Dragging Ass

I think I pulled my ass. Over the past week or so, I competed in a hockey tournament that found me playing more often than usual. Three games in four days had me dragging! Saturday morning I woke up and after about a half hour, realized that for the first time ever, the ‘ol gluteous muscle on the right side was aching. Now, similarities have occured, but I think that was more like a bone bruise or whatever from falling directly on the bone or something. This is definitely muscle. Is it possible to pull your ass? It must be.

A burning question came out of the locker room this weekend: what is the origin of the phrase “hair of the dog that bit me?” Anyone know? Yeah, I suppose I could find it online somewhere, but I want to see if anyone knows. Leave a comment if you know.

I Keep My Visions To Myself

Two new things to point to on the blog. Just above the posts I’ve placed a Flickr badge, which contains six random photos from my Flickr page. Each time you come to the site, you’ll see six new photos. Also, instead of an email address, there’s now a contact form if you want to drop me a line. The link is located over there on the right, just below the About page. More changes coming…..

Last night’s dream: I was in a building and walking around, I don’t remember where or why I was there. A woman comes up to me, dressed in medical scrubs, and is slightly frantic. She tells me she’s an intern and can’t find any doctors that she knows to write a letter of recommendation for her. She then asks me if I would write her a letter of recommendation and claim I’m a doctor so she can get a job out-of-state.

What’s it mean? Anyone?

Blood, Bags & Tears

Lots of interesting little news tidbits today:

  • An article on the possible banning of plastic bags in the city of Boston. This is a curious subject. In grocery stores, for example, I used to swear by the plastic bags, not because they were more sturdy (they weren’t) or bio-degradable (they aren’t), but because they had handles. That’s it. Handles. That is the damn key to grocery bags. You know why? Because I hate having to do multiple trips back-and-forth to my car to pick up bags of groceries. Some may call that lazy, I call it efficient. If bags have handles, it means I can hold more of them. And I take that to extremes in order to avoid multiple trips. I will pile as many bags into my hands as I possibly can – I think once I did four in each hand. Inevitably, my arms start to ache and then I get a little miffed because when I reach the door, I have to fish out my keys to unlock it, and that means putting down the bags, getting keys, unlocking the door, etc. Inefficient! I am crazy! Anyway, since everyone can open cars remotely now, how come we can’t open our houses remotely? I’m way off topic. Anyway, my point: as soon as they added handles to paper bags a few years ago, I’ve never looked back. More room = less bags to carry. Handles rock on paper bags. I’m all for banning plastic ones! I have lost my mind.
  • The Alec Baldwin dust-up is a real drag. Maintaining a sane, safe, happy and stable family life is hard enough without dragging family stories through the national press. Now comes word that Baldwin wants to quit one of my favorite shows, 30 Rock, leave the country and focus on his family. Good for him! But can he please do it and stay on 30 Rock and live in the U.S.? Please? With sugar on top? He, and everyone else on that cast, is so friggin’ funny on that show – if they lose him, it’s a big, big blow.
  • Oh! Check this out! Gary Thorne, a well-known play-by-play guy for ESPN who also broadcasts Baltimore Orioles games locally in Maryland, came out on the air last night and said Doug Miribelli (Red Sox backup catcher) told him Curt Schilling (whose blog, by the way, is awesome) painted that red blood on his sock during the magical 2004 playoff run. Schilling didn’t really comment, but I’m sure he will on the blog soon. I mean, in the end, all they need to do if it comes down to it is get the sock and do a test – it’s sitting in the Hall of Fame.

Here We Go ‘Round again


MVP 2007
Originally uploaded by rustedrobot.

Last year I wrote about how EASports couldn’t make an MLB baseball video game for the PC because exclusive rights were signed with another company. So in lieu of MVP 2006, modders and coders dove into the 2005 version of the game and updated it themselves, with no help from any professional organization. It was ALL community based – 15-20 different people chipped in with designs, audio files, bats, balls…the works. And it was spectacular!

Well, they’ve done it again. Building off of the core of the ’05 game again AND the community-built 06 game, the 2007 version is totally sweet! And really hard to play, which I love.

Some cool minor features were added to make it all even more lifelike:

  • All four levels of baseball are represented with actual players, from MLB, AAA, AA and A ball.
  • Each batter now has walk-up music. Some of it is based on nationality! The Latin players all have Spanish music and the southern guys get Lynyrd Skynyrd, etc. Some of the African-Americans get things like Tone Loc and 50 Cent. A little stereotypical? Yes. But fun. There must be thousands of these little 30-second clips for walk-up at bats.
  • Each stadium is represented accurately for 2007, real ads and all, as well as the schedules.
  • And of course, all of the 06 enhancements remain – brand-name gloves, bats, shoes, batting gloves, goggles, etc. Most uniforms in a team’s history are also available for your choosing each game. Sweet.

Usually I play real rosters, but this year I did a draft and am playing as the San Francisco Giants. I have the least amount of home runs in MLB, but the most hits and steals. I got off to a very tough start but am now 51-44 and in the wild card race, thanks to my trading Carlos Zambrano (1-7, 12.60 ERA) to Milwaukee for Johan Santana, who has gone 10-1 with a sub-4 ERA since I acquired him. The worst team in the league? The Boston Red Sox.

The picture (large one here) is Justin Morneau hitting a two-run shot at Wrigley field.

My sense is that this is the last season I’ll be doing this, with doubles on the way. And I don’t mean baseball doubles.

Come On In…..

First things first – yesterday I walked around our front yard and picked up some trash that people had apparently thrown from their cars. It was only two things. One was an empty cigarette box. The other was an empty bra box, size 40D! Goodness. I can’t seem to figure it out, though. Was the person in such a hurry that she had to rip open the box in the car and get that bra on immediately? I guess if you’re going commando with 40D’s, maybe you do need it on right away.

So……this is the new site. A few notes:

  • This isn’t just a normal redesign like I’ve done in the past. I basically took ALL of the content from the previous five years and moved it to another blog provider’s site. A big job! There were a few nervous moments, like the time just after the transfer when I first typed the blog URL into the browser…..and saw nothing. I recovered it though.
  • Previously, when I redesigned, I’d do the redesign on the home page, then I would have to go and manually change/code all of the other pages by hand to match the homepage. Time-consuming and laborious. I’m sure there’s a way to do that in blogger, but I don’t know enough code or CSS to do it. WordPress does it for me. Now, everything is totally uniform. If I make a change to the structure of home page, it mirrors throughout the site and every other page. No more will you see differently designed pages when you click off onto something else. If you want to see old designs, that’s what the awesome Internet Archive is for.
  • There’s a new categorization system there on the right. As you can tell by the amount of uncategorized posts, I’m still in the process of assigning categories to each post. This will take some time, but when it’s finished, it’ll be way easier for you to navigate the site. Example – I don’t need to create a page anymore for things like Item Five. You can just click on the Item Five categorization link and see all the interviews I’ve done.
  • Each post now has it’s own web page, too. Just click on the title of this post to see what I mean. Previously you’d have to search the site and when you looked for a post, you’d have to scroll through the entire month of posts to try and find the specific thing you were looking for. No more. There’s too many posts here now so I needed a better system of finding stuff – this and categorization provide a huge improvement.
  • Archives are updated with a new calendar-style implementation in the sidebar on every page. Much easier to navigate the old stuff.
  • There is a new About page, slightly updated from the old.
  • Comments are just as easy and do not require login, passwords or any crap like that. Just click on the comments line at the bottom of any post (it’ll say “no comments” if there are no comments yet).

There will be additional changes coming – this is step 1. A note to the RSS people – I’m not entirely sure my Feedburner feed is working correctly. I am working on this. There is an RSS feed of this page, but it’s WordPress’s feed and not Feedburner. I’d prefer if you hold off on re-subscribing until I figure out the Feedburner thing, but do what you need to do. The feed should be here if you need it.

All told, this change benefits me more on the backend than it probably does for you. To you, it probably looks like just another re-design with some slight changes. But it was a huge undertaking and I think it’ll be a vast improvement. Rock on.