We won again tonight, 2-1.
Category: General
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Soccer
Tonight was our first soccer game. We won 1-0. I’ve never played soccer in my life and was the goalie.
Now I’ll explain why the hell Ana and I (and Jay, with Katherine joining next week) ended up on an indoor soccer field. At my work a group of people have been fielding a team for a few years now. They play at the local indoor soccer facility against other people who don’t play soccer professionally – think along the lines of intramural sports. Three of these guys sit around me at work and suckered me into playing this year with them. I’ve turned them down repeatedly since I’ve never once kicked a soccer ball, let alone play a game. So now the four of us (Ana, Jay, Katherine, and I) will be playing soccer for the next month and a half.
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Tickets
I noticed on Friday that Garrison Keillor is coming to the Sangamon Auditorium here in Springfield so I purchased a pair of tickets for Ana and I to see him. For those that haven’t heard of him, or Prairie Home Companion, or Lake Wobegon – google them. He’s a great storyteller that can make the hours pass with is voice. We can’t wait to see the show.
I then noticed that Yo-Yo Ma is going to be at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra next April, so I got us a pair of tickets to that too. I enjoy a lot of his music and he should be awesome to listen to in person.
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Justin’s a Gamer
Last week, Justin Long proclaimed his desire to be a gamer. So he ordered a new PC and it arrived early this week. It’s kinda hard to be a gamer when all you have at your disposal is Minesweeper and Solitaire, so he had to order Myst IV and Battlefield 2 (to join us in games). Well, Myst arrived yesterday and he spent the rest of the day playing it. The guy who says he’s usually in bed by 10 was up until 1 this morning and had no recollection of time passing.
We’re not too sure if this is better than his last great pasttime: Beer drinking at Spammy’s. I’ll keep you posted.
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Series lead
Last night the Cardinals took a 3-1 lead in the World Series. Pretty unbelievable. The games so far have been very fun ones to watch. You can definitely tell the difference between the young and relatively inexperienced Tigers and the veteran Cardinals. One thing’s for sure, regardless of the outcome, the Tigers are going to be dangerous next year with all of their excellent young pitchers.
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New Cubicle Member
As of last week, there is a new member of my cubicle here at work. It’s a nice green plant that Ana potted and sent with me. We’ve given it a name here too – Edward McConaughey. That’s right, distant relative to Matthew.
It’s been pretty nice having a little green at my desk. I hope it stays that color and doesn’t get sympathetic towards the dying leaves outside the window. Only time will tell.
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MySpace
As promised a while back, I have a few comments on the short time I’ve been a member of myspace.
First, a quick background. I’ve been quite curious of the whole social networking fad that has been going on. As such, I first joined Facebook to get a peek at what it was all about. I created my account, added a few people, checked it frequently. Then sat there. Outside of getting in contact with old classmates/friends, it’s a pretty damn boring environment. I think it’s safe to say that I still didn’t get it.
A little time went by, and I got tired of hearing all this roar about MySpace. I assumed it was just another site like Facebook, but wanted to be sure before I wrote it off. So I went and created an account…..
Now that I’ve been on it for a month or so, I feel no need to hold back judgement. Holy crap, what a steaming pile MySpace is. I was definitely wrong when I first thought it was another Facebook. Hell no, at least facebook has a web application that is clean, relatively fast, and… here’s a thought… WORKS! I can’t keep track of how many times I’ve tried searching and get a stupid error page saying their engineers have been notified of the error. I’m throwing the bullshit flag on that one! They’d probably receive on the order of magnitude of 100,000 emails a day if that were the case.
I then tried setting aside my frustration from the technical side of myspace, and focus on the idea and not the implementation. Yeah, there’s nothing there either. I now fully believe that 90% of MySpace users are legally blind, and 85% of the remaining 10% are color blind. I’ve never seen so many webpages that make me wish I’d just have the seizure and get it over with. Again, I tried setting my disgust aside and focus on the content. But then I realized I couldn’t focus on the content because some really annoying song just started playing from someone’s page! When I finally turn that off, all I see are retarded internet joke images, lame shout-outs on the bulletin boards, and shitty camera phone pictures. To those I say: 1) everyone has seen those jokes, they aren’t new. Ever. 2) Oh boy, you’re only the hundredth person to say “Wow, it’s been a long time!” and 3) just because your phone has a camera doesn’t mean it was meant to be used all the time. Seriously, put it down.
I’m convinced that MySpace needs to just be buried in internet history and forgotten about. I admit that I still don’t care about social networking sites, but someone’s gotta come along and beat MySpace. Please! -
You just can’t rush multithreading
A week or so ago in Chef, I needed to add some multithreaded code. At the time, I saw a few things that were going to be issues in a multithreaded environment, so I quickly put some syncronization code around critical resources. I didn’t feel like taking the time right then to really think it through and get it right – I even recall thinking something along the lines of This should work ok, but I don’t really think it’s enough…
Sure enough, a bug popped up tonight from that block of code. It didn’t take long to see what was going on, because in the back of my head was the suspect syncronization code. But the moral of the story is (even if you try to ignore/deny it) you just cannot rush multithreaded programming. Period.
I’ll be fixing that code tomorrow night.
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Game 5
Game 5 goes to the Cardinals! Woooo! They now take a 3-2 lead in the series headed back to NY.
The Cardinals have been extremely lucky, knock on wood. The weather has aligned twice in this series to give much needed rest to the pitching staff at critical moments. The first postponed game allowed Carpenter to throw game 2 and the postponed game yesterday allowed another day rest for Weaver. Who could ask for better timing?
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News sites, please
Stop posting so many stories on your websites that are videos. This is so frustrating – you go and scan the headlines on your favorite news site and find an interesting headline. You click the link, but does it open a nice webpage where you can scan the article? No! It plays a video.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t really scan a video like I can a webpage. Not to mention the 30 second commercial that precedes it. So now a task that could have taken me maybe 15-20 seconds (scanning the article for pertinant information) now takes 30 seconds just to start viewing the story. Is this really what we want the web to be? I could probably use Google News to get around this problem, but Google News really hasn’t kept my interest for some reason or another.
News sites, can you please stop this practice?
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