Monthly Archives: September 2005

Oakland 7, Minnesota 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 6!

Oakland Athletics

Whew.

It’s September, and the A’s were two games back of division leading Anaheim going into last night’s game. Carmen had some homework to do, and the weather seemed beautiful, so I decided to go to the game and see the A’s versus the Twins.

The weather was beautful. I had seats right behind home plate in the Plaza Infield (second deck), and despite uneasily resisting the frequent cries of the ice cream sandwich man to break my diet, I settled in for a relaxing and fun night.

The A’s got off to a good start in the first. Ellis tripled in his first at bat when the Twins right fielder dove and missed at his diving shot to right field. Kendell got the RBI on a grounder, and the A’s were on the board.

They had their biggest inning in the bottom of the second. After Payton popped out and Hatteburg grounded out, Bobby Crosby walked, Johnson singled, and Swisher homered to drive in all three. On the very next pitch, Ellis crushed another one, and the A’s had back to back homers and a 5-0 lead.

Despite a kind of rough looking performance, Zito would leave after six and a third, having given up only two hits and no runs. Kiko Calero came in and gave up a homerun to Jason Morneau, giving the A’s the 5-1 lead.

In the bottom of the seventh, the A’s would score again. Chavez scored when Payton hit a soft tapper back the the infield, which was fielded by Twins pitcher J.C. Romero, and Payton would move to third when Romero’s throw to first sailed to the wall. Marco Scutaro would drive Payton in to complete the scoring in the seventh. A’s lead: 7-1.

Scutaro? Oh, he was in for Bobby Crosby, who came up limping when he hit the bag running in the bottom of the sixth. Bobby’s been out for a couple of weeks because of a broken bone in his foot, and after the game, it appears that he said that he really didnt feel much pain until he hit the bag tonight. I bet you they are gonna rest him for the rest of the Twins series. It’s great that Marco has been doing such a great job for the A’s, but still, Crosby would definitely be good to have going into postseason.

In the top of the 8th, Calero walked Bartlett, got Stewart to strike out swinging, and then walked Lew Ford. With lefties coming in, everyone knew that Rincon would be coming in, and he did. He got Mauer to fly out, but then walked Tiffee to load the bases. The crowd was relieved when he got Jacques Jones to strike out swinging, ending the threat.

I was getting ready for the Bart ride home. The crowd of 15,000+ who were in paid attendance had probably thinned to half that. I was content on soaking in the win.

But then, the top of the 9th.

Yabu relieved Rincon. Cuddyer: homer. A’s 7-2. Morneau singles, then Castro triples, scoring Morneau. A’s 7-3. The crowd begins its chant of “Street, Street, Street”. Sure enough, Street relieves Yabu (faced three batters, scored two, one on, nobody out) with Castro inherited from third. Ryan grounds out, and Castro scores. The A’s lead 7-4.

But the Twins have nobody on, and we have the hottest closer in baseball (Street’s ERA is an anemic 1.36). We are two outs away from closing this out.

Stewart grounds out, and we are one out away, with nobody on.

But the Twins don’t seem to notice. Lew Ford singles, and then goes to second on fielder’s indifference. Mauer pokes a ball to right pass Johnson (who it appeared to me should have at least tried to make a play) and Ford scores. A’s lead 7-5. In what appears to be a loop, Mauer goes to second on fielder’s indifference, and Tiffee pokes another ball to the left of Johnson, scoring Mauer. A’s lead has shrunk to 7-6. Finally, Street gets Jones to strike out swinging, and we all breath a sigh of relief.

A great night of baseball, with the right outcome for the pennant chasing A’s. Still, it was ugly at the end.

By this time next month, I’m gonna be missing baseball.

Addendum: Despite being right behind home plate, the woman sitting directly in front of me managed to get hit in the shin by foul ball tipped off Eric Chavez. She didn’t get the ball though. I consoled her with my story of how I was hit in the head by a Jeremy Giambi foul ball, and we had a good laugh. Still, every pop fly after that, she seemed to duck and hide. 🙂

Théorie de la spéculation

I’m currently reading Poundstone’s book Fortune’s Formula, and am up the the part which discusses the French mathematician Bachelier, and his thesis that the prices of stocks in the market follow a random walk. His thesis was published in 1900, and slept for quite some time until resurrected after his death in 1946. A bit of googling revealed that you can get his thesis here, in French. NUMDAM is apparently a project to provide digital versions of many old mathematics papers published in French journals. Cool.

Now, I’ll have to dust off my high school French.

A Mini-ITX Computer that Boots from USB Flash

Exactly what it sounds like: XYZ Computing describes a project to get a M10000 Mini-ITX motherboard to boot from a stick of USB flash memory. It uses Puppy Linux, and is pretty straightforward. As it happens, I have exactly that motherboard: I remember trying to get it to boot USB stick memory and failing, and this author suggests that upgrading syslinux might be all it takes. I’ll have to try it again.

Telescopes are cool…

Contrary to appearances, I actually try to read blogs of people who are perhaps a bit different than me. I do this to help fight against the perception (mostly my own) that I’m a monochromatic personality, interested only in a few geeky topics. Lisa Williams is such a blogger, who writes about a number of subjects which are near to my heart even if I lack the skill to write meaningfully or interestingly about them myself. Nonetheless, tonight I read that she managed to sneak a peek at M13 through a beautiful telescope at Wellesley. I was lucky enough to participate in the restoration of a large historic telescope here in Oakland, a 20″ Brashear refractor. It is now housed at the Chabot Science Center and is available for public viewing on weekends. Drop in and have a peek if you are ever in the area.

Addendum: the image on the right is a recent picture of this telescope in operation at Chabot. I’ll try to upload some more of my pictures to this gallery over the next few days.

The Basics Work…

Enigma, on the Atari 2600

Well, a couple more hours of debugging has made the basics of my Atari 2600 project work. Have I mentioned what it is yet? No? Well, it’s an implementation of the German World War II three rotor crypto machine commonly known as the Enigma. I wrote a simulator of the machine in C a few years ago as part of my attempt to crack the ciphers in Simon Singh’s Crypto Challenge as part of his book The Code Book. As of today, there still is some work to be done, but my 2600 version works, deciphering messages that are encoded with my C implementation.

How to tell if you’re a racist…

Some stories just make you shake your head.

“I’m not racist or anything,” he said. “It’s just, some people I hate, some people I don’t get along with. And black people just happen to be the ones because they think they’re better than everyone else.”

How can you tell if you’re a racist? If you have to explain to others why you’re not a racist, you probably are one.

San Pablo Dam Excursion

For reasons which actually remain entirely unclear, my wife has been muttering about renting a boat at the nearby San Pablo Dam and taking it for a cruise. This morning she bounded up cheerfully and said that today would be the day. I dragged my sleepy body and bursitis pained shoulder into a hot shower, and we were off. We rented a small boat for an hour with a little six horse power engine, and took a nice relaxing cruise around the lake. We snapped some pictures. I must admit, it was relaxing and fun.

We’ll probably do it again.

Still more 2600 hacking…

Well, today I added a block cursor that I could move around (first real time I’ve written a general motion code for the player missile graphics, kind of whacky). Figured out the joystick handling and even added some primitive (and I do mean primitive) sounds.

I also picked up some real Atari 2600 hardware to go with these PC boards. I’m gonna eventually burn my creation in EPROM and run it on the original hardware.

TiVo turns to the dark side…

Sigh. I’ve been flaming Microsoft for not listening to its customers, so it is sad to see that TiVo has decided to screw their customers at the request of copyright holders. Previously, you could store whatever programs you recorded for as long as you like. Now, if the copyright holder requests it, TiVo will refuse to allow you to keep your programs as long as you want, and will keep you from saving them out using TiVo2Go.

Sigh.

Tivo, I wonder just why you think customers should be happy that you’ve removed features from your product, or that you’ve placed the desires of copyright holders (who, I assume, don’t pay you) over the desires of consumers who are merely exercising their rights to time shift their material.

I guess I won’t be buying another TiVo either. Hello MythTV.

Addendum: It appears that this was mostly a bug, the flag was only meant for PPV broadcasts (which is slightly less bad, but not entirely great either), and was triggered by accident.

Camera Phone Test Image Gallery

Despite remarkably inconsistent remarks about the pictures (many are labelled with “sharp” which are not very sharp, and some are labelled “unacceptably blurry” which actually look reasonably sharp) this gallery is the first I’ve seen which tries to compare many different models of phones on a standard test scene.

You can see why I’m less than completely thrilled with the imagined 1.3 megapixel camera in my Motorola MPx220.

This phone produces pictures which might be in the ballpark of what a reasonable $150 digital camera could produce.