I gave a presentation today at 2pm and think I did pretty well. I had a week to prepare for it, and started really working on it Monday night. Tuesday morning, I was assigned a presentation for tomorrow morning at 9am. Practically everyone else alive is putting up with much worse shit than this, but it’s still kind of cramping my style. At least I’m getting this crap out of the way early in the semester, in the sweet spot of my paid workload–after the pre-semester rush and before the steady flow of work rolls in. Work’s actually going very well so far this semester. I’ve had three new clients and they all seem very pleased with the product I’ve made for them.

So anyways, I gave the presentation today at 2:00 and left campus afterwards, since that class is only a few blocks from my crib. Had to prepare the presentation for tomorrow. First I had to eat though, and I’ve got plans to go to Cass’s sister’s in the country tonight to shoot up watermelons and stuff on their property, so I had to pick up some ammunition for my weaponry. [Damn it, I should have picked up some watermelons while I was out. Stream of consciousness, baby. Dig it.] So now the plan is to make the lovely lady drive while I read my papers, and when I get home, I’ll start working on the presentation. Then I’ll go to bed fairly early, say 11:00, then get up at 4:00am to finish it up and think of stupid jokes to make during the presentation. Because just like all stand-up comedians really want to be rock stars, all graduate students want to be stand-up comedians. I’m almost certain of that.

Oh yeah, this post’s title is in celebration of Jeff Suppan, who’ll take the mound against the Scarecrow from Wizard of Oz tonight (seriously, look at that picture!). Soup will be pitching for his 13th win, but more importantly, aiming to avoid the Cardinals’ 50th loss.

Update: Nevermind, I went out and picked up a couple of watermelons. And for the love of Pearl! Gasoline’s at $3.19 a gallon! That’s like, just 80 cents cheaper than a whole watermelon!

Lookie there! I had my 50,000th pageview yesterday. Not bad for almost four years of blogging, no?

Here’s two opportunities to do some good:

Kiyoshi Martinez is pointing the way to make donations to help ease the devastation from Hurricane Katrina.

The American Legion – Post #71, located at 107 N. Broadway in Urbana, is collecting items for Care Packages to send to our soldiers in Iraq. They hope to send enough to cover all interested troopers in the Urbana National Guard unit, the 2-130th, and then to distribute the rest to other units. So they want to get a lot of stuff. You should deliver it to them this Sunday, September 4th, from 8-11am, although they might take it before then. They’re having a breakfast that morning, $6 for adults, $3 for kids 6-12, and free for kids 5 and under. I heard that you get a buck off if you bring some stuff, but the flyer they gave me doesn’t say so.

Here’s their Wish List of items the soldiers have requested:

• OFF Mosquito Repellant Wipes
• Baby Wipes
• Books – no westerns or romance novels, PLEASE
• Crossword puzzles, word search, etc.
• Foot Powder – Dr. School’s
• Tinactin Spray
• Lip Balm – no chap stick since it melts, but the sort that comes in tubes
• Notebooks, pens, and pencils
• Newspapers – News Gazette or USA Today
• International Calling Cards from AT&T, available at Wal*Mart
• Beef Jerky/Slim Jims – nothing that needs refrigeration
• Chips – pringles ship well
• Easy Mac – Just add water
• Drink Mixes – no lemon lime, fruit punch, or riptide rush gatorade, since the Army provides those flavors
• Cookies – nothing that would melt or expire within 30 days

Anyone with experience in the sandbox is encouraged to leave more suggestions in the comments. I’ve heard that scented candles are welcome as are some of the more exotic and non-perishable flavor sauces.

So I’m listening to tonight’s Cards game and it turns out that local affiliate, WDWS 1400, is the featured station in the Cardinals network. Mike Shannon just said it was time to take a station ID break, especially for the fans up in Illini country. Way to go, Mike! Last year, he misread the call letters, mistaking the ‘D’ for an ‘O.’ And I’d been waiting all year for that game.

Carp’s pitching great so far, although the Cards failed to score after getting their first two men on in the first and then loading the bases with two outs.

Hey, how ’bout that: looks like I’m liveblogging, because Eckstein just scored Molina and was caught in a rundown stretching a single to second. Play went 7-5-4-3.

Top o’ the 3rd: Larry Walker just smoked a dinger. Cards are up 2-0. Walker sure is looking strong back from the DL. It’s hard to believe we could have Reggie back within two weeks.

Mid 4th: AJ Burnett was poised to strike out the side, when he walks Nunez, then walks Carpenter. With two outs, Eckstein triples to clear the bases and Larry reaches on an error to score Eckstein. Cards up 5-0! Eckstein is just a sluggin’ machine these days.

Start of 6th: Carp’s rolling. Through five innings, he’s thrown 56 pitches, 39 of them strikes. Burnett hasn’t been so sharp with 95 pitches thrown, 58 of ‘em in the zone. That’s 70% to 61% strike percentage. AJ’s out of the game, and Chris has at least three more innings in him. Off topic, but Mark Tupper’s got a nice report on how the Bruce-Weber-led Big Ten team fared in Europe.

Long after the game: I’m guessing that Dr. Kremchek is some kind of superstar surgeon when it comes to shoulders:

Wood, who made his first major league relief appearance Aug. 5 in a switch from the rotation to alleviate the soreness in his shoulder. The surgery will be performed by Dr. Timothy Kremchek at Beacon Orthopedics outside of Cincinnati.

(Scotty had his surgery by Kremchek as well.)

Suppose you can ssh into a linux server, but can’t sftp to it–receiving an error message that says something about “message too long,” followed by a dropped connection. The problem here is that you have something in your .bashrc or whichever startup script for the shell you use that’s echoing some message to the screen. For example, I just had this problem, and it was caused by a message prompt that I was echoing in the .bashrc that issued a cutesy insult to one of my coworkers for when he was sitting next to me when I’d log on. Something about him smelling like a water-buffalo’s ass. There were also some stupid bash scripts in there that would throw salt in the wound. A script called ‘really?’ would echo something about, “Sure enough! He smells like the back end of a water-buffalo after a day of plowing.”

This isn’t nice, and interferes with sftp setting up a connection. So you can just comment it out, which is what I did. I bet you could easily bury the echo statement in an if block so that it would only print the insult when you were on a local console. Maybe I’ll do that later on when I have more time. Not that my colleague really smells.

Bobovski just sent this to me:

DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED

HURRICANE KATRINA
A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED
STRENGTH…RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969.

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER. AT
LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL
FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL…LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY
DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL.
PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD
FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE
BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE…INCLUDING SOME
WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY…A
FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD…AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH
AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY
VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE
ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE
WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN
AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING
INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY
THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING…BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW
CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE
KILLED.

AN INLAND HURRICANE WIND WARNING IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WINDS NEAR
HURRICANE FORCE…OR FREQUENT GUSTS AT OR ABOVE HURRICANE FORCE…ARE
CERTAIN WITHIN THE NEXT 12 TO 24 HOURS.

ONCE TROPICAL STORM AND HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ONSET…DO NOT VENTURE
OUTSIDE!

New Orleans is situated in a bowl, most of which is below sea-level. Typical rainfall has to be pumped out of the city’s storm sewer system. To say the least, their pumps are insufficient to pump out the rainfall expected from a directly-hitting major hurricane.

You know what’ll get me real grumpy? Sitting at the DMV, or whatever they call it in Illinois, for two hours. I needed to get a new sticker for my license plate and figured I’d go ahead and get my motorcycle certification added to my drivers license at the same time. The sticker took about fifteen minutes to get. It took an hour and forty-five minutes on top of that to get an ‘M’ written on my drivers license. It wasn’t all bad though. There was a really creepy kid there dancing around in the parking lot and stretching out. Generally acting super fruity. When he left, the dude behind me asked whether he could get any gayer, and a large black woman said, “dang he prancin’ that booty all over this place” or something similarly hilarious. He came back to grab his “varsity cheerleader jacket,” he didn’t forget to mention it by name. It was 80 degrees today. I’m thinking he’s doing some kind of sociology project studying how people react to the presence of an excessively gay person. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against homosexuals. But it’s one thing to be a normal dude who for whatever reason prefers other dudes over sexy ladies and a far different thing to be a cartoonishly flamboyant prancing wierdo.

So now I can legally drive motorcycles. Too bad I don’t have one.

At work I found out that due to the passage of this well-meant law, I’m going to have to maintain an unpleasant amount of paperwork from now on. Naturally, this displeases me, as it cramps my style.

Made some inspiring cocktail napkin advances on two projects I’m working on last night. It doesn’t look like I’ll get to implement them until next week, though.

I’m late for a happy hour. Gotta run. In spite of this admittedly minimal amount of BS I need to put up with, life’s pretty damned good.

Found it at Edna Million’s, who’s now blogrolled with the locals.

I thought that was pretty doggone funny.

Yadier Molina is hitting cleanup tonight.

Didn’t expect to see that this season…

The Pittsburgh Pirates is one of those ballclubs that I like for reasons beyond my grasp. I like their youth and their pitching staff is pretty darned good. They’ve got a nice park. They’re a good shoestring-budget team. Not a fan of their manager, though.

Neither is Dave Duncan, who got in a fight with Lloyd McClendon and hitting coach Gerald Perry last night before the game. I saw a replay on FSN, and they showed that it happened during a media interview with LaRussa. He looked over and saw the brawl, hopped up and ran over to get involved. Fairly intimidating for an old vegetarian is Tony.

Plate umpire for the night, Jerry Crawford, also got involved. It really irks me when the plate umps but a hand on the catchers’ backs while looking for pitch location. Matheny once got into a fairly heated argument over it, but I’m pretty sure that was Angel Hernandez. Last night, Crawford was all over Molina, grabbing him with both hands. What a dickhead. It seems like forever since we’ve had Ed Montague call one of our games. He’s my favorite umpire due to his consistent strikezone, being an all-around good guy, and the fact that he shares his last name with a mathematician who deeply influenced semantic theory.

After work yesterday, I went up to Bunny’s to read a paper, eat dinner, drink beer, and watch Chris Carpenter win his 18th game. I forgot the paper on my desk at the home office, but I managed all the other tasks I’d set out to do. At around the seventh inning, it was very clear that Carp was rolling and the Cards would win the game handily, so I set out to hit the batting cages for the first time in a long while.

It went well, I was hitting the ball pretty good from both sides. After I turned five dollars worth of quarters into satisfying pings, I set out for home. I called Cass on the way home to find out why she hadn’t shown up yet and learned that she was on her way to surprise me with about ten bucks worth of quarters. She’s a great gal. So I turned around and got my bat and gloves out of the trunk, along with the youth bat that I keep in there for the ladies to swing with. She was seeing the ball real well, and stroked more than a few that would have gone out of the infield. I’m a lucky fellow.

Unfortunately, I forgot that I was supposed to go shooting last night, and had already had a beer before being reminded. I’ll have to remember to pick up a trunk-full of watermelons next Wednesday morning. Looking over the Rifles, Shotguns, and Walls page at Box o’ Truth, I’m thinking that some 20-gauge birdshot might do some impressive damage to a watermelon. I once blew up a can of soda once with the 20-gauge and it was one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen.

If a five-year-old Darth Vader can build a robot fluent in over six million forms of communications from shit he found in a corrupt race-car driver’s garage, why the fuck does R2D2 have to communicate with people using a motherboard speaker? It’s bad enough that this pseudo-democratic super-society based on planet-dominating monarchic governments is served by a population of highly intelligent slave robots, but does the Astromech corporation really have to twist the knife by refusing to install sound cards on one of the most popular and useful models, further isolating them from meaningful contact with those around them?

It’s a God-damned travesty.

Update: Then again, R2D2′s lack of a speech module does spare us from that much more of George Lucas’s dialogue.

I almost died today, just the way I always wanted to go. I was walking on the quad when it ocurred to me that I was going the wrong way. I turned around and was startled to see about twelve well-built, scantily clad women running at me. I thanked the maker for delivering me from this wretched existence in exactly the way I pray for every night, yet God is cruel, and his hand turned them aside at the last moment. And so, I must toil on.

Chris Carpenter pitches tonight in his now-usual role of getting the team back onto its winning ways after a Marquis shit sandwich of a ball game. I’ll be watching it at Bunny’s, since I missed last night’s game (thankfully), having to stay late at work to install speakers.

I’m on the hunt for a good Illini Football blog. I know the Illini- and Big Ten- wonks will be back for the Basketball season, but they won’t be covering football. Mark Tupper‘s been writing some very good stuff, but I like to get the pure fan perspective, too.

I was invited to go out target shooting this evening. It’s been months since I’ve been to a range. There’s a man selling watermelons out of a trailer in my neighborhood. Hopefully he’ll be there when I get home from work. Taking out a watermelon with twelve gauge 00-Buck sounds like a damn good time.

When I passed the watermelon man’s trailer, I recalled the Box o’ Truth website, where an older gentleman runs some fairly well controlled experiments to test the penetration characteristics of different kinds of ammunition. He’s added a shitload of new tests since I last checked out his page. Last time, he’d just gotten ahold of some ballistic glass and now he’s got all sorts of armor.

When I retire, I want to be just like him.

I’d always wondered exactly how the MLB.com Gameday system works, the flash application that displays near-real time information over the internet during a baseball game. One of the gentlemen who inputs the data for the Rockies describes it in sufficient detail at the Hardball Times. (Thanks to Scott for the link.)

I’m impressed that they use keyboard-entered codes to score the plays. Most people in this crazy, mixed-up Windows dominated world would have insisted on a clumsy mouse interface. I’ve noticed that certain plays take a long time to post in Gameday, usually critical plays at the ends of half-innings, which can be frustrating as all get-out. The writer says that this is because they’re waiting for the official scorer to tell them what he saw happen. They do have a means to go back and edit previous plays, however. If I set policy for the Gameday scorers, I’d have them use their best judgement on plays, and keep the pipeline of information flowing, and then go back and edit conflicts with the official scorers rulings. He describes scoring the game on paper while waiting for the official scorer to let them know how to score a play. It would seem like a lot of information to score if a few batters go by before the ruling comes in, especially considering that they’re logging pitch locations.

Classes start up for the Fall semester tomorrow. I spent almost all of my downtime today laughing my ass off at this webpage. Thanks so much for pointing me there, CS&W. Way to distract the man.

I’ve got one class tomorrow, a Computational Morphology seminar. I went ahead and printed up two papers from the reading list to read while watching the game tonight. Jason Marquis goes up against the terrifying young lefty for Pittsburgh. Marquis is looking for his tenth win (still) and with a win tonight, La Russa ties Sparky Anderson on the all-time managerial win list.

Yesterday was a fairly big day for me, as I finally officially selected a thesis advisor. My first class with her is on Thursday.

First of all, I have some excellent news to report from Washington, DC. My sister and brother-in-law have again created life, and their second child–for the time being codenamed PINBALL–is due to arrive via stork on December 20th. Very exciting news, and means that I’ll likely be spending my Christmas in DC this year. Colin, <brag>who managed to pronounce “Uncle Liam” once while I was visiting</brag>, doesn’t quite grasp the concept of having a new baby in the house. He seems to have misinterpreted gesturing to mommy’s tummy while saying ‘baby’ to mean that “belly,” “tummy,” and “baby” are all co-referential terms. It’s much like the dual earth model that some children have of what the Earth looks like. They recognize that there’s a round thing floating in space that’s called Earth and a flat thing that they stand on that’s called Earth, but they don’t realize they’re the same thing from two different perspectives. In Colin’s case, he realizes there’s a round thing in my sister’s tummy and he knows that babies are little people, but doesn’t realize they’re the same thing from two different perspectives. He’ll figure it out by Christmas, no doubt.

My flight home was great. The sky was very clear, so I could see the ground most of the way. Amazingly, I spotted the Archway dropzone from 28,000 feet. It was a lot more clear than this satellite picture. It was such a clear day that it didn’t seem that high at all. I didn’t see any of their planes or skydivers though. I guess they don’t send up any traffic when a jet passes overhead. That was really neat, in any case.

I finished The Code Book on my flight to DC, and recommend the book very highly to anyone interested in crypto-graphy/-analysis, history, the second world war, or technology. My brother-in-law lent me his copy of Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America for more history on code-breaking and such intelligence gathering operations. It’s a great book so far, an excellent follow-up to Code Book. It’s about the incredibly hostile espionage work the Soviets did on us during the 30s and 40s. The current chapter is about the underground arms of the Communist Party of the United States of America as described in the Venona documents, wartime Soviet documents that the NSA and GCHQ had cracked, and from Soviet documents released after the USSR crumbled and Yeltsin seized communist party assets. It would be interesting to anyone who would like Code Book, as well as sundry communist sympathizers and others who think the Rosenbergs were cute.

(The title of this post, completely unrelated to its content, comes from the final line of Nicky V’s “Dr. Jones and Kirk,” sung to the tune of the Counting Crows, Mr. Jones. When meeting up with B. Sharpe and Chris on Saturday night, I recalled another line from that song, “if I had a holodeck, I’d f*@k Jenny McCarthy.” Then the song was playing at Derald’s when I picked up a cup of the bean juice this morning and had a private laugh.)

Had a good time yesterday. My sister, nephew, and I met up with my cousin to stroll around the Washington Mall and visit the monuments. The Washington Monument has been fixed up very nicely with flags and sod. Chris (in Silver Spring) mentioned that they should have redesigned the security shack, or “pillbox” as he called it. The WWII memorial is incredibly beautiful. It probably sounds predictable and cliched, but I was surprised by the size of the Vietnam memorial. I didn’t get a chance to investigate it myself, but I’m pretty sure the park service had installed touch-screen computer terminals so that visitors could easily find their loved one’s names on the wall more easily than with a sequential search. There was an older couple working on it when I walked by. I also walked the steps to Lincoln’s monument, a most impressive piece of sculpture.

After playing with Colin until he was exhausted and in bed for the eve, us grown-ups had supper and then I hopped on the train to visit my old pal Chris. We met up at DuPont Circle to drink beer at the Brickskeller, a DC bar renowned for having the world’s largest beer selection. We drank a lot of hard-to-find brews, including the great Weihenstephan and my first good Pilsner in a long while. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a good Belgian beer that Chris would have liked, l’Alsacienne. The beer features a lovely young lady on the label with a scratch-off patch covering her rump. Scratch it off with a beer cap and you’ll discover that the naughty madchen is going commando. Chris gave me a taste of an amazing beer called Schlenkerle Rauchbier, which tastes astonishingly like a smoked turkey leg. “Not for the faint of heart; guarantees some girl won’t be drinking out of your glass all night,” was Chris’s review.

After that, we hit Chris’s crib to study a map of the District and discuss its history and current state of affairs into the wee hours of the morn.

Chris is one knowledgeable fellow, and should be back to blogging soon.

So I made it to the game around 7:15 last night and met Jeff for a fantastic Mark Mulder shutout that, coupled with the White Sox loss, gave the Cards the best record in the major leagues. Met up with Pete n’ Lindsay after the game and learned that they’d become engaged and picked out an apartment together. Congratulations to them! Foolishly, I ate some White Castles afterwards and so had quite the stomach ache this morning while waiting three hours for my plane to load.

The trip was pretty nice. Landing in airplanes is far less fun than jumping out of ‘em.