watching and pulling for your favorite team. Falcons fans don’t bother. I gave up my season tickets and replaced them with a NFL Sunday Ticket subscription.

I could not resist just tossing up this very short story in a blog post. It will age out soon and just be one of those things I toss in a collection of short stories one day.

First Strike on Kansas

By

J. Lee Ragans

© 2009 J. Lee Ragans

v1.0

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

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If Suspended NASCAR driver Carl Long is standing helmet in hand at Atlanta Motor Speedway when they come back in the fall, I will drive out there just to help him pay this fine.

The 12 race suspension for an over sized engine being reduced to 8 races does nothing in this case to help the small time driver owner who does not even build the engines he uses. If NASCAR can prove that the oversized engine gave him a competitive advantage then I think the $200,000 fine would be fair.

However he did not make the race, his record is not impressive over his career with an average starting position of only 36.9 and a career winning total of only 1.4 million dollars since 2000. This fine is a death sentence for his race aspirations. I am no expert but it seems to me that the engine manufacturer should have been the one on the hook for all this.

All that said, NASCAR may know something here that they are not telling us, but then NASCAR has always been an overly secretive organization. Their rules are rarely obvious and always open from interpretation, so when they drop the hammer on someone we must assume that this person has done something severely wrong. This kind of corporate secrecy has served the sport well over most of its life, but with the free flow of information today it only seems suspicious.

I will admit that I don’t know Carl’s career as well as I know some of the other drivers, but something about this story seems wrong. A small team being effectively executed because of a problem that requires and engine to be torn down to detect just feels wrong. I have to ask, so what did he do to make NASCAR mad? If they are not mad at him, then they will soon be looking like Formula One with fewer and fewer cars running every race. Small teams will be tossed aside because of shrinking budgets and ridged requirements. More and more microscopic violations will be hard to avoid.

After months of waiting the iPhone app for accessing Sirius XM has finally been released. It is however an unmitigated failure right out of the gate. Why? It requires a premium subscription to access something that you are already paying for. I have a regular online subscription for online content because I pay for my XM subscription on an annual basis. I see no need to turn over more money for something I am already paying for.
I suppose that someone at Sirius XM thinks this will make people pay extra so they can listen to that awesome Sirius XM content from their iPhones. Do they realize that people who have already paid for an iPhone most likely have an iTunes library. So there is already music I liked enough to pay for on my phone.

Now you may ask, “Lee, you have a giant iTunes library. Why do you want to listen to XM?” If you didn’t know before you now know that I have spent way too much money on CDs then way too much money on digital music. Why listen to Sirius XM? Am I a Howard Stern fan? Nope. And by the way Howard Stern channels are not available on the iPhone app for some reason. I am an Opie and Anthony fan. Why would a Computer Scientist who aspires to be a science fiction writer listen to Opie, Anthony and Little Jimmy? Who knows. Can you explain your friendship with all your friends? I find them amusing.

So bringing this rambling back around. Sirus XM has decided that someone like myself that pays annually for a product from a company that almost went bankrupt may not access the online content on their iPhone unless they pay an additional $2.99 a month.

Sorry folks, go tell the brilliant minds that came up with this way to encourage me to pay extra for this that it will just make me reconsider paying for an annual subscription when it comes up in the next few months. That is not an idle threat. I almost did not renew this year, but I was 2 days to late to cancel when I remembered that I had to make a phone call to stop from being charged. Be careful how much blood you try to wring from this stone. I have lots of options and most of them I have already paid for or they are free. Can you say Slacker Radio?