According to this report, the Cardinals might have signed Roberto Alomar to play second base for the Cardinals next year. Interesting. He’s a switch-hitter, and a classy fellow. That gives this lineup:

P: Mulder/Carpenter/Morris/Marquis/Suppan

C: Yadier Molina

1B: Albert Pujols

2B: Roberto Alomar

3B: Scott Rolen

SS: David Eckstein

LF: Reggie Sanders

CF: Jim Edmonds

RF: Larry Walker

That’ll sound good coming over the loudspeakers at Busch. I’m not very familiar with Alomar, but I thought Cora would have been a good fit. We need a decent arm in the middle infield. If Alomar provides the needed pop at 4 in the 6-4-3 play, it’s a good move. And the price is right: $500,000 for the year. That leaves us with some flexibility to pick up another right-hander in the ‘pen.

Update 10:19am — The chatter in the Cards Talk forum indicates that most fans consider this an insurance move. And a whole lot of them are enraged that Alomar could become a Cardinal due to some spitting incident. This page gives a very unflattering biography. I buy the insurance move theory. It appears that Jocketty is playing chicken with Cora, trying to wait it out while his value drops with the cooling free agency market. Signing Alomar gives us a competent backup to increase our bargaining postion, although frankly, Hector Luna’s ball handling skills saw enormous improvement last season under Jose Oquendo’s tutelage, and he represents similarly legitimate option at second. I’d like to see Cora sign for cheap enough to allow Walt to pick up another right handed reliever. Or else maybe Jimmy Journell (former Illini) might be ready to try his hand in the bullpen again.

Update 12:09pm — The original report is here, down at the bottom.

One of my favorite actors died today, Jerry Orbach. I’ve seen practically every episode of Law and Order. The spinoff shows are weak without him, and I stopped watching the primary show once Orbach left.

Few people know that he did the voice of Lumiere, the candelabra in Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast. He was a gifted and versatile actor.

This bad news was broken to me by Peoria Pundit.

Mark Tupper, one of the sports columnists for the Decatur Herald and Review newspaper, has his own blog, in which he dishes out some solid insights on the Fighting Illini men’s basketball program and other local sports stories of interest.

If only the News-Gazette had a similarly sensible website. Newspaper and radio are practically useless these days without a dependable internet presence. The News-Gazette and Newstalk WDWS (the radio station I listen to several hours a day) share the same utterly useless webspace. I’d love to see a Dave Loane/Lorne Tate group blog. It’s unthinkable, considering how easy it is to maintain a website–and in a town with as much skilled labor as Champaign-Urbana. There practically isn’t a waitress or bartender in town without a master’s degree.

Anyways, I think one of my projects for vacation will be to retool my sidebar and the overall look of this website. There will be a section devoted to College Basketball links, and Tupper’s will definitely live there. Also a section for the Cardinals sites I read. I try to maintain a sidebar that acts like my own portable bookmarks list, and lately I’ve noticed that I’m typing in a whole lot of URLs. Barbaric.

Hat tip for the Mark Tupper link goes to Illini Girl.

It’s fairly long, but a beautiful and inspiring Christmas story by Orson Scott Card:

Homeless in Hell

Link courtesy of Mean Mr. Mustard.

Electronic Gaming Monthly has the second installment of their hiliarious “Child’s Play” feature out. In it, they get some kids to play the old video games that we used to play and comment on what they think of it. Naturally, it’s hilarious. The last page includes “Street Fighter II,” the absolute best game out when I was thirteen or so. So I start you there, but there are five pages–navigable from the bottom of the page, and I recommend them all.

It’s fashionable to speak truth to power and fight to bring down the corporations that rule us. As men discovered when we developed the two-button suit and saw that it was good enough, new fashions are complete bullshit.

In truth, big corporations are great and make our lives better. Case in point: I bought myself a fantastic laptop computer a few months ago. But I’m a poor man and can’t afford to shell out sixteen hundred bucks to get one. Best Buy is a big enough corporation that they own their own financing department, and so they loaned me the money I needed to buy a new laptop. And since their primary business is in retail and not in financing, they loaned me the money at no cost to me, provided I pay it all back within 18 months. So instead of having to shell out $1600 all at once, which I couldn’t afford, I shell out $100 a month for a little over a year, which I can afford. A small business couldn’t do that for me. A few weeks ago, the keyboard on this computer went on the fritz, and I had to use the ‘character map’ to input the 5, 6, -, and \ characters. Today, I took it back in and a bright and helpful fellow swapped my HDD with about 20 gigs of necessary data into a brand new version of the computer, gave it to me for free and repackaged my fritzy old shell of a ‘puter back to Hewlett-Packard, a Big Corporation. HP might not have been able to eat those sorts of costs if they weren’t a Big Corporation (although they’ll no doubt set it in a pile for cannibilization and resell it ‘refurbished,’ at a price someone who can’t afford one from Best Buy and doesn’t qualify for their financing offer. See, Big Corporations are GREAT!!!

Not that small businesses don’t have a role in the economy. Big Corporations are great at providing known, established goods and services, and fairly crappy at developing new things to sell. (Take the music industry as an example) Small businesses are nimble, flexible, and built for risk. Small businesses are typically run by a group of people who have an idea that they want to develop and make money off of, and are highly motivated to bring their idea ot the marketplace. Small business owners are willing to work 18 hour days or more, and are willing to keep losing money in the hopes that once they get their idea off the ground, there’s no limit to how high it’ll fly and how much money it’ll make them. And at the end of the day, when their idea takes off, they should either become a big corporation or be bought up by one. This is how the world should work, and to an extent how it does.

Rule one is to never be unemployed. Working in a Big Corporation isn’t glamorous or terribly exciting, but your check will come in on time. Save up your money and keep your imagination working. One day you’ll curse a piece of software you use or see someone doing something that would be a lot easier for them to do if they had some sort of whatchimacallit not available in the marketplace. Boom! There’s your idea. Then you go out there, become an entrepreneur, get some friends in on it, put in the long hours, and bring your idea to fruition. Become a small business owner and make a boatload of cash. Hire who you want, outsource your billing to PayPal, and build, baby! And get big, or sell out. Set yourself up to do it all over again. Just never be unemployed. You’re not that special.

As you can tell, the lines at Best Buy were fairly long, and I’m still in the saving money and imagining phase of life.

Jan England Egeland needs a good kick to the groin. Dontcha just love Scandinavian socialists who view taxation as charitable giving? Ones who see a natural disaster as a great opportunity to argue for higher levels of taxation? At least this sort of opportunism hasn’t gotten this bad. Yet.

A fellow named Bob Herbert desperately needed a good kick to the testicles, but was dealt an equally sharp and pointed fisking by Jason Van Steenwyk instead. It’s truly a thing of beauty, a joy to behold.

Update: Yeah! Step back! Can ya hear me!

I should note, that as the death toll rises over 60,000–many of the dead small children–my point in desiring Egeland’s genitals thwomped was not that I consider the current level of aid heading to the Bay of Bengal adequate. The point was that the UN is a hopelessly inept organization at handling these things because of people like Egeland. Instead of making lame remarks about how much he hates the United States and our levels of taxation relative to Scandinavia; he ought to be working hard to put together an efficient, uncorrupted, productive plan for delivering the aid to those suffering in the Bay of Bengal. Unfortunately, the UN won’t do that, and most of the money that passes through UN palms will end up in UN pockets. NGOs will do a better job and the job will be taken care of.

A few days ago, in Thar Be Whales Here, I promised that I’d mess with the audio for the mystery monster sound. They say that they sped it up 16 times, but I suspect they did something a bit more sophisticated than that. The description says “[t]he sound rises rapidly in frequency over about one minute,” but the rapid increase in frequency, when slowed down by sixteen times, doesn’t add up to a minute, or anywhere close. The ambient water sounds also strike me as near real speed. They don’t say that they sped it up BY 16 times of course, and it’s possible that they meant they did some speed up procedure sixteen different times, with different parameters.

Who the hell knows?

So anyways, I pulled out as much ambient noise as I could without losing (what I perceive to be) the target signal that we want, in two passes with Bias Inc’s outstanding Sound Soap software. The result is this sound:

(You’ll need decent speakers for these to sound like much of anything.)

Just Bloop

The rest of the DSP was done with Bias Inc’s Peak software. Slowing it down sixteen times (by increasing the duration by 16 times) produces this sound:

Slow Bloop

Taking the original cleaned-up sound file and lowering the pitch by 16 times produces:

Bloop Re-Pitched

Why didn’t slowing it down and changing the pitch produce the same sound? I haven’t a clue! My guess would be that the increase duration is using PSOLA type expansion, and the change pitch is doing dynamic time warping–or the other way around–but I’d have to get a technical manual for Peak to find out for sure. It’s clear that the duration changing DSP function is trying to maintain the frequency of the source. I probably just had some setting wrong.

In any case, if you know any kids with those stupid car stereos that pop loose the body putty, try playing that re-pitched sound in their stereo. It’ll blow your mind!

Jeff Ooi, who was one of the stars of the blogging session at the Harvard conference a few weeks ago, is your man for news and updates on the horrific tsunami that hit the bay of Bengal yesterday, wreaking havoc from Indonesia to Somalia. It was caused by a 9.0 (Richter) earthquake off the northern tip of Sumatra.

Long after CNN goes back to covering Britney’s pregnancy and downplaying the good job our country is doing abroad in difficult work, Jeff Ooi and other bloggers will still be covering the reconstruction efforts.

Update: A group of East Asian bloggers built a clearinghouse for news and donation information.

Apologies to Thomas Sowell for stealing (and not doing justice to) a theme of his.

Christmas dinner went well. We ate a monstrous ham, or a small portion of it at least. While we were sitting at the dinner table, I had a seat facing towards the back door and noticed that snow had started to fall. “Holy Smokes,” said I, “we’ve got a white christmas after all.” And we did. About an inch of loose powdery snow fell. I played out in the yard with Gordon for a little bit. He’s a sled dog, his breed loves the snow. I taught him to run fast across the patio and then stop quick on the plywood wheelchair ramp and slide a few feet in the snow. He seemed to like that. I’m not bred for snow, so his playing lasted longer than mine. But I’d see him slide by the door every once in a while. Another fine Christmas memory.

The Mudville Gazette (HT Hugh Hewitt) has a roundup of posts by military bloggers who were at the base in Mosul that was attacked by a suicide bomber two days before Christmas. At first the story in the news was that a mortar or rocket had hit the mess tent. The terrorists had been firing poorly aimed mortars into military bases for well over a year, and this would have been the first serious damage inflicted by that tactic. But no–their aim is still bad and they’ve resorted to the lowest trick in their evil playbook. The stories in that MG roundup are absolutely required reading. As Greyhawk points out, the MSM doesn’t want to get the story out–their purpose is in tallying the dead and filling in their paint-by-numbers Hieronymous Bosch-esque doomsday scene in Iraq.

There appear to be three people working in the building today. It’s pretty creepy. Even the server guys, who’re here in one form or another seven days a week, are not to be found. If I wasn’t in a mood to finish up my work and go home to finish “The Years of Rice and Salt” (which I’m enjoying greatly), I’d get together a game of office tag. I’m archiving old video off the server and a local HDD onto DVD-ROM. 4.7 gigs fills up a whole lot faster than you’d think. I’m burning the sixth disk, making doubles, and haven’t even gotten through a year’s worth of video. And that’s just from one department (albeit the biggest client department.)

Still no second baseman for the Cards, but the idea of signing Mark Gruedzielanek is quite tempting. Looking up his stats on MLB.com, I came up with a plan to automatically build a pronunciation dictionary of player names by spidering the MLB.com website and scan for something like: \(([A-Za-z]+-)*[A-Za-z]+\) (I haven’t tested that yet, but it’s supposed to be a regular expression for a series of letters separated by dashes and enclosed in parentheses.) I could use that in a SUB tag in the SABLE representations that my boxscore reader uses to script boxscore summaries. One of the problems that I didn’t tackle, but is easily tractable, is to build a function from player-names to player-name-pronunciations. That way, the synthesizer would know how to pronounce something like “M. Grudzielanek.” Some professional announcers don’t.

I might have been unnecessarily harsh on ESPN.com the other day. They still have Peter Gammons. This column of his is a beaut. He’s a really big fan of Billy Beane. I can’t wait to start reading Moneyball. It’s on the shelf at the local library, so my plan is to finish TYoRaS today and trade it in for Lewis’ book.

The age of this column makes it look even worse, but I believe it might be the stupidest bit of nonsense yet to hit the ESPN.com pages. Just lazy dreck.

I celebrated Christmas this year with my girlfriend, the first time in my life without my family. It’s gone very well. We ate Alaskan King Crabs in a very fine meal (I believe my sister-in-law eats these tasty beasts for Christmas as well). At 1am, we tossed a very large fresh ham into the oven for the Christmas proper meal. Injected it with juices from pineapple, orange, and cherry, with some powderized mustard seed as well. I expect it to be super tasty.

One of my Christmas presents was “Call of Duty: Finest Hour,” a brand-spankin’ new WWII simulation. So far it looks like a really impressive game. Lots of weapons to choose from, and it’s very difficult to survive missions. In what I’ve played of it, I didn’t get any of those “Medal of Honor” moments where you capture a machine-gun nest and mow down waves of Nazis… Mostly it’s just following the sergeant around as close as I can (so he doesn’t shoot me, you start the game off as a Russian conscript… and unarmed) and popping Nazis with the crappy weapons that I pick up off of dead Germans.

I have two books to read over break: “The Years of Rice and Salt” and “Blind Man’s Bluff.” I also intend to read the “Tao of Jeet Kune Do” and the book that introduced the Sabremetrics evalutions of baseball performance, I believe it’s called “Moneyball.” I’ve read about half of “The Years of Rice and Salt” today, much to the consternation of my better half. It’s a book by Kim Stanley Robinson, who’s Mars Trilogy I’ve mentioned many times on this website. I’ve gotten to the point in the book where I can confirm that it is a work of great genius. Let me tell you something about Robinson, purely speculative, naturally: He read Foundation and decided that it’s great to write a story that spans many, many lifetimes; but bad to have to introduce new characters all the time. The Mars Trilogy dealt with this problem by inventing anti-aging therapies, so that the characters would live for the hundreds of years the story would take to tell. It was a brilliant technique he used to end the story: biology outran psychology, and the main characters died off because their friends did. The Mars Trilogy is fairly hard to get into, and I’d say this book is even more difficult, especially when it becomes clear how Robinson plans to get around the whole Same Character/Big Story problem. His main characters are reincarnated over and over again, playing roles in the history of a world without Europe, which was completely wiped out by the Bubonic plague.

It’s a fantastic story. Right now, I’m at the part where calculus is needed to be discovered. It’s a beautiful thing to see Robinson reinvent the necessity for things like this, and to come up with this alternative universe where they would be invented.

If you can get past the first few chapters of Red Mars, you’ll definitely appreciate this book.

The Cardinals signed David Eckstein today to a three year, 10.25 million dollar contract. The Cardinals now have a starting shortstop and a leadoff hitter. We still need a second baseman.

My brother called up to tell me. He thinks Alex Cora will be signed for 2B in the next few days. I happen to agree.

My girlfriend’s sister was pictured on the front page of the local newspaper yesterday, and neither of us subscribe to the paper. This means that I had an excellent excuse to go out drinkin’ at my favorite watering hole until closing time last night. The bars would just throw away the newspaper, so I can just take the copy.

So that’s what I did. Also read through the USA Today and ran across this hilarious article in the Money section. It deals with Ford’s new “urban street” model of the Ranger pickup truck. The best reporting in newspapers, and definitely on television news, is in the financial section, since that’s the only place left where the reporters are assigned an actual “beat” to master. Everywhere else all journalists my be presumed equally incompetent. In the business pages, if you make a stupid mistake or reveal wishful-thinking bias, ALL of the readers will notice and complain. The business page reporting tends not to be tainted with BS, in other words.

Here’s a few choice excerpts to show why I enjoyed this hilarious, yet BS-free article on Ford’s new pickup trucks:

“I think there’s a market for these things,” says Bobby Jones at urban-marketing consultant AMPdi, but not in big numbers and maybe not among the hip-hop hardcore that’s the target. Jones sees the trucks appealing to suburbanites who want to wear the urban, hip-hop image but don’t live the gritty city life.

The urban designation means the truck is more accessory than tool, valued for its looks rather than for what it will carry or crawl over. None of the urban pickups has four-wheel drive.

The urban-market trucks feature spoilers, different lights and grilles and other cosmetic items to distinguish them from mainstream models.

That’s just funny stuff.

Tonight is the 24th annual Braggin’ Rights game between the University of Illinois and of Missouri’s men’s basketball teams. The Fighting Illini have won the last four years, and this year enter the game ranked no. 1 in both polls and with a 17 point spread out of Vegas. It goes without saying that I am a very big fan of this year’s team. I like Bruce Weber’s “motion” offense very much, which is averaging 22 assists per game. The motion offense is sort of like an application of Jeet Kune Do (mentioned by me here) to basketball. Motion doesn’t have any fixed plays; its success is entirely dependent on the selflessness and athleticism of the players, and their ability to read and react to defenses. This year’s team is perfectly composed to work the motion offense, and it’s truly beautiful to watch in action. Tonight at 7:00 CT, on ESPN. I’ll be watching it at the Esquire.

A fascinating post on hybrids between two different animal species having hybridized calls between the instinctive mating calls of the two parent species starts off by talking about this article on a mysterious whale that’s been tracked in the Pacific for the past four years.

Submarines have always interested me. Sailors patrolling the deep back in the cold war used to hear all sorts of crazy shit on the sonar, and the navy installed a bank of deep sea listening equipment to listen in on the movements of the Soviet submarine navy. Apparently the listening system has been (at least partially) demilitarized, because the NOAA is doing research with it now and publishing discoveries on the web. Here’s a few links: the possible hybrid whale, an index of different kinds of sounds, and a CNN article about an unknown beast of the deep. The listening system repeatedly recorded a sound during the summer of 1997 that would have to be made by a creature larger than a blue whale, if it is an animal sound. Here’s a link to one such recording. When I get back to my office, I’m gonna tweak those audio files a bit with my phonetics software and let my imagination run wild. This stuff really excites me.

And I think I’ll pick up a copy of “Blind Man’s Bluff” for my holiday pleasure reading.

Skipping around some weblogs run by Cardinals fans, the reaction to the Mulder for Haren/Calero/Barton trade is universally this: where the hell did that come from?!?! Here’s a roundup:

Bellyscratcher at Belly Itcher says, “This came out of nowhere.” He thinks Calero will be the most missed of the three headed to Oaktown, and wonders whether Lincoln or Reyes will be able to fill his role as a dependable setup man. If Lincoln returns to his pre-injury form of early last season, he most certainly will. And if La Russa doesn’t overwork him again.

Scott Humphries at All in the Cards managed to score a telephone interview with Mulder. He’s gonna miss playing with the A’s, but is excited about coming to St. Louis. He prognosticates that the Cards have a very good chance at defending their pennant. Nice work, Scott.

Robb at Random Redbird Musings gets the award for obvious jokes, with an X-Files reference in the Mulder post’s title. He asks, “Am I the only one who was blind-sided by this trade?” No, you most certainly are not. He notes that all five of the Cardinals projected starters won 15 games last season. Super nice! In a more recent post, he comments on the possibility of picking up free agents David Eckstein and Alex Cora to plug the personnel hole in our middle infield, providing a surprising statistics to argue that Eckstein and Cora would represent an improvement over Womack and Renteria. Actually, his conclusion is less bold: “they would likely – at worst – be a slight downgrade defensively over the 2004 Cardinals.” I don’t know much about Eckstein, but he sounds an awful lot like Bo Hart. Good defensive skills, slappy contact hitter, fan favorite youthful sort…

Dan at Get Up, Baby, Get Up! (I’d love to build an alarm clock that loops Mike Shannon’s trademark call in lieu of the beeping beeps) doesn’t like the trade. He’s trying to like it, but can’t seem to get over that hump. His reasoning for hating the trade is that Mulder’s late season numbers were freakishly bad. That makes sense to me–Mulder faded hard last year, and if he doesn’t pull up and pitch like he has for his entire career again, then the Cardinals will have been royally screwed by Billy Beane. And he cites the JD Drew/Eli Marerro trade to Fatlanta for Jason Marquis (a fifteen game winner last season), Sweet Baby Ray (one of two kickass lefties in our bullpen with Ankiel–and a fine baserunner, believe it or not), and Adam Wainwright (a stud prospect who apparently had some problems with shoulder weakness when he came over, and spent most of last season injured), huff… huff… cites that trade as an example of Jocketty’s weird trades. JD Drew was arguably the Braves best player last season, and I’ve always been a big Eli fan, but I liked the trade at the time and like it now. We needed pitching at the time. It was a very good trade for the Cardinals. He also cites the Tatis for Hermanson and Kline trade as another example. Tatis was coming off a great pair of seasons offensively… in 1999 he hit two grand slams in the same inning off the same Pitcher (Chan Ho Park of the Dodgers). In spite of all that, I wasn’t much of a Tatis fan. He struggled for power, and his percentages paid for it. And we needed pitching, and got it. Hermanson was a competent starter, and Kline a great reliever. And now, Jocketty trades away our (numerically) best pitcher from the BP and two of our future stars for what could possibly be the best lefthanded starter of the next few years–a potential Cy Young candidate–to address our desparate need for a #1 starter, and it’s another of Jocketty’s wacky trades? C’mon man! This is gonna work out. Let yourself get excited! And if the sky falls in and Mulder can’t pitch worth a damn next season, we’ll just have to swap Ankiel into the rotation. But I find that unlikely.

Some more displeasure is available at STL Outsider, concluding with “Last March a lot of talking heads wrote off the Cardinals because they didn’t have a Big Name pitching staff. In retrospect those people look like idiots as Jocketty got some unheralded starters to fill the innings, letting the position players carry the team defensively and offensively through a special summer. I’m really concerned that the Cardinals ignored what won them 112 of their first 173 games, and focused on those last four losses.” I politely disagree. Look at it this way: we swapped out Williams for Mulder. Haren spent 2004 in AAA for the most part, while I think he’s a great pitcher and a hell of a guy, I don’t think the Cardinals success in 2004 can be spoken of as though it hung in the balance of Danny Haren’s right hand. Calero was missing for much of the season. We got a left-handed starter who had a couple of bad months last season, preceded by a lifetime of ass-kicking. (Although some of the statistics that blog mentions are rather spooky. I’ll have to do my own calculations to verify.)

Beau Chapman at The Psychotic Cardinal has mixed feelings about the trade (at times bordering on psychotic, true to form). He recognizes Mulder as an upgrade over Haren, but doesn’t have confidence with a Calero-free (and Kline-free) bullpen. Barton’s exit from the Cardinals’ farm system terrifies him. I can relate to that, but I side with conventional wisdom in that he’ll never make the big leagues as a catcher.

David at Red Sea Scrolls (I dig the name) also bemoans the lame X-Files jokes we’ll be putting up with this season. He’s also rationally worried about Mulder’s decline in the second half of last season: “But after the break, he hit a wall…and we’re talking Berlin/Great Wall of China type wall here. His post ASB record was 5-6 with a nasty 6.13 ERA. Opponents hit almost .300 off of him. Ace he was not. Heck, Brett Tomko (v.2003) he was not.” He also takes (what I consider to be) the right attitude with respect to Barton: “All we can do now is wish him luck.” The conclusion is that the trade was (probably) a good idea.

That’s all the Cardinals weblogs I know of… the rest are either on hiatus or retired.

News of the Tim Hudson to Atlanta deal hit be pretty hard. After that went down, I thought the Cards weren’t going to be able to upgrade our rotation, and we’d be just that much worse with Woody gone.

But Walt Jocketty flies under the radar and somehow brings Mark Mulder to the Lou. The deal is Haren, Calero, and Daric Barton for Mark Mulder. Danny Haren is a great young pitcher, and has incredible maturity. For those that don’t remember way back when, the only difference between a Ryan Leaf and a Peyton Manning is maturity. Manning had it when he was drafted, and now he’s arguably the best quarterback in NFL history; Ryan Leaf might be doing car commercials in the town where he grew up. Haren can be expected to make Oakland’s rotation and thrive. Kiko Calero was, numbers-wise, the Cardinals’ best reliever last season, believe it or not. Daric Barton is a left-handed hitting (for average, power, and OBP) 19-year old catcher, the 2nd best prospect at class A ball. He’s got a very bright future, although it remains to be seen whether Oakland will develop him as a catcher.

But we’ve got Mark Mulder, the winningest lefty in the game, and for at least three years. Assuming his health is as good as Jocketty believes, we’ve got a truly top-notch rotation next season. Matt Morris as your third starter? Whoa, dude. And we kept both Marquis and the Soup. (Unless one of them is traded for a shortstop.)

I’m hoping Polanco signs with the Cards for a reasonable amount. I don’t know what’s going to happen at short, but obviously Jocketty deserves our full faith in that he’ll make the best moves for the team. I’m very, very excited about seeing this rotation next season.

Turned in the fifth paper today. Technically, it was supposed to be in by Wednesday, but nobody’s pounced on me yet. It’s a pretty good feeling, although this last one was kind of crap. Finishing up some paperwork as fast as I can, then off to the Lou for a certain young fellow, who doesn’t post anymore, is being fitted for his leg irons tonight. (Just kidding about the leg irons thing.)

Glad that semester’s over. Next one is gonna be great, unless something unexpected comes up in the next few days.

A great tech site is Bitbender Forums. I’ve got an account there, and check it out every few days to learn handy new stuff. They’ve got a slackware installation walkthrough that is legendary in quality and detail. It’s what started me down the Linux road, a journey that has significantly improved my ability to get work done.

This tip is really very cool:

javascript:alert(“The real URL of this site is: ” + location.protocol + “//” + location.hostname + “/”)

You paste that into the address bar of your browser and it gives you the correct URL of the page you’re viewing. A certain type of scammer (technically called phishers) sends email to people that asks them to confirm their password for paypal, an online bank, credit card company, whatever, that looks like official email. The website they send you to looks like the real company’s website (apparently, I’ve never done anything but delete the crap), even down to the URL that appears in your address bar. Using this piece of javascript, you’ll be able to find out where any webpage really is.

I don’t figure it would work in the event of a DNS hack, however.