Thoughts

I’d like to know exactly how much crack you have to smoke, over how long a period, to trade away your only moderately decent relief pitcher. That’s exactly what the Yankees just did, for of all things, a utility infielder. A utility infielder batting .231 as of today. Obviously the Yankees don’t have enough infielders. Like I don’t know, Giambi [doing rehab starts now], Phillips [starting 1B], Cairo [utility fielder], Mienceivitcz [back at the beginning of August]. That’s not to mention the regulars like Jeter, Cano and Arod.

Now, I’m not saying Proctor was particularly great, not by any means. But it isn’t like there’s other pitchers waiting in the wings to take his spot. The Sox just signed Gagne, probably the only reliever on the market worth getting. The Yankees have some prospects in the minors, but those are mainly starters, not relievers. They could go to the bullpen, but if that was going to happen, why hasn’t it happened already, letting them see how they do, before getting rid of Proctor?

GAH.

So, I come into work this morning, and it’s curiously warm & humid in my office. Now, I work in a big office building - pretty good HVAC control. Apparently, the disclaimer on that is “HVAC may not work as expected.” Yeah, the entire cooling tower “farm” on the roof had been screwed up. It got to at least 87 degrees, plus humidity, in the office, before they finally got it running on a “temporary fix” around 12:30 PM. In the meantime, I think I downed my body weight in water. I certainly took off my dress shirt.

So also today, I get to move to a window office, in about 1.5 hours. This is a good thing, I suppose. But considering I’m leaving this job in under 3 weeks, it’s probably more of a pain than its worth. Nice view from the 3rd floor though.

So, the Simpsons Movie was well worth the $9, but it wasn’t anything amazing.  Except for Spider Pig.  Spider Pig was awesome.  Don’t agree?  You’re wrong.  Overall though, it needed to use more of the normal secondary characters.  It really was just a story of the Simpsons, Flanders, and… well… that’s it.  Everything else was just cameo’s or new characters.  Which is OK, but when you have 1 movie after 18 years of a TV show - not to mention that the show is still running - they don’t need to be doing an entire show of new characters.

The Simpsons Tonight!

The Simpsons Movie came out last night (this morning?) at midnight… sadly, I did not see it then. 8 hours until I do!

Writing Code

I hate writing code.  I don’t write code.  Except that I do, sometimes (PHP), for my websites.  And there’s nothing I hate more than code.  Except for code that doesn’t work, for no apparent reason.  Damn it.

Income Tax

To people that don’t like the income tax: Deal with it.  I don’t care how many court challenges you fight it with, it’s here to stay.   And more than that, it SHOULD be here to stay.  You use all the services it pays for, just  like the rest of it.  So quick your whining.

Mail is the lifeblood of communication today. Whether it’s personal, business, or somewhere in between, losing your stored mail is a big deal. Not receiving your e-mail in the first place - an even bigger deal. I was reminded of this last night in quite a rude fashion: Google locked me out of my Gmail account because of “unusual account activity.” Now, unless checking my e-mail, and replying to e-mails, is unusual (that’d be an interesting definition of unusual, for an e-mail account!), I don’t know what possibly could have caused them to lock the account. To make matters worse, I was in the middle of negotiating a business deal when it happened. My Gmail remained locked all night, but was finally available again this morning.

Now, when they lock your account, this is what they tell you:

For your security, we may temporarily disable access to your account if
our system detects abnormal usage. It will take between one minute and 24
hours for you to regain access, depending on the behavior our system
detected.

Abnormal usage includes, but is not limited to:

- Receiving, deleting, or popping out large amounts of mail (via POP) in a
short period of time
- Sending a large number of undeliverable messages (messages that bounce
back)
- Using third party file-sharing or storing software, or software that
automatically logs in to your account and that is not supported by Gmail
- Multiple instances of your Gmail account opened
- Browser-related issues. Please note that if you find your browser
continually reloading while attempting to access your inbox, it is likely
a browser issue, and it may be necessary to clear your browser’s cache and
cookies.

If you feel that access should not have been disabled, please visit
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=53897 for
troubleshooting tips.

Now, go to that link there, and tell me if that’s any more useful than the message left (as above). It isn’t. So I contact Gmail support. And what do they send me? Well, here’s the “surprise”: What I copied above wasn’t the message left to me when I tried to go to Gmail, it was the SUPPORT E-MAIL BACK TO ME. Freakin useless.

Well, I’m lucky enough that I’m involved in web companies to the extent where I don’t actually use Gmail as my provider - I simply use it as a webmail platform. I changed some redirects on my servers, and created a new webmail account directly on my servers, so I missed no urgent messages. Everybody is not so lucky. So here’s my advice: never trust a 3rd party with your important information, especially one that you have no business relationship with (you’re not paying). I *do* have a business relationship with Google - they even send me Christmas presents every year (aww, how nice), but when it comes to Gmail, they still couldn’t care less about me, you, or anyone else.

Unfortunately, if you do use Gmail (or anything short of your own domain & hosting) as your primary e-mail inbox, you don’t have much choice as to relying on them. But at the very least… BACK UP YOUR DATA. There’s several ways to do this:

1. The nerd method, using a UNIX/Linux box and Getmail + a cronjob: Click here
2. The mostly nerd method, using Cygwin (UNIX emulator) and fetchmail: Click here
3. The non-nerd method, just using a simple POP3 client (Outlook, in this example) : Click here

The list goes on. You’re capable of doing a Google search, I assume.

So, as of July 25/26, 2007, Nintendo is now worth more than Sony, and Apple Computer is now worth more than Hewlett-Packard (and already passed Dell, a while ago).

Nintendo

Nintendo passed Sony in market valuation yesterday (approx?). I don’t know how the hell this happened? Nintendo’s Wii and DS systems have been doing great - better than great - but it’s still just a couple products, compared to Sony’s massive presence in many markets. Nintendo is now one of the top 10 Japanese companies, and Sony’s not. Nintendo, in market cap, is bigger than Honda or NTT!

Apple Computer, Inc.

The company formerly known as Apple Computer announced revenues for their June quarter yesterday, July 26 at 5 PM. Net rose 73% to $818M from a year earlier, on the strength of, of all things, Macintosh sales. But the stock price primarily reflected sales of 270,000 iPhones in the first 30 hours of availability, methinks. iPod sales were fairly flat at +2% to 9.82M. Mac sales were +33% year over year to 1.76M. Apple now has $13.8 BILLION dollars in cash on hand. I could use a handout… how bout you?

On the strength of these figures, Apple stock skyrocketed to a new all time high, passing HP in market capitalization during after hours trading on July 25. Apple retained that lead with stock +$10 to ~$146 on July 26, leaving it with a market capitalization of approx. $127B.

As of this writing, market cap:

IBM: $174B
Intel: $139B
Apple: $127B
HP: $123B
Dell: $64B (Oh, Dell, where have you gone? Do you still think Jobs should shut down Apple and hand the money back to the shareholders? The king of all stupid comments?)

OK, so after about… 30 minutes… on Movable Type, I changed this over to Wordpress… primarily because MT isn’t written in PHP, and that… sucks.

So, after years of resisting the “blogging” thing, I guess I have to admit defeat now that I have this. Will I ever use it? Who knows. What the hell do people write on these things? It’s all a little too public for me, but I guess most of my life is in public anyway, considering all the .com’s I run.

On a sidenote, this Moveable Type software is pretty good, except that you have to actually know the URL to get into the management console to write a post. Somehow I think that that could probably be made easier… like ya know… a link.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!