Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Six wins in four weeks. 1 Four of those wins came in their final at bat. It appears the Royals may indeed suck this year. You can feel the enthusiasm waning as frustrated fans mutter “Same old Royals.” Danny Duffy can’t throw strikes. Joakim Soria looked lost (but may have been found). Alcides Escobar can’t hit and Ned Yost refuses to pinch hit for him late in games. Outfielders let fly balls drop.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Can’t complain. That’s my simple, two word summation of our week in Hilton Head. I know you expect much more than that from me, though. I will do my best no to disappoint. Our home was gorgeous. S. spent many, many hours researching the options and looking for something that would hold a significant chunk of our family and be a nice place to stay. She found the perfect place. We stayed in the Forest Beach area, which is on the ocean-side of the island.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
By the time you read this, we should be several hours from home in the Family Truckster - a.k.a. Swagger Wagon a.k.a. Daddy’s Blue Van - heading south. We will pass near Cincinnati, go through Lexington and Knoxville, then turn east towards Asheville. We will spend Friday night visiting with friends there and then continue southeast Saturday until we can continue no further. Our final destination is Hilton Head, South Carolina, where we will be spending a week with the kids, three aunts, one cousin, and two grandparents.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
A long-winded, semi-diary of last night’s storms in Indiana. Crazy week. If I’m not mistaken, the bulk of my regular readers have heard tornado sirens and taken cover at some point in the past 72 hours. Hopefully all of you made it through this insane weather safe and sound. Last night was our turn to get Mother Nature’s hammer. To make it even more fun, S. was working, so it was just me and the girls.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Piggy-backing a bit on my post about cloud-based music systems last week, my baseball post for this week will focus on the changing broadcast technology of the game. I first became a baseball fan in 1978. But I really went head-over-heels for the game in 1980, when we moved to Kansas City. Suddenly I could listen to every single Royals game. Every week or so a couple road games were on TV.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
I’ve wanted to believe Lance Armstrong for a long time. I know I’m not the only one. Each time there was a new allegation claiming Lance had, in fact, benefited from various banned substances and procedures during his Tour de France reign, I held the company line: He had been tested over and over and over again through his career and never been caught. He operated under as intense a microscope as any athlete in modern times, with seemingly the entire European cycling community focused on nailing him for doing something wrong, and was never caught.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
In recent weeks both Amazon and Google have launched cloud music services. Persistent rumors have it that Apple will follow suit sometime soon. Throw in a wide-range of independent streaming services and we may be on the verge of the next digital music revolution: the age of cloud storage, high speed broadband access, and the ability to stream our music wherever we want it. I’ve been a loyal iTunes user for almost seven years.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
We are in the midst of some crazy times in our house. S. was away at a work conference for a couple days. She now works eight straight days. I have a couple work assignments coming up, and really could be working almost every night if S. was not. C. finishes school this week, M. next week. Next Friday we’re off to South Carolina for a week. Oh, and C. turned five yesterday.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Did I jump off the Bond Bandwagon? Nope. Between watching the Royals most nights and keeping up with my Thursday shows, it’s been tough to watch movies lately. My slight reluctance to tackle the next Bond movie didn’t help. I remember hearing, when I was a kid, that some people thought George Lazenby was the best Bond ever. Back then, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was rarely, if ever, shown on TV.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
You would think I learned my lesson already. I was unreasonably excited about Josh Selby’s arrival at KU last fall, and downright giddy the day he debuted against USC. That didn’t work out so well, after the first five games or so. Four years ago, I was pumped for Alex Gordon’s arrival in Kansas City. That excitement quickly disappeared and did not return until this season, when Gordon seems to have finally figured things out.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
In case you missed my recent ramblings about my training schedule, I ran 13.1 miles Saturday. It went pretty darn well, all things considered. First, the important thing. Not only did I finish but I did so in 2:21. So I was slow, but that was expected. I was pleased to break 2:30, although it was another sobering reminder of my age. When I ran a half-marathon 11 years ago with a sore hamstring in pouring rain in hilly Kansas City, I got in in 2:05.
Friday, April 29, 2011
We all have our sports weak spots. There are those who think Pete Rose did nothing wrong. Giants fans embraced Barry Bonds when the rest of the baseball world shunned him. I guess there are a few people out there who think Roger Clemens isn’t lying. And then there’s Manny Ramirez. I’ve written many times over the years about my love for Manny. Through all of his bizarre behavior, I stuck with him because he was such a joy to watch in the batter’s box.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a new blog, not to replace this one but rather in addition to it to give me an outlet for all my technology geekery. If that happens, I’ll let you all know. I wrote something this morning that would have fit such a blog perfectly. But, in the absence of it, below I shall share with you my thoughts on the latest “scandal” to plague the fine Americans at Apple, Inc.
Monday, April 25, 2011
I once made the grandiose assertion that the Beastie Boys saved my life. The context was, in our preparations to see the B-Boys live in 1998, several of us were sharing our favorite Beasties memories. My claim that they saved my life stemmed from the year my family spent in San Leandro, CA. Our arrival in the Bay Area over the holidays of 1986 coincided with the explosion of the Beasties' Licensed to Ill.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
A few notes from our Easter celebration. M., who it should be noted is getting smarter by the minute, had an interesting observation last week. She suggested that the Easter Bunny exists simply so Easter is exciting for kids. She’s received a healthy dose of why Easter is significant, going to a Catholic school and all, but apparently she was unimpressed. She said she knows all about how Jesus died and they put him behind the rock then he came back to life and moved the rock.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
So there I was, sitting on my couch, watching Luke Hochevar mow down Cleveland batter after Cleveland batter1 Wednesday night and, for a few moments, I thought history was unfolding on my TV. The first 15 batters Hochevar faced failed to reach base. He was commanding every pitch beautifully. He and Matt Treanor seemed to have a solid plan of attack. Even when a Cleveland batter made contact, the ball flew directly to a Royals fielder.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Time for two more Bond movies. Thunderball, 1965 Four years, four Bond movies. While there was a sense of extravaganza to the first three Bond movies, Thunderball feels like the moment the series became a massive event. Sprawling, audacious plots by the bad guys. Large deployments of troops by both sides. And massive climactic battles. In this case, it all works. Almost. What kills Thunderball is not the cheese factor, which again creeps upward.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: expectations for athletes are never fair. Especially for kids who were high school stars and who move on to elite college programs. All these kids do is play a game they have some natural talent for very well and suddenly outsiders are ranking them against other kids their age, experts are touting them as the missing piece to teams that are already loaded with talent, and fans expect players who may not have to shave more than once a month to step in and play like Kobe or LeBron.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
I’ve been kicking around a minor change to the blog for a couple weeks. I’m still not 100% happy with how it looks right now, but I’m going to go with it for the time being. Basically, Reader’s Notebook posts are disappearing. I will still be listing the books I read, but instead of doing a monthly listing, I will be posting each book individually on a new Reading page. You can either hit that link to see the first entry, or click on the Reading link up at the top of the page.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Winters are hard for me. I think that’s probably the case for most stay-at-home parents. You run out of things to do to entertain the kids. They get sick of being stuck inside around each other, and you, constantly. The longer the winter stretches, the more tension builds. I’ll admit that each year, when we get to late February/early March, I’m pretty much ready for them to leave for a month or so and let me recharge.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
If the Internet is good at anything, it’s connecting people with similar, obscure interests.1 If there’s something that interests you even in the slightest, chances are you can find a community of people who are crazy about the subject. Blogs, Flickr groups, newsgroups, podcasts. Thirty minutes of searching on Google can produce enough research material to keep you busy for weeks. Example: people love to show off their desks. Either they’re sharing the computer hardware they own, 2 showing off their interior design chops, or perhaps are writers and just want to share how their carefully crafted writing space looks.
Monday, April 11, 2011
It seems like once a week I’m linking to Joe Posnanski’s blog. Believe me, I’m tempted to do so more often. In fact, I’m surprised that someone hasn’t already set up a blog where all they do is use Joe’s posts as a jumping-off point for their own writing. His latest effort, at its surface a commentary on what happened to reporter Tara Sullivan at the Master’s but evolves into a discussion on Internet commentary, is typically brilliant.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Opening Day, bitches! In general, I’m against beginning the season on a Thursday. Opening Day should be on a Monday, preferably the Monday of the NCAA title game. But, needing something to take my mind off of basketball, I’m granting MLB a waiver this year. I can’t wait to fire up MLB.tv in a few hours and start watching some games. Of course it snowed here almost all day Wednesday, so odds are most of the early, East Coast games will either be played in shitty weather or not played at all.
Monday, March 28, 2011
This week Pearl Jam reissued their second and third albums, Vs. and Vitalogy. I’ve listened to both online, and neither is as interesting or exciting as last year’s reissue of Ten, their debut album. Ten was recorded and produced in a manner that did not fit with how the band’s sound evolved. While remixing and rereleasing it was probably self-indulgent, the result was surprisingly great. In fact, I now only have the remixed songs from Ten on my hard drive, the originals banished to the CD box in the basement.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Well, that certainly sucked. I should have done what I threatened to do midway through the first half: turn off the TV, get in the car, and drive until the game was over. It worked against Davidson three years ago. Perhaps it would have worked yesterday. Instead, I just turned the volume down when the second half began, pulled out the MacBook Air, and dove into some media file organization projects I had been putting off for awhile.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
There are times in every man’s life when he must undertake a specific challenge: watch all the Bond movies. Some men are even more ambitious, endeavoring to read all the Bond novels as well. Friends, it is time for me to climb this mountain. This is not my first attempt at Mt. Bond. I believe it was the summer of 1986, the summer in which I turned 15 and still relied on my parents for transportation, that I acquired a stack of Bond books at a used bookstore and spent hours on our deck reading them in the Midwestern heat and humidity.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
If you watched any of ESPN’s coverage the night the NCAA tournament pairings were announced, you know that Jay Bilas laid into the selection committee and some of their decisions. It was great TV as few analysts, no matter what issues they had with the teams that made and did not make the tournament, have attacked the committee so directly. Nearly two weeks later, some of his criticisms seem silly, especially with VCU winning three games and still being alive.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
I had a nice long rant half-drafted, and then it got shot down. Tuesday, Amazon removed API access for Lendle and several other Kindle book lending services. That killed these services as they rely on access to Amazon databases to facilitate sharing amongst users. Amazon said they removed access because the services did not aid Amazon in its primary mission: to sell things. Fair enough. Amazon is a business and certainly has the right to deny access to their content to those they feel cut into their sales.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
16 to go. Some first weekend of the tournament. Or week, I guess, with the new First Four games. The NCAA thinks it’s being sneaky, but it’s pretty obvious that we’ll have another tournament expansion sooner rather than later. It’s just a matter of logistics, mostly securing sites for an additional weekend of games. But it’s happening. Two years from now, I bet. I’m really going out on a limb there, aren’t I?
Thursday, March 17, 2011
I’ve been stuck on a couple longer pieces all week. So to make up for that, a few smaller ideas crammed into one post. The new NCAA tournament broadcasting agreement is spectacular! Four channels with simultaneous games is about the coolest thing ever. We spent most of Thursday outside, enjoying the perfect weather, so I read e-mails and Tweets and blog posts carrying on about the viewing options jealously. Finally, after the girls collapsed into bed, I was able to watch.