Go download Firefox 3 RIGHT NOW.
Submitted by jrenaut on Tue, 06/17/2008 - 5:51pm.Today is the day! It's Firefox Download Day! Their servers seem to have recovered from the earlier rush, so now is your chance to get Firefox 3.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to close other applications before starting Setup.
Watching a little basketball, playing with some computers
Submitted by jrenaut on Fri, 05/02/2008 - 7:55pm.So how's this for a great Friday evening:
I'm sitting on the couch. To my left, the windows are open because it's a gorgeous spring evening. Right next to me on the couch, the wife is napping, waiting for the Celtics game.
I have a kitchen full of beer and wine left over from my birthday party last week. We have the ingredients ready for dinner, pasta with tomatoes and asparagus, plus some cauliflower poppers.
In front of me is my brand new work computer, on which I've just installed Launchy, which everyone should install on their Windows machine. It's similar to Gnome-Do for Linux and Quicksilver for Mac - I've been using Gnome-Do for a while and I love it, and wanted something like it for my Windows work machine.
And speaking of Linux, my personal laptop is currently downloading and upgrading to the latest version of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron.
So, I have sports, food and drink, computer geekishness, and my fabulous wife. I have no idea what more I could possibly want.
The wife will think I'm crazy
Submitted by jrenaut on Mon, 04/07/2008 - 12:56pm.She'll think I'm crazy, but that's just because she's not as big of a nerd as I am.
Anyway, you may notice that, when I talk about a baseball player, I usually link to his career stats at Baseball Reference. It's a great site for the stat nerd. And they support themselves through sponsorships. Yesterday, I decided to sponsor two pages in the name of Complaint Hub.
The first is Chad Bradford, one of the stars of Moneyball and now an Oriole. As you can see from his stat page, Billy Beane and the A's got four years out of him for about what the Orioles are paying him this year. But that's okay.
The second is Mark Knudson. When I was little, I had a little handheld baseball game, Tomy Pocket Baseball. You pulled the lever and a ball dropped, and then you released the lever to swing the bat and try to hit the ball into one of the holes for a hit. It was awesome. I had my own league. I used real players, their names painstakingly copied from baseball cards. Mark Knudson was the all-time leader in wins. He retired with a record of 48-5 and a 0.59 ARPI. I used Average Runs Per Inning because my games tended to be higher scoring than real baseball games, and not multiplying by the number of innings in a game made a good ARPI look more like a good ERA. These were four inning games, so his ERA would have been 2.37, which would have been fine. But he was the greatest of all-time, and the average pitcher would have had a much higher ERA.
Anyway, I have no idea if these sponsorships will drive any traffic here. But I get a lot of enjoyment from Baseball Reference, and now I've given something back.
Trying to write about something other than baseball
Submitted by jrenaut on Tue, 04/01/2008 - 8:34am.So, I'm trying to think of something I want to write about rather than rehash yesterday's Orioles game. No one wants to hear about it - O's fans will just get depressed, and the Rays don't have any fans. Maybe the players' mothers. Anyway.
So I thought I might write about Quacker of the House Nancy Pelosi advising the President to boycott the Olympic opening ceremonies to protest China's all-around unpleasantness, but then I was reading the article and my eyes started to glaze over. No one cares what advice Nancy Pelosi has for President Bush. She'd be more likely to get a reaction out of a large rock.
Then I thought I should say something about IBM's temporary suspension from getting federal contracts for some horrendous thing they did to EPA that no one will explain. This is huge news, but until we get some more details, it isn't all that interesting. Or maybe it's not interesting because my mind is refusing to grasp the massive incompetence or malice necessary to actually be disciplined by the government at all.
But really, the most exciting thing about today is that I plan to go meet Charles Stross at the Brickskeller tonight. He's one of my favorite authors, and he's in town for something or other. He claims he's trying to fend off jet-lag, but anyone going to a place with a beer list like this is merely fending off sobriety.




