I’m still not sure what type of head injury DMQ suffered when he decided to invite me to contribute to HLS but whatever his rationale, I am humbled and honored to have been the 12th choice. This makes me the Charlie Weis of the Great HLS Writer Search of ’11™. I believe this requires me to make some bombastic statements in my initial couple of posts which you are all required to save and use against me years from now.

For those that don’t know, I’m a 2008 ND graduate. I lived in Carroll Hall all 4 years while I was at ND (as @ndtex said, “that explains everything!”) and I got a B.S. in Mathematics. I currently work as a consulting actuary in New Jersey.

Due to my math nerd background, I hope to have some posts focused on statistics and numbers. We’ll see how many I actually produce because well that takes a lot of time and effort. On a side note, if you have ever uttered the phrase “stats are for losers”, we will never be friends and I already hate you.

Generally, most of my posts will be lighthearted and hopefully humorous. I realize that to some of you The Internet = Serious Business but personally I try and enjoy the time I waste while on Twitter or ISD (IrishSportsDaily.com – the best recruiting website on the interwebs!…you’re welcome Mike).Additionally, I am an eternal optimist so any predictions I make regarding ND football must be taken with a grain of salt..

Thanks for indulging me with my introduction. Please feel free to follow me on twitter (@pootND) as that is where you’ll find me most frequently.

P.S. I  solemnly swear to never use dancing leprechauns in one of my posts.

So, in an effort to bring more of the "quality" of writing you've come to expect at HLS, we've been out recruiting. Picture the Maryland Coaching Search, but with less glamor and more rejections. The result is this: Our newest contributor, PootND.

Many of you may know PootND from his moderating duties over at Mike Frank's site. Still more of you may know him as "@PootND" on Twitter, typically using his account to remind me of how old I've gotten. And if neither of those references ring a bell, surely you've come across the hash-tag meme that's taken the world by storm: #DammitPoot (trust us, the Notre Dame Twitterati use that tag at least 10 times a day).

So join me in congratulating Poot. He's done it. His life's goal has been achieved.

It's somewhat "vanilla," right now. It's actually hosted by a company called "Vanilla Forums," but you'll be able to access it directly within HLS. We plan to integrate further, but we're launching this as a sort of "pilot" program so we can feel our way through it. We're not going to replace Shoutbox with it. We just figure some discussions live and breath better on a forum than in a constantly updating chat window. We've got a few other plans in store too, but this one is the quickest and easiest one to implement - a "minimally viable product" as we like to say in my business.

And actually, the forum software itself is fantastic. So give it a spin. We'll be more tightly integrating it into HLS as we go along, so be sure to keep that in mind when picking a user-name.

Note: The login process on the forum is currently separate from the login process on HLS. We just wanted to get things up and running. We'll integrate the 2 logins later. Hopefully soon. Thanks.

Thanks,

MQ

Well, hopefully that's no longer a problem. We've implemented some new styling that should make the threaded nature of our comment system much more intuitive (and it should look a hell of a lot better too).

Hope ya like it. It wasn't all that much work, but was a tough ToDo to reach on our ever expanding list.

Updated to add most important bit: And now, at last, you can leave a comment when logged into HLS!

I think it's pretty intuitive, but Carrier thinks their thermostats are intuitive, and those things are just downright bewildering, so: If you want to just leave a comment to the post, click on the "leave a comment" link within a post, and then fill out the comment form at the bottom of the page. If you are reading comments and want to reply to a comment, just click on the "reply" button under that comment, and the comment form should open under that particular comment (so long as you've got javascript enabled on your browser). The system supports sub-commenting to a depth of 5 comments, so if a "sub thread" gets to 5 comments, the reply button will be disabled for that 5th comment. But you can continue to reply to higher-level comments to your heart's content.

Also, again, we invite you to register on our site. We love getting to know the folks in these parts, and we've got some other features planned for our "regular," registered members coming up (hopefully) soon. We're heading into our 5th football season with HLS, and what started out as a laugh among a few friends has sort of evolved into a place for some pretty good discussions about all things ND football and CFB in general.

And even if you don't register with us, if you'd like to get one of those sweet, sweet images to appear next to your comments, just head over to Gravatar.com and click the button "Get your gravatar today." It's a simple process, and will help you establish a presence across a multitude of websites. Plus it makes it a heck of a lot easier for us (me) to recall you as a user, giving everyone more context.

I'll work on pretty-ing up the main WordPress commenting system instead. If you run into issues, let us know.

Thanks.

It's that time of year again! Time for us all to discuss our brackets with co-workers as we pretend we've been watching college basketball for more than the last 2 weeks. And what better way to show off all that now-ledge than to sign up and play in Her Loyal Sons Bracketitis III!?

Details:

1. Follow this link: http://hls-3.mayhem.cbssports.com/e
2. Enter this password when prompted: holtz
3. Ponder that it's been more 15 years since we've had a head coach of football for whom we'd bestow the honor of last-name-as-password.
4. Sigh.
5. Shake head in disbelief as you go straight-chalk in Duke's division.

Prizes? We don't need no stinkin' prizes! And acknowledgement? Hell, if domer.mq is doing poorly enough early enough in the tourney, you can consider this pool all but forgotten. Hoorah for autocracy!

So join up because, well, because it's fun! And if you join 26 other pools, it'll be 26 times the fun!

So if you've got some good ND photos that you'd like to share, then please send them along to the e-mail address you see over on the sidebar. Soon we'll get a gallery set up so you can just submit them that way if you prefer. And if we use them in posts, we'll be sure to send a hearty hat-tip your way.

Thanks,

HLS Management

Enjoy, and Go Irish!

Yeah, okay, so we've decided to be sell outs. We've added advertising to the site. For the 4 of you who read the blog with regularity before this year, you can now moan and groan to all your friends who only recently started reading us and have conversations like this:

Friend: "Hey, have you heard about that amazing Notre Dame football blog, HerLoyalSons.com? They're incredible! So smart, so witty, so good looking! And funny! And they don't just cover ND Football either. Yeah, they cover lots of national stuff too, just with a pair of blue and gold glasses on while they do so! They're fantastic!"

You: "Oh. HLS? Yeah, well, I liked their old stuff, back before they started making money and became sellouts."

And the reason you now get to look so cool to all of your friends is this: The economy, stupid. We at HLS have been thrilled that people actually visiti and read the site. However, with actual visitors comes actual costs - costs we've been paying ourselves for quite a while now, but costs that cost real money which could otherwise go into our children's trust college fund. And the way the economy is going, "college fund" is quickly looking like we can call it by another name every week: Mega-Millions Lottery.

So here's how we're going to play this: We're going to keep the ads to an absolute minimum. We're not out to make money on this thing. We're going to start with one strategically placed ad and watch it for a while to see how it's performing, and then we're going to adjust from there if need be, either in number of ads, ad placement, or ad mix. While some of us have experience trying to "monetize" much larger sites with much more aggressive advertising schemes, we have absolutely no experience in this bohemian-I'm-okay-you're-okay-let-someone-else-pay-but-just-barely-world, so please just be patient and know that we're doing our best.

Thanks,

HLS Management