• Bubba likes the 'Cuse! Just interviewed at the Big East Tournament. Gotta love it. Get him up to Varsity ASAP! #
• #1 for less than a week. It was fun while it lasted. #

I’m settling in nicely to my new job over here at Federated Media. I’m working on some great stuff. And to that end, I wanted to let everyone know of an event that FM is hosting in June here in NYC.

So I’m proud to announce the 2010 CM Summit, which will take place on June 7th and 8th at the Hudson Theater and Millennium Broadway Hotel in NYC. We will have some amazing speakers and conversation, which I will let our fearless leader John Battelle speak to in his post on the FM blog. As a preview, some of the booked speakers include Avner Ronen of Boxee, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post, and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. of The New York Times Corp. Here is the full list of speakers.

Some additional resources for your viewing pleasure:

CM Summit Website: http://www.cmsummit.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cmsummit
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/CM-Summit-NY
LinkedIn Group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1005697

So book early. Every previous one has been sold out. Its going to rock!

A guy named Paul Yperman spent the past two years constructing a scale model of the Star Wars Droid Control Ship from scratch, using schematics he found in a Star Wars Cross Sections book in a bookstore.

He found a software on the Internet that helped him figure out the orb in the middle and then he continued from there. 30,000 pieces later and 2 years of building, he was finished. The God sent idea was finally done, and as a result, he constructed one of the worlds most elaborate Star Wars LEGO creations. Forget the small 200 piece builds you can buy off the shelf. This one was carefully executed and took some custom ordering to fit the purpose.

This is just another amazing example of the super cool things that can be built with Lego.

Tron. Now this is a movie remake that I am looking forward to seeing. For its time, the original was a pretty ground breaking flick with a decent cult/geek following. The modern technology of today will bring it to a new level.

• Secret menus from several fast food joints. In N Out Burger menu sounds great! – http://bit.ly/b1zEPW #
• Kevin Durant is manchild playing with boys. 39pts/10reb tonite #
• Syracuse Orange No. 1 in ESPN/USAT coaches' poll http://bit.ly/bMDFHG #
• With Purdue losing, looks like the Orange have locked up this week's #1 spot in the College Hoops world #
• Is it wrong that I DON"T want Syracuse voted #1 in next week's college hoops poll! I just want to be #1 at the end of the NCAA Tournament #
• Fantastic win by Syracuse! Wow, impressive!! #
• Come on fellas! Nine more points and 34,616 free tacos up in Syracuse!! #
• Raise the roof, fellas! Lets Go Orange!! #
• Not a pretty first half but somehow SU is up 10. I'll take it. DC, Billy Owens and Pearl in the house. Gotta love it!!! #
• Has the Dome Ranger come out of retirement? Can SU make a lay up? #
• Not liking the way the Orange are standing around and not boxing out. #
• Interesting that Boeheim is barely a .500 coach against Villanova all time. A foreboding stat? #
• Lets Go Orange!!! Huge game tonight! Wish I was up there!! #

To get in the March Madness spirit, here is a video vault from the NCAA that has full games and highlights from the past ten years of the final rounds (Sweet 16 through National Championship) of the NCAA Tournament.

For all you Syracuse fans out there, here is the video of the 2003 National Championship win for your viewing pleasure.

Come on, Jimmy B, don’t let me down. Throw a wrinkle in the gameplan to throw Villanova off. That is what is going through my mind tonight as my #4 ranked Syracuse Orange take on the #8 ranked Villanova Wildcats. The anticipation for this game is rivaling the classic Georgetown games from the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Throughout the years, there have been several unique characters, signs and stunts at the Dome that have helped get those huge crowds revved up – there was Dome Eddie (a scrawny guy wearing a big Orange wig), the Dome Ranger (a guy in an Orange Lone Ranger outfit who ran up and down the length of the court), signs telling Boeheim to “Unleash Tony Scott” to name a few. And now, there has been a new twist when a genius SU Grad Student brought a five foot high picture of Jim Boeheim to a game. From there its expanded to Wes Johnson and, hilariously, even Juli Boeheim, Jim’s wife.

Over at Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Communications blog, there is a great interview with Pat Manley, the aforementioned grad student who came up with the idea for the “Big Head Boeheim”. And yes, for all you Syracuse fans, he is part of that same Manley family who’s name was on the old fieldhouse.

So here we go, this is what college hoops is all about. May the best team decked out in Orange win!

A rare and high quality copy of Detective Comics #27 was sold at auction for $1,075,000. The record setting auction price came just three days after an original Superman comic sold for $1 Million.

Both Detective Comics #27 and Action Comics #1 were originally published by National Allied Publications, a company that later became Detective Comics and then DC Comics.

• I'm at Sundown Saloon (1136 Pearl St, Boulder). http://4sq.com/6wcpmN #
• I just unlocked the "Adventurer" badge on @foursquare! http://4sq.com/bgRfb4 #
• In Boulder's version of Chuck's….for the Syracuse crowd :) #
• I'm at Catacombs (2115 13th St, btw Spruce & Pine, Boulder). http://4sq.com/bwUA2p #
• I'm at The Mediterranean (1002 Walnut St, 11th St, Boulder). http://4sq.com/5FFWm8 #

In the 15 minutes that Tiger Woods had his contrived, staged, talking…like…this…because…I…got…caught press conference, the markets on Wall Street literally stopped what they were doing until he finished his speech.

• Syracuse sweeping Georgetown this season – Priceless. Next up – huge game vs. Villanova in the Dome. #
• RT @sportsguy33:. Asolutely had to do it though. RT @SethBurn: Either we (NYK) get Lebron or we are an epic fail. There is no in-between. #
• RT @mags: O'bummer, I agree with @fastcompany – the new 'cent' sucks. It's like Captain America lost his shield http://bit.ly/bLwqMu #

Tiger Woods is finally breaking his silence after three months in seclusion after his well publicized SUV accident and alternate life as “Fred Garvin, Male Prostitue“. What I love is that bookies actually have lines on several items related to this story:

A British bookmaker has set odds at 4-to-7 that Woods wife, Elin, will be with him. William Hill didn’t stop there, however. It offers 8-to-1 odds that Woods will announce he is getting a divorce, 12-to-1 odds that his wife is pregnant and 100-to-1 odds that he is retiring.

Any Baio over at Waxy dug up an article and press kit from the failed DEN.net launch back in 1999. But the super cool thing he also dug up was the “Top 100 Sites of 1999″ (Direct link to PDF of article). Just an amazing list of all the sites that were big in the first wave of the online revolution. I’m proud to say that at the time that article was published (November 1999), I was employed at Tripod, the #7 site on that top 100 list.

• Blue box, bye bye. Its been a great run and I am looking forward to the new and exciting work that lies ahead! #newjob #
• Hell has frozen over!! Congrats to the Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints!! WOW!! #

One of the minor things I’ve been meaning to do on my Wordpress site was to use a more visually appealing treatment on the “Previous Entries” and “Next Entries” links at the bottom of the site’s main index.php page template. These links appear on the bottom of every page of the blog, from the first page on to the “n^th” page and help users navigate back and forth to see different posts. Scroll to the bottom of this page to see the “Previous Entries” link to see an example.

In looking around at different button styles, I settled on Richard Davis’ SexyButtons set because they were lightweight, flexible and offered lots of different color schemes that could be used in different circumstances on my site. However, when I installed the SexyButton code, there was a minor bug on the homepage of my site with the “Next Entries” button.

Problem

Since the posts on my blog’s homepage are the most recent posts (my most recent post through my tenth most recent post), obviously there are no “Next Entries” to go to, and therefore that button does not need to be displayed on the Homepage. The issue is that while the Wordpress Loop code did not output any text, the SexyButtons still recognizes the code that is present on index.php template page and renders the grey background of the button style I chose (see highlight in red box above). To take this scenario one step further, if you clicked through the “Previous Entries” link at the bottom of the main blog page, you would get to “Page 2″ of my blog that would have the next 10 posts I created, and at the bottom of that page, the “Previous Entries” and “Next Entries” buttons would be rendered and linked accurately. The code I originally used to render the above screen shot is below, which is the combined standard Wordpress code and the SexyButtons code:

My Solution (Or, My Hack)
The nice thing about Wordpress is that since its built on PHP, there are tags and code for practically every element of your blog. In this case, the <?php (is_paged ()) { ?> tag is available for you to specify functions or actions on the paginated pages of your blog (yes, poor English…but I digress). So knowing this, I just strung together a couple of PHP “if” statements that keyed off of the “is_paged” tag which is noted in the code below.

The first “if” statement basically says “if Wordpress validates that the page is “is_paged”, then drop in the start of the button tag. Then, I left the “previous_posts_link” alone as was provided by Wordpress. Then, I put in another “if” statement to close out the button tag.

I then took this code and I put it on my index.php Wordpress template page, in place of the standard “Previous/Next Entries” code provided on most Wordpress index.php templates.

I am not about to admit that this is the cleanest way to solve this minor issue, but it works for me. Hope this helps someone out there on the internet. Or, I hope someone can help me if there is a simpler solution out there.