Reds blogger Red Hot Mama, she of the smack-talking comment fests with Belly Itcher during Cards-Reds series, has published a book. I love the cover, but I’m a big fan of garters.
For those who haven’t read it, the cover spoofs this one.
And she wasn’t really sued. I just try to be funny too sometimes.
“For the second straight game, Brian Randle did things to make you sit up and go ‘Wow!’” So says Mark Tupper.
He was impressive, indeed. He’s starting to show his freakish athleticism.
Brown’s shooting doesn’t bother me, but the turnovers are worrying. They look like his mistakes, and not those of the young guys. James Augustine should be fouling more. Crazy thing to say, huh? He’s got to learn the boundaries, what refs might be willing to give him as an established big man. He’s not pushing the boundaries, not even approaching them. He plays well, yes. But if he wants to use his talent, he’s got to start owning the paint. And the down payment is physical play in the pre-conference schedule. He passed up a lot of opportunities tonight to play physical on the youngsters from NC.
Good for him. Abraham Nuñez cashed in on his outstanding 2005 season with the Cardinals for $3.25 million over two years with the Phillies. As much as I hate seeing good role players like Abe and Mabes leave the Cardinals, I sure like seeing them soaking up salary on other team’s benches.
There are quite a few things you may hear me complain about wrt the Windows operating system. The filesystem is garbage and their virtual memory solution is horrifying to start things off. But mostly the problems I have with it are how few things it can do. The command line is impoverished for useful commands, and the shell overall just doesn’t allow you to do much. And so you have to add on a bunch of junk to get work done. Out of the box, Windows doesn’t allow you to do much work.
But Microsoft does have a page of some good add-ons for Windows XP, their Power Toys. The image resizer might interest some of you. Install it, and you can resize images with a right-click. Very handy, since modern digital cameras record pictures in huge filesizes that aren’t all too appropriate for email.
Cal Eldred retired… Too bad, he’s a good pitcher. John Mabry signed with the Cubs for a million bucks, too.
(I should point out that this rumor didn’t quite pan out immediately. It looks like the Marlins are willing to deal Pierre, but are weighing from whom they can get the best package in return.)
Good news! Juan Pierre has been traded to the Cubs. Crazy that I’d consider this news to be good, eh?
The Cubbies gave up three prospects for the lead-off worthy centerfielder, suggesting that Chipper Jones’ salary deferments were enough to allow the Braves to make Rafael Furcal an offer too good to refuse.
I’d rather face the Cubs leading off with Pierre than with Furcal this season. I’ll also go out on a limb and prognosticate that Juan Encarnacion will have a significantly better season (wherever he lands) than Pierre does in Chicago.
This leaves me two limbs from the trunk. A leaf. Or something.
Happy birthday to my wee sis, yesterday. She woke up at 4:30am, shortly after I’d gotten home from the Casinoes. I’m not a gambler, but I won $70 screwing around with quarter slots. Let me rephrase: I’m not a gambler, so I would have won $250 playing quarter slots. I was playing the minimum bet, and the rules of the machine I sat down at only paid out for bars on a quarter bet. So I’d had three sevens land on the line twice before pointing out to my pals that something was fishy. Of course, had I been playing full bets, I’d have spent all my money in too few turns to win the big money, eh? Gambling is entertainment, not investment.
Or as Boomhauer said on an episode of King of the Hill replayed tonight on F/X: “Money’s like the wind man… You don’t fill it if it ain’t movin’.”
All’s I’m saying is don’t expect money to be a sail, when you’re gambling. More like a sled. A sled on a hill deliberately planted with trees such that sledders would run into them. It’s a fun ride, but if you should happen to come out at the bottom with a smile on you face and now flesh missing, you were a lucky one, eh?
Oh Yeah: I saw the end of the Illinois game. It wasn’t on TV here, so all I had was the ESPN2 ticker to go by; later, I saw just a replay of the last minute desperation shot by Wichita State that left the player’s hands too late but went in the basket. Mark Tupper filled in some of the details for me.
Yes, Happy Thanksgiving from the dark ages. After eating some tasty food today, my brother-in-law and I spent the rest of the day fixing my mom’s ‘puter by reinstalling Windows. The modem and soundcard went undetected–fortunately, the win98 modem driver works with XP as well. I just went out to download both drivers appropriate for XP and the downloads were being measured, no kidding, in bytes per second. How do people survive on dial-up? Truly barbaric. She pays money for this, too.
Soooooo, I watched the movie Skeleton Key last night. It’s about this really attractive chick who moves into Forrest Gump’s old house, only to find out that it’s haunted–but only if you believe in ghosts. Then it sets itself up to be a really neat psychological movie, only to blow it by making the ghosts real. Then it’s a very stupid movie for about four minutes, during which you feel stupid for missing or ignoring all the obvious cues that would have throughout made the movie lame if you’d bought into them.
The really attractive chick, though, is Goldie Hawn’s daughter. She’s beautiful, and Goldie Hawn was born on the same day as Stan Musial. That means that if I were dating Kate that I’d be able to have a few enthusiastic lines of conversation with her mother before I realized she was an idiot actress. And then I’d wake up. And Stan Musial would still be the Man. And Goldie Hawn would still be an idiot. But Kate Hudson wouldn’t be going out with me for drinks.
Did you know that you can listen to the pitch tracks generated in Praat? Why you’d want to, I have no idea.
I’m trying to remove some human voice from over the sound of a seashell horn, and I was setting up some high and low pass filters to see if I could get rid of it. Unfortunately, the seashell that this tone is being played on resonates between 240 and 260 hz, and the person talking is a female. Pisser. Listening to the tone track of this reminded me of the sound effects in Jungle Hunt.
‘Twas brilling and slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
lboros had some fun with an AI chat-bot this morning. I’ve tried playing around with it, but couldn’t get it to produce a truly funny conversation.
I’m guessing the technology there is slighty above Eliza. It says that it learns English from interacting with users. I noticed that it misspells a lot of words.
Then again, I tried having a conversation about whether to sign AJ Burnett or Brian Giles with Eliza and got back nothing but, “Please go on.”
My dad sent me this a while back and I laughed at it.
1. DRILL PRESS: A tall upright machine useful for suddenly snatching
flat metal bar stock out of your hands so that it smacks you in the
chest and flings your beer across the room, splattering it against that
freshly painted part you were drying.
2. WIRE WHEEL: Cleans paint off bolts and then throws them somewhere
under the workbench with the speed of light. Also removes fingerprint
whorls and hard-earned guitar calluses in about the time it takes you to
say, “SH**!!!”
3. ELECTRIC HAND DRILL: Normally used for spinning pop rivets in their
holes until you die of old age
4. PLIERS: Used to round off hexagonal bolt heads.
5. HACKSAW: One of a family of cutting tools built on the Ouija board
principle: It transforms human energy into a crooked, unpredictable
motion, and the more you attempt to influence its course, the more
dismal your future becomes.
6. VISE GRIP PLIERS: Used to round off bolt heads. If nothing else is
available, they can also be used to transfer intense welding heat to the
palm of your hand.
7. OXYACETYLENE TORCH: Used almost entirely for setting various
flammable objects in your shop on fire. Also handy for igniting the
grease inside a wheel hub you’re trying to get the bearing race out of.
8. WHITWORTH SOCKETS: Once used for working on older British cars and
motorcycles, they are now used mainly for impersonating that 9/16 or 1/2
socket you’ve been searching for the last 15 minutes.
9. HYDRAULIC FLOOR JACK: Used for lowering an automobile to the ground
after you have installed your new disk brake pads, trapping the jack
handle firmly under the bumper.
10. EIGHT-FOOT LONG DOUGLAS FIR 4X4: Used to attempt to lever an
automobile upward off a hydraulic jack handle.
11. TWEEZERS: A tool for removing splinters of wood, especially Douglas
fir.
12. TELEPHONE: Tool for calling your neighbor to see if he has another
hydraulic floor jack.
13. SNAP-ON GASKET SCRAPER: Theoretically useful as a sandwich tool for
spreading mayonnaise; used mainly for removing dog feces from your
boots.
14. E-Z OUT BOLT AND STUD EXTRACTOR: A tool that snaps off in bolt holes
and is ten times harder than any known drill bit.
15. TWO-TON HYDRAULIC ENGINE HOIST: A handy tool for testing the tensile
strength of bolts and fuel lines you forgot to disconnect.
16. CRAFTSMAN 1/2 x 16-INCH SCREWDRIVER: A large motor mount prying tool
that inexplicably has an accurately machined screwdriver tip on the
end without the handle.
17 AVIATION METAL SNIPS: See hacksaw.
18. TROUBLE LIGHT: The home builder’s own tanning booth. Sometimes
called drop light, it is a good source of vitamin D, “the sunshine
vitamin,” which is not otherwise found under cars at night. Health
benefits aside, its main purpose is to consume 40-watt light bulbs at
about the same rate that 105-mm howitzer shells might be used during,
say, the first few hours of the Battle of the Bulge. More often dark
than light, its name is somewhat misleading.
19. PHILLIPS SCREWDRIVER: Normally used to stab the lids of old-style
paper-and-tin oil cans and squirt oil on your shirt; can also be used,
as the name implies, to round off the interiors of Phillips screw heads.
20. AIR COMPRESSOR: A machine that takes energy produced in a
coal-burning power plant 200 miles away and transforms it into
compressed air that travels by hose to an Pneumatic impact wrench that
grips rusty bolts last tightened 70 years ago by someone at Ford, and
rounds them off.
21. PRY BAR: A tool used to crumple the metal surrounding that clip or
bracket you needed to remove in order to replace a 50 cent part.
22. HOSE CUTTER: A tool used to cut hoses 1/2 inch too short.
23. HAMMER: Originally employed as a weapon of war, the hammer
now-a-days is used as a kind of divining rod to locate expensive parts
not far from the object we are trying to hit.
24. MECHANIC’S KNIFE: Used to open and slice through the contents of
cardboard cartons delivered to your front door; works particularly well
on boxes containing upholstered items, chrome-plated metal, and plastic
parts
Fortunately, I don’t have much opportunity to use real tools, and spend most of my time with software tools. I made one to remove the formatting from the forwarded message this list came from. Didn’t break any bolts off or crush my fingers, neither.
My pal Nick and his wife Erin started up a new blog. I think Erin’s talking about her boobs in this post…
Seeing as I’ll be celebrating my 28th birthday a week from Sunday, it seems appropriate to rip off some birthday related stuff from Cassandra.
First off, I was born under the ashtree:
ASH TREE (the Ambition) – uncommonly attractive, vivacious, impulsive, demanding, does not care for criticism, ambitious, intelligent, talented, likes to play with fate, can be egotistic, very reliable and trustworthy, faithful and prudent lover, sometimes brains rule over the heart, but takes partnership very seriously.
I’m uncommonly attractive? Ha! Children run, screaming in terror, from my hideous visage.
Your Personality and Character Cards:
Your personality and character cards are identical!BirthDay: November 27, 1977
Personality Card Number: 8
Character Card Number: 8
Strength – Personality Card
A time for self-awareness involving courage, strength, and determination.
Like my odor, my personality and character are strong–unpleasantly so.
This year’s Growth Tarot Card for your birthday
Celebrated BirthDay: November 27, 2005
Growth Card Number: 9
The Hermit
A time for soul searching and meditation; a need for patience and solitude.
Damned tarot card reading hippies. Soul searching and meditation? Bah! Although some cold frosty beverages are in order.
And there are several MLB players born on the same day as me, including Mike Scioscia and Ivan Rodriguez. Also Willie Bloomquist, in the Mariners organization who was born on the same day of the same year. I and this dude have the same birthday and damn near the same name.
Also born on my birthday was Bruce Lee and my high school valedictorian, who recently married, apparently.
Thanksgiving break starts on Saturday, and can’t get here soon enough. This week has been pretty rough, and no sleep for me tonight.
Of course, I’ll have a lot of work to do over break, too.
Need to find a project to implement for one of my classes ASAP and get started on it.
One of my colleagues is leaving to do some field work in Switzerland tomorrow and needed a good portable recording solution. I saw M-Audio’s got a new portable digital recorder out and she ended up buying it. It’s something like the Marantz PMD660 except without the XLR pre-amp inputs. Probably a little more user friendly, though. These gadgets are great for linguists. Capturing hours of DAT or minidisk is a horrific waste of time, so being able to record direct to uncompressed wav and moving it onto your hard drive via USB is a huge deal. Say you pay yourself fifteen bucks an hour… you’re cutting your workload in half by not having to capture and avoiding the potential for adding noise by eliminating that step. I imagine a device like that at a cost of $400 bucks would pay for itself in a year of use between not having to buy DAT cassettes or minidisks and the labor your saving yourself in eliminating capture time. Something else of some interest is that my colleague’s husband is a big Cardinals fan and just had his Busch Stadium seats delivered. She said they even came with some gum stuck to the underside of the seat.
Well, how about that! The Blues finally won their third game of the season tonight against the Columbus Blue Jackets, whose newly acquired forward Sergei Federov had his first start as a BJ.
Although things looked bleak the last time I’d talked to him (far, far too long ago), things are looking well for my oldest friend. Guess which one he is?
This is the first I’ve heard of it, but apparently local Cardinals radio affiliate WDWS is balking at remaining in the Cardinals network:
Speaking of KTRS, I’m anxiously awaiting news of whether my local station will remain a Cardinals network station this year. WDWS in Champaign, IL is the flagship University of Illinois Fighting Illini station, and is balking at the new network requirement of carrying all of the spring training games. U of I baseball has always taken precedence in the spring — it’s part of the “price” WDWS pays for being the hub of U of I football and basketball games. If not, I’m hoping that WSOY out of Decatur or WJBC out of Bloomington remain on the network, but even then, those are a little far for me to pull in regularly. I’ll miss the mighty MOX as my fall-back signal.
I’ve been testing the quality of the KMOX vs. KTRS signal ever since I heard about the proposed change and can pick up both stations fairly well during gametime, so the flagship of the move shouldn’t have effected me in either way. But losing the crystal-clear WDWS rebroadcast would be unbearable. WDWS pre-empts the ballgames for all sorts of things: volleyball games, the Ron Zook show, High School Football. That pre-season games are such a big deal is hard to understand.
Meaning that it’s hard to understand who to get pissed at, but I’m looking at you, KTRS.
WDWS was outstanding during the playoffs. They realized how horrible the TV announcers were, and set up a circuit to delay the feed from KMOX so that it would sync with the TV picture. And I genuinely enjoy the volleyball games. We’ve got a real local treasure with Dave Loane calling those games. I’ll frequently keep up with the Cards game on one of the internet gamecast things and listen to the volleyball games until they end and the baseball game comes on.
So I’m on WDWS’ side here. They’ve served Cardinals fans well and done a great job of promoting U of I athletics. If KTRS is trying to bully WDWS into abandoning their committment to U of I sports, then they’re making a big mistake.
This day started out about as bad as it could have, but has gotten progressively better since.
Just got back from class to discover Albert Pujols has won the NL MVP. I’ll link to Cardsblog discussion once things settle down a bit, or just check out the right sidebar.
My quick, conventional wisdom analysis: Pujols has earned it. Derek Lee had a better season, and so would have tipped my cap if he’d won. If Andruw Jones had won, I’d have been mighty pissed. I think the voters took into account Pujols career greatness which has gone largely unrecognized by the Writers, for good reason with Bonds overshadowing him. And they also took into account that the Cubs finished a distant third in the division, and those two factors took away from Lee’s candidacy.
This news really puts a bounce in my step, though.
Too bad I’ve got so much work to do. Hopefully I can get enough done today to sneak out for a few celebratory cold ones tonight.
While the weather lately has been real peachy, it was bound to end. It supposed to start dropping down below freezing starting tomorrow night, and so I gave in and fired up my furnace today. My furnace last winter was short-cycling, where it would turn on for only a few minutes and then turn off far too early, so that it would have to turn back on a few minutes later. The effect was that the furnace was almost constantly burning my hard-won cash up the chimney all day long while I was at work earning it. Even worse, since it kept shutting off so early, it never got decently warm. I’d tried a bunch of stuff… replaced the thermostat, cranked up the heat anticipator, threatening the furnace with ultra-violence. Eventually, I settled on turning the thermostat down to 54 or so and using electric heaters when I needed them.
But this year, I bought a fancy programmable thermostat and installed it tonight. It’s working nice. I’ve been sitting on the couch writing code for the past three hours and it’s turned on only twice, and stayed on for a long enough time to get the heat up pretty nicely. And it’ll turn itself down nice and low during the night and while I’m away at work, so I won’t be wasting much money. Now I just have to put some of that plastic sheeting over the windows, and I’ll be in business.
Not in the next few days though. I’ve got three fairly major tasks to do in the next 36 hours. Another paper presentation at 9am tomorrow, a group project in my 12:30 tomorrow, and another group project at 2 Wednesday. No sleep for me, tonight.
When you’re testing whether some purportedly intelligent way of solving a computation problem is, in fact, intelligent at all, it’s customary to compare it to a baseline system, or one that spits out a reasonable answer while doing practically no work to come to the answer.
For example, I’m working on a system that tries to guess where a prepositional phrase attaches in a transitive verb phrase. Take these three sentences:
John ate a salad with a fork.
John ate a salad with a hard-boiled egg.
John saw a building with a telescope.
In the first case, the PP (with a fork) modifies the verb ate, whereas in the second sentence, the PP is attached to the direct object NP a salad. The third case is ambiguous, since he could have used the telescope to see the building or the building might have had a telescope on top of it or something. So the task is to come up with a method to guess whether the PP modifies the verb or the NP, given any sentence with a transitive verb and a prepositional phrase following the direct object.
A reasonable baseline method for this task would be to count up all the times in a corpus you see NP-modification or V-modification and always guess whichever one is more likely. Then if you build an elaborate system for the task that performs worse than that baseline system, you know it’s not performing intelligently.
In this column, Gregg Easterbrook sets out a baseline system for guessing the scores of NFL football games to test whether the professional football pundits’ prognostications of final scores are intelligently made. He’s determined that the most frequent outcome for a football game is a score where the home team wins 20-17, and so he’s guessing that’s how every game will end up for the season.
His baseline system has given him three correct guesses so far: Chargers at Eagles in Week 7, Washington at Seattle in Week 4, and Chargers at Denver in Week 2.
I can’t find Berman’s success rate thus-far, so can’t do a good comparision of his performance over baseline.
(And if this post didn’t amuse you, I’ll end with a paragraph from Big Ten Wonk’s Michigan preview that made me laugh out loud:
Make no mistake: fate gave Michigan a wicked pitch to hit last year. But the Wolverines didn’t just swing and miss. They swung, missed, hit the ump with the bat, fell down, clubbed themselves over the head a few times, stumbled back to the wrong dugout, threw up, fell down the steps, hit their head on the bat rack, and fell into a coma.
Hilarious!)
I never quite got why this one gets included in the list of Shannonisms, see the post a few down for links a’plenty: We’d like to say hello to all those folks listening in Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky.
So I went ahead and tracked down this town, which doesn’t show up in Census records, at least the ones I looked in. I found this post saying that Monkey’s Eyebrow is “located in northern Ballard County, on Ky. Hwy. 473″ and that it’s a very small place without much commerce going for it. Here’s a map of the general area. I expect they listen to the Cardinals affiliate from Cairo, IL–WKRO AM.
If I’d've known of this before, I’d have stopped in Monkey’s Eyebrow when I drove down to visit Nashville to verify its existence. Alternatively, I could call the Ballard County offices and ask them. I’m sure it wouldn’t be the first such call they’ll’ve gotten.
Updated: I’ve received photographic evidence that Monkey’s Eyebrow, KY is a real place.
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