I stopped paying attention to baseball the year of the strike. The Mets, a team I had rooted for since I was 7 or 8 years old, were the highest paid team in baseball that year. Despite this, they managed to spend the season at the bottom of their division and were involved in a number of unsavory incidents, including Vince Colman blinding a child on the west coast in a fireworks incident and one of the pitchers dousing the press corps with bleach in revenge for unfavorable coverage of his outings on the mound. Then they went on strike and said ‘give us more money, we deserve to be better paid’ and I said ‘Fuck off.’

I’ve stood by my guns for like 10 years now.

Still, I usually watch the World Series and some of the divisional playoff games. I caught most of the Series games this year and have to say, especially in terms of high drama, that they were better than even my previous favorite, the Mets win over the Red Sox in 86. 3 9th inning 2 out comebacks in one series? Incredible, just incredible. Will I return to being a fan? No. They’re still spoiled overpaid jocks and the games pacing is too slow. But hats off to the Diamondbacks and Yankees for an incredible World Series nonetheless.

I’m in the midst of a long string of bad luck with the devices I’ve been buying. In the last couple of months:

• My mid-range sony receiver stopped listening to its remote control.
• the wireless router I bought broke. Well, more accurately, it never really worked right to begin with. After literally months of haggling with the company that manufactures it I finally am issued a new working unit. Which doesn’t really work right, actually…the wireless networking stops working at random intervals until I cycle the power. And a month or so after they issue me a sort-of working unit, the manufacturer goes out of business.
• I buy a brand new graphics card, a top of the line Radeon 8500. It works for about 48 hours and then simply dies.
• I build a new linux box that among other things hosts the website you’re looking at. 4 times now the thing has suffered some sort of hardware issue that locks the machine and renders it unable to boot. Problem is, I can’t identify what the issue is, despite hours of troubleshooting.

So what’s the scoop? Was I meant to be a luddite? Is the proximity of a power company uplink station to my house causing my electronics to fry? Is the quality of manufactured goods declining? Or do I just have really shitty luck? I have no idea. I do have a router to sell if you’re interested though 😉

The group I work with produces websites for the academic departments of a small liberal arts college. One of the faculty members of a certain department often displays behavior best described as…erratic. They’re somewhat aged so we’ve joked that perhaps this individual is pre-alzheimers. Today this person contacted the project lead for a project we’ve worked on them for the past several years and asked if they could have a copy of their project on CD ROM. Since it’s a server-based application this is not trivial to provide and the project lead wanted to know why. It turns out this faculty member was concerned that our servers might get infected with anthrax, thus destroying the project. (!!!) “Not that I’m not worried about you folks (ie us, the staff) but I really want to be sure not to lose all this work.’

Granted, a significant portion of the older generations are a little unclear on how computers work, but mistaking them for biological organisms? We all had a laugh at this poor person’s expense.

I’ve been working on a bunch of things for the site, one of which is switching over to a better blogging system. No offense at all to greymatter, it’s great free software, but Moveable Type is awesome and will allow me to plug in to weblogs.com among other things. Plus it’s actively maintained.

At least that’s my hope anyway. We’ll see how it goes.