My sister-in-law and niece/goddaughter are visiting St. Louis, and I drove down Friday to see them tonight. It’s been a great trip. I took one of my good friend, Hansenelli, to the shooting range I frequent in StL. It’s apparently under new management, since the guy I’m used to seeing there wasn’t around, and everyone working there was a city cop. They were friendly though, and when asked whether it was ok if I used pre-ban magazines answered, “I don’t care what you use, but rifle targets have to be all the way at the end.” Come on man, of course. My friend and I also managed to kidnap his dad and bring him out there. He had a great time, and is an excellent shot with a handgun. It was his first time shooting since he left the military, and his first shot was dead center. Hansenelli is very good with the rifle, his groupings were impressively tight. Mine weren’t so good, but when I work with it, I try to hit a spot and then try to hit it again as fast as I can re-acquire it. Still not bad though, don’t get me wrong. Just nowhere as good as H. His dad managed to draw a smiley face within a five-inch diameter grouping. We were impressed. I was close at one point, and all I needed (with my usual rapid re-acquire practice strategy) was to add the nose. Couldn’t get it and gave the smiley face a goofy freckle off on his cheekbone. I don’t mind being the worst shot as long as we all had a good time. There was a dude at the range with a professional quality .22 target pistol, counterweights and all sorts of crazy stuff. His eye protection had some magnifying glasses sticking out from it, making him look like some sort of sci-fi villian. He talked a lot of crap to the people he was practicing with, which led me to believe that he’s long ago stopped having fun shooting and now looks at it as a way of making himself feel better than his peers. Sad, really. I’m sure he was very good, and had a great time shooting at one point.

So I’m logged into my neighbors’ wireless network to post this. My mom has the dial-up access, which is clearly substandard. I refuse to transfer data that slowly. I apologize to my neighbor for stealing his internet connection, but I haven’t done anything irresponsible besides that. I’ve been tempted to test whether his admin password is the default, just for purposes of talking to him about it. That would constitute a serious violation of access, however.

Wireless networks have a couple of serious security faults. The most obvious is what I’m dealing with, where my mom’s neighbor set his up without any care for its security. Some asswipe could drive by and log in, screw things up for him. All he’d have to do is reset the factory settings. This procedure requires an ancient tool called a “pencil.” And then he’d have to see whether said asswipe had inflicted any harm while admin of his firewall. Many bars in my town have their networks configured in this half-assed way. They don’t listen. It’s easy to protect. My house’s network is fairly secure, enough so that would-be asswipes would pass me by and look for weaker or sicklier prey.

Another nasty trick is to log into a wireless network and then set up your own wireless network piggybacking on theirs, so people log into your own local wireless service and transmit data through it. I’ve heard of this becoming a problem, although I figure it’s a simple firmware issue on the server to fix it. Any client of the DHCP that’s broadcasting a wireless network gets their IP dropped. Viola. Or Walla, for those readers from Freedom Lick.

The Post Dispatch continues their excellent coverage of Spring Training with an article about how impressed with Mike Matheny the Giants’ pitchers are. Included is a quotation from Champaign native, and former Giants’ closer, Matt Herges: “That’s the best bullpen I ever threw. It was almost too good to be true.” His dad (I think) owns the bar at which I watch Cardinals games. He’s been a fan of Matheny for a long time, no doubt.

The article goes on to talk about how Matheny hopes St. Louis fans don’t think he went to San Francisco out of greed, and makes it clear that he isn’t bitter towards us or the Cardinals organization. Recklessly speaking for Cardinals fans, I’ll say that we understand that he got an offer to make much more money and play more baseball–it’s an offer he couldn’t refuse, and one we couldn’t match. I’m glad to hear that he sees it similarly. Here’s two interesting paragraphs:

Matheny, who will keep his house in St. Louis County, will be back in August when the Giants play a three-game series at Busch Stadium and when he and his Catch 22 Foundation officially dedicate a baseball field for handicapped children in Chesterfield.

“We’re going to be able to assist any kind of handicapped kids,” Matheny said. “We’ve even got something for the blind where they can follow the bases and the ball with sound.”

I was wondering whether he’d keep his house, and am glad to hear he will. I’d like to see Matheny coaching the Cardinals once he retires from catching. The second paragraph there caught my interest on purely technological grounds. I’ll be very interested to see how that works, and will definitely go watch the kids play a game there at some point this summer to find out.

Update: Off topic, but there’s also a decent article at stlcardinals.com about the new middle infield. Not much there, just a glimpse at attitudes.

Also, I got my 38,000th visit today. Aren’t I special? Four years well spent!

It was a sad day when I delinked happy fun pundit, they of the motto: “Standing athwart history, yelling YEE-HAW!!!” It took an entire year of their non-posting to do so, and even then it wasn’t until they took down their main index that I got the hint. But their archives are still up.

This one made me laugh tears of joy.

The big-collared shirt of shame is a true classic.

Somewhere in there is the “boner water” post from the Operation Enduring Freedom, but I gotta run to class and haven’t gotten to it yet.

Donald Sensing asks whether a public flogging would be the appropriate punishment for this evilly cruel hoax.

Now that word’s out among the spouses, I predict if the perp is foolish enough to attempt the stunt again, there wouldn’t be much perp left to flog after she’d have finished with him.

When my brother-in-law was deployed, my sister kept a collapsible metal baton near the door for general security purposes. I have little doubt she wouldn’t have hesitated to brain someone for pulling that sort of nonsense.

Getting Luther Head drafted as high as he can will be a huge accomplishment for Bruce Weber, and will make it a whole lot easier to recruit talented high school kids in the near future. Luther’s turned himself around and matured well, and he’s an outstanding basketball player. I don’t care about the NBA, but I love the college game.

This mock draft has him going 42nd to the Pacers. The link comes from Illiniwonk’s roundup of Deron Williams’ decision to enter the 2005 draft and not return to Illinois for his senior year. Deron is predicted to go as the fifteenth pick. It’s in the best interest of the long-term health of the Illinois program to help Deron get the best deal he can in the NBA. It’ll be interesting to see whether his style of play will change–whether he’ll start taking more shots, or continue to rack up assists and unravel opponent defenses.

Update: This is the comment I left at IlliniWonk’s, regarding Deron Williams:
“He’ll be missed, but it’s good for the Illinois program to have talented players leave for the NBA. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it makes the program more appealing for talented recruits. Having Deron go in the first fifteen picks will reassure top notch HS prospects that playing in Illinois’ team-first, unselfish motion offense won’t hurt their NBA aspirations.

It’s better to lose Deron a year early than to never recruit another Deron.”

Parents: protect your computers from the excessive keystroking your loser kids use when chatting with their loser friends.

Microsoft’s on the case, putting together a handy primer on leetspeak. Pretty kewl d00d.

The funniest story I can think of from the dorms is this:

I had a roommate with interesting quirks.

I kept my dumbells stacked on the floor next to his bunk. He was on the top, another roommate was on the bottom bunk.

One night, he returned in a drunken stupor from god knows what lame shit he was doing and flopped into bed.

At some point in the night, he fell out of bed–off the top bunk and landed on my dumbbells, back arched.

I’m pretty sure he was still there when the first of us woke up.

Another funny story is that he once walked two miles or so to the grocery store to pick up a twelve pack of Dr. Pepper. He dropped a few on the way home, having succumbed to fatigue enough to have stopped for a rest and a warm sodie pop.

When he got home, we told him that the gas station two blocks away sells twelve packs of Dr. Pepper, much to his disbelief.

The gloating is already lain quite thick on the election returns post at Illinipundit. Note that the kookiest of the gloaters would have blamed a Prussing loss on imagined intervention by Karl Rove. Such is the way of life, though. I wish Prussing the best, and that she serves as a trustworthy and honorable steward of my city. (I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords).

If my property taxes go up a tenth of a percent, she’ll hear from me.

That’s right, I voted today. And supposedly could have been arrested and sent up the river to Sing-Sing for it. Why? Because I was voting in the Urbana Democratic Primary, and one of the challengers is threatening legal action against cross-over voters. Illinipundit‘s been all over the story for a few days now, and some of his left-of-center commenters got their panties in a bunch over it. They weren’t upset that a politician was trying to keep people from voting, they were upset that Republicans were going to be able to have a say in who is Urbana’s mayor for the next term.

Let’s explore the issue here. The basic facts of the case are that Urbana has partisan municipal elections, so the general election is between candidates chosen from each party’s primary. The Republican party chose not to field a candidate since he would have been likely to lose in this Democratic stronghold. Thus the next Urbana mayor will be chosen in the Urbana Democratic primary, and will then win the general mayoral race without contest.

Laurel Prussing is the primary challenger. There is a third candidate in the primary named Shirley Hursey that I know little about. Some friends saw her on a televised debate and said she seemed like a nice old lady, and probably not administrative material. She hasn’t got a prayer of winning the election.

The Urbana City Council is stocked with very liberal councilmen and is due to stay that way or become more liberal due to the rankly gerrymandered ward map created by after the most recent census. The responsibilities of municipal government are so different from state or national government, that the notions of liberal and conservative ought not be so appropriate. Not so with the Urbana City Council. They pass resolutions from the kooky and meaningless, like formally stating the city’s opposition to the US military operations to destroy the regime of the Ba’ath Party in Iraq, rebuild the country’s basic infrastructure, and nurture the nascent democratic government there; to the self-destructive, like opposing commercial development in the city. The city council is inappropriately ideological, in a national barking-moonbat sense–very anti-business and willing to raise property taxes to any limit.

Allow me to explore an analogy. Businesses are to city government as cows are to subsistence hunter-gatherers. (Elegant, no?) If you develop a healthy, symbiotic relationship with the cow, you’ll have plenty of milk to nourish you, and the cow will be happy. Other cows will see what a great relationship you have with your cow and will come live with you too, and you’ll be wealthy with milk. But don’t get greedy! If you do, you’ll not see the teat for its milk, but for its meat. And once the other cows see you butcher and eat the cow, gorging on her blood, they’ll all take off running for greener pastures. The city of Urbana long ago bit off the cows’ tits and scared the survivors off to Champaign with high tax rates; now a Wal-Mart wants to move in, and the councilmen are complaining about how much it will poop in the grass.

If they had their way, my property tax would go up significantly. The only reason they haven’t had their way is because the incumbent mayor blocks many of their schemes. He’s Tod Satterthwaite, a fairly lefty fellow himself, although pragmatic enough to do what he thinks best for the city in spite of ideology. The city council has been butting heads with Tod for some time now, and many of its members have campaigned for a like mind, one of their own, to unseat him. This would be disastrous, in my opinion. Spending would go up, and revenues would go down, with nothing to keep the council’s anti-business ideology in check, or to keep the council’s checks in the book.

Tod Satterthwaite suggested that Republicans have a right to crossover and vote in the Democratic primary, since we have a right to choose who our elected officials are as much as anyone, and the Democratic primary would be THE vote for mayor. Laurel’s people cried foul and said it was illegal for Republicans to vote in the Democratic primary.

That’s the background. Sorry it took so long to get here.

Is it unethical to vote in an opposition party’s primary? Not in this case. It would be wrong to vote in the opposition party’s primary in an effort to sabotage their efforts to select the best candidate for the general election–so if there was a strong Republican running in the general election, it would be wrong to vote in the Democratic primary for Shirley Hursey to sabotage the Democrats’ chances in the general election. This case is different, because crossover voters aren’t crossing over for nefarious reasons like that: not to support a weak candidate to sabotage a stronger candidate, but to support who we believe is the best candidate. It’s much the same as when I crossed over to vote for Barack Obama. I can vote for Democrats, if I want, damn it. I will vote for who I think is the best candidate for the job.

So I voted in the Democratic primary today and I voted for Tod Satterthwaite. My vote wasn’t challenged, and the election officials were friendly. There exists no legal justification for suppressing my vote, as I am not formally or officially affiliated with any political party or group. I’m not even in Blogs for Bush. Now to see if Laurel Prussing contests the election if Tod’s margin of victory is within 198 votes, the number of Republican voters who can’t legally vote in the election according to a city law that is likely unconstitutional. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if the provisional ballots cast by those Republicans won the election for Tod, Prussing sued to have those votes not count, and Tod appealed to have the law overturned by the supreme court? Selected, not elected! Bu$h $tole Florida!

Update: Oh No. There goes the neighborhood.

Check out Capitol Fax’s Factoid of the Day: “Tuition (at Illinois’ universities) has risen 40 percent since 2002 as the state’s support of higher education dropped 13 percent.”

That’s wrong. Funding schools is vitally important. Providing highest-quality schools is only slightly less important than providing the highest-quality military.

The most important thing that needs to be done in order to get the schools in shape is to break the teachers’ unions. Good teachers should be paid (significantly) more than they are currently, and bad teachers shouldn’t teach. Unions hinder both needs. (Full disclosure: I’m in a teacher’s union, but voted against its formation. The commie bastards now get to pull my money out of my paycheck.) Tuition waivers for kids in failing schools would do a lot of work in breaking unions and saving kids from a hopelessly bad system.

But a larger problem with the schools is that many people (and I’d wager a majority-both parents and students) view public schools as free daycare. Parents are more likely to defend their kids from demanding teachers than to scold them for weak performance. The same parents plop the kids in front of the tv instead of supplementing their education with books and other activities. Later they’ll blame the schools because “Johnny can’t read.” All part of the children-as-pets mentality perhaps.

Over at the STL Post-Dispatch Cardinals index, Derrick Goold is doing a daily update, posting in the afternoon. It would have been nice to set it up in a blog style, so he could use it throughout the day to take notes, and Cardinals fans could go to the same page every afternoon to check it. Joe Strauss is also covering the camp, following up his excellent work covering the Winter meetings. He’s got a nice column today about Chris Carpenter’s first session throwing batting practice at camp.

I’ll link back to today’s Goold piece, which should be good. Mulder and Anthony Reyes will be throwing their first pitches today.

Update: Today’s Derrick Goold report. To summarize: Mulder’s fastball has “dirty movement,” Anthony Reyes throws really hard, and a teaser that John Mabry is learning to play behind the plate. I think that would make him the biggest catcher in the game, at 6-4 and 210.

Another: More from Matthew Leach right here, including non-teaser scooping on Mabry’s new skills.

Apparently Ligers do exist.

Danielle in the comments makes the essential remark, excerpting from this dialogue:

Deb: What are you drawing?
Napoleon Dynamite: A liger.
Deb: What’s a liger?
Napoleon Dynamite: It’s pretty much my favorite animal. It’s like a lion and a tiger mixed… bred for its skills in magic.

Pretty sweet… Awesome.

Funny getting it from me, eh? Seeing as I don’t watch the show and all. But I noticed in Thursday’s issue of USA Today that my favorite contestant is still in the game: Ozzie Smith Jr.. I’d mentioned him here, noting that my friends had seen him sing karaoke at a bar near their old workplace quite a bit and that he was beyond talented and quite rangy. My friends said his name was Nee Ko (rough phonetic transcription), which I’d assumed was written Nico. He was listed originally in al the press I’d seen as Osbourne Smith Jr, but now he’s listed on the AI website as Nikko Smith.

His talent is unquestioned at this point, but I’d like to put out for debate whether it’s classy for him to go as Nikko instead of his given name of Osbourne.

I’d argue that it’s classy: he’d obviously been going by that name for a long while before the show and given his praise of his parents in his bio, it’s clear that he’s more interested in making it on his own merits than on the fame of his father. Good man.

A cynic might argue that he’s only trying to protect himself from accusations of favoritism or gimmickry. I’ll paint these cynics as fun-hating bullshitters until Nikko does a backflip on stage.

I’m rooting for the man.

Josh (who helped more than he knows with my boxscore reader project) posts on an article written by the same dude who ghostwrote Jose Canseco’s book.

It’s the same issue as if, say, a presidential candidate had a book written about his life by a newspaper reporter who continued to write newspaper stories about him. Like that would ever happen.

The NHLPA appears ready to chew their collective arm off.

NHL may resume tomorrow with a $45 million team salary cap, and no linkage between revenues and salaries. Sounds like a good contract. Now just set the ticket prices to meet capacity and hope you still have some fans left.

[/subtlety] Update: I titled this post “coyote sex hangover.” That’s a joke some might get. Coyotes are known to bite their legs off when caught in one of those crude claw traps, so that they can get away. Coyote sex, thus, is when you wake up with your arm around a partner so unacceptable to your right sense of standards (this presumes that the situation came about by way of subdued reasoning on such things due to the influence of chemicals like the sauce) that you’d be willing to chew your arm off rather than wake said partner up.

The NHLPA seems to have woken up with a rather clarifying hangover and seems willing to bite an arm off (Goodnow) in order to live another day.

Jokes are best when explained in full. But that’s just this example.

Hooray! Today, pitchers and catchers reported to Jupter, Florida to open the Cardinals spring training camp for the 2005 season.

And ESPN the Magazine’s Buster Olney gives his pre-emptive ranking of the 30 MLB teams. I’m pleased that the Cards are ranked third. Now just keep your fingers crossed that the Redbirds don’t show up on the cover of SI’s Baseball Preview issue, the ultimate harbinger of doom. I notice that the Cubs are listed seventh, with this laugher:

They’re going to need some leaders on their team this year, and who better than Wood, Maddux, Prior and Zambrano?

Oh Buster… You card!

I also notice that they put the Brewers, Pirates, and Reds 23-25, respectively. Laziness or coincidence?

Mean Mr. Mustard posts about self-resistance training, or flexing your muscles for prolonged periods of time to work them out. I’m no personal trainer–in the immortal words of Fezzik, “I don’t even exercise.” But when I was about 12 or thirteen, I decided to work out every morning. I’d wake up at 5 or 6 and do 300 situps before breakfast, at least three times a week, but usually every day. Within about two weeks, a seam showed up down the middle of my gut, and two weeks later, I had a pretty formidable quarter-case to show off for the chicks. A side result of so furiously overworking the muscle group in the morning was that my stomach muscles were more or less locked up tight all day long, sorta cramped into a contraction. I stopped working out like that once the results showed up, but I kept flexing my stomach muscles throughout the day just by habit, which kept the muscles well worked out. The habit continued all the way through college and a bit into graduate school, and only in the past few years has the muscle tone forsaken me. Throughout the whole time, I didn’t do anything in particular to work out my stomach. Back in college, I used to occasionally challenge people to punch me in the gut as hard as they wanted, just to show off that I was a mightier man than they. Can’t do that sort of thing these days, alas. And I’ve found that I’m out of shape enough that I can’t consciously flex my stomach muscles for a long period of time anymore without it becoming painful. It’s not like I’m gonna start doing situps again, so I’m lost to the world of modeling swimming trunks.

Moral of the story: the technique works, and especially well for parts of your body that you don’t really use all that much in your daily life but are already in decent shape. Basically, it’s the same principle as these things.

Oh boy:

The suit, in any case, says that Patterson would interpret hand movements by Koko as a demand to see exposed human nipples.

Via Dave Barry, who’s blogging has improved since retiring from his job as humor columnist.

The other day on one of the tech support forums I routinely browse, there was a desktop wallpaper posted that included pictures of several important people in the world of non-commercial computing. One of them was Eric Raymond, and I figured I’d go check out his “Armed and Dangerous” blog, which I haven’t been checking lately since he’s writing a book (I think) and doesn’t update often. But when he has been updating, it’s good stuff. Sort of like a bizarro-world me, who writes quite a bit of pure crap.

His most recent post concerns (former) CNN bigshot Eason Jordan, who accused US troops of deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq, and then lied about having said it–he was canned over the affair. The next is an essay on things ESR believes without evidence. More good stuff follows back in time, but we’ve arrived at the point that I’d like to make. (Mixed metaphor?) He mentions a man named Albert Korzybski and his theory of “General Semantics.” I googled the fellow and came to this page, a biography that includes a basic description of General Semantics. Sounds like a social engineering project intended to get people to use more precise language. Here’s a rather bizarre excerpt:

Korzybski developed a training program to teach people how to burst through their language habits to properly evaluate the unique characteristics of their daily experiences. His goal was to help people evaluate less by the implications of their everyday language (by intension) and more by the unique facts of a situation (by extension).

Korzybski advocated the application of a few mathematical devices to our daily language, such as indexes (apple1, apple2, apple3 …) and dates (US1930, US1940 …) to encourage a more factual orientation among language users. He also encouraged the use of more actional, relational terms. Instead of saying what something “is” we, instead, describe what it does or how it relates to a greater whole. He also developed visual tools to teach humans to differentiate between non-verbal and verbal levels, descriptive and inferential levels, et cetera.

That’s some funny shit. Indexing objects like apples and oranges is a rather silly thing to do, but it’s doable nonetheless. But imagine having to index time in your speech. Take simple examples like, “Mary kissed John after she’d married Bill” or “John will have punched out Bill before proving he’d kissed her.” It’s possible to say things in unambiguous ways and overt indexing of temporal relations is unneccesary. I imagine that what he had in mind was making impossible intentional ambiguities in language, but since those ambiguities can be useful, people would invent them if they didn’t exist already.

So I’m intrigued. The library has several copies of his most famous book, “Science and Sanity.” I’ll be returning some books later and plan on picking it up.

I just ordered Lee Sinins’ 2004 Sabermetric Baseball Encyclopedia, a CD-rom that has some kind of sortable database of baseball statistics and measurements. Can’t wait for it to show up. It’s described as a program, so I’ll be interested in seeing how it works. Hopefully there’s a command-line interface. I’m considering building a natural language interface to its database for my Computational Semantics project this semester. That would allow you to query the database with regular questions like “Which New York team had more games in which they struck out more than their opponent?” Or other stuff like that. I’m not sure whether it’s possible, but that’ll be one of the things I try to figure out when it shows up in the mail and I get to play with it. It would be cool.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are real busy. A “Buffalo Springfield” song was stuck in my head earlier, for the sky was indeed blue today. Later on I found myself whistling an odd tune and couldn’t figure out what it was. Eventually realized it’s my girl’s cell phone ringer.