Or is it hot outside? It’s not so bad now, but when I got home from work, there was a hot breeze blowing that made me want to move to San Fransisco.
It’s good to be back home, though. Vacation was nice, but the cat missed me.
And, if I ever get a reasonable internet connection at work, I’ll try to get back in the habit of posting regularly. I know I’ve been a bad, bad blogger lately.
Starting tonight and continuing until next Tuesday night, I will have no internet access. Well, that’s not entirely true. I will have some internet access through AOL dial-up. But that doesn’t really count, does it?
Anyway, I won’t be posting. But I’ll be back next week.
Or maybe it’s new heights. I guess that depends on your point of view. I’ve been doing a little fooling around with some C++ with GCC. I’m doing a little baseball simulating, and it’s going well. If it continues to go well, I’ll eventually have a little executable that generates pages and pages of wonderful statistics that I can do all sorts of wonderful things with.
I realize I’m in a very small minority with my obsession with baseball statistics, but those of us here (And by ‘here’, I mean ‘In the crazy minority’) are really into it. The wife doesn’t really understand, but as long as I don’t sit here writing code and ignoring her while she’s talking, I think she’ll humor me.
I’m a little disappointed with Eclipse, however. It was slow, error messages were unhelpful, and code completion was iffy. And since code completion is one of the greatest things about an IDE, its absence is kind of a deal breaker. It may be partly a function of my crappy computer, though.
So I’m currently coding in Gedit and doing command-line compiling. It’s fine so far, but I haven’t done anything really complicated.
Anyway, it’s fun.
It’s bad enough that Starbucks coffee tastes burnt. I could get around that by ordering, on my wife’s recommendation, the mild instead of the regular. And I can get by the milkshakes passed off as coffee by just making fun of the people who order them (A good general rule – if it takes more than 5 words to order your coffee, not including “please” and “thank you”, you’re drinking a milkshake). I even got past the first price increase that sent the largest coffee over $2 when you include tax. But now the medium coffee is $2.02, less than six months after the last price increase.
I’m done. No more Starbucks coffee. Tomorrow I’ll bring in a coffee mug and start drinking free work coffee.
On an unrelated note, I’m testing out a WordPress tag plugin. I don’t really know what it does, but this is the first post that has tags on it. Maybe nothing will be visible to you. Anyway, we’ll see.
I’ve been doing some more playing with Ubuntu and Wubi. I got the wireless working Friday, and I haven’t booted up Windows since then. This is something holding back Ubuntu for the masses. It took me four tutorials and about a week to get connected to my wireless network. This isn’t so bad for me – I don’t mind messing around with things on the computer, and now I’ll appreciate the wireless connection even more. But I hesitate to put Ubuntu on my dad’s computer, for example. He’s a perfect candidate – Windows hater, older PC – but I don’t want to have to get things working for him every time he wants something new.
Anyway, I’m very happy with my new Ubuntu install. And I don’t know how to write a wireless manager that just works.
I wonder if Dell has something. They’re selling machines preloaded with Ubuntu now, and they must have come up against this by now. Of course, if the Windows wireless manager that Dell put on my laptop is any indication, they probably just threw the first piece of junk they found in there and hoped that people would figure it out.
HIDE YOUR ARMS » Teetonic are a bunch of hippies
Teetonic is a t-shirt design competition website that has decided to go organic cotton. Not sure if they’re using the omnipresent American Apparel organic cotton shirts, but they’re using something. I like the American Apparel shirts because they’re cut skinny, and if I want to wear some of my favorite shirts, I have keep my weight down.
The Soul of Baseball: First Base: Albert Pujols
For instance, a scout friend of mine called a couple of days ago and said that Manny Ramirez is an “underrated defensive outfielder.” Now, first of all, this may be true, in that MannyBeingManny is rated as “Putrid” defensively, and he’s actually “Rancid,” and “Rancid” is better than “Putrid,” so that would make him underrated.
I have to admit that anyone making fun of Manny Ramirez playing the outfield is likely to get on my good side, like people making fun of Condi Rice or Nickelback. But this is funny, and it gets better from the quote above.
If you need any sort of running gear, go to Fleet Feet. However, unless you really have to (And I know I linked to it), don’t go to their website. It resized my browser window, which is absolutely unacceptable.
However, the service at the store is fantastic. At the end of May I bought a new pair of running shoes. I’ve since put probably 40 miles on them. There is now a hole worn in the heel on the inside of the left shoe. This seems a little ridiculous.
So, I went to Fleet Feet, where they promptly exchanged the pair of shoes for a new one. I hope it was just a defective pair, because I really like the shoes. And I have weird, skinny, flat, bony feet. It’s really hard to find shoes that fit me.
Anyway, I have been very happy with my experience at Fleet Feet. I’ll definitely go back next time I need something. Just hopefully not for these shoes again.
Metroblogging DC: Metro Unveils New Online Station Maps Powered By Google
Metro’s unveiled new online maps for their stations, which include local business listings, all powered by Google Maps.
Well, not exactly. I mean, they still have all their vowels, and I don’t think they have an AJAX “search as you type” function. But they’ve finally gotten a decent map. The next step would be to integrate local public transportation search into Google Maps. That would be cool. You could choose driving or walking or riding public transportation when you tried to get directions. They’re probably working on it.
What the heck is going on with cycling? They can’t go a month without someone getting caught doping. I can’t believe the positive feeling about cycling in the US generated by Lance Armstrong is going to last much longer, especially with the controversy surrounding him.
I’m in favor of not only a one strike rule, meaning you get caught doping once and you get a lifetime ban, but also a one year team ban. If your teammate gets caught, your team sits out a year. Edited to add: Looks like they did kick out the first guy’s teammates, as well. That should do wonders for team unity. Maybe next time they’ll do a better job of policing themselves. Or maybe they’re all on drugs. I’m guessing the latter.
Maybe they should implement that in all pro sports. Mandatory regular tests and lifetime bans should go a long way towards getting rid of the performance enhancing drugs.
It gets pretty tiring. And it’s not just the drugs. We have Michael Vick leading a pack of guys who just can’t be satisfied by adoring fans and millions of dollars and feel the need to break all sorts of laws. We have the gambling, point-shaving basketball ref, and if you’ve ever watched a basketball game and think this guy is the only one, you’re crazy. The NBA has been a little too quick and to insistent in stressing that he was just one “criminal”. And we have Bonds on the doorstep of asterisking himself past Hank Aaron and into first place on the all-time home run list, at least until A-Rod passes him. If we lived in a truly just world, he’d get indicted this week and end up going to jail before he can break the record.
Anyway, none of this means I’m not eagerly awaiting the beginning of football season, and constantly dreaming that someone in the Orioles organization will finally wake up and trade the entire team except for Brian Roberts and Erik Bedard, rebuild with prospects, and be the 2006 Tigers of 2012.