Miami (OH) vs SMU Mustangs - March Madness 2026

It’s a miami moment

The MIAMI (OH) Redhawks vs SMU Mustangs NCAA Tournament Game 2026 is Something that happened in Dayton, Ohio on March 18, 2026.

The same Wednesday that I personally filled out a March Madness bracket for the first time since I was born out of a confluence of curiosity & impulse flowing with suddenly increasing force in the direction of the question “when does March Madness start?”

The curiosity expands to pose the question “What is March Madness?”

It’s a single elimination basketball tournament with 68 teams which get selected out of 353 teams.

So now I’ve got the premise. I can fill out a bracket. Just like everyone has always done, and I joyfully join the parade. I realize that 2 of the final four games are happening that same night. I vote for Miami (OH) to win against SMU to then play against Tennessee in Philadelphia because….

I have been OBSESSED with Bloodbuzz Ohio.

It is my current personal anthem of victorious, efficacious ambivalence in a somewhat mundane but transitory season of life.

Bloodbuzz Ohio is a fantastic song by a band called The National.

Anyways, I’m really in a phase with it again so I voted for Ohio in this game out of whimsy off the dome.

The Miami (Ohio) Redhawks were undefeated in their regular season this past year

Their record was 31-0. Their inclusion in the tournament presents a philosophical question due to this basketball ranking concept called strength of schedule. Miami-Ohio was undefeated in their regular season, but this remarkable accomplishment doesn’t mean they are included in March Madness. Apparantly there are 353 teams in Division 1 college basketball league. Enter: “strength of schedule”

It’s this other metric to decide who gets in to the 68 March Madness slots called strength of schedule that measures difficulty of your wins or something. So Miami (OH) was 31-0 with a perfect record but their strength of schedule was bottom of the food chain vibes so they got positioned to become

an underdog hero.

Gaining haters by simply being included in the ncaa National tournament. Scandalously seeded 11th in the Midwest Region, scheduled in the First Four round of the famous tournament. & they won. so they’re still in the famous national tournament.

The Redhawks beat the Mustangs 89 to 79 in the first four round of March Madness 2026

America is carried to Ohio in a Swarm of Bees.

theres so much analogy in this i will have to save something for tomorrow.

Azure Devops

Intuitive Project Management Tool

According to Software Developers

Elegant CI/CD Solution

According to Artists

Knowing who you’re selling to is more important than knowing what you’re selling.

Azure devops includes A very Powerful And elegant CI/CD solution.

When I started my career as a software developer, with no knowledge of software or networking concepts. I went to a 3 month code camp and walked away with the tools to ask the right questions and an extremely basic knowledge of c# syntax. The concepts never clicked for me until i was actually building code in an enterprise scenario.

…such as dependency injection.

when that clicks, you are a programmer.  trust me.  anyways, then i start hearing words like deployment when all I know how to do is write the shittiest c# console app you’ve ever seen in your life.

wtf is deployment?

Where I was working there were no fully dedicated positions for this type of deployment or “release management” work. It was maintained by a volunteer team made up of a handful of IT Ops engineers and a 1-2 Sr. Developers. Kind of like an extracurricular club in high school.

I asked if I could join the team as the most junior developer in human history (glorified intern). I might’ve asked to do this work because at this particular personality cult type corporate situation, you needed a club to get promoted. That is not always the case. But this place was like high school and academia illusory success. However, I viscerally remember being unbearably confused by the concept of deployment, So I can almost guarantee you I was not doing this for clout. I HATE not knowing foundational concepts.

I need to know them or I’ll die.

Anyways, after I joined the team, I got paired with this guy to work on the Azure DevOps migration as my first task on this strange council of elder men. I was going to help this guy “Dave” with the migration of our CI/CD pipelines to YAML in Azure DevOps. And I had no fucking idea what that meant. I never knew what we were doing but we would sit in a room for an hour once a week and work on “yaml” pipelines. He was extremely quiet & pleasant. Classic “Dave”.

I did not begin to even barely grasp the premise of what we were doing until like two years later when I left aforementioned extra credit team and I had to do it by myself out of necessity created by the incompetence of my teammates. When I knew the basic premise of what i was trying to do, I became known as the YAML pipeline / Azure DevOps Configuration as Code expert across all of IT. Then I found myself in a strategic position at 26 against my will, reporting to a Director.

All because i wanted to know what it meant to “deploy code.”

Deployment is a fancy word for moving files.

These thoughts relate to a feature of the product known as Azure DevOps pipelines. It’s a great tool.

crazy flash of thunder in nashville

Azure Pipelines make artists and scientists happy. As a CI/CD solution. Developers might say it’s too much work as a CI/CD or not fast enough, but you get your moneys worth.

Re: ADO Boards

DevOps as a project management solution => makes non-technical people angry. tiny font. no flashing lights or bells and whistles. makes developers happy. Elegantly orchestrated under the hood.

User stories / Features / Epics. This is the hierarchy of Work Items you can add in ADO. These are a part of a feature of the product known as azure boards.

The Secret to Success

The Secret to Success

“Know who you’re selling and know what you’re selling, and do it well.” - my Dad, allegedly, in a newspaper in 2011

Knowing who you’re selling to is more important than knowing what you’re selling.

Hate to break it to you sweetheart. You can live your life doing very little actual work and experiencing a lot less pain than most competent individuals have historically endured if you can just fucking internalize this. It is always the answer. Don’t waste your breath attempting to communicate something meaningful to people who have no desire to participate in understanding. You’re not being kind or helpful. You’re just letting morons drink your life force like bedside water in the middle of the night. Communicate exclusively in tones and vibes and shiny objects when dealing with NPCs (takers).

Knowing what you’re selling will make you useful in the world.

You are participating in the world around you instead of draining it. When you know what you’re doing and you are doing it, you become generative. That doesn’t mean that you have a millisecond of free time or autonomy. But at least at this point, you’re a giver.

Selling it well leaves you bandwidth to spend on yourself.

The advantage of excellence is in its continuous expansion of your mental and temporal capacity to pursue a meaningful life. Doing it the right way with both finesse and efficacy is your ticket to choosing to do something remarkable if you want.

We forget that the best kept secrets are what we already know.

“Simplicity seems to always roll back around as aging wisdom reveals what you understood as a child is a grander truth than the complex.

More deeply human than details is that hand-holding walking into all your fears sure that you are not alone.

Go back. “ - lyrics to a song I wrote in 2018 with my friends