… but that’s because the Rays beat the White Sox in Game 4 to move on to the ALCS!!
I had the chance to purchase ALCS Games 1 & 2 tickets today but was so busy at work I didn’t get a jump on the purchase at 9am like I did for the ALDS. As a result, the games were sold out (online at least) by the time I tried to purchase my tickets. I’ll just have to hope I get chosen in the lottery for the later games.
Way to go Rays!
A friend pointed me to MLB’s Gameday application this afternoon during Game 1 of the ALDS between the Rays and White Sox (the Rays are up 4-3 as I write this). This thing is amazing … how do they do it?
The mini version is shown to the left. It gives you the pitch-by-pitch details, shows the location, trajectory, and speed of each pitch, and then the play-by-play details … for free and in near real-time.
The full-blown 3D version lets you use your mouse to change the camera angle and zoom in/out while viewing the graphic pitch overlay. I didn’t try this but apparently after a play you can click on a hyperlink and see the actual video footage of the play.
That’s some seriously cool technology … I would love to know how it works. They have a blog and it appears that they just launched this 3D version back in June.
Ever since getting the Wii Fit back in May and having the balance board pronounce me “overweight” I’ve been more focused on my personal fitness: I’ve been watching what I eat, eating less, and exercising more.
When my eyes were opened by the Wii balance board, my BMI was 26 and I weighed 200lbs. Earlier this month, after working hard for the past 5 months, I finally got my BMI back into the “normal” range (below 25), am down to about 182lbs and am still working on losing more. If nothing else, Wii Fit has given me an easy, fun way to track my daily exercise and keep me motivated. I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve wanted to eat something and then thought “man, the Wii is going to yell at me if I do this.” 😉
Yesterday I placed a pre-order for the $99 Fitbit that is coming out in the late-December/early-January timeframe. I had heard Leo Laporte and Jason Calacanis discussing this new company on a recent episode of TWiT and seemed to vaguely remember hearing/reading about it shortly after the company announced its product at the TechCrunch50 conference earlier in September. I have a thing for gadgets, and since the Wii Fit started me on this path of weight loss and general fitness (and has kept my interest so far) I figured this little gadget might help keep me going.
It’s basically a souped up pedometer that you can wear unobtrusively on your person. It tracks your steps and calculates how far you’ve walked and how many calories you’ve burned … nothing new there. Here’re the cool parts. You can also wear it at night and it will track your sleeping habits: when you fall asleep, how long you stay in deep sleep, how often you wake up, etc. It’s also wireless so you can sync the data it collects back to your PC (and from there to your account on the Fitbit website), and has a rechargeable battery which you charge via the included docking station.
Sounds cool, right? I can’t wait to try it out, but until it arrives early next year I’ll have to stick with my Wii Fit/Dance Dance Revolution exercise plan. 🙂
TiVo and Nero today announced LiquidTV, a package that brings the TiVo experience to your Windows-based PC available on October 15.
There are plenty of great blog articles covering this new product, like Megazone’s over on Gizmo Lovers.
It looks pretty slick … it’s basically the TiVo interface on your PC, something (some) people have wanted for quite while. It looks like it will still require a subscription to the TiVo service (you get a year free when you purchase the software), so that’s one thing against it when competing against the other media center software out there. Hopefully the superior interface and features will separate it from the pack. Personally this is not something I’m interested in since I already have plenty of TiVo boxes but it’s good to see TiVo branching out.
I was selected in the lottery to be able to purchase Rays playoff tickets for Game 5 of the ALDS at Tropicana Field. Hopefully we won’t need to play a fifth game, but I’ll be there at the Trop if we do!
We’re still waiting to see if the Rays will be playing the Twins or the White Sox. If the White Sox win their make-up game against the Tigers tonight, they’ll have to play a tie-breaker game with the Twins to determine the winner of the AL Central.
It didn’t happen quite the way they it wanted to, but I suspect they’re not going to complain.
With the Red Sox loss to the Yankees last night, the Tampa Bay Rays clinched their first ever American League East division title. After finishing dead last last year at 66-96 and never having won more than 70 games in their entire existence, wining the division and having a 96-64 record is an amazing accomplishment. Not to mention this is the first time since 1997 that a team other than Boston or New York has won the AL East. Wow.
The magic number to clinch had been at 1 for the past few days, ever since the Rays swept Baltimore in four games earlier this week (including their first ever double-header double-win). But then they just couldn’t win against the Tigers, and the Indians weren’t helping out by losing to Boston. So it’s unfortunate (to me anyway) that it was the Yankees that ended up helping out, but the divisional title is the divisional title. With only two games left in the season that was cutting it a little close …
So, bring on the Twins or White Sox … GO RAYS!
Preparations for the feast for the Summer of the Golden Plain are underway at Redwall Abbey, and young Mattimeo’s mother sets him to work with the other inhabitants. His father, Matthias, is the guardian of Redwall Abbey and it is this fact that puts the young Mattimeo in danger as the evil Slagar the Fox plots to kidnap him in a bid to shake the very foundations of the Abbey and its inhabitants.
The third book of Brian Jaques‘ Redwall series, “Mattimeo,” picks up eight seasons (so, uh, two years?) after the events of “Redwall.”
Mattimeo is the young son of Matthias (the Champion of Redwall) and Cornflower. Growing up as the son of the Warrior isn’t an easy thing for Matti, who tends to get himself into trouble. During the feast of the Summer of the Golden Plain, Slagar the fox, a slaver, infiltrates Redwall Abbey, drugs the inhabitants, and makes off with Redwall’s young ones.
Once Matthias and the rest of the woodlanders awaken and realize what has happened, a grand pursuit begins which takes us, the readers, and the rescue party (Jess squirrel, Basil Stag Hare, and some new and old friends) through the southern reaches of Mossflower country to the underground kingdom of Malkariss.
While the warrior party is away chasing Slagar, a second plotline follows the raven General Ironbeak and his army of rooks, crows, and magpies as they invade the roofspaces of the abbey and attempt to take over Redwall from the top down. With their warriors gone, the remaining Abbey residents must come up with different, inventive ways of dealing with the invaders.
As before, my daughter was tired of waiting for me and has already gone ahead and read the next book in the series, “Mariel of Redwall.” She’s promised to wait for me to finish that one so we can read “Salamandastron” together.
I discovered, while perusing the wiki, that there was a Redwall animated series on Canadian public television back in the late 90s/early 2000s. I managed to find the Season 1 DVDs (which basically cover the first book) on eBay and bought a set for my daughter’s birthday (I think she’ll flip out). There is also talk of a live-action/CGI Redwall movie to be released in 2011.
The day before Hurricane Charley hit back in 2004, I cut plywood sheets to protect all of our windows using my tiny jigsaw (which is all I had at the time), and it took forever:
But now that our new impact-resistant hurricane windows are in (partially paid for by the state of Florida thanks to the My Safe Florida Home project), we no longer need them! This:
has been replaced by this:
The boards have been just sitting in the shed (and garage) taking up space and providing a haven for hundreds of cockroaches, ants, and other creepy-crawlies (shudder). Over the weekend, we cleaned out the shed (in preparation for getting rid of it altogether) and moved all of the wood (after I fumigated to kill the insect hordes) into the garage.
After the 2004 hurricane season I purchased a 7″ circular saw, figuring I would need it at some point when it was time to replace the plywood, not wanting to have to use the jigsaw again. Luckily, I never had the need to use the new saw … until tonight when I started cutting up those old plywood sheets for the trash. Wow, it’s like cutting butter … and kinda fun! 🙂
The Rays beat the Twins tonight 7-2, clinching their first ever playoff berth!
Could they possibly hold on and win the division?
In the year 3016, the Second Empire of Man spans hundreds of star systems, thanks to the faster-than-light Alderson Drive. No other intelligent beings have ever been encountered, not until a light sail probe enters a human system carrying a dead alien. The probe is traced to the Mote, an isolated star in a thick dust cloud, and an expedition is dispatched.
Jerry Pournelle is a frequent guest on TWiT. That, coupled with a recent mention by Steve Gibson on Security Now (episode #151) and the fact that I’ve never read any of Pournelle’s work, prompted me to purchase and read “The Mote in God’s Eye” (by Pournelle and Larry Niven). This book is an excellent example of hard science fiction, about as far as you can get from the last classic SF text I read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The story is about mankind’s first encounter with intelligent life: an alien probe, having travelled for hundreds of years in “regular” space is discovered. A combination military/scientific/political/religious/commercial mission is launched by the humans to the Mote system, where they meet the Moties and begin learning about their culture, their history … and their dark secret. I can’t even begin to describe the plot here with any justice, so I recommend checking out the wiki page (just beware of spoilers!) if you’re interested.
My favorite thing about this book is that the aliens are … well, alien. This isn’t “Stargate SG-1” or “Doctor Who” or even “Star Trek.” There are no universal translators, the Moties don’t speak English (at first), they don’t look human, they’re so … unfamiliar. Pournelle and Niven do a great job of creating an entirely alien race, complete with physiology, theology, mentality, architecture, technology, the whole nine yards.
They wrote a sequel, “The Gripping Hand,” some 20 years later (“Mote” was published in 1974). I’ll probably read that one as well. I seem to remember reading and enjoying Niven’s “The Integral Trees” when I was a kid, so it’s probably time to revisit his works as well.