Lincecum hijinks

L is for Lincecum, who won #14 yesterday?



L is also for lugnuts, which along with tires and rims are missing from my car today, because someone stole took them from my car while it was parked at the BART garage in Hayward and I was watching the Giants game.



Back to the Beatles tomorrow.

In a town that dare not speak its name

This weekend I volunteered at the Stonebrae Classic, a Nationwide Tour event that was played just a few miles up the hill from where I live. The Nationwide Tour is like golf's version of triple-A, just one level below the PGA tour.

Anyway, this event was at Stonebrae Country Club, a brand new gated community that seems to go out of its way to avoid mentioning the town that surrounds it. Stonebrae claims to be "a private, gated country club community located in the East Bay hills", but it's actually part of the same wayward East Bay suburb where I live. I don't remember crossing any town limits between my house and Stonebrae.

Their golf course changed its name from Stonebrae CC to TPC San Francisco Bay -- "Etched into the rugged hillside high above San Francisco’s East Bay". And the list of nearby hotels and restaurants list a bunch chain hotels and restaurants (like Hooters and In-N-Out) over the hill in more prestigious area.

There's also a four year university up in the hills above my home that changed its name to Cal-State East Bay to avoid mentioning the actual city where it's located. No matter how hard those college kids and country clubbers disavow their community, there's still no town called "East Bay". Wayward suburb represent!

Shufflin

I didn't participate in the shuffle meme when it was going around last month, so here's my chance. Here's the drill.

Directions:
1. Put your iPod, iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. Write the name of that song down, no matter how silly it sounds.


How would you describe yourself?
"Before Too Long" (Paul Kelly & the Messengers)

What do you like in a man/woman?
"Only Love Can Break Your Heart" (St. Etienne)

How do you feel today?
"Blowin' Away" (Laura Nyro)

What is your life's purpose?
"Joy Division Oven Gloves" (Half Man Half Biscuit)

What is your motto?
"Don't Feed The Rats" (The Lilac Time)

What do your friends think of you?
"Tractor Rape Chain" (Guided By Voices)

What do your parents think about you?
"Back Seat Of My Car" (Paul McCartney)

What do you think of your best friend?
"Radio Wave" (Oranger)

What do you think of the person you love?
"It's the End Of The World As We Know It" (R.E.M.)

What is your life story?
"The End Of Something" (David Lewis)

What do you want to do when you grow up?
"The Evangelist" (Robert Forster)

What do you think when you see the person you love?
"You Think Too Hard" (Syd Straw)

What will you/did you dance to at your wedding?
"Charmless Man" (Blur)

Your favorite hobby or biggest interest?
"Dreamer" (Dennis Wilson)

What is your biggest fear?
"Hickory Wind" (The Byrds)

What is your biggest secret?
"A Proper Cup Of Tea" (Anton Barbeau)

What do you think of your friends?
"Trouser Press" (The Bonzo Dog Band)

Typealyzer Baby

What's your blog type? I'm ESFP

ESFP - The Performers

The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.

Clip-on comfort

Even though I'm a strong believer in Apple's portable media player, the iPod (perhaps you've heard of it?), their earbuds leave a lot to be desired. My iPod Touch came with the worst earbuds I'd ever seen, so I kept using the Sony phones I got a few years ago with my PSP. These were nice and compact, but over the past few weeks, I've started to notice that nothing was coming through on my left ear, and thought I was going deaf in one ear.

The earphone just stopped working on one side, so I had to buy new ones. I'm particular about phones, and don't like in-ear buds that come with iPods, but also don't like the classic mini-headphone design. I found these Philips SHS4700 headphones at Target yesterday (regularly $19.99 on sale for $15.99), and they're pretty much exactly what I like. Great sound and comfortable fit -- the best of both worlds!


Listening to these is like hearing all my old albums in a new light. I'm going to fall asleep to OK Computer tonight, and wish I owned Dark Side Of The Moon -- isn't that supposed to be the best headphone album ever?

Generation Jonestown

On this 30th anniversary, here's BJM's "Ballad of Jim Jones"

The Jonestown Massacre was just a week before the Moscone/Milk assassinations, and no matter how bad things are now in the S.F. Bay Area, they aren't as bad as they were then. In November 1978, I was in eighth grade and disco was still popular!

Light is a Mystery

A new perfect Christmas ornament from the American Family Association.

Let Your "Light" Shine For Christ This Christmas Season!
Looking for an effective way to express your Christian faith this Christmas season to honor our Lord Jesus? Now you can…. with the “Original Christmas Cross” yard decoration.

Express your Christian faith with.. a burning cross? really! Forgetting all the ugliness associated with burning crosses (and I'm just not talking about Madonna's "Like A Prayer" video!), isn't the cross the symbol of the other end of Jesus's life?

Taking a Stanyan against Haight

Two words for both sides in the Prop. 8 debate.

Under the Milky Ways and Musketeers

There was a big bowl of mini-Mars Halloween candy treats at our front desk today. All the Twix,M&M's, and Snickers bars were gone before lunchtime, but most of the Milky Ways and 3 Musketeers are still unclaimed at the end of the day.



Does anyone like 3 Musketeers and Milky Ways? They're like the unwanted stepchildren of the Mars empire. Twix bars have that cookie crunch, Snickers have peanuts, and Mars bars have almonds, but Milky Ways and 3 Muskys are just big blobs of nougat and caramel that stick to your teeth. They're what's left over after you've already eaten all the good stuff from your Mars fun size variety pack.

In other Halloween news, it looks like today's Family Circus violates this year's "no Sarah Palin costumes allowed" rule by having Dolly dressed up as you-know-who. Someone in our building today was dressed like Ashley Todd . Hey, last week called -- they want their Halloween costume back!

Twenty Five Years

I attended my 25th high school reunion this weekend, which means I've been out of high school for an entire quarter century (class of 1983)!  By some strange coincidence, my high school in Singapore chose to have its 25th reunion in San Francisco, and about 25 of my classmates (out of a graduating class of 150) made the trip.   I live just across the bay, so it wasn't a very long trip for me, but some folks came from as far away as Australia.

Going to an American school overseas is a lot like attending school in a small town, and we have a really tight class that's had reunions every five years since 1983.  It seems like everyone in my class but me has gone on to get married and have kids and lead responsible lives, while I'm still living like a 40-year old college student, but we're all still in high school when we get together! On Friday night, we went to see an 80s cover band at some bar in North Beach, and I can at least take solace in knowing a lot more about bands and songs from the 1980s that my classmates do.

Since I was S.F. local, people were asking me about places to go and this restaurant or that bar, but I don't get out to the city very much, and almost never venture into the touristy Chinatown/Nob Hill/North Beach/Wharf area, so I was like a tourist in my own town.   I even went to see the Fleet Week performance by the Blue Angels, which I hadn't ever seen before.  Airshows are a lot like fireworks, because I'd never make an effort to see them, but think they're really cool while they're going on!      

Relatedly, I succumbed to peer pressure and finally joined facebook, so if any facebookers want to "friend" me, you know where to find me. Hopefully it's better than myspace!

stock photo

Just back from a trip to New York and New Jersey, where I had a lot of fun visiting the East Coast and catching up with friends. Yesterday, I experienced the thrill of winning a free game of mini-golf and the agony of crashing some poor kid's rental bicycle during my last thirty minutes in Ocean City, NJ.

Today, I had a few hours in NYC before heading to JFK airport, so I visited Ground Zero and the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. This was my first trip to New York since 9/11, and that big hole in the skyline where the twin towers used to stand is still devastating. The markets were getting hammered when I dropped by the NYSE (down 400 points), and there were some dazed investors on the Street, but the outside of the NYSE building didn't look any different than usual.

The best part about the subway to JFK airport, is that it's the A train to Far Rockaway, all the way from Duke Ellington to the Ramones in one $2 subway journey!

Joe Chimay

Last night I wanted to find some libations to go with watching baseball and vice presidential debates, but I didn't have a bottle opener or a corkscrew and my hotel room didn't have a fridge, so my options were basically beer in a can or a bottle wine with a screwtop. The store also had bottles of Belgian beer (Chimay) with a corkscrew, so I picked up one of their Abbey ales that was supposed to be served "at cellar temperatures" (45-50 degrees F). And it had an easy open champagne-style cork, so it didn't require a bottle opener.

The opportunity to pay ten dollars for a bottle of beer doesn't present itself often to me, so I got the bottle and took it back to my room. Even though it costs almost as much as I usually pay for a 12-pack, the Chimay was smooth and rich and quite satisfying, even being drunk from those small plastic cups they provide at chain hotels. One 750ml bottle lasted for three hours, because this ale is designed to be sipped like liquor instead of chugged like Bud Lite.

As far as the ballgames, I caught the end of the Rays-White Sox game (which was pretty good), the entire Phillies-Brewers game (which wasn't that good), and most of the Cubs-Dodgers game (which was even worse). National league baseball is so boring. Luckily I was able to flip between the games and the debate.

As far as the VP debate, I thought Palin did okay. She came across like a playlist of Republican talking points set on "shuffle", but that probably played to the Republican base ("tax and spend, cut and run, hockey mom, Joe Sixpack" = she's just like us!). It was obvious that Biden was playing defense, and trying to outline the differences between Obama and McCain, and succeeded well at that, but didn't get Palin to say anything too incriminating. She was mostly held back by the Republican policies she was forced to depend, while Biden had the issues on his side. All in all, it wasn't a real game-changer in the presidential race, but that probably favors the party that's already leading in the polls with just one more month until Election Day.

I can't deal with Sarah Palin's speaking voice (fingernails on a chalkboard), so I kept muting my TV while she was speaking and letting the closed caption write out the words for me. Right wing talking points seem a little more palatable when you don't hear them spoken out loud in a grating church-lady voice!

The world is collapsing

When U.S. markets are so volatile that the Dow can drop 777 points today (the largest point drop ever) when Congress votes down a $700B bailout, I'm wondering how much they would be helped in the long run by passing the bailout. It seems like something is obviously broken, and the government is trying to put a Band-aid on a cancerous tumor.

I've been following the bailout debates for the last week, and am still not sure what to think. On the surface, it seems like a bad deal for taxpayers to bail out Wall Street, and the best argument for it that Congress and the Bush administration can come up with is "I know this deal stinks, but the survival of the economy depends on passing it!".

After today, it's clear that something needs to be done, but I'm not sure what that something is. A part of me was glad that Congressional Republicans opposed it (the Democrats voted 60-40 for it while two thirds of the Republicans opposed it), partly because their party will be blamed for the collapse and partly because this was a bad idea and I'm glad someone opposed it.

On a solipsistic level, this issue doesn't affect me that much. I have a fixed mortgage with one of the banks that failed recently, but it was gobbled up by another bank, so I still have the same mortgage. My 401(k) has lost about 10-15% over the last month, but those are paper losses on income that I've never "seen", except in my quarterly statements. About the only thing that we on Main Street can take is to keep our own personal finances are in order. For us, "no credit" means live within your means, limit your debt as much as possible, and don't risk any more money than you can safely lose on investments.

Stolen moments floating softly on the air

Today's Rick Wright subject heading comes from "Burning Bridges" off Obscured By Clouds. I keep trying to ignore the news but these Google alerts keep pulling me back!



Here's how some 133t hax0r cracked Sarah Palin's yahoo account.

The hacker guessed that Alaska's governor had met her husband in high school, and knew Palin's date of birth and home Zip code. Using those details, the hacker tricked Yahoo Inc.'s service into assigning a new password for Palin's e-mail account..

Someone was able to compromise Palin's yahoo mail account by knowing her date of birth and Zip code (information found easily on the internet) and where she met her husband (information easy to guess). That barely even qualifies as hacking -- it's like breaking into someone's luggage when they set their combination to 12345.

All the more reason to pick more "obscure" security questions for online accounts, espcially when you're conducting state government business on your Yahoo account.

The break-in of Palin's private account is especially significant because Palin sometimes uses non-government e-mail to conduct state business. Previously disclosed e-mails indicate her administration embraced Yahoo accounts as an alternative to government e-mail, which could possibly be released to the public under Alaska's Open Records Act.

Every company I've ever worked for has guidelines against using personal email accounts for work purposes. Even something as seemingly innocuous as forwarding an Excel spreadsheet to your gmail account so you can work on it at home is frowned upon. I would imagine that governments have even stricter rules about that sort of thing.

It doesn't excuse someone violating a candidate's privacy by hacking into her email account, but it says quite a lot about Palin's judgment and her ethics when she's running a state government from a Yahoo account.

Tomorrow brings another day

Today's Floydian post heading comes from Rick Wright's solo contribution to Atom Heart Mother, "Summer '68".



Everyone who said the Oakland Athletics would be lucky to win 70 games this year can suck it, because the A's have been unlucky all year and they just won their 70th game! 2008 has mostly been a lost season for the A's (especially the second half), and my interest in baseball has been waning lately, just like this post on Catfish Stew.

All the players I like are now gone.
Rich Harden was traded. Justin Duchscherer is probably lost for the year. Eric Chavez is out for the season, and may never grace the hot corner again. Frank Thomas is out for the season, and may never play again. Mark Ellis is out for the season, and may never return to Oakland.

Who is left to watch? The Oakland A's have been drained from my soul. I feel empty. What is left to say? Meaningless talking points, nothing more.

But now, this three game winning streak and crossing the 70 win threshold has renewed my interest in the A's for the last two weeks of the baseball season. They were eliminated from the playoffs long ago, but if they win their last eleven games in a row (unlikely), they'll have a winning season! And if they go 6-5 (possible), they'll have a better record than they did in 2007. And they'll probably have a better record than the Giants, even if very few people in the Bay Area even know that baseball is still going on. And the Sacramento Rivercats (Oakland's triple-A affiliate) just won their fourth PCL title and second straight Bricktown Showdown (AAA World Series), which is doubly impressive since the A's suffered so many injuries that all the best Rivercats players are already in the majors.

With the end of the baseball season, it's time for me to assess my preseason picks. Here are the list of current division leaders along with the place I picked them before the season. I would be doing really well... if I were picking in bizarro world!

AL East: Tampa Bay Rays (last place)
AL Central: Chicago White Sox (last place)
AL West: Angels (1st place)

NL East: Phillies (2nd place)
NL Central: Cubs (2nd place)
NL West: Dodgers (4th place)

I had one division right (AL West) and the other two AL divisions as wrong as I could (picking the first place teams to finish last). In the NL the Phillies, Cubs, and Dodgers are in first because of collapses by the Mets, Brewers, and Diamondbacks (who I picked first).

One of the best things about this year's baseball season is that the New York Yankees will not make the postseason for their first time in 15 years. So this Sunday's "last game ever" at Yankee Stadium will be the last game ever at Yankee Stadium! And I picked the Yankees to finish third, so I had them pegged as a non-playoff team before the start of the season.

Even though they lost to the A's yesterday, I like the Angels in the AL playoffs, possibly in a Golden State Freeway series against the Dodgers. That's a World Series matchup that somehow excites me, and I don't like either team that much. A Cubs-White Sox series (1906 rematch) would also be a good one, especially if it gets Cub fans to stop whining about one hundred years without a title.

With all the stuff about hurricanes, the financial crises, and the volatile presidential race, I've decided to boycott the news as much as possible. It's pretty easy to not read the paper and tune out TV/radio news, but hard to look the other way when my iGoogle page shows the Dow dropping another 450 points today. Time to set my "no bad news" filter on in Google News!

Google in ten years

Yesterday Flasshe posted a list of all the important things that happened on September 7th. One of the ones that caught my eye was..

1998 - Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University.

This means that Google has been around for ten years, and has become more or less synonymous with "the internet" and it's own verb. Here's what the site looked like when it launched
(click to enlarge).



There were search engines before Google (altavista, infoseek, webcrawler, lycos?), but they were all slow and unreliable, with different buttons and interfaces that would take forever to return results. Google's front page had one text box and two buttons labeled "Google Search" (which returns results) and "I'm feeling lucky" (which returns the first result), and both buttons generated results almost instantly.

Google's interface was a marvel of simplicity (they still have the same box and two buttons), and their speed and scalability made it exponentially easier to find information on the internet. It became almost everyone's homepage almost immediately, and when stumped for any question about anything, the standard response was "I'll google it" (long before google became a dictionary verb in 2006).

Over the last ten years, they've dropped the exclamation point but kept expanding their brand with lots of services that do pretty much everything related to the internet, including their own web browser, Google Chrome, which launched last week. Not bad for a decade's work.

Take two cue Howard

Even when the football game is over and the A's are losing 9-1 (to the frickin' Royals!), it's still not a good idea to start watching the Republican convention unless you want to turn into Howard Beale.



Bad baseball and Republican speeches makes me as mad as he..
a community organizer scorned!

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

Tripping on antacid

Acid indigestion is a type of indigestion involving an excess of hydrochloric acid in the stomach. Acid indigestion should be distinguished from heartburn, which typically involves aggravation of the esophagus.

When you're checking wikipedia at 3AM for differences between these two conditions while doubled over in stomach pain after having a pepperoni and jalapeño pizza and a couple bottles of of Dos Equis Amber at 9PM, and drinking another one to help "neutralize" what you have, since it's the only carbonated beverage in the house, you need to know where your esophagus is.

It's just below the breastbone, so if your pain is lower, it's probably acid indigestion. When this happens, your best bet is to try to neutralize with carbonation, wait for Montezuma to exact his "revenge" on your gastrointestinal system, and swear off spicy foods "forever". By which I mean the next 24 hours. What's the point in living if you can't eat pizza and drink beer a couple of hours before bedtime?

Under cloudy skies

My Gmail account was on the fritz for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon, where I could see my new messages on my iGoogle page, but kept getting the following "temporary error" when I clicked on the Inbox link.


I kept trying to log in every few minutes like they told me, and kept getting the same error. Apparently this was part of a global Gmail outage yesterday afternoon. The whole world was without their Gmail from 2pm to 4pm PDT. Oh the humanity!

One of the major benefits of so-called "cloud computing" (webmail and other web-based software services) is that software and data is "always there". Even if your hard disk crashes or your primary computer is lost or stolen, your data is still safe on a magic cloud on the internet.

I've been using Gmail since a few months after it launched, and have had it as my primary personal email address for the last couple of years. I have another email account on yahoo, but that's another web/cloud account. I also have a blog on blogger (obviously) and a flickr account and many other bits of personal data scattered across the intertubes.

But what happens when the cloud is down? If my home ISP or our work network is down, I can still go to the library or Starbucks to get on the internet, but I'm SOL if "the internet" (Google or Gmail) is down. A large part of my internet existence is in Google's hands, even though I've never given them a cent (or even clicked on any ad-words) and they don't provide any guarantee that the cloud will always be there for me. But what happens when it isn't?

Google later apologized for the downtime on the official Gmail blog, saying it was caused by "a temporary outage in our contacts system". Going without email for a couple of hours really isn't the end of the world (and it was only the webmail interface), but it made me think about how much faith I put in that company. Why is Gmail still in "beta" more than four years after its launch? That's enough to cause me to think twice about putting too much faith in it!

Gmail is still the best email I've ever used, and I can't imagine using anything else. Google's products are powerful and easy to use, and not terribly intrusive (unless you want them to be). And their 2008 "Summer Games Gadget" (even they aren't powerful enough to use the O word without paying the IOC) is very cool, but the internet is a big place, so I'm going to try not to use Google as my sole information source.

Magazine Street

I'm in the beautiful state of Washington this Fourth of July weekend, and flew up from the Bay Area yesterday. I forgot to bring something to read on the plane and decided to pick something up at the airport, but since the flight to Seattle is just over a couple of hours, I headed to the magazine racks.

It's been a few years since I've bought a magazine at a newsstand, so I was astounded at how expensive they've become. It was $5.95 for the latest issue of Sports Illustrated with Tim Lincecum on the cover, or the latest issue of Rolling Stone with Barack Obama on the cover, and even news magazines like Time and Newsweek had cover prices above five bucks. That's even higher than a grande mocha or a gallon of gas!

I remember when magazines were all in the $2-3 range, and UK imports like Mojo and Uncut were around $7.95 (usually with a free CD). I think paying $5 or more for less than 100 pages of which 75% are ads is a bit steep -- does anyone buy magazines anymore?

I didn't end up buying anything to read, and made do with Alaska Airlines' inflight magazine. There are apparently a lot of golf courses on Maui, and Ruth's Chris isn't one of the ten best USDA prime steakhouses in the U.S.A anymore -- they probably stopped paying their bills to the beef lobby.

Now I just need to find something to read on my return flight!