Archive for the ‘personal nonsense’ Category

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Some Things I Learned in the Past Week (Part I)

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

It turns out that men-on-base information isn’t preserved in the Gameday database. I hadn’t ever noticed it before, but if you load up an old game like this one between the Angels and Blue Jays from 5/7/9 and look at any plate appearance aside from the final one, you’ll find that the Runners on: dialog will never change to reflect the PA you’re looking at, nor will the little dots appear on the field schematic to indicate a player’s occupying the base.

The only place where that shows up, in fact, is in the gameday_Syn.xml file loaded by Gameday. There’s a subtree in the file containing information about the next two batters and the current (final) pitch sequence, as well as containing nodes for the three bases with Boolean attributes to indicate occupation. That came as something of a snag for me this past week, but it’s an intriguing one.

In any case, I’ve got to do something far more interesting than table-lookup for this part of the project to work but have a plan. So far, it’s looking good—should have something quite amazing built by the time I hit the sheets tomorrow night.

Update: Some more stuff I learned this week: my data indicates that there were 283,862 plays or personnel changes made during the course of the 2009 MLB season. Of those, the most frequent were assisted groundball outs at 32,655 that didn’t advance a runner, followed by 31,267 fly ball outs that didn’t advance a runner. The third most frequent play type was the swinging strikeout: 26,918 of them. There were 13,726 walks issued with 1st base unoccupied and 7,861 pop outs. The most common hits were bases-empty singles on line drives followed by ground ball singles at 7,830 and 7,172, respectively. There were 3,602 two-throw double plays with outs at 1st and 2nd. 1933 batters struck out on foul tips. There were 9,896 pitching changes not involving a defensive switch. One batter lined into an unassisted triple play. Six other players hit into a triple play, four on liners, two on ground balls. Fifteen players hit inside the park home runs. 862 play-types occurred only once, out of 2,300 different play-types (suppressing player and position names).

Amazingly, this information has non-trivial uses… Trust me!

(Re-ran the data set, so the numbers changed at 10:23 from an hour or two earlier.)
((Turns out those numbers were wrong, but I do have them correctly now.))

Final update: I noticed what seemed to be some odd inconsistencies with that dataset and figured it out. Those counts include spring training and WBC games, so those numbers (and some of the underlying data) are a slightly screwy.

Posted in academics, personal nonsense, tech | No Comments »

So What’ve I Been Up To…

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Looks like my last substantive post (he generously declared) was written back in early April and the last of any kind in late May. In the meantime, the sorta personal stuff has gone on Facebook and the baseball-related internet writing on Viva el Birdos.

It was a good summer: the weather was mild and pleasant and is now thoroughly missed. The cool summer terrified me after the frigid winter we’d just been through. So far, Autumn has been mild, too, although wet to a historic extreme.

I stopped taking classes this semester: I’m not currently a student, as I have more than enough credits. I’ll need to register for 0 hours next semester to deposit and defend my dissertation, which is coming along pretty well now, although obviously not as quickly as anyone involved would prefer. My goal is to get the whole thing largely written before the New Year: a tall order, as I’m not quite half-way through, but the part I’m working through now is by far the most difficult. If I have it close to completion by the end of the year, I’ll be very confident that the defense happens in the Spring semester. The work is very engaging and I’m fortunate my advisor hasn’t abandoned me after all the time it has taken to get here.

I’ve been working for the same group, although as staff now instead of a student worker. My workload has been shifting away from production work a bit and more into software development and infrastructure (although I’m out in the field at least two or three times a week.) I wrote a daemon to wrap ffmpeg today in about an hour and a half that will dramatically improve our throughput speeds and, provided the right hardware, would allow us to perform campus-wide transcoding services, if requested, and it already has been for at least one large media provider on campus. I’ll have the office all to myself Monday and Tuesday and have a bunch of projects that have sat on the shelf for too long ready to work on.

Over break, I’m looking forward to getting those projects knocked out and making some major progress on the research, as well as my second annual all-day Thanksgiving feast/football fest. Also happy for the Illinois Basketball season to truly get underway, as the football season was something of a let-down.

In short, things are good. Heading in the right direction. No complaints.

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Life can be cruel

Monday, April 6th, 2009

My ancient magnolia blooms right around April 1st each year. Last year, or the year before, a terrific storm blew through right after it bloomed and all the blossoms were torn off, which was quite a waste. This year, it snowed early in the morning on April 6th.


Here’s hoping the blossoms hang tough and I can take a decent picture when the sun comes back out. If you look closely, you can see the plastic improvised greenhouses on the daffodils, tulips, and other assorted bulb plants. The snow will probably help my yard, though. I used my new drop spreader to put down some crabgrass preventer/fertilizer on Saturday and we’ve had mist and this light snow since then, so it should be well into the root system by Wednesday.

Posted in home improvements, personal nonsense | No Comments »

Back

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

I’m back from my adventures—will have pictures and prose up shortly after I dig myself out from under more than a week away from the office.

Posted in personal nonsense | No Comments »

Interim

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

The election season is over and I probably won’t have time to study up on current baseball stuff until closer to the winter meetings. (Although my research requires me to build an extremely thorough database of the last two seasons’ MLB activities. I swear, it’s for science.) That gives me about a month where I don’t expect to write anything political or baseball related, barring a trade or unpredictable national crisis.

To conjure up low-effort content, I propose an online chili cookoff. Here’re the rules (calvin-ball style):

  • Write up a post, including pictures, of your chili cooking process.
  • Include at the end a couple of fake reviews of how awesome your chili is.
  • If anyone else picks up the game, write up fake reviews comparing their chili unfavorably to yours.

It’ll give me at least one post that shouldn’t offend anyone. Everybody likes cooking tips.

Posted in cooking, personal nonsense | No Comments »

Consolidation

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

The headline: ‘NYT’ Drops Sports Section Today

Actually, the Gray Lady didn’t eliminate the sports section, but instead appended it to the back of the business section. Makes sense: now all the news reported by actual beat reporters with (even sometimes laughable) expertise over their subject material may be found in one place. Less work for bird owners.

Posted in personal nonsense | No Comments »

Speaking of Pork

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

The weather’s fantastic today, so I went to the store this morning in mind of buying a whole chicken that I’d butterfly, stuff with a yogurt-tahini sauce and slow grill for an hour or so, then eat the legs and thighs and shred up the boobs and the rest for pita sandwiches for tomorrow and snackin’.

Pork spareribs were on sale for $1.50 per pound, though, so the plan changed once I hit the meat case.

I don’t have a smoker and don’t cook ribs often, but in the past when I’d done it, I par-boiled the ribs, slathered them with bbq sauce, and finished them off on the grill. Real barbecue connoisseurs swear by the dry rub method, so I thought I’d give that a try today while watching some college football and writing my chapter.

I used Chris Schlesinger’s basic rub recipe, although since my grill cooks with gas, I added some of this great St. Louis-style hickory rub to it that’s got very good heat. To offset that added heat, I increased the volume of sugar to about 3 tbsp and used a mixture of white and brown sugar in equal parts. Although I’m using a gas grill, it’s a real good one with well-seasoned cast-iron grates (I keep a can of bacon fat in the freezer over the winter and apply it to the grates first thing in spring like a stick of deoderant) and the grill’s got louvers that can be closed for indirect heating. I’m cooking at the lowest temperature allowed with the louvers closed.

Damn, Jason Ford, you shoulda had that one… finish the route, kid, perfect pass! Next play, Dufrene runs it all the way in from their own 43 on some slick running after the catch on a screen. Illini takes the lead, 17-14.

I’m already a convert to the dry-rub method. Essentially what’s happening is that the fat rendering out of the ribs is cooking through the rub and forming a nice sauce under the crust of air-cooked rub on the outside. Looking forward to tasting these puppies in three or six hours.

Here are some pictures of the ribs after cooking for twenty minutes, maybe.

Yum, yo.

Posted in cooking, personal nonsense | No Comments »

Free Content and Time Wasted

Monday, September 8th, 2008

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so long that it doesn’t seem to come up in a search of the archives. For that reason, I’ll go ahead and blow twenty minutes or so on this nonsense:

1) Are you in a relationship with somebody? Not the kind you’re thinking of.

2) Do you hate more than 3 people? Absolutely, but it would take some thought to name the top three. Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Vladimir Putin, Osama Bin Laden come quickly to mind.

3) How many houses have you lived in? Owned just the one, but let’s see: I rented two apartments, a house, and lived in a dorm room since leaving the nest, and three different houses in as many states before then.

4) Favorite candy bar? Snickers

5) Favorite shoes? Hard to say, I’ve got two pairs: some Docs and Reefs, plus my old football shoes for mowing and playing softball.

6) Have you ever tripped someone? Yes, I was a defenseman.

7) Least favorite school subject? Psychology.

9) Do you own a Britney Spears CD? Of course not.

10) Have you ever thrown up in public? Yes. I climbed up a tree once because I was too drunk to be social. One of my friends found me and passed up a glass of wine. One sip later and I puked out of the tree. Classic. Classy.

11) Name one thing that is always on your mind. My research.

12) Favorite genre of music? Don’t have one.

13) What is your zodiac sign? Sagittarius

14) What time were you born? 2100ish

15) Do you like beer? With gusto.

16) Ever made a prank phone call? In elementary school to friends and as an undergraduate to call centers for ridiculous products sold on late-night informercials.

17) What is the most embarrassing CD you own? That first John Mayer record. “Why, Georgia” is a good driving-through-the-country song, though.

18) Are you sarcastic? Me? Nooooo.

19) What are your favorite colors? Cardinal red, Blue n’ Orange, and charcoal grey.

20) How many watches do you own? I’ve got a pocket watch sitting on the desk in my home office. There’s a wristwatch somewhere.

21) Summer or winter? Summer. Preferred winter as a kid, though. Too poor to enjoy winter now.

23) Favorite color to wear? Charcoal. Cardinal red in October.

24) Pepsi or Sprite? Pepsi.

25) What color is your cell phone? Grey.

26) Where is your second home? My office, I guess. St. Louis, when I can get down there.

27) Have you ever slapped someone? Yes, but it was a manly slap.

28) Have you ever had a cavity? Yes, just spent a ton of money filling some.

29) How many lamps are in your bedroom? One, plus the lights on the ceiling fan.

30) How many video games do you own? Over twenty, across four different platforms.

31) What was your first pet? A turtle, not counting goldfish brought home from county fairs and such.

32) Ever had braces? Yes, but it wasn’t my decision.

33) Do looks matter? They do for a time, but that’s not what most of us are remembered for.

34) Do you use chap stick? No.

35) Name 3 teachers from High School. Mrs. Tenholder: fantastic woman, taught Asian Studies and Humanities; Dr. Miller: German; Coach McCaffery: medical science. All first-rate human beings.

36) American Eagle or Abercombie? Neither.

37) Are you too forgiving? I surely think not.

38) How many children do you want? As many as my future wife agrees to.

39) Do you own something from Hot Topic? I don’t know what that is. I think I hope not.

40) Favorite breakfast meal? Grilled pork steaks and scrambled eggs for the crew before Saturday’s football game at Memorial Stadium. That was pretty good. Breakfast burritos cooked on a campfire is pretty competitive, though. Cream of Wheat in the winter brings back happy memories.

41) Do you own a gun? Several.

42) Ever thought you were in love? Plenty of times.

43) When was the last time you cried? It’s been sixteen years, I’d guess. My tear ducts atrophied during puberty.

44) What did you do 3 nights ago? Went to Physics happy hour, had a good time with good people. Then went home and read.

45) Olive Garden? I like their salads.

46) Have you ever called your teacher mommy? Has anyone ever done this? Were they committed?

47) Have you ever been in a castle? Yes. The Prunn Schloss is among the many beautiful things I’ve been fortunate to have seen.

48) Nicknames? Anything that starts with an L. L-Train, L-Skillet, L-Slice, L-RonHubbard, just L. Most people use my name, though.

49) Do you know anyone named Bertha? Not off the top of my head, but I don’t pay enough attention to people’s names.

50) Ever been to Kentucky? Yes, but never for very long.

51) Do you own something from Banana Republic? I’d be surprised.

52) Are you thinking about something right now? Finishing this to get back to the research. The pilot for House is re-running on TV, that’s a pretty good show.

53) Have you ever called someone Boo? I’m sure I have. Since I don’t pay enough attention to names, I have to make things up at times.

55) Do you own a diamond ring? No.

56) Are you happy with your life right now? I imagine I’ll be happier with it once I work through a few things.

57) Do you dye your hair? Ridiculous question.

58) Does anyone like you? If not, I hang out with a lot of talented actors.

59) What year were you born? 1977.

60) What were you doing in May of 1994? Finishing up my sophomore year of high school. Probably debating whether I wanted to play hockey again the next season after an injury plagued year. Having a lot of fun.

61) Do you own a Backstreet Boys CD? See 17.

62) McDonalds or Wendys? Neither sells good food.

63) Do you like yourself? More than I like the person who wrote these questions.

64) Are you closer to your mother or father? I’m close with both of them. My dad lives closer.

65) Favorite physical feature of the preferred sex? Mind (I’m a materialist). Then legs (also a pig).

66) Are you afraid of the dark? Not afraid of anything like that.

67) Have you ever eaten paste? Glue paste? No. Bean paste, yes.

68) Do you own a webcam? No.

69) Have you ever stripped? At least twice a day.

70) Ever broke a bone? Both clavicles. See 60.

72) Do you chat on AIM often? I use Pidgin that communicates through their servers, but most people I talk to use gtalk. We use IM at work almost constantly.

73) Pringles or Lays? Neither. Tortilla chips with some good salsa, pretzels, popcorn, or nothing.

74) Have you ever broken someone’s heart? Not intentionally.

75) Rugrats or Doug? I find Spongebob pretty amusing.

76) Full House or The Brady Bunch? My friend Nick shot a cameraphone movie at the hill where the Full House introduction was filmed. He’s a brilliant dude.

77) Did you like your high school guidance counselor? No. I talked to her once or twice maybe. It reminded me of having to go to confession when I went to a Catholic grade school. Didn’t recognize her authority, essentially. I always marched to the sound of my own drum as a youngster.

78) Has anyone ever called you fat? Yes, but I don’t recall the times it’s happened.

79) Do you have a birth mark? No.

80) Do you own a car? Yes. And it’s spectacular.

81) Can you cook? I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

82) 3 things that annoy you: condescension, racism, communism.

83) Do you text message often? Yes. I don’t like talking on the phone much, and can almost always say enough in two or three sentences of a text to get a face-to-face in short order.

84) Money or love? Both. Lots and lots of both.

85) Do you have any scars? Of course, some more interesting than others.

86) What do you want more than anything right now? To finish school and start a career.

87) Do you enjoy scary movies? Some are good. Some are unwatchable.

88) Relationships or one night stands? Are you kidding me?

89) Big Red or Juicy Fruit? Juicy fruit, but I don’t chew gum very often.

90) Do you enjoy greasy food? I don’t like deep fried food. I could eat bacon every day of my life and be happy.

91) Have you seen all the Rocky movies? Not that new one. And had a hard time paying attention to the one where he was a manager or coach or whatever.

92) Do you own a box of crayons? No.

94) Who was the last person that said they loved you? I don’t recall.

95) Who was the last person that made you mad? The last time I lost my temper was when I was held up in traffic for a Critical Mass bike protest while driving from one awesome thing to another. That was over a year ago.

96) Who was the last person that made you cry? I honestly don’t remember the occasion when I last cried.

97) Who was the last person that made you laugh? Myself. I come up with jokes all day long, most just awful.

98) Who was the last person that you fell for? Jill Wagner.

99) Who was the last person that instant messaged you? A friend and colleague in Baltimore.

100) Who was the last person that called you? A client returning a call when I was at work. Last personal call I got was Saturday from a friend wondering why I hadn’t shown up at his BBQ yet. I had shit to do.

Posted in jill wagner is so doggone pretty, personal nonsense | No Comments »

A Somewhat Dangerous Prank

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

Every member of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign community just received an email, spoofed from the Chancellor’s email account, reading thusly. Note that this is 100% a prank and not from Chancellor Herman:

Dear Students,

Many of you may be aware of an event known as Rush. It is my objective to
warn you of the potential downsides of Greek organizations. I advise you to
not succumb to the aggressive recruitment tactics used by these
organizations. It has been my concern over the years, that the Greek culture
of alcoholism and lack of respect for the community degrades campus life.
These organizations present themselves as prestigious, yet are
discriminatory, serve to perpetuate social inequality, especially with
respect to the opposite gender, and promote a lack of diversity. Many
students have expressed concerns with regards to safety on campus,
particularly due to Greek culture and behavior. It is my hope that a
student’s experience on campus strengthens one’s individuality, but the Greek
system emphasizes the group above all, without cause or reason. This is
detrimental to the purpose of universities.

I hope that you will consider wisely.

GDI Chancellor Richard Herman

There are obvious problems with the email that suggest that this was written by someone other than Herman, but the real giveaway is the “GDI” designator on his name. (Stands for “God Damned Independent” amongst undergraduates who don’t join Greek organizations and think there’s something noteworthy about that. I personally considered setting up an entirely separate Fraternal system based on the Mongols instead of the Greeks—gave it up when I couldn’t secure a yurt or enough horses for successful raids.)

It’s going to create some headaches, although not for me. Lots of complaints, hastily thrown together letters to the student newspaper, etc.. (Impressive: they’re on this quick!)

But it’s dangerous in a Boy Crying Wolf sense. We get security related emails from the Chancellor at times (though usually from the Public Safety chief). Spoofing email headers isn’t cool, in any case.

Posted in local news, personal nonsense | No Comments »

He’s Gonna Wake up with a Cramp

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

Supposedly, a couple of dudes found a Bigfoot carcass in Georgia and will present it on Friday.

Supposedly, they saw several live ones on the same day, walking upright.

Call me skeptical.

Posted in personal nonsense | No Comments »

Note to Self

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

See if this works.

About three or four years ago, I’d been up all night writing a piece of software for a research project. I finished at around 4 or 5 in the morning and was very pleased with myself. Crashed for a few hours then went to get the work off my laptop. The laptop wouldn’t boot, though. After about an hour of cussing and googling, I found that my hard disk had somehow platter locked itself, meaning that it had physically locked down the disk until I keyed in some password. At the time, it looked pretty much un-breakable: the disk had to be powered down after five failed attempts to guess the password so a brute-force method wouldn’t have worked to crack it back open. The best I could find was a solution to get an identical, unlocked disk and swap out the platters.

Searching around just now, I came across that very simple solution that people in several online forums report to work very well. Apparently the platter lock mechanism has two different passwords, one set by the user and a master password set at the factory. If true, I’ll have access again to a huge amount of pictures and music that’d been lost to me for a long, long time—in addition to that since re-written piece of software.

Posted in personal nonsense, tech | No Comments »

Good Line

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

While reading this essay on anti-intellectualism, I encountered this sentence:

Intellectuals spray polysyllables like squid ink, to evade the democratic decencies of conversation.

Lovely prose, that.

One of my goals for the dissertation is to make it accessible. The chapter I’m almost finished struggling to complete attempts to make accessible a fairly rich body of work dating back to Aristotle… A very limited, but representative subset of it, at least.

One of my advisors is particularly skilled at making extremely dense and esoteric writing plainly understandable. It’s a marvelous skill.

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Hobbit Movie

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

I agree with every one of these seven things that Tom Burns wants from the Hobbit movie, especially #4 and #7.

I hadn’t realized that there was a fifth move planned. It sounds like it’s going to take place between the Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy. I can’t imagine what that story would involve. I’d always thought that Beren and Luthien would make for a successful movie, if you could pull off the talking-dog part without conjuring up the Bush’s Baked Beans commercials.

Posted in personal nonsense | No Comments »

Amused

Friday, April 25th, 2008

by this comic.

Mythbusters is a swell show.

This one too, although I’d argue with the placement of pineapple on the vertical axis.

I’ve seriously considered building a device much like this one.

Posted in Comedy, personal nonsense | No Comments »

EARTHQUAKE!!!

Friday, April 18th, 2008

In case you’ve been living under a rock that’s not attached to the Earth, there was a quake in southern Illinois last night that registered 5.4 on the richter scale, followed by a few aftershocks. The only damage I’ve heard of involved some concrete falling an overpass at Kingshighway and (Southwest and Shaw). (What overpass at Kingshighway and Southwest? I-44? What are they talking about Southwest and Shaw and Kingshighway being at the same place? What the heck?)

Here’s a roundup of stories:

My earthquake experience:

I woke up with a start at 4:38 to the sound of my bedroom door vibrating. My first guess was that some fool had broken into my house and couldn’t figure out the doorknob. I grabbed a weapon and went patrolling in my pajama bottoms. House was perfectly still and quiet, nothing was amiss. Nobody was outside. I thought I was going nuts. A text message came from Jeff asking if I’d felt the 5.4 earthquake that just hit. Can’t shoot an earthquake.

Jeff’s story:

He thought it was the wind. His fiancee didn’t, so he went looking for prowlers. Found out it was an earthquake and sent me a text message.

A co-worker’s story:

Thought there was someone climbing around on his roof. He pounded on the walls and yelled, “Get the #@*% off my roof!” until he tired of it and went back to sleep.

Another co-worker’s story:

Woke up to the bed shaking and the cat going nuts. Thought the cat was jumping on the bed to make it shake and yelled at her. Woke up to text messages about an earthquake and felt remorse for yelling at the cat.

I didn’t feel the 10:24 aftershock at all, but that one registered over 4.

Posted in personal nonsense, weather | No Comments »

Content coming

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Swamped with work and research, but a big ol’ post is coming down the pike. Included: travel tales and Spring Training pictures.

A picture to whet the appetite:

Posted in personal nonsense | No Comments »

Neck Cramp

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

A colleague brought to work the other day a catalog that’d mysteriously been sent to his house. This catalog was full of ridiculous swords and sundry nerd/skinhead paraphernalia. Included in this collection of stupid crap was this ballcap meant to double as a club, containing a “pocket of a unique impact material that is 110% the density of lead.”

It made me think of Anthony Reyes.

Posted in personal nonsense | No Comments »

Lost Post

Monday, February 18th, 2008

In the show, Lost, who the heck was Kelvin Joe Inman? I’m guessing that character will be brought back to tie up some loose ends, but I can’t guess which group he’d've been affiliated with. I suspect he works for whichever organization Naomi’s with.

Incidentally, the actor also does the voicework for Mr. Krabs on Spongebob.

Posted in personal nonsense | No Comments »

Roundup

Sunday, February 10th, 2008
  • Derrick Goold’s first Birdland post from Jupiter is up. I think I’m looking forward to this Pyro’s Grill place on my first trip to Jupiter. He was able to see Jaime Garcia pitch and offers up this report:
    LHP Jaime Garcia … Is coming off a season cut short by a tender elbow. Did not have surgery as the Cardinals’ doctors prescribed rest. Has no restrictions on him, according to the Cardinals. Threw well Monday, and had noticeable zip on his fastball.

    That’s very welcome news. The uncertainty about his elbow caused enough uncertainty that he dropped hard in all the prospect lists. Recall that Adam Wainwright was shut down for most of 2004 to rest—without surgery—what’s been reported as a torn ligament. Garcia’s elbow had only been described as sore, from what I know, so it wouldn’t be unprecedented if he were able to put together a solid, healthy age-21 season on the verge of the major leagues. I hope to see him unleash his curveball while I’m down in Jupiter.

  • I’m a bit surprised that this article about Richard Zednick’s throat injury made no mention of Clint Malarchuk. I was watching that game live as a wee fellow and was shocked by that injury.

  • I enjoyed this article about the sorry state of undergraduate CS curriculum and the essay that inspired it. I can say truthfully and without exaggeration that I have never seen anyone properly comment their code since finishing my undergraduate degree, when I was taught to program (using Ada) by John Neitzke. I’ve still met plenty of excellent programmers, but ones who were clearly taught different from me. It appears that the Truman CS department no longer uses Ada… in favor of Java. Alas, my discipline has slipped mightily over the years to the point where I sometimes have a hard time maintaining my own old code—but the article inspired me to document the software for my dissertation work old-school style: with a uniform, straightforward strategy. The original essay claims, “Ada is the language of software engineering par excellence.” I agree, but notice the writers DO work for AdaCore… In any language, I’m sure Neitzke still holds his students to the same high standards.

  • The job on my desk right now is quite a fun bear. A client made a video recording and a tape recording of the same interview. Here’s where I come in: the microphone on the camera wasn’t working and the batteries in the tape recorder were slowly dying. She needs me to synchronize the audio from the tape to the video. Since the batteries were dying, though, the motor pulling the tape over the recording head was pulling more slowly than normal and at a decreasing rate. So I need to incrementally slow down the audio track to keep it synced to the video. Astonishingly, it’s going pretty well. But quite a tricky chore.

  • A classic game that I think I link to every winter: Snowfight 3D.

  • I’m considering applying for work with this organization.

  • Somebody needs to rap their knuckles on Jeff Gordon’s desk and explain to him that Josh Phelps is on a minor league contract to play first at AAA so we don’t need to call on Mike Ferris to replace Pujols in case of catastrophic emergency. Look at this Q-A from his most recent chat:
    Ryan: Judging by Mr. Strauss’ article on how the Cards roster looks to shape out after the Spring, it seems that either Brian Barton or Skip Schumaker will no longer be with the club. Barton offers a decent bat and speed at the leadoff position, but hasn’t seen an AB past AA. Schumaker has hit fairly well in the bigs, but never seems to warrant steady playing time. Who do you see as having the most potential and the favorite to make the 25-man roster?

    Jeff Gordon: Barton did get a taste of Class AAA ball last year, hitting .264 in fewer than 100 ABs. But he is an unknown. He is younger than Skip, he bats right handed and he could have more leadoff potential—all of which could help him win the coin flip, if it came to that. On the other hand, Skip hit well enough at all levels to merit a good look.

    Could both stay? Perhaps, if somebody else (like Spiezio) fell out of the mix.

    Gordo alludes to Spiezio being an outfielder in competition with Barton and Schumaker. He twice mentions Phelps making the team as a RH-pinch hitter—which, for non-baseball fans—is NOT a defensive position.

    A well-built NL team needs two backups in the infield and two backups in the outfield, plus a backup catcher. One of those backup infielders needs to be able to play the middle infield positions: in a sane world, that would be Brendan Ryan but will likely end up being Aaron Miles. The other bench infielder needs to be competent at third and first with a solid bat: that’s Scott Spiezio, since Phelps can’t play third. At least one of those backup outfielders has to be solid defensively at all three positions and the other needs to be at least good in left and with a strong bat. I can’t imagine any backup catcher not being able to fill in at first—ideally, you’d have someone who can play another position like we had with Marerro, who could play decently in the outfield corners. You need to have such a roster or else you can’t give players a day off without seriously compromising your ability to win that game by putting bad defenders on the field and bad hitters in the lineup.

    If Phelps is on the team and Spiezio isn’t, then Glaus doesn’t have a backup. That’d leave us with no decent backup anywhere on the left-side of the infield, assuming Miles beats out Ryan. Spiezio’s ability to play half-decently in the outfield is gravy, but doesn’t make him an outfielder. He’s a backup third baseman who’s about as good with the glove as our starter next year. Spiezio bats better left-handed than righty, but I’d be stunned if the team broke camp with Phelps over Spiezio. Especially considering that Phelps is on a minor-league contract and Spiezio is signed to a $2.3M major-league contract (with a $100,000 buyout on his ’09 option). That is all I have to say about that.

  • One of my colleagues is going to PyCon next month. I asked him if his wife was getting sick of him walking up to her out of the blue and engaging in exchanges like this:
    Colleague: You think I should pack my bags yet?
    Colleague’s Wife: Pack your bags for what?
    Colleague flexes his biceps and grunts: FOR THE PYTHON CONFERENCE!!!

    I’d consider going myself, if only to visit friends in Chicago and to have all those sweet jokes.

  • With McCain and Obama looking like the presumptive big-party presidential nominees for this November’s election, it’s all but guaranteed that someone will move from the Senate to the Presidency for the first time since Kennedy in the 1960 election. (I think that Obama website I just linked to is hilarious, and a bit frightening. ALL politicians are scumbags, except for Ron Paul and he’s batshit crazy. Think of it: Obama may not have even won the Illinois senate if Jack Ryan hadn’t tried to force his hot ex-wife, Seven-of-Nine, make sweet love with him in front of an audience at sex clubs. Ryan’s carpet-bagger replacement, Alan Keyes, was pandering fool enough that even I voted for Obama.)

Posted in bragging, personal nonsense, roster moves, tech | No Comments »

Getting Old

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

It occurred to me that in August, I’ll have lived in Urbana for as long as I’d lived in St. Louis—I’ll have lived here longer than I’ve lived anywhere else in my life. That’s a bizarre thought. Fortunately, I’ll be finishing up here soon and getting on with a real life, something that I’m looking forward to, admittedly with some anxiety. Most of that anxiety is relating to getting my work finished up satisfactorily in a tight schedule, but it’ll be strange selling my house and moving away to places unknown.

Got me thinking back a bit. I checked to see if any of my elementary school teachers were still around. Shockingly, my second grade teacher is still in the biz. I was in her classroom when the Challenger exploded during launch. She’s a wonderful woman—amazing to have that much patience to put up with little brats all these years.

Spring training starts soon, players are already starting to arrive. Illini Hockey looks to close out a perfect regular season tonight. Regular posting imminent.

Posted in personal nonsense | No Comments »

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