Author: Jon

Computers, baseball, and a lot of free time

Uni Watch » Pete, Julie, and Linc

It’s safe to say that I spend more time creating uniforms for MVP 2005 than I do actually playing it.

If you aren’t reading UniWatch, you should be.

This particular post is by a reader who painstakingly recreates all sorts of historical baseball uniforms for MVP 2005, a really nice baseball video game.

I’ve never been that interested in uniforms, but I have definitely spent unreasonable amounts of time on introducing realism to video games and whatnot, so I can identify his obsession. It started with Tomy Pocket Baseball, a little handheld game. I had a league that went on for about ten seasons (A good chunk of my childhood). I still have all the stats, and periodically I get nostalgic for the game, and I’m tempted to go find it and play another season.  I used to spend hours in my room with that game.  And it was really more the stats that drew me in than the game.

Then there was penny soccer, invented by a friend.  I played at his house for a while, then created my own league.  There weren’t so many stats to go along with that, but we did NCAA football-style rankings, which was fun.  I always loved watching the unranked no-name upset the undefeated powerhouse.

I wonder what the wife would say if I pulled out the old Tomy Pocket Baseball.  She’d probably prefer it to me playing on the computer, but not to me cleaning the house or something.

I win! Im a big winner!

Some of you may remember that I contested a ridiculous parking ticket last month. I left the response letter at home, so I can’t post it now, but I can summarize.

Dear Sir, Your relentless powers of persuasion are too much for us. We have tried to formulate a response, a scenario where you might possibly be in the wrong, even a little bit, but we have failed. As such, please do not pay us any money. We’re sorry. Sincerely, DC Adjudication Services

I’m pretty sure that’s almost word for word. I may have taken a few liberties and substituted a word here and there to get down to what they really meant, without the posturing and bureaucracy. We’re still waiting on a response for the big ticket, the $100 ticket. The wife wrote that letter. She’s a lawyer, so she should be better at convincing them, but we had a much stronger case on the one that I contested. So we’ll see.

71% is good?

The folks over at DCist write that, according to an article in the Examiner, 71% of the DC area drives alone to work.  They say this is good because we were at 74% three years ago, and the nation is at 77% and rising.

That’s kind of depressing.  I’ve been taking Metro to work since March, and I love it.  I don’t worry about traffic.  I’ve done more reading since then than in the previous three years combined.  My biggest worries are four car trains at Pentagon City and loud tourists.

I know many people don’t have the opportunity to take public transportation, and carpooling can be hard.  But only doing 6% better than the national average in a city like DC is kind of sad.  I wonder what the percentage is in London, for example, where they have huge congestion taxes.  Now that I’m an excessively smug city resident and Metro rider, I say $20 to drive your car into the city!  $30 if you’ve come from more than ten miles away!  We’ll give two monthly exemptions for people who just have to come to the city every once in a while, like they way I have to drive out to Manassas once or twice a month for work.

We can use some of that money to pay for whatever it is we’re paying for with all the parking tickets DC gives out.  I think more and more that DC gives out those tickets maliciously.  I think I’m going to start contesting them regardless of guilt, just to spite the city.

I dont want to be eaten by a lion

MIT finds cure for fear | Press Esc

Inhibiting a kinase, an enzyme that change proteins, called Cdk5 facilitates the extinction of fear learned in a particular context, Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and colleagues showed.

This is interesting. If I’m reading the article right, they have chemically prevented a fear of a particular thing. They shocked the mice whenever they went to a certain spot until they were afraid of it. The more Cdk5 activity in their brains, the more fear. But when they cut down the activity, the mice were okay.

I’m not quite sure how this translates to humans, though. For example, I am quite rationally afraid of being eaten by a lion. I have never been close enough to a lion to really express that fear, but it is a fear nevertheless. Now, let’s say you have inhibited the Cdk5 in my brain. Will I now happily approach a hungry-looking lion?

No, I won’t. My fear of the lion, or lack thereof, has no bearing on whether or not it will eat me.

I suppose that what they really mean is that they could prevent me from being paralyzed by fear if I were ever in close proximity to a lion. But, I suspect I could prevent myself from being paralyzed by fear by spending a lot of time with lions and learning to avoid being eaten.

The article mentions soldiers with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and panic attacks, which “stem from the inability of the brain to stop experiencing the fear associated with a specific incident or series of incidents”. I guess I never realized that they were so technically precise.

It seems unlikely that they can stop rational fears. That is, I don’t believe that they can inhibit my Cdk5 and allow me to waltz through a war zone, explosions and people trying to kill me all around. But if I come home and still find myself waking up at night, screaming and remembering that experience, that seems like something they could turn off.

Anyway, I don’t mean to second guess MIT researchers. They probably know what they’re talking about.

Ubuntu, Wubi, and other funny words

I installed Ubuntu on my laptop last night using Wubi, and I’m not sure why I didn’t do this sooner. Wubi is a Windows installer that lets you run Ubuntu sort of like running a Windows program.

My initial reactions are limited, because the install finished sometime after I went to bed last night, and I only had a few minutes to play this morning. But I was surprised that Ubuntu recognized the volume buttons on my Dell (I accidentally uninstalled the Windows driver for them and have never bothered to find it again), although I was a little disappointed that it seems to like to turn the volume on when I’m not logged in, which drives me nuts.

Also, I couldn’t get onto my wireless network. But I’m not positive I have the right password. I’ll have to play with it tonight. Of course, the wife comes home tonight, so I should probably do a bit of cleaning. I did some yesterday, but not everything.

In any event, I would much rather be at home playing with Ubuntu than sitting at work, checking for Section 508 compliance in our web application. Although at least this gives me an excuse to get rid of some of the awful, awful code generated by Visual Studio. If you ever hear anyone try to sing the praises of Microsoft’s .NET environment, I want you to kick them in the teeth.

City wildlife

I saw a deer!  In DC!  I was out running (Well, running and walking.  It’s hot out, and I haven’t really run in three weeks) down along the Rock Creek Parkway path, and across the creek, behind a big tree, there was a deer.  Well, its rear end, anyway.  I couldn’t really see the rest.

Other than that, the run pretty much sucked.  A hole is wearing in the heel of my left running shoe, and the shoes are only two months old or so.  Maybe I’ll take them back and see if Fleet Feet can send them back to the manufacturer or something.  I know I have skinny, bony feet, and I tend to be hard on shoes, but this is a little ridiculous.

Honestly, I would pay $300-500 for a nice, custom pair of shoes that would last me five years.  Maybe not running shoes.  I don’t know if they could make them last that long.  But a nice pair of work shoes, lightweight, comfortable, and sturdy, that really fit my feet, would be great.

Can I get that somewhere?  Or am I looking at more like $3000?

Im back, the cat is back, the wife is gone

Well, she’s gone temporarily.  We got in on Friday (A day late because we missed our flight.  If you’re flying from Dublin to Philadelphia on US Airways, do yourself a favor and get there early.), and she flew out yesterday for work.  She’ll be back Thursday.

Unfortunately, as usual when she’s not here, I didn’t sleep well last night.  I haven’t figured out why I sleep better when she’s here, but I do.  And the stupid cat didn’t help.  She was loud and irritating pretty much all night.  I don’t think I got more than an hour straight of sleep all night.

Anyway, hopefully tonight I’ll sleep better.

The trip, by the way, was fantastic.  I’ll write more at some point, but we had a great time.  Dublin is very expensive, however.  But I sure do love Guinness.

The Kennedy Center responds

Finally a response from the Kennedy Center to my complaints.

[Dear Cherished Patron,]

We have manually removed you from our e-mail list. You shouldn’t be receiving any e-mail from us regarding anything aside from shows for which you have purchased tickets. If you do receive anymore unwanted e-mail, please feel free to get in touch with me and I’ll do my best to fix the problem. I apologize for your inconvenience.

Sincerely,

[Some dude]

Electronic Media Intern

So, all I had to do was complain to the FTC.  I would have appreciated an explanation of why they thought it was okay to violate the CAN-SPAM act, but maybe that’s too much to ask.  Maybe they could have told me why I had to complain three times before I got a response. 

Well, at least they responded.

A suggesting for writing

Why I Won’t Read Your Unpublished Work (Whatever)

For God’s sake, if you’re going to hand your work over for critique, finish the damn thing first. Even if it’s broke, you can fix it. But you can’t fix a fragment. All you can do is fiddle with it, and in fiddling avoid finishing it. I don’t encourage this; even with friends, I don’t read things that aren’t finished.

The whole post linked above is pretty amusing, as Scalzi generally is.  But this part caught my eye.  I’d never thought of that.  And it makes a lot of sense.  Not that I’ve ever finished any story I’ve started, but often asking for feedback has actually been the last thing I ever did.  I joined a Sci-Fi writers feedback web site, got some pretty positive feedback on the first chapter of something that I had started, and promptly never picked the thing up again.  It was a strange feeling.  The person who offered the feedback did what I thought was a good job.  He mentioned some good things, gave some constructive criticism, and did it in a polite, supportive manner.  Not much more you can ask for.

And still, I got that “OMG my writing is terrible” feeling.  And it’s not that my self-worth is tied up in how someone I’ve never met feels about the first draft of the first chapter of a novel I was working on.  Honestly, if he’d ripped it apart, I would have just assumed that he was incapable of understanding what I wrote, and pretty soon I would actually believe that.

Anyway, not that I want to use “I let people read it” as an excuse for why I didn’t finish any of the writing projects that I started.  But maybe I should keep stuff to myself until I’m finished.  My wife will kill me, probably.  But if I explain to her I’m doing it so I can finally finish a novel, become a bestseller, and support us both into our old age, I think she’ll understand.