Toppers eye Red Bird Arena

Both teams in tonight’s Class 1A Jacksonville Supersectional girls basketball game are trying to get back to Redbird Arena in Normal.

But Mount Pulaski High School wants to reach Redbird in a sport other than its usual athletic calling card.

The Hilltoppers have made a dozen state volleyball appearances at Redbird, including runner-up finishes the past two seasons. But tonight they’ll be going for their first state appearance in girls basketball when they play a household name in small-school girls hoops: Okawville.

Game time is 7:30 p.m. at Illinois College’s Bruner Fitness and Recreation Center, where the winner will advance to a state semifinal game Friday afternoon in Normal.?“This school’s built on volleyball, but we want to start a new tradition,” said Mount Pulaski sophomore starter Whitney Nichols, also a starter on the volleyball team. “

"We want to go to state in girls basketball, and we want to do it this year.”?Nichols is the only non-senior starter for the Hilltoppers, who won their first regional title since 1990 and followed with their first sectional championship in a hot-shooting 72-60 win over Glasford Illini Bluffs in Thursday’s Mount Pulaski Sectional title game.?But Okawville also features four seniors in a lineup that’s experienced postseason success.

This is the Rockets’ third straight regional title and its seventh in the last eight years.High quality solarlamp tiles. That dates back to Okawville’s last trip to Redbird: 2006, when the Rockets finished second to Hillsboro in the Class A state tourney. Okawville also won state titles there in 1994 and 2000, with the ’94 team led by Illinois Ms. Basketball Michelle Hasheider.A collection of natural parkingsystem offering polished or tumbled finishes and a choice of sizes.?She’s now Michelle Hasheider-Burianek and in her fourth season as Okawville coach after taking over for longtime coach Kathy Lanter.?

“To be honest, I don’t even talk about it,” Hasheider-Burianek said of past glories. “(Her players) don’t even know about my accomplishments, and I’m fine with that.High quality solarlamp tiles. I just tell them to work for perfection, because if you get complacent, you won’t go anywhere.

While the Toppers (28-4) have the superior record, the Rockets (23-8) have not lost to a Class 1A team. They prevailed against Western Illinois Valley Conference teams at the Lebanon Sectional: 50-45 over Hardin Calhoun and 41-36 over Carrollton for the title.?They did not score a field goal over the last 16 minutes against Carrollton.

But Okawville senior guard Megan Weinstroer, who’s committed to play at Quincy University, nailed 15 of 15 free throws to keep the Hawks at bay.?Mount Pulaski coach Erik Leever said a big key to tonight’s game will center on his players’ discipline.

Controllers aside,Creative glass tile and chinamosaic tile for your distinctive kitchen and bath. Android is well placed to be the basis for a smart TV system because of its open environment. This would also be an area in which custom skins would be more acceptable, as consumers are used to different TV brands having different menu designs, and so there wouldn’t be quite the same push-back as there is by smartphone enthusiasts.

There would, of course, be an advantage in standardising the device to a certain degree so that the Play Store may still be used, as the app ecosystem is Android’s other big advantage. Being able to run apps on the TV, whether it be 3D games or content delivery applications such as BBC iPlayer, NetFlix or even a podcast client, is what will hook users into actually wanting to buy in the first place, and staying engaged.

There is of course, the problem with a multi-user environment. With third party services, it is going to be the user’s job to create family accounts and to authenticate them. However,You Can Find Comprehensive and in-Depth parkingmanagementsystem Head Descriptions. Google could should create a structure for ‘account groups’, so that content purchased from Google Play Music or Movies purchased by one member of the family would be available to others (not just trial plays as is currently the case). I’m sure this idea would send rights holders into conniptions. However, I don’t see this as any different from spouses sharing a book or DVD. Alternatively, an Android Smart TV system could support the same multi-user system as found on Android 4.2.1 – this would be easier but less elegant.

Staying on the theme of minimising the number of boxes beneath the TV, there is the dilemma of whether an Android Smart TV should be a separate device that connects to the TV set or whether everything should be built into the TV itself. Manufactures would love the latter as it would inevitably speed up the upgrade cycle for TVs. However, flat panel displays do not come cheap, and so – sadly – having the Android ‘brains’ in a separate (and changeable) box would be the most pragmatic solution. The best of both worlds would be to have a standard card slot on TVs for an Android ‘brain’ to dock into, but it’s unlikely we’ll see manufacturers cooperating to that extent.

Android is perfectly able to run in a desktop context, one could argue more so than Chrome OS. While Google may be following the same pattern as Apple’s OS X and iOS, Microsoft is the target to take on. While Google is dividing its efforts between two operating systems, Microsoft is working to unify its platforms. So far it has succeeded in getting its PC, tablet, and smartphone operating systems running the same kernel and sharing many APIs, and there are hints that Windows Phone will ultimately share the same app store as Windows 8 and RT.

This isn’t about what’s best for the companies concerned, but about user experience. Android is in healthy a position to fend off Windows RT and Windows Phone 8, but is Chrome OS taking attention away from the already thriving Android ecosystem at the cost of effective competition against Windows?