Geeky Baldisms

I didn't take to sports right away. I grew up listening to the St. Louis Cardinals on the radio. My dad was a diehard fan. But it wasn't until the "ripe old age" of nine that I finally got bitten by the sports bug.

I, too, became a passionate Cardinals fan. The 1968 heartbreaker World series was the first I ever payed attention to. The loss in seven games set me up for the long, depressing 70's, when the team would struggle.

Prior to that year, beginning in 1960, athletes from Communist nations began winning lots and lots of Olympic medals. East German female swimmers, who had V-shaped physiques when viewed from behind (and also a bit of 5 o'clock shadow on their faces) did particularly well.

I began buying baseball cards and watching NBC's Game of the Week every Saturday afternoon. I also learned to love the broadcast voices of Harry Caray and Jack Buck.

My friends were more into football. But I spent all of my time explaining to them why baseball was the better sport. I attempted to get across to them how you have to watch closely, look for the subtle nuances.

For example, to see a pitcher's best pitch, the one he has the most confidence in, look at what he throws with a 2-0 or 3-1 count. True hitting greatness is laying off the first pitch when you're down by three runs late in the game and the bases are empty. And a loss must be shaken off. After all, there are 162 games to be played, one loss, in most cases, won't end your season.

Circa 1994, I was probably the biggest baseball fan in the world. Then came the first blow: The Strike.

Baseball was riding high that year. ESPN was showing two different doubleheaders a week, and also a couple of single games. No matter what team you followed, the odds were good that you would see them from week to week. Sunday Night Baseball announced its intention of featuring a game in every ballpark in the league during the course of the season. Baseball, the sport, was at an all-time high.

I had weathered the strike in 1983. It was resolved in time to save the season, but Bowie Kuhn had concocted some bizarre scenario for the playoffs that shut out the two teams that had the best divisional records in the National League: Cincinnati, and my beloved Redbirds. Yet, I was still enough of a fan that I rooted for the Dodgers as they beat the Yankees in that year's World series.

But this time, the strike kept hanging on. Canceling the World Series over a dispute between millionaires and billionaires couldn't POSSIBLY happen, could it?

I skipped the game for a while. It was just as well. MLB, which must be the most horribly run "successful" sports organization in history, decided it wasn't good for ESPN to broadcast all of those games. So they were cut back to about half of what they were broadcasting. ESPN began going for the biggest audiences with their now meager supply of games, and soon every time Boston played New York on Sunday, the game was scheduled for a 7:00 PM broadcast.If you were a Minnesota, Pittsburgh, or Detroit fan, good luck ever seeing your team on national television.

There was still the occasional feel-good story like unassuming, hard-working Cal Ripken's dogged pursuit and eventual passing of Lou Gehrig's unbreakable record. But I was no longer a baseball fan.

I wasn't alone. The sport's popularity swooned after the World Series that was canceled by a labor dispute. But I believe the effect of baseball's becoming stingy with who could broadcast their games was just as great a factor.

Of course, we all know what happened in the late 90's. The (snicker) "Lively Ball Era" began. In 1977, George Foster hit 52 home runs. It would take 21 years before another NL'er would hit 50 again. Only he didn't just hit 50. He hit 70. And the second-place home run champ hit 68.

What in blazes was going on? That ball must be REALLY lively. Pitching must be going to pot.

How naive we were.

A bottle of Androstendione was spotted in McGwire's locker. Suddenly, his record was in question. "Just a minute!" I said to the questioners. "Andro is legal, it's not steroids!" I pointed out that McGwire hit 49 in his first full season. It wasn't drugs that made him hit homers, it was TALENT.

A few years later, I saw McGwire's rookie card. He looked as skinny as I do.

Despite the Cardinals' poor team performance, I had my interest in baseball rekindled. Right up until three years later.

Barry Bonds exemplified the anti-hero. Obnoxious, self-centered, didn't go anywhere without his posse, the kind of player who would draw the contempt of fans in every ball park except one: the brand-new one in San Francisco.

When the season was resumed in 2001 after the tragic September break, Bonds kept sailing homers over the right field wall in PacBell Park. When the line-drive hitter, whose largest home run total prior to 2001 was 46, reached 72, fans in San Francisco were ecstatic. The rest of us began to wake up from our coma.

Either that park had a ridiculously short right field wall (it didn't), or something had happened to the game.

The next year, Sports Illustrated interviewed Ken Camaniti. The former MVP was out of the game, and thus spoke freely. He claimed that at least half of the guys who played major league baseball, including him, were on steroids.

The world began to look at the ridiculous home run figures of the last few years in a new light.

Sure, we had new "homer-friendly" ballparks. The rise in home runs went all the way back to 1990, when Cecil Fielder broke the 50 barrier. Busch Stadium had brought its cavernous walls in, as did many other older parks.

But Camaniti had revealed the obvious truth: baseball's records had been irreversibly tainted. It was time for MLB to flex its muscles and clean up the mess.

Yeah, right.

The wussy new steroids policy that was adopted assured anonymity for cheaters. It was all that the Player's Union would allow. Anonymous testing began in 2003. If more than 5% of the steroid tests are positive in 2003 or 2004, players would be randomly tested for a two-year period. Players wouldn't be punished for testing positive.

Holy crackdown, Batman.

Mike Wallace can inspire deep-seated terror when he strolls into a corporate office with a camera crew. But he was the WRONG choice to let accused steroid-pumper Roger Clemens have his say on 60 Minutes.

Note these observations from the Sports Illustrated website:

Where Wallace came up short was in not pressing Clemens. He did not follow up on why McNamee injected Clemens with Lidocaine, and B12. Most glaringly, he did not press Clemens about his longtime friend Andy Pettitte, who validated McNamee's account regarding Pettitte's growth-hormone use. "Why would Brian McNamee tell the truth about Andy Pettitte and lie about you? Wallace asked. "Andy's case is totally separate," said Clemens. "I was shocked to learn about Andy's situation. Had no idea about it."

There was no follow-up question, and there needed to be. Clemens has long claimed Pettitte as the Tonto to his Lone Ranger, a relationship not fully explained to viewers on Sunday. To characterize Wallace as sympathetic to Clemens would be unfair, but there was a clear distinction between he and Logan in terms of aggressiveness. (CBS declined to make Wallace available to SI.com after Sunday's broadcast.)

The BCS stunk worse this year than normal. There was no clear-cut faceoff between #1 and #2. Instead, we had Ohio State (a good choice) and LSU (WHAT???).

LSU was there largely because of their status as champion of the Most Holy of conferences, the SEC.

Yes, LSU won handily, but that proves nothing. Getting hot for one game doesn't mean much. It's how you got there to play it that matters. And in this case, LSU's presence is clear evidence of the disrespect that other conferences, particularly the Big Twelve, are subject to when the BCS say who shalt play for the championship.

How did this conference get named as the Ultimate in the BCS's eyes?

Here's how the typical SEC team does business:

• Schedule non-con creampuffs like Middle Tennessee, Tulane, NE Louisiana, or North Texas, to provide easy non-conference warmups.


• Beat up on the conference doormats. This year, it was Vanderbilt, South Carolina, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.


• Play .500 against the better teams.


• Stroll into a big fat bowl game secure in the fact that the BCS is wowed by your unbelievable tough schedule.

I discovered the Internet Movie Database ten years ago. In case you've been living in a cave, it's the premier user-driven site for opinions and commentary about movies. And I must say that I agree with the majority of its rankings.

For instance, it rates the two original Godfather movies in the top three of all time. Hear, hear. Every time they are broadcast on AMC or TNT, I have to stop what I'm doing and watch them again.

The site's fans have also had an affinity for a movie that was largely unappreciated by the critics and the public alike. The Shawshank Redemption has been sandwiched between the two Godfather movies for years as the second best ever.

I am very pleased with this, because the fact is that the movie is simply better with each viewing, and the upbeat ending gets me very time. A salute to the astute voters of IMDB.com.

The rest of the Top ten (at presstime) is rounded out by:

• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
• Pulp Fiction
• Schindler's List
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• The Empire Strikes Back
• Casablanca
• The Seven Samurai

So Microsoft wants Yahoo. Should I give a hoot?

Not on the surface. Yahoo lost my interest years ago. The ads, absent from the cool Yahoo of old, became overbearing. So I switched to Alta Vista, then Google, where I remain today as my home page/search engine of choice.

Yahoo has become Grandma's home page, in case Grandma has managed to connect to the web without the help of AOL.

But that doesn't change the fact that Yahoo is the #1 visited site on the web. And giving Microsoft that kind of power is scary.

Microsoft, simply put, wants world domination.

For that matter, so does Google. But I see two distinctly different ways of dealing with customers here. Google wants your web-based business. Will they someday want your business on an unconnected desktop computer? Perhaps. But, by and large, Google has stuck by their "first do no harm" policy. Additionally, Google has supported the WWW standards well. Their Gmail interface, for example, fires up and runs perfectly in a standard web browser without requiring add-ons.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has their own way of doing things. If you want to run MS technology, then, in their minds, you need to be running a MS O/S, MS software, and nothing else.

One of the earliest services set up on the newfangled internet way back when was Usenet. Here's a brief history from Wikipedia:

Usenet (a contraction of user network) is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users read and post public messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles bulletin board systems (BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the various web forums which are widely used today. Discussions are threaded, with modern news reader software, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.

Basically, in the days before all of the purty pictures and such that comprised what would be the WWW, Usenet was how ideas were exchanged. And it was very effective in its time.

The whole structure was pretty rigidly organized, with hierarchies as follow:

* comp.*: computer-related discussions (comp.software, comp.sys.amiga)
* humanities.*: Fine arts, literature, and philosophy (humanities.classics, humanities.design.misc)
* misc.*: Miscellaneous topics (misc.education, misc.forsale, misc.kids)
* news.*: Discussions and announcements about news (meaning Usenet, not current events) (news.groups, news.admin)
* rec.*: Recreation and entertainment (rec.music, rec.arts.movies)
* sci.*: Science related discussions (sci.psychology, sci.research)
* soc.*: Social discussions (soc.college.org, soc.culture.african)
* talk.*: Talk about various controversial topics (talk.religion, talk.politics, talk.origins)

Well, occasionally I have to be reminded that you should just was pick your battles.

I just wasted several hours on a comment board at the otherwise excellent Ziff-Davis website.

The subject was Ed Bott, Windows worshipper, and his gleeful take on how people hated XP as much as they do Vista, and how one day soon it will all be moot as people learn to love Vista.

It turns out that many of his followers share his philosophies.

In short, it's a quagmire that a Linux fan would should stay away from at all costs.

Some people just don't get Linux, FOSS, or the fact that the war for the desktop is not over, it's only begun. And trying to convince them otherwise is like attempting to teach the proverbial pig to dance.

I know that some simply don't pull for the underdog. People who have never been to Florida loudly cheer for the Miami Hurricanes to crush Florida A&M. Yankee fans exist all over the country, screaming for them to get to the World series, ignoring their hometown team that's had some losing seasons lately.

And Microsoft shills love their operating system, and the overall "trusting" nature of Ballmer and company.

There are a smattering of I Love Windows Vista websites out there. However, these are dwarfed into insignificance by the legions of those who are unimpressed to a greater or lesser degree.

I don't run Vista, I never intend to. I'm a happy Linux camper, and XP will be the desktop of choice at my place of employment for the foreseeable future.

But it seems that a major bugbear that people have with Microsoft's latest and greatest(?) is its bizarrely different interface.

Microsoft, who generally seems blissfully unaware of what is popular among the masses, has, since Windows 1.0, seen fit to radically rework the UI with each release.

Up until Vista, the practice was more or less tolerated by its customers. But now, the rebellion of users befuddled by the Vista experience is evidenced by downgrades to XP (and a small but growing number of Linux converts).

Microsoft, it's time to take a long, hard look at one of your hated rivals, and the way they do business.

I'll never forget the day in 1993 that I excitedly unpacked my first PC, plugged everything in, and watched with keen delight as that first DOS prompt appeared.

I was happily running MS-DOS 6.2. Somehow, that friendly CLI (on which I ran a wonderful, long-lost GUI called Geoworks) turned into the vile monster that is Vista.

What happened? Why?

The plain and simple fact is that when you run a CLI, its brand name doesn't matter nearly as much as when you begin depending on a GUI.

I remember playing around with DR-DOS and NDOS as command-line shells. They all looked and acted pretty much the same.

And Geoworks provided a graphical desktop, complete with rudimentary multitasking, as did Desqview and Windows 3.1.

But by 1995, things had changed. 32-bit operating systems became the state-of-the-art, and a prepackaged GUI was an integral part of the deal. Witness OS2/Warp and Windows 95.

While booting into a CLI was possible with Windows 95, there was no such thing as an add-on GUI that would run in 32 bit mode on top of it. So you were stuck with Microsoft's product, unless you wanted to take a walk on the wild side and give IBM's product a try.

When Hitler was in the midst of gaining world domination, he underestimated an enemy. Germany's rousing defeat at the hands of Russia during the winter of 1942-43 was the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime.

The RIAA, a fitting comparison to the fuehrer, has made major assaults on its home territory by suing everyone from prepubescent children to grandmothers who don't know how to power on computers. However, the corporate entity's future fate is sealed by going after the same enemy that whupped the Germans: Russia.

They pressured the Russian government via bribes or whatever to shut down allofmp3.com. No problem, now there are a handful of Russian sites offering the same deal, music for about a dime a song. And in case the RIAA should manage to buy enough Stoli to get them shut down, there are plenty more where they came from.

The end result is slow death for an entity that exists solely to make money off of the talent of others by charging exorbitant middleman fees. I don't know about you, but I'm certainly not shedding any tears.

What did these clueless morons do to get in this mess, anyhow?

Simple. They ignored technology, and the benefits thereof. They also ignored what their customers wanted. It doesn't matter how big you are, or how many politicians you have in your pocket, thumbing your nose at paying customers will put you out of business.

The RIAA has stubbornly stuck by their CD package for nearly 25 years. And while the price of media and digital recording technology has fallen to the point that it's practically free, record companies still try to sell CD's at the same price that they cost when introduced.

I have a sub-$100 car stereo that plays mp3's from CD's, USB drives, or camera flash drives. I can put over 30 hours of music on one drive if I wish. Standard CD's give you a bit over an hour of music, then have to be changed for more. Do you think I want to mess with the only musical format that I can buy in a store?

Another problem: consumers don't want to pay a dollar for a song.

I used to get TWO songs on a vinyl 45 for that price.

Ten cents a song is an acceptable price, and double that wouldn't chase me away. There should be plenty of room for everyone to make a nice profit with a twenty-cent song. Even middlemen.

Thirdly, DRM is universally despised by all but its corporate proponents. Windows Vista has enough built in to choke a fast dual-core processor. It's there for the benefit of the RIAA and their nearly-as-clueless cohorts, the MPAA. It benefits Joe Consumer not a whit. And it keeps fast hardware from translating into a fast operating system.

I used to hear that a lot back in the 60's and 70's. Not only would every home have a computer, but it would be doing things like controlling our appliances, lights, and security systems.

Well, some of us have managed to accomplish that scenario. But the rest of us simply have computers that are used for things like eBay and playing games while our houses continue to be run by good old humans.

But what are the ramifications of the fact that non-computer people are buying computers in droves?

Sadly, with Microsoft dominating the operating system market, it means that there are millions and millions of computers out there that are doomed to eventual takeover by malware to the degree that the Storm bot will continue to get larger and larger. Want to spam? Rent the Storm bot. It's available for hire.

It's just a shame that computers must be sold with Windows, unless you want to jump through some hoops. The thought of supporting Linux is a scary one for PC manufacturers. It shouldn't be. Sure, it's different, but once a system is up and running, keeping it going under Linux is a snap. I personally like living on the "bleeding edge" and running Ubuntu, but there are many more stable releases out there for those who aren't into upgrading so often.

What's even more sad is that Dell will sell you a PC with Ubuntu on it, but it costs more than a Windows-equipped one. Why? Because of the lack of crapware kickbacks.

A non-computer-literate (that sounds less harsh than computer-illiterate ;-) friend asked me for some advice yesterday. He told me that his virus scanner was popping up and bugging him for money to stay current. I told him I'd come over and kill it off and install AVG, which wouldn't die (although I'm not 100% sure it doesn't nag you anyway).

I regretted my promise when I sat down in front of his screen and encountered Vista, it all its glory.

Oh well, I thought, surely a simple uninstall of whatever timed-death-crapware came with his system (PC-Cillin, in this case) combined with an AVG install shouldn't be too much trouble. And for good measure, I would install Firefox, with a few of my favorite add-ons. He was excited about the automatic spellcheck feature that came with the browser, too.

So I started downloading both programs. I instructed the system to save the big AVG file, and install the smaller Firefox one. My buddy has AT&T's budget DSL, so it was taking a while.

I watched the download dialog for Firefox disappear as the file completed, and waited patiently for the install to begin. It never did.

Oh well, this is Vista, the single most despised operating system in history. What did I expect? So I tried the download again, this time indicating that I wanted to save the file. I was annoyed that the download started from scratch, ignoring the cached copy that existed somewhere.

My annoyances were only beginning...

Some of my earliest, happiest memories of computing involve the fine folks over at ZDNet. From the mega-cool PCMag utilities to the excellent informative journalism that is found in their print publications, my overall impression of this publishing house is a very favorable one.

Alas, it's not a perfect impression, though. Witness one Ed Bott.

Bott is a microsoft apologist who produces online columns for ZDNet. He was once editor of the U.S. edition of PC Computing and managing editor of PC World. So he is definitely one sharp cookie.

But his defense of all things Microsoft is puzzling, to say the least. Note this quote:

For years, Microsoft has occasionally updated its Windows Update client software automatically on systems that are configured to check for updates. This has been true even when Windows Update is set to simply check for (and optionally, download) updates but not to install them.

Unlike previous Windows Update updates, this one isn’t sneaking in under anyone’s radar. In addition to the Microsoft Update blog, this update will be documented in an updated version of Knowledge Base article 946928 (“Information for network administrators about how to obtain the latest Windows Update Agent”) and will be available for download there.

Gee, that's nice of Microsoft, isn't it? To actually TELL you before it forces an update on your system (unless you completely opt out of Windows update alltogether)? Of course, Bott's take on this is that it is necessary, polite, and overall, just peachy-keen.

I guess we're all allowed our favorite operating systems. I guess that if threats of operating system shutdowns, taking away of functionality, and possible legal prosecution if you can't prove your software is legitimate is your thing, then Microsoft is for you.

But that's not what makes me bad-crazy about Bott's style. No, it's the difficulty in responding with an opposing viewpoint at his blog that really gets my dander up.

Barry Bonds can't get a job.

A recent Sports Illustrated article outlined the steroid user's travails in that no team wants him. His agent (who would apparently deal with the devil himself) is talking about investigating the possibility of collusion.

Then, there are a few out there who would put the soon-to-be-convicted-criminal together with that most what's-wrong-with-baseball franchise, the Yankees.

Witness this article.

I hope Bonds never plays again. I hope he goes to prison for perjury. I hope his records get an asterisk, which is baseball's ultimate penalty. Just ask the family of Roger Maris, who did absolutely nothing wrong, but received one anyway.

But instead, look for the grotesquely muscled "superstar" to be wearing pinstripes soon. Look for the "faithful" fans to boo at first, then become hysterical supporters with his first tainted home run.

I use Firefox exclusively.One of Firefox's most popular extensions is AdBlock plus. AdBlock plus, by default, blocks Google ads. That means that webmasters like myself, who allow text ads on their site (including Google AdSense) are now seeing their revenue drop.

On the positive side, web surfing is faster and less cluttered by advertisements, particularly those windows which crawl across the page that I'm trying to view (my personal anti-favorite).

Firefox is growing at a rate that is probably keeping Steve Ballmer awake at night. And nobody is more pleased than I. IE's liberties in ignoring www standards made it a very bastardized web surfing experience. FF has forced MS's IE developers to add FF's popular features, and also to at least start acknowledging that there are indeed standards out there.

So, in my eyes, reduced AdSense revenue is part of the price to be paid for getting Goliath's attention, and forcing him to change his behavior.

It's just a shame that the AdBlock developers found it necessary to throw Google into the same pot as DoubleClick, Commission Junction, and the other problem children.

I guess it's just part of the overall tarnishing of the shine that Google enjoyed in the eyes of all a couple of years ago. They are now the big dog on the web, and subject to attack by those who don't like big dogs.

Personally speaking, I have never had a problem with the way Google did or does business. Take GMail, for example.

While reading the latest spam crisis report, a thought occurred to me.

This world is incredibly litigation-happy. If some yutz injures himself doing something foolish and dangerous, he's liable to hire a lawyer and go after someone, and sure enough, some bubble-headed judge will likely judge liability on some innocent bystander who didn't stop the fool from hurting himself.

Indeed, lawyer-spread liability is feared like the rat-spread plague was in Europe a few hundred years ago.

So why hasn't anyone sued Microsoft for the spam crisis?

The vast majority of spam is generated by bot nets. These networks of outside-controlled computers all have one thing in common: they take advantage of security holes in various Microsoft operating systems to profligate.

And these aren't operating systems that have been donated by the behemoth corporation out of the goodness of its heart. No, these are bundles of software which have, in many cases, been painstakingly proven to be genuine by WGA. And as many as is humanly possible have been paid for, with proceeds going to Redmond, Washington. The amount of money that Microsoft has received for its various incarnations of Windows is too staggering to comprehend.

And what does the consumer receive for his money?

A “lease” of an operating system that promises security, reliability, and availability.

This operating system is far from secure, of course. Its architectural layout guarantees that if a hacker can get in with user rights, he can make fundamental changes to the operating system and bring it under his control. Another member of the bot net is thus produced.

Microsoft offers patches to keep things secure. However, many millions of computers remain unpatched, fair game to worms that will infiltrate them and add them to the botnet.

Spam costs untold millions, or possibly billions of dollars. Who pays? Big business, governments, and individuals.

So why hasn't anyone sued Microsoft?

[rant on]

You know, nobody likes a whiner/complainer.

That's why I'm really reluctant to make postings like this, because it's basically whining/complaining on my part.

But sometimes I get good and mad and have to vent.

Where I live, there are basically two newspaper choices: a good-sized local and the larger Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

I'm a fan of the New York Times crossword, ergo I go with the latter choice.

I'm also a sports fan. I really enjoy good sportswriting.

I consider the penultimate newspaper sportswriter to be the late Bill Connors, who wrote columns for the Tulsa World for many years.

Connors supported the local teams, of course. But he did so without much homerism. Example: he frequently roasted dirty OU coach Barry Switzer, despite the fact that he always spoke highly of the team as a whole. He also lambasted Brian Bosworth, one of Switzer's proudest.

What Connors was loath to do was whine.

Bad calls? Horrible officiating? Cheating? Sure, fans of the Sooners, the Cowboys, and the Golden Hurricane would speculate such after losses, but not Connors.

Bill believed in a team's being able to overcome outside adversity and win despite strange circumstances.

When BYU won a national championship in 1984 after a victory in the Holiday Bowl over 6-5 Michigan, the complaining was long and loud from sportswriters all over the country. But I recall Connors being philosophical about it, pointing out that all that OU (or USC, who defeated OU in the Orange Bowl) needed to do was WIN EVERY GAME, and the national championship debate wouldn't be a debate at all.

Bill, when I read Wally "Bad Call" Hall's rants at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, I miss you. A lot.

Hall has managed to become the head of the sports department at the newspaper.

(deep sigh)

• I was a baseball fanatic when I was nine years old. And lately, my forty-year-old love for the St. Louis Cardinals has outweighed my contempt for the rest of the sport, although I must confess to actually watching my first non-Cardinal World Series in ten years with the unlikely success of the Tampa Bay Rays. But I wouldn't be caught dead watching a Yankees/Red Sox game, or any regular-season non-Cardinal game, for that matter.

  Baseball has ZERO salary caps. That means that unbelievably rich owners like Hank Steinbrenner can run roughshod over everyone else, signing greedy free agents willing to sell their souls to leave their small-market fanbases to go play for Satan's Team.

  This year, enraged by the fact that the low-budget Rays won the AL East (the only division in baseball that matters, according to ESPN), Steinbrenner has turned loose of nearly a half-BILLION dollars to sign C.C. Sabbathia (up yours, Brewers fans), A.J. Burnett, and Mark Texeira.

  Fans of baseball, the sport, does that make you want to puke?

  The only reason I'll be paying even the slightest bit of attention to baseball news this year at all is because what you pay for is what you get.

  A team full of high-salaried "superstars" that no other teams could afford?

  It would take a Joe Torre to effectively coach that gargantuan mass of ego and turn it into a team.

  And Steinbrenner has run Joe Torre off. :-D



• I paid a little attention to the NBA when I was about twelve years old. More recently, Michael Jordan's Bulls also piqued my interest.

  But in 1997, some idiot (don't want to give him any credit by naming him) choked his coach. In fact, his teammates had to pull him off of the man. What did the NBA do about it?

  A ten-day suspension.

  If trying to kill your coach doesn't count as a lifetime ban, what does?

  Well, at least he didn't bet on his team.
  

• Another idiot, one that San Francisco Giants fans loved, but hardly anyone else (and now, even Giants fans don't love him), didn't play baseball last year.

  Why? Was he banned because of horribly tainting the sport by bulking up to the size of an NFL lineman by taking steroids?

  Nope. The sports owners (even Steinbrenner) showed some brains and, dare I say it, a little class, by ignoring his free agency.

  Of course, baseball, the business, has no problem with him. His home run records stand.

• China has been flaunting the rules in Olympic-type sports since the Russian Empire crumbled. But nobody does anything about it.

  After all, we don't want to do anything to offend the world's suppliers of cheap crap that is sold at Wal-Mart, now do we?

Joomla looked like the perfect contact management system for me.

Back in 2006, I created a bonzer site for a Realtor based on Mamboserver. Its backend interface was weird beyond belief, but I was impressed with what I was able to accomplish, creating a simple property search as well as a more sophisticated one that was accessible to site members.

Recently losing a nice paying gig caused me to investigate building a general-interest site with either Mambo and Joomla. I decided to go with Joomla this go-around.

I was able to get a site up and running in short order. But after that, things began inexplicably breaking every time I would attempt to add features.

Worse yet, stuff that worked fine broke on its own in the course of a few days.

I still believe that Joomla is a wonderful product. I just feel like it's not friendly for old-time hands-on php developers like myself.

So, I'll soon be deleting the content that I have at zuptoday.com and putting the domain itself on ice until i can come up with another idea for it.

Dreamweaver, we hardly knew ye.

Yes, you can still purchase a copy of Dreamweaver, currently the appropriately named version CS4, from its new owners, Adobe.

But for all practical purposes, the web development package is dead.

Macromedia's web editors and I go back a long way. I reviewed Macromedia Studio for WorldVillage way back about 1995. I was impressed with its wysiwyg editor. The suite itself was designed to run as a backend on a Windows server, providing many built-in extras for websites. I have always hosted my sites on UNIX/Linux, so I never tried any of them.

When Dreamweaver 2 came out in 1998, I jumped at the chance to review it. It was everything that the Studio Designer was and more. I next got my hands on version 4, MX, MX 2004, and finally Version 8, which was released in 2005.

That year, Adobe bought Macromedia. At the time, I thought that it could have been worse. There had been rumblings for years that Microsoft had its eyes on the Dreamweaver product. We call know what a raging success Front Page has been since Redmond acquired it.

But remember, Adobe consists of the developers who have taken a basic pdf-reading program and turned it into a monstrosity that is now a 20 meg download in its most basic form, which expands to at least twice that size on your hard drive.

For a pdf reader!

Thus, I had low expectations for the "new" Dreamweaver. And I must say that I was not a bit disappointed.

Problem: Flash sucks.

Microsoft solution: create a proprietary standard that doesn't suck quite as much.

It will work great on XP and Vista. Oh, and Mac has made some serious inroads on our desktop, we'd better make it play nice for its users as well.

There. That takes care of everyone.

As an Ubuntu user, I have grown used to making my web browser and my OS of choice jump through a few hoops in order to access content that was never intended for me. It's part of the price you pay to remain Microsoft-free. One day, Microsoft-free will be irrelevant, sort of like NDOS-free.

Anyhow, while I was disappointed to be unable to watch Winter Olympic videos through my native browser, I figured that by now all would be well. After all, check out this glowing MS blogger report:

Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Silverlight Moonlight 1.0 ships today

Novell has released version 1.0 of Moonlight for Linux. http://go-mono.com/moonlight/. Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems. Congrats on the release and look forward to the comments.

Hooray! I can watch Silverlight videos at last! And just in time for the NCAA Basketball Tournament!

Yes, another corporate entity has drunk the Kool-Aid and gone with MS's proprietary format to provide live internet videos.

Oh well, as I mentioned before, all is well now. Microsoft has chosen to support "Unix." Let's watch some videos!

Only...

McDonald's is #1 in the fast food industry.

They dominate, but not overwhelmingly so. Burger King made inroads several years back to knock the golden arches off of their perch at #1. During this time, they attacked McDonald's by name in their advertising.

McDonald's never, ever mentioned Burger King or any other competitor in their ads. Despite stupid hot coffee lawsuits, changing perception of good taste vs. good diet, and relentless advertising by their rivals, McDonald's simply continued to advertise their product on its merits alone, without referring to its competition.

I'm not a big fan of McDonald's, although I will treat myself to a high-fat, high-calorie helping of the most delicious french fries on the planet. But I only eat them occasionally.

The point that I'm making is that you don't mention the competition in your advertising unless (a) you're feeling like you can dethrone #1, or (b) you are #1, but a sinking ship.

The strategy sometimes works in the former case. It has for Apple, in their Mac vs. PC commercials. It NEVER works in the latter.

With that, if you've been watching the NCAA Basketball Tournament on TV, you've likely spotted the commercial where the redheaded ditz comes to the conclusion that buying a laptop computer with Windows Vista on it is a much, much better deal than purchasing a MacBook.

The Microsoft ship has begun to list.

I just noticed that my Windows virtual machine is off by an hour.

No problem. I'll just download the KB931836 patch and fix it.

So, I begin by visiting the Windows Update site via IE. I get scanned, the site suggests I use express install to get up to date.

No thanks.

I'm running service pack 2 on XP Pro. It's a legal copy. It would blast through WGA authentication.

Except...

I refuse.

I think WGA is the single most contemptible way to treat customers that has ever been devised.

On Seinfeld, customers risk the wrath of the soup Nazi because his product is perfect.

Why would Windows users accept the same treatment for a product that is so fundamentally flawed?

My I Remember JFK site has lots of small graphical images on it which many folks love linking to to display on their own sites.

The problem is that what they are doing is costing me bandwidth.

I have a stated policy on the site that individuals can copy a graphic and use it on their site as long as they give irememberjfk.com credit.

But unfortunately, many choose instead to simply link directly to the image.

The powerful .htaccess file will put a stop to it. I'm listing mine here, for the benefit of any others who might have the same problem. Read on.

In 2007, The Consumerist held a poll and determined that the RIAA was the single most hated company in America.

Gee, sue a few grandmothers and grade-school-age kids, and all of a sudden the world gets all testy about you.

The RIAA survives today largely through litigation. Many musical artists have expressed their disdain of the recording industry in general, and of the RIAA in particular.

The basis for most of the legal shenanigans perpetrated by the massive corporate entitiy which makes lots of money from the talents of others is this: Anything we produce is copyrighted. Any usage of anything we produce which is not expressly approved by us is illegal, and will be prosecuted.

Let's back up a minute. A musician, as well as a company which owns the rights to a musician's work, all make money through sales.

What is a large factor that drives sales? Buzz.

Where does buzz come from? Word of mouth.

What drives word of mouth? People getting their hands on stuff.

Update: HSBC claims that I didn't request my credit balance to be mailed to me on 6/24/2009, the day I closed this account. In other words, they claim that I closed my account and, in essence, told them to keep the money. It will now take up to 21 days. During this time, they deducted 19 dollars from my balance for what they claim is accrued interest. The saga goes on, and if you are doing business with these people, I strongly suggest you consider dropping them and giving someone your trade who knows how to treat customers.

I've been too busy posting lots of fossil pics over at my new site, What Is This Fossil?, to spend much time updating this blog.

So, it's time for a nice gripe-fest.

Why have so many companies forgotten what customer service is? Why do they tie their employees' hands so that they can't help their customers even if they want to?

Specifically, I'm talking about HSBC bank, their credit card program in particular.

We lost about 1500 bucks in monthly income last year, and it made things financially dicey. I did a refi on my house to stop the bleeding, and we're back on track now, I'm happy to say.

But there was a time in January when I made an online payment to HSBC, and unfortunately, the direct payment from my bank account bounced. They had to run it through a second time.

Jump ahead six months. The refi is closed, a cashier's check is mailed to HSBC. I log into their site and track its progress. Finally, credit is given. However, my card is unable to be used.

So, I call the 800 number and finally get a rep online. It's some dude from way overseas who obviously has no decision-making power, so I ask for his boss.

She gets on and explains that they have a"policy" of waiting five business days after posting payment in the case of someone who has had a payment returned.

I respect that, I said, but reminded her that payment was made in the form of a cashier's check.

Darn it to heck, she wished there was something she could do, but it's policy. She can't change it.

"Look" I said. One of two things is going to happen here. Either you're going to lift this hold, so that I can begin using this card for my corporation, or else this account will be canceled on the spot.

One minute later, HSBC and I had parted ways.

Bad move. I'll be making lots of purchases for my little corporation in my newborn favorable financial situation, and paying the card off monthly. Now, that privileged arrangement belongs to Capital One.

Oh well. At least HSBC can take comfort in the fact that their policies are apparently un-overrideable.

At my workplace, I've managed to integrate Linux and Active Directory so that I can use AD groups to control access to intranet sites. That was quite a breakthrough, allowing me to move my MySQL/PHP-driven apps onto Linux, where they feel most at home.

I'm going to be learning asp and asp.net web development, so I built a Server 2008 machine this week where all of my new development will be living.

I've managed 2000 and 2003 Server installs, so I know how things work. But let me say this: If you think Vista was an abortion, it's NOTHING compared to the piece of crap that is Windows 2008 Server.

Basically, an admin is treated like an idiot. Things like managing services now involve at least two more mouse-clicks. I'm behind a strong firewall, I don't need Windows Firewall. But guess what? You CAN'T turn on Terminal Services unless Windows Firewall is running!

Here's what it amounts to: our OS is so inherently unsecure that we are going to forbid you to make a connection to it unless our firewall is on. What rubbish.

Well, at presstime, another woman has accused Michael Irvin of rape.

Irvin has the following incidents on his record:

• March 1996: cocaine possession at a hotel party celebrating his 30th birthday. Irvin showing up to court in a full-length mink coat. He pled no contest to the charges and was sentenced to community service, ordered to pay a $10,000 fine, and put on 4-years probation. My favorite part of the whole disgusting mess: Irvin asking an arresting cop "Do you know who I am?"


• 1998: Irvin allegedly inflicted a two-inch cut in the neck of Dallas guard Everett McIver. McIver did not press charges, and rumors swirled that Irvin brokered a six-figure settlement with McIver to drop the matter. Accounts of this incident after the alleged settlement became difficult to find or research in the local Dallas press.
  


• 2000: Irvin was arrested on drug possession charges.In this case, Irvin was in a Dallas apartment with an unrelated woman. Police entered the apartment forcibly and found drugs. Irvin and the female were placed under arrest, though charges against Irvin were later dropped.

Are those who bypass the RIAA-affiliated record companies cold-hearted thieves? Well, obviously, the RIAA would like you to think so. And they're willing to sue as many grandmothers or eight-year-old little girls as it takes to convince you of that.

I'm setting a precedent for this piece: The RIAA needs to go away. If you don't agree, you might as well stop and find something else to read.

With that said, I really don't think that everyone who downloads music in whatever fashion that bypasses the record companies refuses to consider the idea of giving credit where credit is due. I believe that if artists made it easy for fans to donate to them, the money would roll in, probably more than would ever be received from their record companies.

This is a business arrangement I'm talking about here, not a charity movement. The Rolling Stones are rich beyond imagination, that doesn't mean that fans of, say, 5x12 wouldn't be willing to toss a few bucks or Euros their way because of the enjoyment that the venerable work continues to provide.

The problem is that there is no way to do that, short of mailing a check made out to Mick Jagger to what you hope is his home address. Their record company would never allow it. And the RIAA, of which their record company is an affiliate, would never, ever, EVER allow it.

Fans, it's time to change the business model.

In 2008, I made a modest amount of money working for my employer. Well above the average mean income for my area, as befits my IT skills, but still quite modest when compared with other white-collar jobs.

I make some money on the side via my websites, and it's reported to the IRS.

In addition, my wife makes some money in her endeavors, again, reported.

I'm in the process of paying off a $4,000 tax debt.

That's why I get hacked off when I read about the state of Washington, and its collectively planting its figurative lips all over Microsoft's collective Ballmer, excuse me, posterior.

Read the depressing details here, if you dare.

Basically, M$ is getting unconditional amnesty from the financially strapped state of Washington for past tax evasion. We're talking OVER A BILLION DOLLARS.

Corporate crooks have long existed in American business. Meet the most prominent one today.

The calculatedness of Tiger Woods is amazing.

He knows just how many tournaments to play in in order to maximize his effectiveness for the majors.

He also know what tournaments require his presence, for contractual reasons or for maximum public relations.

He wouldn't DREAM of missing Nicklaus's Memorial, or Palmer's Bay Hill Classic. That would cost him the support of the game's biggest names (next to his own, of course).

And he knows how to make a return to professional golf from a scandalized absence.

He debuts in the Masters.

The Masters is the world's most uptight, rigid, protocol-ruled tournament. Gary McCord continues to be banned from broadcasting it because of that bikini wax remark about the greens. That was back in 1995! Fifteen years and counting for making a remark that the Powers-That-Be deemed inappropriate.

The fans know they are under watch, too. Booing, jeering, and basically doing anything but politely applauding can result in losing tickets that took many, many years to obtain.

Ergo, Mr. Woods chooses the hallowed halls of Augusta to make his return. No chance of anything but polite appreciation there. No signs, no banners, no "Tiger slept with me" t-shirts. Just the adoring praise of the announcers, the fans, er, PATRONS, sorry, Hootie, and the chance to spend a quiet week getting back into golf.

Once it's over, look for an extended break. The next tournament will be equally chosen in a calculated manner.

DISCLAIMER: I've been a Tiger fan since he destroyed the amateur golf world. The folks at The Masters have earned the right to be buttheads about their tournament. It truly is the greatest in professional golf. The four minutes of commercials per hour is wonderful. However, I'm not a fan of spin doctoring. And Tiger Woods is about to demonstrate the most coolly calculated painless return to public life that you've ever seen.

Are you like me? Taxed to death? Yet, pay taxes we do, because it's the law.

Ya know, if we all had billions of dollars to spend on lawyers and lobbyists, maybe we wouldn't be in that boat: Click here for more.

Hey, Washington residents! The next time your local taxes are raised because of deficits, why not give Steve Ballmer a holler and thank him personally? :-)

Gadfly: pest: a persistently annoying person.

We're all annoying, we can't help it. Imperfect humans will always sometimes rub each other the wrong way.

And let's face it, sometimes we CHOOSE to be annoying. It can even be fun.

With that in mind, I must try to show more patience to annoying gadflies (whoops, that's redundant, isn't it?) who hang around blogs of certain technologies and bash the technologies in question.

I guess I don't understand the mentality of the blog gadfly.

Example: I think the New York Yankees are Satan incarnate. The team has wealth beyond imagination, and an impotent management structure over major league baseball refuses to consider a salary cap. Ergo, small-market teams raise talent in their farm systems and watch helplessly as they eventually sell their souls to Hank Steinbrenner and begin wearing pinstripes.

That being said, what I don't do is hang around Yankee discussion boards and annoy their fans.

I've foolishly relied on "security through obscurity" for my various AWStats reports. I have also had lots of referrals to my sites from sites which have nary a link on them pointing my way.

Duh.

I was being used by these scumsuckers to provide bogus links THEIR way, thanks to my unsecured aws folders, in which dwelt my traffic reports. Presumably, these "links" would enhance their status with the search engines.

It was fixed with putting password protection in place via .htaccess.

If you have wide-open web tracking reports, and are seeing crap sites as major referrers, you're being used.

Implement password protection ASAP.

I was at Barnes and Noble last night, looking for a good science fiction book. I'm sort of stuck in the past, SF-wise, I like the works of the masters: Pohl, Clarke, Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Lem, Asimov, etc.

I was distressed to find no books at all by Anderson or Lem. The selections of the others were quite limited.

On the other hand, there was a plethora of the later Dune books by Herbert (and/or son). There were also a ton of books by new authors with whom I'm not familiar.

I realize that time goes on, and new faces take the place of the old, but I'm disappointed that two writers of the stature of Anderson and Lem would be completely left off the shelves at a book store.

It doesn't seem like good business. The science fiction section should be well-stocked by the books of the authors who put it on the map in the first place.

College football has sadly become quite boring and predictable. Let me give you the rundown on how this season will go:

The (insert SEC team here) will have their adoring local sportswriters announce that the (insert fractional Louisiana team here) are a much tougher opponent than they appear to be and they won't take anything for granted. The next day, when they have won by a score of 63-0, the victorious coach will praise the vanquished team for playing with a lot of heart. The adoring sportswriters will state that the reason they play fractional Louisiana schools in non-conference games is because the SEC is the Toughest Conference in the Universe.

During each halftime break, ESPN announcers will mention Tim Tebow at least five times. There will also be heated discussions as to which SEC team will eventually win the National Championship, and despair will be expressed that it is practically impossible for TWO SEC teams to square off in the Big Match, even though the Top Twenty teams in the nation are all from the SEC.

After the season is over, if a non-SEC player somehow wins the Heisman Trophy, there will be loud outrage expressed by the adoring local sportswriters about the unfairness of such goings-on. Claims of cheating, blanks ballots, and hanging chads will be angrily emitted.