Monthly Archives: January 2005

Ah, Baseball…

Well, it’s just past the middle of January, but already this fan’s mind is turning toward opening day at the ballpark. I was following my wife around in Macy’s and J.C. Penny, and surfing the Internet on my cell phone, when I found this article about A. Rod. Apparently he feels like he has something to prove against Curt Schilling after the Yankees blew their 3-0 series lead against the Red Sox.

Yes, Alex, you do have something to prove. You have to prove that you can do better than 2 for 17 in plate appearances in those critical close-them-out-the-series games. You know, the sort of games where the A’s have consistently choked in recent years. Like it or not, Schilling went out bleeding and kicked your collective asses.

Schilling won 21 games in 2004, the best in the AL. He ranked 3rd in strikeouts, 3rd in innings pitched, 2nd in ERA and had the 4th best batting average against rating of any pitcher in the AL. And most importantly, he summoned up what he needed to do, went out their with a foot held together with bailing wire, and helped the Sox kick your sorry butts four times in a row.

Oh, and Alex, that play in game six where you slapped the ball out of the glove and were called out for interference? It was a bush-league play.

I love to watch the Yankees lose. To anyone. I’ve never seen a team which seems to sap the personality and love of the game out of their players more than the Yankees. It seems like it’s just a business to them, and Alex Rodriguez is the perfect mascot for such an organization.

Oh, and Randy Johnson? Why Randy, why? Yes, you’ll win a lot of games with some run support, but… It disappoints me even more than Giambi’s departure.

Damn, I can’t wait for it all to begin again. 🙂

Today’s Geek Adventure

iPod ShuffleGod, it’s 7:25AM and I’m awake on a Saturday. What am I thinking?

Well, I’m thinking that the Apple Store opens in 90 minutes, and my wife needs a new iPod Shuffle to celebrate her return to the land of the employed. (Woo hoo!) So, we are gonna take a quick shower, get dressed and head out to Walnut Creek. Hope they don’t run out. I’ll post an update later.

Hmmm. They didn’t run out: it turns out that they didn’t even get any. We showed up shortly before 9:00, and there was a line of maybe twenty-five people outside. When the doors open, a quick dozen Mac minis were sold, but they informed us they had no iPod shuffles. A call to the Emeryville store revealed that they had no shuffles either. Oh well, I guess I should just order one off of the website.

Vonage Doo-Hickey Arrived…

I finally had it with the phone company. I end up spending close to $100 most months with minimal long distance charges, and that seemed like way too much. So, I got my brother to refer me to Vonage (good for a month’s free charges) and ordered their service.

Today the Linksys RT31P2 arrived. It looks just like a traditional Linksys router, except that it has 3 ethernet ports instead of 4 and two phone jacks. I was concerned that it would interact badly with my existing WRT54GS router, but I decided to just try the stupidest thing imagineable: I plugged the RT31P2 into my WRT54GS on an open port, powered it up, connected the phone, and voila! I have dialtone!

I’ll probably have more to say about it later, but so far, I’m fairly impressed.

Giant squid ‘taking over world’

NEWS.com.au | Giant squid ‘taking over world’

According to scientists, squid have overtaken humans in terms of total bio-mass.

That means they take up more space on the planet than us.

The reason has been put down to overfishing of other species and climate change.

Or, it could be Lord Cthulhu, rumbling in the underwater city of R’lyeh. There are many signs for those who are watchful.

Jumping on the Bed Stories…

Apparently over in Lisa’s world, her little one took a header off the bed and bumped his noggin. All seems to be well (phew!) but it put me in mind the story of my little sister (now, not so little, with four boys of her own). When she was little, she used to like jumping on the bed. My dad would hear her bouncing, and of course come storming back to her room and open the door. Upon seeing him, she would launch herself into the air, and Dad would catch her, scold her, then give her a hug and a pat on the butt, and send her on her way.

This happened probably dozens of times, until one day when Dad wasn’t quite so coordinated.

She landed flat on her butt.

And after that, she didn’t jump on the bed so often. 🙂

Steve Jackson Games’ electronic publishing venture is brilliant

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’ve been a geek for a long time. Twenty five years ago, my geekdom took the form of “gaming geek”. In high school this meant a mild spate of RPG games, but mostly wargames from Avalon Hill and a fair number of games from Steve Jackson. I loved Steve Jackson games because they were cheap and fun. I played Ogre, Car Wars, Illuminati the classic Tom Wham games Snit’s Revenge and The Awful Green Things from OuterSpace. Good stuff, Maynard. Lately some of us at Pixar have gotten into lunch time games of Munchkin, keeping the spirit alive.

That’s why it is so cool to read Cory Doctorow’s posting claiming that Steve Jackson Games’ electronic publishing venture is brilliant. SJ Games now has an electronic publishing arm that sells games and game related materials as PDF files which are not copyprotected by DRM. And you know what? If you lose the files in a disk crash Steve Jackson Games will let you redownload the ones you bought for free. Take that, iTunes music store.

They have four samples you can download, including GURPS Lite, a streamlined version of their popular roleplaying system. Break open a can of Zygwortz, pat Ook on the head, and enjoy.

Gathering Statistics for Your Weblog

Visits to brainwagon.orgI have to thank Russell Beattie for writing about StatCounter.com, the service that he uses to monitor his website. In the days immediately after the Apple Keynote, his website showed a significant bump in traffic. Neat. I decided to give it a whirl (for the level of traffic that I use it for, it is free, and presents no annoying ads or popups for my readers). I’m only a week into using it, but it’s really very helpful, and now it’s part of my daily “web maintenance” routine. It filters out spiders like Google and leaves you with raw counts on numbers of visitors, where they came from, and what search terms they may have used to find your website. All it requires is the addition of a small chunk of JavaScript to your webpage, and no muss, no fuss, you can access your account on statcounter.com and find out just how few actual readers you actually have. 🙂

One small thing that could be improved is that it doesn’t do any monitoring of RSS feeds, so I can’t use it to monitor who is downloading my podcasts or reading brainwagon just on an aggregator. The reason is of course that even if you put JavaScript in the feed, no aggregator would know what to do with it. It would be nice to have an all-inclusive solution to monitoring downloads, but that would almost certainly require direct access to the Apache log files.

Incidently, I have no interest in this company other than as a satisfied customer. Give it a try if you like.

Brainwagon Radio Comment Line

Well, everyone in the universe seems to be having fun with Skype, so I thought I would join the fun and open my very own:

Brainwagon Comment Line!

If you have some comments or questions about the show, feel free to call the Skype user brainwagon and leave a message and I’ll try to use it in a future podcast. This doesn’t work for some reason that is escaping me at this late hour. The funny thing is that it worked just fine on my laptop. I’m not sure what the deal is. I’ll try again tomorrow when heads are clearer.

Answering machine services provided by Sam — the Skype Answering Machine.

Apollo Guidance Computer Replica

While chatting with Tom over lunch, I was reminded of a guy who built his own Apollo Guidance Computer Replica. Tom was the guy who got me to write an emulator for the PDP-1 (he wrote one as well) so that we could run the original Spacewar! on a PC, so this was right up his alley. He hadn’t heard of it before, so I decided to put up this link.

Enjoy this step back into retro computing.

Iron/Nickel Meteorite Found

Mars MeteoriteIn itself, meteorites are not uncommon, but what’s pretty cool is that the Mars rover Opportunity managed to land close to a basketball sized one lying on the surface of Mars. You can read more in NASA’s press release.

CMU developed a project to find meteorites in Antartica using an autonomous robot that could search the frozen plains for these bits of stellar flotsam. Of course, there are other, more labor intensive ways to find Antarctic meteorites too.

California State Senator introduces Stupid Legislation

I know, I know, this should come as no real surprise. California legislators craft stupid, unconstitutional legislation every day. But Kevin Murray has introduced a law which would fine or imprison anyone who “sells, offers for sale, advertises, distributes, disseminates, provides or otherwise makes available” software that allows users to connect to networks that can share files, unless that person takes “reasonable care” that the software is not used illegally.

Goodbye, Betamax Decision.

You can read some commentary from Ed Felton at Freedom To Tinker.

Google Blog on Preventing Blog Spam

Google Blog

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

I’ll update my web templates shortly.

Gutenberg Gems: Treatise on Light, by Christiaan Huygens

Treatise on Light, with cool diagrams!It’s great to see a book related to one of my pet interests made available on Project Gutenberg. Today’s Gem is the classic treatise on light, called (curiously enough) Treatise on Light, by Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch mathematician and physicist who first argued that light propagated as a wave. He has an extensive resumé: according to Wikipedia, he also discovered Saturn’s moon Titan, wrote the first book on probability theory, discovered he the laws governing the motion of pendulums, and patented a pocket watch. He also wrote the book Cosmotheoros, one of the first books to speculate on the possibility of life on other planets.

Good stuff.