EasyLinuxGuide Blog

The long awaited rematch in the main event is here! This Saturday Georges St. Pierre has his opportunity to show the world what everyone (except maybe Matt Serra and his camp) expected him to do — dominate Matt Serra. It’s been a long road back for St. Pierre after losing the welterweight title to Serra who received his title shot because of winning the tv show “The Ultimate Fighter”. St. Pierre was criticized for mental weakness as likely this was the only way MMA fans could make the world right again. The fact that the 5′6″ Italian guy from New York came off a TV show and beat who most everyone figured would be the reigning champ made the world somehow not right.

St. Pierre went through the death of a young cousin and endured a serious illness suffered by his father. These are undoubtedly very traumatic events, yet, it would be fairly unheard of to call off a fight due to mental anguish. Typical fans would expect a physical injury to be the sole reason for delaying a bout.

In terms of a prediction, it is foolish to go against St. Pierre this time, although surely anyone who is on the Serra bandwagon will end up looking genius if he wins again. This time has all the right ingredients to be a different outcome. St. Pierre is no longer dealing with those emotional issues and in fact hired a sports psychologist to help with straightening out some things. Anyone who squaks at this method lacks the capacity to understand the pressure that St. Pierre who is still fairly young at 26 is under. Having a solid foundation in terms of dialog is definitely an asset. Georges also has had 2 fights since his last fight with Serra. He beat Josh Koschek and destroyed the greatest Welterweight of all time – Matt Hughes. St. Pierre is hungrier now more than ever. You can compare this to BJ Penn’s past. BJ was able to get by on his talent and therefore didn’t train as hard as he could have, this is not necessarily a carbon copy of those events, however; St. Pierre understands much better now what it takes to stay on top. Of course none of these claims discredit Serra. In fact, out of the entire Welterweight division, Serra may be the fighter with the best chance to hang with Georges in the Octagon. Serra is very underestimated. People generally still don’t give him enough credit even though he won the Ultimate Fighter TV show and then beat the champ. The kind of mental toughness and belief in yourself to accomplish that along with a black belt in BJJ are true assets that very few combatants possess.  I can’t resist – St.Pierre with a first round TKO. It must be so. This also sets up Serra vs Hughes which Hughes has already requested due to ‘unfinished business’.

I’ve been a Rich Franklin fan for a long time and I genuinely empathize with the personal struggles he has faced over the past year or so. It has been a collapse for Rich in that he was the defending Middleweight Champion with no one in sight that could defeat him. Everything changed. His father died unexpectedly which was a devastating loss. Also, Anderson Silva came along and as much as Rich respects Silva, surely he would be much happier had Silva never come to the UFC. Rich suffered a brutal loss to Silva and then fought his way back to a title shot in his hometown of Cincinnati. This resulted in virtually the same outcome – even the trademark broken nose was administered. This time around, Rich faces a fellow victim of Anderson Silva in Travis Lutter – another winner of The Ultimate Fighter TV show. This should be an interesting fight. Each fighter has been open about his strategy. Lutter wants to take it to the ground and Rich would rather stand and kickbox. Both fighters really need a victory – this is likely Lutter’s last run at success in the UFC and Rich needs to keep himself in the upper echelon of the weight class. Although the fan in me would somewhat like to see Lutter win if only because he may get a rematch with Anderson Silva – and I truly believe he may be the only one who can beat the Spider (he came close last time and that was after a terrible weight cutting that cause it to be a non-title bout), I am going to have to go with Franklin in this one. I just think Rich is too strong for Lutter. Rich was able to make pretty good work of Yushin Okama who was touted as the physically strongest fighter in the division, so Lutter will suffer the same fate, I believe. The only way to beat Franklin is to out skill him on the feet like Silva has done.

Here is the full card: (my picks are in bold)

Main card (televised):

185 lbs.: Rich Franklin (22-3) vs. Travis Lutter (9-4)
185 lbs.: Kalib Starnes (8-2-1) vs. Nate Quarry (9-2)
185 lbs.: Michael Bisping (15-1) vs. Charles McCarthy (10-4)
155 lbs.: Mac Danzig (17-4-1) vs. Mark Bocek (5-1)

Under card (may not be broadcast):

185 lbs.: Jason MacDonald (19-9) vs. Joe Doerksen (39-11)
185 lbs.: Alan Belcher (12-4) vs. Jason Day (15-5)
155 lbs.: Sam Stout (13-3-1) vs. Rich Clementi (30-12-1)
170 lbs.: Jonathan Goulet (21-9) vs. Kuniyoshi Hironaka (11-4)
265 lbs.: Cain Velasquez (2-0) vs. Brad Morris (10-2)
185 lbs.: Ed Herman (14-5) vs. Demian Maia (6-0)

And once again, Rogers disappoints by not showing this in HD

Wordpress version 2.5 was released last week. This is a major jump from previous versions in terms of bugfixes and improvements. The main feature is that the interface looks a lot different. The general concensus is that it is easier to use with which I would agree. It has added some new features such as radio buttons for adding media like video, pictures and audio to your posts. Also, tags have been added just underneath your writing area of a new post. One thing I preferred from the older version was the categories section being on the right as it was more readily accessible.

There are now separate buttons for settings, plugins and users which appear on each page in the top right which makes them easier to reach.

The upgrade process was quite easy as usual and went off with no hitches. If you are a Wordpress user and haven’t upgraded yet, then this might be the one to try. Obviously you want to back up all of your files first as per usual, but once you upgrade, you probably won’t want to go back.

Great work by the Wordpress team in making it the defacto blogging software in my opinion.

I watched the Ultimate Fight Night 13 tonight and watched as numerous fighters were unlike themselves and this was due to the high altitude of the Denver venue. While it is easy to say that they are fighters and they should have been better prepared, the kind of training and conditioning that would need to take place in order to appear unaffected in this altitude would typically involve an extreme modification of a fighter’s training regimen.

I truly believe this was the cause of several fights results. Notably, Tim Boetsch completely gassed which was very unexpected and I believe this caused him to lose.

Kenny Florian was very impressive in his fight against Joe Lauzon. I expected it to be a lot closer and actually picked Lauzon to win as Florian hadn’t looked all that great to me recently. Perhaps Florian is back on track?

Thiago Alves caught Karo Parisyan with a knee to the face that dropped him and he was not defending himself momentarily and it was stopped by the referee. Parisyan was very upset with the stoppage. There are a lot of Karo haters out there that criticize him for putting on boring fights and eking out wins. This win by Alves will surely make them happy. Parisyan is now even further away from a title shot now that he was once poised to receive in the past but was unable to compete due to injury.

Houston Alexander got knocked out in 8 seconds which started with a superman punch from James Irvin followed by a solid connecting punch while Alexander was down which cemented the victory. Alexander claims he was fine and pled to Steve Mazzagatti that it was stopped prematurely.

Probably the fight of the night (although I haven’t seen the rest of the undercard) would be Nate Diaz vs Kurt Pellegrino. This fight was action packed from the start and teetered back and forth with momentum until Diaz finally through ‘Batman’ into his patented triangle choke upon which locking up, Diaz threw his arms out signifying victory and also flexed to place an exclamation point on his impending win.

It was awesome to see free UFC on Spike for 3 hours which is what the fans asked for in droves. It was great to see them respond and I’m sure the ratings will indicate that it was worth it. As mentioned though, I would never again put on a show in Denver again. Also, while I’m asking for favors – how about showing this in HD? Now that would be amazing!