The Daily Diversion Archive For April, 2004

Tuesday April 6, 2004

I watched the Twins home opener from the comfort of my couch last night. What with baby and all, I decided that going out to the game might not be the best idea. It was just as well. I got an extra hour of sleep because of it. Not because the game was boring and I fell asleep--far from it. It was because it went extra innings and was exciting until the end. Traffic after this game would have been awful.

The Twins won last night. That is a good thing as always. The way they won was impressive and I hope is a sign that the team's heart is still there. They think they're the one to beat in the AL Central and most of the sports writers agree. The way they hung tough last night and pulled out a win was an example of what a winning team must do to keep winning.

That said, Cleveland pulled defeat from the jaws of victory. The loss can be hung squarely on their not-so-great bullpen. Their starting pitcher, C.C. Sabathia was awesome. This dude is 6'4" or so and goes just a whisper under 300 pounds. He's big and he throws some evil stuff. He held the Twins to two hits for most of the time he was in the game. Radke, the Twins veteran pitcher didn't have his best stuff. He gave up many hits including 3 solo homeruns, but he gave up the hits in a way that didn't do the team much harm. When they say "spread the hits" they were talking about Radke's performance.

The Indians got 17 hits off the Twins last night. Most of those were off Radke. I think the Twins got 8 hits. The Indians were only able to cross home plate 4 times. As I mentioned earlier, three of those runs were solo homeruns. Everyone else was stranded. Credit the Twins fielding (I refuse to use the word 'defence' in baseball) and the fact that Radke hung tough even though he didn't have much in the way of control with keeping the Twins in the game until Sabathia hit the showers.

Michael Cuddyer came up huge with a nice pinch hit to score a couple of runs and a textbook relay from Jones to Mauer at home to get out Matt Lawton. Jones had a nice jumping catch in right and although Stewart had a ball go off his glove for one of Cleveland's homeruns, he more than made up for that play by ending the game in the bottom of the 11th with a 3-run homerun to right about the same place in the outfield.

I must say that it looked bad for the Twins in the early innings. They weren't getting outs. They weren't getting hits and they were down 4-0 when Sabathia left the game. To come back scoring 7 unanswered runs while having just about every arm in the bullpen come out and pitch is something we've come to expect from the Twins of recent vintage. It's good to have you guys back.

Thursday April 8, 2004

I passed the Network+ test yesterday. I had studied pretty hard for it and all that studying was necessary. Out of 900 possible points I ended up with a little over 800. I'd like to have done better, but I wasn't in too much danger of not passing as passing score was somewhere in the 600s. I didn't kick this test's ass like the A+.

All in all, I'm happy that's done with. I'm going to think a bit before I grab my nest certification. I think it will either be a wireless networking or router tech certification. My only regret with this test was that I should have studied NetWare a bit more.

The Twins are now in deep doodoo. They've lost three players to injuries great and small. Mauer's going to have to have his knee 'scoped. Hunter has a hamstring problem. Having had a pulled one of these myself, it took about 6 weeks for it to not threaten to tear everytime I moved around. Here's hoping Hunter's case is less severe than mine was. Santana's forearm spasms are probably a one-shot deal and he may not even miss a start, but it's not encouraging. Last night, LeCroy took himself out with some issue as well. It's looking pretty thin at Catcher for the Twins. I wonder if we have any prospects in the minors. Here's hoping we can dig up some Junior Ortiz or Tom Prince. I just looked at their roster and realized that they do have someone like that. Henry Blanco. He's pretty much exactly what they need right now. He backed up an All-Star for most of his career, bats below the Mendoza Line and, hopefully, isn't costing the Twins much.

I'm worried about how the Twins will do this month.

Friday April 9, 2004

We watched the PBS Frontline show on the Rwandan Genocide last night. We had TiVoed it. It was worth watching, but I must say that I probably wouldn't watch it again. 800,000 people murdered in 100 days. 8,000 people a day hacked to death by machetes and farm tools and, of course, shot. Oddly enough, the program really didn't go into the cause of the problem very much at all. They touched on it, but what was in the program really didn't answer the question as to why one group of people wanted to exterminate another. I guess karma was served because the genocide doers ended up losing the civil war. Either way, it was just a lovely late spring in Rwanda.

I really feel sorry for the Canadian leader of the UN forces. He looked absolutely devastated by what happened under his watch. I'll say this: If the UN wants to be taken seriously in its peace-keeping missions, they really need the ability to shoot a few bastards--especially machete and assault rifle wielding ones.

In Twins news, the season is starting with a parade of players to the DL. Not good. A large share of the Twins hitting power is riding the pine for the next couple of weeks. Hunter and LeCroy are down with muscle problems. Mauer had his knee 'scoped yesterday and is out for at least two weeks, perhaps the balance of the month of April. Add to this some sleepy bats and you get a .500 team after 4 games that hasn't really had a good game yet. One of the most troubling things about these 4 games is how many runs the other teams have scored. Here's hoping for a big 180 turn back from the hole.

Friday April 16, 2004

So here am listening to some organ music. Ok, shut up. It's not like that. It's CHRUCH organ music. Jeez...

Anyway, it really reminds me of church. That's all.

Today at work I had an alpha and omega moment. I was installing Windows NT on a Pentium Pro 200 machine and Windows XP on a 3GHz machine. It was quite something, I must say. Truth be told, there wasn't as much difference in install speeds as you might expect. I suspect Windows XP has a bunch of overhead.

This isn't saying that there wasn't a huge difference in the speeds of both boxes, I'm just saying that I would have expected the 3GHz machine to be quick as a blink and for the PPro box to grind along like a snail. I think that due to the fact the PPro box had a newish HDD in it made it much faster than it would have been with it's original HDD. Much faster.

That brings me to my latest acquistions. I'm going to be taking us off of USWest's voice messaging thing. I'm going to give using the PC as an answering machine a shot. I expect it'll be a real pain in the ass. I'm hoping that we'll be able to get our messages at least as easily as we could before. I'm also hoping that I'll be able to get them over a web browser. That would be neato. That's the goal: To add a bit of functionality to our life without adding a huge pain in the ass. I think it will help Sarah out quite a bit to have faxing capabilities from the house so I'm going to give that a shot as well.

There are a bunch of other features that I may or may not try to get set up, but it remains to be seen if they'll be annoying to us or our callers, that they'll work and that it won't be a pain in the ass to administrate. The rub here is that even if it works perfectly, it'll only save us a couple of bucks a month. So really what I'm doing is answering a question that noone is really asking. Such as it is.

The other big deal that wasn't that costly is a new hard drive for the other laptop. I'm hoping it will speed up the old guy so that our new nanny will be able to use it. I'm not going to have her use it to stay in touch with us. I suspect that IMing her all the time will annoy all concerned and probably lead to panic attacks when she doesn't respond immediately. No, this will be convenience for her and that's all.

Yes, we're getting a nanny for Gus. Although we like our daycare center, we just can't put up with having him sick all the time. Worse is that we're sick all the time as well and that's not really good for either of us. We'd like to not get fired and showing up to work is like step one of that deal.

Radke really stepped up to the mound yesterday. 8 shutout innings gave everyone a much-needed break. Way to pull it together.

By the way, the Star Tribune really scored in signing the Twins Geek to provide content for their online sports section. This guy writes well and really knows his stats. He also has really good insight and really does a nice job filling Joe Average Fan (me) in on what's going on with the Twins. I'm going to be adding him to my blogroll as I've also added him to my daily hit-list.

The annual motorcycle auction at Aldrich Arena is this weekend. I was very tempted to pack both the rides up and ship them over to the arena to see what I could get for them, but I don't really want to pay their fees and I'm not sure I'm ready to see either of them go away. Excuses, excuses. I really need to get out and ride. I'm going to have to work on the Suzuki this weekend and get my first ride in. I should also pull down a bit of work on the Truck as there's something I need to pick up across town.

Thursday April 29, 2004

Sick again.

Not only am I sick again, I've gone and made the dog sick as well. How? It was an inadvertant tennis ball toss in the dark. I threw it near him in the dark so that it would bounce off the fence wall so he could find it. What really happened was that I scored a direct hit on his right eye.

Folks, I couldn't have done that if I tried to do it. No, it had to happen we were out playing ball in the dark.

The vet bill was $100 for the check up and a day's worth of lodging. I couldn't take him there and then home again as work is really pressing on my neck. I'm happy to report that he's just fine. I feel like a jerk.

The Twins are knocking them dead out there. It seems as if no lead is safe when the Twins have another at-bat left. Last night they squandered a 4-run lead only to score four more in the very next half-inning to take the win. That's some pretty impressive ball playing.

Not much else to say, really.