I know that many of you are sick of hearing about baseball, but you’re going to have to deal with a bit more. We have the Orioles in HD! Last year, the Comcast feed from MASN was not in HD, and it was absolutely terrible. It was poor even for a non-HD channel. But today, I came home from work a bit early to watch the Orioles opening day, and we have MASN HD. Now all we need is an Orioles win.
Tag: Anti complaint
I’m so glad baseball is back.
Even if it’s just Oakland playing the f’ing Red Sox in Japan, I’m so happy that the baseball season has started again. Just looking at box scores, seeing that Daric Barton walked twice more, bringing his OBP to .444 despite not getting a hit yet, and seeing Rich Harden make the Sox look silly, striking out nine in six innings, it just brings a smile to my face. Never mind that the Orioles aren’t expected to win even 70 games this year. I’m not going to worry about that right now. Instead, I’ll point and laugh at Jason Varitek, 0-8 with six Ks so far. And who knows – maybe the Orioles will flash back to 1989 and unexpectedly make the playoffs. I can’t imagine Jeff Ballard is too busy these days . . . Edit: Article here mentioning Barton as an AL Rookie of the Year candidate.
Barton has never hit up to corner-infielder standards — though he’s still young enough to develop the power — but he has never not hit, topping .300 everywhere he has been. He is a remarkably disciplined hitter at a young age — his Minor League totals show 303 walks versus 255 strikeouts.
I like this kid more and more. He’d probably be the poster boy for Moneyball II – What Can Billy Beane Get for Huston Street?
South Park shares all the episodes
New South Park site debuts, with full episode streaming – Boing Boing
Eventually every episode and clip will be available everywhere in the world. There is a tangle of contracts that Comedy Central has with different cable companies and territories that are preventing us from that right now. But hopefully it won’t be long.
This brings me back to the glory days Chuckles. Chuckles was the name of the forgotten machine on the work network that the IT team didn’t realize was unused. It had every episode of South Park through season 8, gigs of MP3s, movies, and tv shows. Whenever I was bored at work, I could just watch something. And now the creators of South Park are doing the same thing. Shocking that the show that has never been afraid of pushing the envelope (BTW, did you know that “pushing the envelope” actually refers to the flight envelope, which is “the capabilities of [an airplane] design in terms of speed and altitude”?) is also not afraid of experimenting with new business models.
Yay, Nashville!
I wrote about this a little while ago, and now Boing Boing says, Copyfighters beat down Tennessee bill. Well done, Tennessee. People in the comments point out that this is not a total victory – it still requires universities to police their students, which is a dumb idea. But at least it’s no longer a horrible, despicable idea.
New science fiction site coming soon
Making Light | Phase one: collect underpants via Whatever Tor Books, a big (the biggest?) name in science fiction publishing, is opening a new website. It is supposed to be “a place and a context for the lively, ongoing, wide-ranging, and profoundly self-organizing discussions that have characterized the science fiction subculture since its earliest days”. That sounds pretty cool to me. I signed up for their advanced membership or whatever it is to get some free ebook downloads. I haven’t read any of them, because I don’t have an ebook reader (Please, won’t someone make a good, affordable ebook reader?). But I have them, and I plan to read some or all of them, and I suspect that I will end up buying something from some or all of the authors that I read. I hate announcements of far away website launches – I don’t really care until your site is live. Actually, I don’t really care until it’s live and finished being Dugg and Slashdotted, which I’m sure it will be. But I am looking forward to this. I was really disappointed with Gawker’s crappy science fiction blog, and I have high hopes for this one.
Things are a little bit rough so far
So I’m converting to Drupal. I have most of the basics working. I’m not sure my .htaccess redirect from the old site is working. It might just take the server some time to figure it out, I don’t know. I know the RSS feed is updated. If you’ve been reading the feed, it should be basically a transparent change. It’s pretty cool so far. Of course, everything gets messed up when I upgrade to Drupal 6, but they aren’t quite ready for the full release yet (Contrary to what it say on their site). Anyway, it’s late, so I’m probably just about done for now, but keep watching. More cool stuff is coming.
Mmmm, delicious Consecrator Dopplebock
I stopped in Whole Foods to pick up some dinner (Salmon and asparagus, at the wife’s request), and saw they had a Bell’s brand I’d never seen – the Consecrator Dopplebock. It’s still getting cold in the fridge, so I can’t give a review yet, but Bell’s crappy new website calls it “a well balanced, full bodied beer”. It turns out it’s only available in February, and not even the whole month.
I feel sorry for my West Coast brothers-in-law, both lovers of Bell’s, who can’t get it locally.
I have to say, it’s more fun to drink a beer with a cool name. I mean, Consecrator Dopplebock? That’s awesome. It’s up there with Rogue Dead Guy Ale (A great beer) and Dogfish Head Raison D’Etre (Another great beer).
Saving money through credit cards
When I finally got fed up with hearing, “I’m sorry, sir, we don’t accept Discover”, and went looking for a new credit card, I started off at Fatwallet, looking for a good deal. I looked through their list of rewards cards for something with a 2% return on something that I would actually use. The one that jumped out at me was a Chase/Countrywide card (Even though I hate Chase). If you, like me, have a mortgage through Countrywide (Which I do, on our rental condo in Falls Church), this card will pay $50 towards that mortgage for every $2500 you spend on the card.
They just applied the first payment to my mortgage, and I was wondering what my long term savings were. I have 27 years, 8 months left on the loan. The wife and I intend to continue to rent out the condo as long as we can afford it (And that should get easier from year to year, as rents inevitably go up while the mortgage stays basically the same). Now, it’s likely that we’ll refinance at some point, although the rate is 5.375%, so it probably won’t be until we can get a 10 or 15 year fixed mortgage instead of the 30 year.
Anyway, I found a mortgage calculator that would tell me my savings based on a one-time extra payment. I don’t know how accurate it is, but it tells me that my one-time payment of $50 in the 27th month of the loan will save me $177 over the full remainder of the loan. So my 2% reward turns into a 9% reward (I know, adjust for inflation, present day value vs future value, blah blah blah I dropped my econ major, remember? It’s not a perfect calculation.).
So that’s pretty awesome. And it shows how much a small early prepayment can help in a long-term loan. So, while Chase’s customer service is, in my experience, unbelievably bad, this credit card is a great deal if you have a Countrywide mortgage. I have no idea whether Bank of America will mess with this or not, but I hope not.
Obama is down with Creative Commons
I was poking around on one of my favorite websites, Flickr, and found that my favorite presidential candidate not only has an account, but shares all his photos with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.
For all of you internet communist Techdirt-fanatic geeks (like me) who believe that non-scarce resources (like photos and MP3s) should be free (And there is extensive economic theory that reinforces this), this is awesome.
Not that I needed another reason to vote for the guy – he’s the only one running who I trust with my country, even if I don’t agree with him on a lot of the issues. But if I were looking for more reasons, this would be one of them.
Now I just have to figure out a non-commercial use for one of his photos so I can take advantage of the license.
Welcome to five years ago
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency – finally with RSS! While they offer a title-only feed, which I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen, at least they’re making progress.
I guess they want you to come to the site and see the ads for their various books and subscriptions and such, but it still seems very odd not to at least offer a teaser in addition to the title.