I recently rebuilt one of my work computers, and while I was careful enough to backup and reload all the critical tools I need to do my job, I wasn’t thoughtful enough to backup the desktop background. It was pretty sweet, too–the picture of Eckstein getting tackled at the plate by his team after thwacking his game-winning grand slam against the Braves on August 7th, 2005. It had been the desktop on that machine since August 8th. Computers running Windows with one or two users generally need a clean install every year or so, and this one had had a much longer run than that. It had gotten bad, though. Simple scripts would take an unnecessary amount of time to run and loading up a flabby program like Excel would take literally five minutes. I’d start it up, walk up to the fourth floor to check my mailbox and say hi to the secretary, and a spreadsheet would usually be open and ready for data entry when I’d get back downstairs. Now that it’s cleanly rebuilt it runs about as well as you can expect from a seven or eight year-old ‘puter that saw time as a public lab machine.

The point is, I needed to replace the desktop image, and found Redbird Central to have some outstanding pictures. The navigation on that site is horrendous. It demands you stay in its frames, so I can’t send you straight to the page with the wallpapers. Follow that link, click on “Photos” in the left menu, and follow through to “Desktop Wallpapers and Downloads.” There are some really cool pictures of the stadium, and all the pictures are in a respectable 1024 X 768 resolution. Also from this website, I found the plagiaristically named Red Bird Nation, a google-map thingy that you can stick pins in to show off where you root for the Birds on the Bat from. I put mine in. Knowing how nasty and hate-filled Cubs fans are, it won’t be long before it get hijacked by the bastards, but it’s fairly neat anyways. Wonder if I’ve already run into fellow local fan Barb. If you’re new to the scene, Redbird Nation was Brian Gunn’s beloved blog, and you should go there and check out the “Best of RBN” links down at the bottom of his left sidebar to get up to speed.

Some phenomenally good news: I finally have a thesis topic. It’s sorta been like being buried alive in loose, sandy soil and you can’t tell whether your thrashing about is digging you deeper or wriggling you upwards. Today was the day that my fingers wrapped around a skinny root, and so I know which way air is and I have something to guide myself towards it. Just gotta hang onto that root and dig like the Dickens for another fifteen months or so. Then I’ll be free.

It’s just like that… Except for the fact that being buried alive generally kills you after a few hours or even minutes, whereas these years of happy dilettantism were interesting as all get-out and a heck of a good time.

Update: A related quiz… Courtesy of IoH???I!!!

The current weather here is “freezing fog.” That’s fairly bizarre, isn’t it? It’s supposed to get up close to 50 today, too.

Tomorrow, we’re expecting gusting winds up to 40 mph.

Aarrrr!!!

New Cards blog plugged by David Pinto: Gashouse Gang. No content there yet.

How about these sneaky bastards?

Kerry recently discovered an online genealogy service that’s drumming up publicity by offering free facial recognition comparisons from your face to the photographs of the famous people in their database. She bears a 69% resemblance to Shania Twain.

I used a cropped headshot of me from when I was sporting a beard and eagerly awaited my results while I registered for their spam. And here they are:

It says I look 60% like Karol Szymanowski; 56% like Georg Simmel and Will Smith; 52% like Kurt Vonnegut; 47% like Russell Crowe; and 45% like Max von Sydow. After that it was Gerard Depardieu.

How come nobody’s told me I’m so freakin’ ugly?

I’m silly. I next uploaded the right image you’ll find in that “ugly” link, and the closest comparable is, naturally, Gerard Depardieu. Shirley Temple, Aaliyah, Pamela Anderson, and J-Lo were all listed in there too.

Just to be even sillier, I uploaded this picture of an old chimpanzee. Fortunately for the folks in the database, no matches were found.

I learned tonight that the local cable company has switched from Fox Sports Chicago to Fox Sports Midwest, meaning that anyone with cable gets all the Cardinals games on TV next season.

In 2000, I sent the cable company a drunken email announcing that I’d subscribe to their service only when they switched from FSC to FSM.

A deal’s a deal, I guess.

Cable + cable internet is about twice what phone + DSL costs. I’ve been wanting to get rid of my phone for a while though. I get at maximum two legitimate phone calls on my landline per month, and telemarketers at predictable times every day.

I’ll have to think about this. Check this out, in the meantime. Read about that in the Mechanic’s waiting room today.

I spent four hundred dollars and five hours today getting my car fixed up. It’s going to need a new alternator real soon, too. I can hear the bearings wearing out. It makes my car sound something like a spaceship when it drives around. I’ll keep telling myself that. Maybe if I have one of those light-bars installed in the grill like K.I.T.T. had, I’ll be able to fool others as well.

Fantasies aside, I’ll just have to fork over another $150 or so to have the part replaced.

I need to decide on a specific dissertation topic immediately. I was hoping to have one picked yesterday–no dice. It’ll be an enormous load off my back when I’ve actually got a topic. Light at the end of the tunnel and such. It’s stressing me out, and being stressed out is not something I’m used to. If I haven’t chosen a problem to tackle by Monday, my advisor is going to assign me one. That’ll feel like a cop-out. So I think I’ll get workin’ now.

The Cardinals avoided arbitration hearings again this year, signing Jason Marquis at the last possible moment to a 1-year contract. Here’s the press report. A poster in Bernie’s pressbox offers the figure $5.15 megabucks without supplying a substantiating link. That would be $650,000 more than lboros had been predicting for his roster matrices. That would leave us about $1.5 million within a $90 payroll. Of course, he also assumes Nelson makes the team, and I don’t expect that to happen. Swap in Tony Reyes for Jeff Nelson and we’re about 2 megabucks under by my reckoning.

Today’s the last day of my winter break, and it’s back to the grind bright n’ early tomorrow morning. The gods smiled upon us today, deigning to provide us humans with near-sixty degree weather, much to the consternation of my friends newly arrived from Georgia who are ready for a good hard freeze and a sea of snow lasting weeks. It’ll come, I promise.

To celebrate the gods’ benevolence, we barbecued in my backyard. We grilled up a massive 1.5 lb pork steak; a pound of string beans marinated in olive oil, a dry rub, and some garlic and yellow onion mince; two burgers; and three brats. The brats were boiled in a beer, garlic, and onion bath on the grill, then put on direct heat for browning, then finished off back in the beer bath. The chow was good.

Also today, my roommate unexpectedly moved out. I walked into the living room at around 1 or so to find the front door wide open and the roommate moving his belongings out. I untactfully remarked, “Cool!” He’s not quite done moving out it seems. He definitely left one of his characteristic science experiments sitting on the table in his room. Here’s a picture:

What you see there are orange peels piled up in the bottom of a pint glass, with an overturned cup of yogurt on top. Most of the orange peels are unrecognizably furry with green mold.

My-oh-my, what a wonderful day.

“I find your lack of bones disturbing…”

____________________
Found it here.

The Cards signed reliever Jeff Nelson to a minor-league contract with an invitation to spring training. He’s a very big 39 year old right hander who’s still a quite effective pitcher, although he gives up too many walks and appears to work too deep into the counts. This is a much better player to have than Felix Rodriguez, in my opinion, and if Juan Mateo looks good enough to make the team out of Spring Training, we’ll have the luxury of having Nelson in Memphis to call up should injury, fatigue, or ineffectiveness set in.

Nelson was dramatically a right-handed specialist in 2005. His OPSA versus right-handed hitters last season was .566 and 1.035 against lefties. His previous four seasons don’t show such radical splits, though. Surprisingly, he was a better pitcher away from Safeco field, an extreme pitchers’ park. He looks to have had some trouble locating the plate in those pastures.

Illinois’ 79-74 win over Michigan today was the most exciting basketball game I’ve seen so far this season. Everytime Illinois would seem to get ahead, Michigan would score in a hurry and be right back in it. Michigan’s got a very good team there. Something I noticed was that Chester Frazier, who’d looked very good in the Michigan State game, was dressed but never entered the game. Someone on the Post-Dispatch boards noticed that he didn’t play too, and asked whether he’d reinjured his quadriceps. Someone replied: “From what Weber said on the post game show, Frazier must be in his doghouse.” Hmmm. I didn’t have the radio on and missed the postgame show. Wonder what that’s all about. He must have had a bad time with the hard practice this past week. It’s pretty clear that they worked on free throws. We shot 91.7% in the first half. I was pretty spooked when Warren Carter was inbounded the ball with 18 seconds left and the Illini up by 1. They fouled him, and if he’d missed the first shot, Michigan would have regained possession and be in a position to win the game. It was quite a relief when he nailed both of them.

Update: Mark Tupper’s put up his post-game post in which the man sez: “Chester Frazier didn’t play Saturday as [he] sat out a one-game suspension. ‘He just didn’t take care of business in a timely manner,’ Weber said, avoiding details.” So there you go.

Added some blogs to the sidebar and removed a few last night. Also updated my homepage so that a random picture would display when the page loads. It turns out I don’t have so many pictures of myself.

The recent FAQ post at Cardnilly is something that every Cards fan oughta steal, if only for the free content.

Nobody asks me questions, and certainly not on any frequent basis. The few I get are of the sort, “Are you the same Liam Moran that…” followed by a grossly exaggerated third-person description of something hilarious I vaguely remember having done long ago. I assume that the content of my posts are sufficient evidence that I don’t have satisfactory answers to any questions that might be asked of me, ever, by anyone older than four or five years of age. But there’s always the possibility that someone might want to know something aside from what I choose to blather on about, and starting with Scott’s questions seems good enough to me. And so, I rip off his FAQ’n FAQ.

Wassup with the name, yo?

My roommate had a Nintendo 64 at college, and someone was always playing it in the living room. One of the only games I ever played was the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was never a big gamer, but I liked the Zelda and Metroid games all the way back to the beginning. That game was freakin’ outstanding. And since the N64 was in the living room, my seven roommates would often be sitting around playing backseat Link to whoever was playing the game. In the game, Link had an assistant who would pop out of his backpack and say, “Hey! Listen!” whenever he’d run in a direction badly inconsistent with the path best suited for accomplishing his mission. As a lame gag, when we’d try to get the attention of the person playing the game to inform them that they were wasting time or missing something worth exploring, we’d say in a high pitched voice, “Hey! Listen!” And heckle the player into getting back on track. When I started this blog, it was mostly political content, so the idea was that I was heckling folks to get back onto the track I thought most suitable to success in accomplishing the mission. Totally pretentious, yes, but my audience was only me at first, for reasons to be described in the next question.

It also gave me an excuse to use the little Link-with-sword gifs as my permalink markers.

Why did you start the blog?

In Fall of 2001, I was a very poor graduate student. For two meals a day, I typically ate spaghetti stir-fried with scrambled eggs, soy sauce, and a couple of scoops from an aluminum-foil capped can of mixed vegetables I kept in the fridge. Al Qaeda’s attack on our country affected me deeply, and blogs were the best source of speedy information and insightful commentary afterwards, especially Instapundit. A good friend of mine has a brother, Xristos who’d been blogging for a long time, and he unknowingly inspired me to start writing down my own reactions to what was happening in the world, which to me was much more important to the work I was doing in graduate school at the time. The early days were pretty unhappy times, and I was surrounded by people who had astonishingly different reactions to the attacks than what I experienced. Basically, I wanted to communicate to myself and whoever else might be interested what was going on in my head, and I didn’t want to have the same conversations on the telephone over and over, especially considering that long-distance calls didn’t fit well in my budget at the time.

Also, similar to Scott, I like writing and wanted to do more of it. I was writing plenty of technical stuff at the time, but didn’t do any writing for fun. Some of my professors would probably argue that writing this blog has negatively affected my academic writing style. (And probably my academic reputation even more.)

Waste of Flesh: what’s up with that?

Ain’t my thing. I thought Einar shoulda ended up with the title, but I don’t get a vote. This year: Gary Bennett. We coulda had Sandy Alomar Jr. for $150,000 less. And Michel Hernandez would be no slouch as a Memphis call-up if the old man got hurt.

How did you become a baseball fan?

This is kind of embarassing. I hated baseball for most of my life. It wasn’t a game I played as a kid. I swam and played soccer when I was young, and hockey from fifth to tenth grade. Watching sports on TV never interested me much, aside from hockey–TV in general wasn’t something I was into. Then in my sophomore year in college, I had C-Bot as a roommate and he insisted on getting cable. This was 1997-1998 and in short time he converted me into a fan of football and baseball. His favorite teams growing up were the Broncos and Cardinals and both teams were ideal for teaching the finer points of the game–the Broncos moreso at the time than the Cardinals. I really became a baseball fan watching my roommates play a complete season of Ken Griffey baseball on the N64 my Junior year, since I got to learn how the differently gripped pitches are supposed to move, and which pitchers threw them. Of course, that was the year Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa had their season-long home-run derby, so it can be fairly said that I am one of those who was brought into baseball by their accomplishments that year, although what most intrigued me was the tension of baseball. Some people think it’s a boring game because there’s a lot of waiting for something to happen. I like the watching and waiting aspect of the game. Once you get to understand the game, you’ll find yourself mesmerized by something as simple as an outfielder taking a few steps in one direction against a particular batter, then waiting to see if he’d guessed right.

Are you a stathead or a seamhead?

I only started teaching myself to throw a baseball a few years ago by buying one of those pitchbacks and have never taken a swing at a ball thrown by a human pitcher, so I can’t be called a seamhead. The sabremetric stuff interests me, since modeling complex human behavior is part of my job. I can’t be called a stathead either by any stretch. Somewhere in between, I’m just a fan who enjoys the game a whole lot.

What is your earliest Cardinal memory?

I had a friend named David when I was a kid in Ohio. He asked me who my favorite baseball team was. Since I didn’t care about baseball one way or the other at the time, he listed a few and I picked the Cardinals. “They’re a good team,” he said approvingly. The next one was when we moved to St. Louis. My dad’s a Mets fan, so he and the moving guys had a friendly conversation about the Mets being Pond Scum.

What are some of your favorite game memories?

I was at the second to the last game at Busch last year for Anheuser-Busch employee’s day. That was a lot of fun, since all the current and many former players were out in the concourses signing autographs. I was there for the July 2nd and 3rd games against Colorado–heading to St. Louis for all the games of a weekend series is something I will be doing more often in the future. Chris once nailed us tickets seven rows back of third base once for a game against the Pirates. Some friends of mine got upper-deck tickets. Rain came on hard and all my pals got to come down and sit with us. Scott Rolen played one of the worst games I’d ever seen of him that day, though. I was there for Larry Walker’s first at-bat and gave him a standing O for striking out. I was thirty rows behind home plate in 2004 with Jeff and his mother when Yadier Molina had a walk-off single. That was a sweet game.

Do the postseason chokes bother you?

Yes, but I’ve been a Blues fan for a long time. They’re about to end their professional-record streak of most consecutive playoff appearances of any major American sports team and yet have never won a league championship. The Cards are putting out great teams every year and are bound to win a Series before the Blues hoist Lord Stanley’s cup.

What are some of your favorite posts?

I don’t really read my posts. I just fart out words and hit publish. Check for comments and that’s it.

What are some posts you’d like to write, but haven’t?

Wait and see, I guess.

What blogs do you check frequently?

All the ones in the sidebar.

What would your intro music be for your at-bats?

The part in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture when they light the cannons.

Well, what would it be if you were a shut-down closer instead?

The Imperial March from Star Wars would be super cool. I think it’s taken by someone, so I’d settle for that Klingon theme song from Star Trek. That would be ever so nerdy.

Who plays you in a biopic?

Either the orangutan that plays third base in Ed or the chimpanzee in MVP: Most Valuable Primate. He plays hockey in the first one, skate boards in the second, and snowboards in the third installment. That’s some chimp!

I felt not quite right yesterday, so I stayed home from work (the semester starts on Tuesday and I’ve gotten a lotta work done earlier this week). The plan was to get caught up on reading. I’ve wanted to go through last years COLING papers to get some ideas. Instead, I started reading Vernor Vinge’s Fire upon the Deep, and was thoroughly engrossed a few pages in. Ate a whole bunch of vitamin C to stave off whatever nasty bug was crawling into my guts.

Eating some spicy food at dinner, I started to get a bit of a runny nose. Thought it was from the habanero sauce, but woke up this morning with a mildly sore throat and stuffy sinuses. Two thousand mgs vitamin C and a gallon of water later and I’m feeling acceptably well. If it gets worse, I’m not going to hesitate to see a doctor. I try to avoid taking antibiotics, but haven’t been sick for at least a year and a half to my recollection.

To make things worse, I’m at work now, when I should be on the other side of town getting a baseball autographed by Anthony Reyes.

Update: From bad to worse… From now on, I vow to spend more time at Hooters. (Obligatory Brad-Thompson-looks-young joke: would they serve him?)

I was sent a link to Self Nut Punch today from K-Dog and it reminded me of the funniest thing out there on the internet. It’s the brilliant Channel 101 hosted Kicked in the Nuts series. It’s a clever spoof of those asinine Funniest Videos shows where at least every third or fourth clip features some poor sap getting thwacked in the junk. In the spoof, every clip has some jerk getting kicked in the stones by a dude in a clown wig. During their painful throes, they realize that they’re on the “Kicked by the Nuts” show, they smile and wave to the viewers at home, often saying “It’s my favorite show!” Funny stuff.

I also see that Laser Fart went to ten episodes. I’d only seen the first two, and they were very clever.

“The beauty of sports is not knowing, then scooting to the edge of our seats to find out.”

Truer words have never been spoken. But Mark Tupper wrote ‘em in a post urging Illini fans off the ledge after the hideous loss to Iowa this past Saturday. Shall we call him Una from now on?

I rather flippantly tossed a link to this must-read column by Mark Steyn into the next post down. It’s important enough to warrant an entire post all to itself here on HT!, right along with the posts devoted to bragging and complaining.

Seriously, though. You should read it.

Thanks to Sine Qua Non for pointing it out. I’ve been too busy watching tv shows on DVD to stay caught up with the good stuff out there on the intrawebs.

I’m not too much for watching television, aside from sports of course. And if you plant me on a sofa with some discovery channel, I might not get up for a while. Haven’t had cable television for a long while, so that’s not so much of an issue.

With a gift card to Best Buy I got for Christmas I bought a DVD player. Those suckers have dropped astonishingly in price over the past year. Cassandra was nice enough to lend me her Season I DVD collection of Lost last week and I finished it up on Sunday night. That’s an incredible TV show. I’ve noticed that I can’t stand watching it on television, though. The commercials drive me nuts, and the cliffhanger endings are a dirty trick. Unfortunately, the first season ends with a gigantic cliffhanger, and since I haven’t watched any of the episodes of the currently-running second season, I’ll have to wait until the second season comes out on DVD to get caught up. I think it’ll be worth the wait. I won’t say much more about Lost. If you haven’t seen any of it, go out and rent the DVDs and you’ll be impressed.

Last Friday, I was talking to a friend of mine in his office and noticed that he had the Serenity DVD on his desk. It had gotten very good word-of-blog when it came out, so I was looking forward to giving it a view when it came out on video. On Monday, my pal shows up to work with the Serenity DVD and the entire series of Firefly, the television show that the movie is based on. So last night when I got home from work, I started watching the Firefly television show on DVD. Eleven and a half hours later, I fell asleep at some point during the eleventh episode. This show’s pretty impressive too. It’s a sci-fi set five hundred years from now, with a feel inspired by the Outlaw Josey Wales. The primary two characters were soldiers on the losing side of a battle for independence, and they spend their time avoiding government interference and trading foodstuffs mostly. The writers make the assumption common in the last fifteen years of science fiction that Chinese culture will have a significant influence on human civilization down the road. It used to be the Japanese, and the Russians before that. Arabic culture was sprinkled throughout the 80s and 90s, notably in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. I’m not passing judgement here, or suggesting the assumption is unreasonable, just making note. It’s kind of funny really. My Chinese is terrible, but some of the actors sound bad even to my ear. I should probably brush up on Chinese, in fact. There wasn’t much that was said that I could understand. I did hear tzhao nide at one point, which means something like f*ck yours. It’s a good thing that the many fans of this show might be inspired to go on and learn to speak Chinese, and hopefully better than I did–or the actors on Firefly.

They do an excellent job of capturing the notion that the galaxy would be colonized by poor people with limited skill-sets–not crews of all engineers like in much of science fiction. So in this universe, worlds get terraformed, people get plunked on them, and they struggle to eke out a living. Better than staying on this rock, for sure.

The writing’s fantastic, and the actors generally do an excellent job. The third DVD has some absolutely hilarious episodes on it. And unlike Lost, each episode is more or less self-contained, so if it were still on TV, I’d probably start watching it. My only serious complaint is with many of the battle scenes. The tactics the principles use are laughable. At one point, this gal does a clumsy somersault into a hallway defended by three or four trained killers with rifles, stands up straight and unholsters two sidearms, then she shoots all of them dead without taking any damage. It looked silly, and it was silly. Lots of stuff like that happens.

It’s still a very good tv show; and it’s a shame that FOX cancelled it. I’m thinking I’ll finish up the last five episodes tonight, then watch the Serenity movie tomorrow night.

I just noticed that the show’s creator, Joss Whedon, wrote the screenplay for a Wonder Woman movie, to come out in 2007. It would be hard to imagine he wouldn’t suggest that the Brazilian-born Morena Baccarin, an actress from Firefly, be cast as the Amazonian superhero. I’m not the first to have thought of that, I notice: If you google for images of that fine looking young lady, the first picture is titled “Morena Baccarin for Wonder Woman!”

Everytime I think of Wonder Woman, I think of Dave Chappelle’s old stand-up routine–really his appearance with that material on Dr. Katz.

Here’s a pair of pictures from the New Year’s festivities. I only had room on my camera for nine pictures. These two are pretty decent.

Here’s a picture of the Ice Sculpture/Luge we had. I drank a few red-headed sluts out of it and a few glasses of champagne sparkling wine.

Good times were had by all. If anyone picked up one of the carver’s business cards, drop his URL in an email or comment and I’ll throw him some free advertising.

Here’s a picture of people wondering what all the flashing was about that was coming from the ceiling. Just my flash, folks, get back to your beverages. This must have been taken at some point after the Raiders game ended but before midnight based on what’s on the tube. The only person I recognize in this picture is our old buddy Mike at the very bottom of the frame.

After midnight, I morphed into a dancin’ fool. Perhaps Jeff or someone has a picture of me making an ass of myself on the dance floor.

The schedule for the Cardinals Caravan tours is out. The Champaign tour is here on Thursday at noon, with OF John Gall, SP Anthony Reyes, RP Brad Thompson, SP Danny Cox (ret), RP John Costello (ret), and play-by-play man John Rooney showing up.

And on Saturday at noon, another Caravan will be in Bloomington at noon with John Rodriguez, Larry Bigbie, Rick Horton, and Tom Lawless. That’s about a forty-five minute drive from CU.

I recently switched from Firefox to the Opera web browser. A nifty feature is a speech synthesizer add-on. You highlight some text on a webpage and press V or pick “speak” from a right-click menu and the text is read aloud. It’s pretty fun to play with, especially in blogs. It uses IBM’s speech synthesizer, one that I’ve never worked with before. Hopefully they’ll picked up the ball Rhetorical put in play and put together a Valley Girl voice. If they do, I promise to mark-up this page to use it.

Something else geeky I could mention is from last night’s basketball game. I noticed the camera operators were having more trouble than usual keeping all the action in the frame. My guess is that they were shooting the game using 16 X 9 perspective cameras, and had to rely on the post-process delayed 4 X 3 output that came from the truck… or else just eyeball it.

Update: The geekiness is snowballing! I synthesized the final sentence in the previous paragraph to see how good their text normalizer is. It doesn’t do much. It should have read “16 X 9″ as sixteen by nine, but it pronounced the ‘X’ as ecks. Lemme give it some more typical un-normalized text:

(321)911-8642
1234 Whitelawn Drive
Tuscaloosa, MN 69021

Wait just a moment for the next update…

Moments later: Wow. It read those perfectly, so it is doing some text normalization. It read the phone number in the conventional melody, paired up the numbers in the street address (twelve thirty-four), and read the ZIP as a series of numbers. Not bad for a little plug-in. But not as good as the one my team had built a few years ago.