Just a picture I snapped this morning of my cat as he was reading. As soon as I got the camera out though, he flopped over and pretended he was napping.

Silly cat.

Addendum: I now have given up all hope of actually rising to the blog A-list. I mean really, blogging about your pets… That’s low.

Addendum²: I was at a second-hand store yesterday looking for a particular piece of junk for a project, and saw one of these:

Yep, a CueCat barcode reader. It’s a little gadget that you stick between your PS/2 keyboard and your real keyboard, and when you run it over a barcode, it spews out a message like:

.C3nZC3nZC3nZDxb7D3T2CNnY.cGf2.ENr7C3TZDNn3DNDYChPZC3nZ.

A bit of spelunking with Google will reveal that you can do a nearly trivial hardware modification to make your CueCat send barcodes in the clear, but why warm up the soldering iron when you can just write about five lines of Python that “decodes” the output, and produces the ISBN (0805045414 in this case, which you can use to go to http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/<ISBN>). which you can use in whatever sort of application you want, perhaps using Amazon web services.

[tags]Cute Cat,Cue Cat,Barcode[/tags]

Last night, the A’s managed to lead the Rangers 7-0 going into the bottom of the sixth inning, and still managed to collapse sufficiently to register their sixth straight loss. Heavy sigh.

I wonder what the chances are? This is the third largest collapse of the A’s in franchise history. I could run my analysis based on Poisson scoring and determine what the odds are in my simplified game. Might be amusing.

More amusing than watching balls sail over the fence.

MLB – Oakland Athletics/Texas Rangers Box Score Thursday May 25, 2006 – Yahoo! Sports

Addendum: For teams averaging 4.5 runs per game, my Poisson model says that a team will overcome a 7 run deficit in 4 innings approximately 0.0148% of the time, or (given 2430 games per season) about once every three years.

[tags]Oakland Athletics,Baseball[/tags]