Given that it’s that holiday season where one has a built-in excuse to randomly bake all sorts of yummy goodies, I suggest the blog people to point their ‘tubes over to the Stamford Museum & Nature Center’s first annual Visions of Gingerbread: The Sweetest Architects holiday exhibition. Some impressive stuff, especially the gingerbread rollercoaster:
I had to go to the Apple store yesterday to get another power supply for my laptop. I have three places where I use the computer (office, home, and apartment) and I kept forgetting my existing one one place or another. Anyway, if you have lots of them you don’t have to carry them around.
While I was there though, I picked up one of Apple’s new Magic Mice. I have to say that it’s definitely the best bluetooth mouse I’ve ever used. The laser tracking is really nice, it has decent heft, and fits in your hand well. The cool thing though is that the surface of the mouse works as a multi-touch trackpad so you can scroll around by sliding your finger on the surface of the mouse. It works really nicely. Right and left click work too with the mouse sensing which finger you’re using to click.
Now for the negatives.
1) I didn’t actually need a new mouse, but couldn’t help myself.
2) There isn’t a middle mouse button, which would be handy for pasting in UNIX programs. I assume this could be fixed in software though.
3) I actually prefer a corded mouse. (The batteries in the Magic Mouse are supposed to last around 4 months, so this might just not be an issue.)
So, in conclusion, both of Apple’s mice right now are pretty good and I really like the “Mighty Mouse” (now just the “Apple Mouse”), but the ball on my old mice seem to get jammed up every 6 months or so sending the mice to mouse heaven. The fact that the new mouse doesn’t have any moving parts should hopefully solve that problem.
We have previously addressed this item, when one comes across hotness in either an unexpected, unanticipated or unconventional situation, or instead when traditional hotness is encountered in an atypical wrapping.
It is in this second category that I submit the item below:
Everybody expects cheerleaders to be hot, or rather is at least not surprised when cheerleaders turn out to be hot (but don’t forget the importance of community service) – and disappointed when that hotness is not lived up to. But what is extra-, or should we say, sneaky-hot, is when you put a hot cheerleader in 1960’s throwback outfits. They didn’t quite make up for the awfulness of the Broncos uniforms – see below – but it was a good effort.
Some may not be familiar with Carl Sagan and the Cosmos (both the book and TV series – I think viewable for free on Netflix and Hulu), but you should check him out. This little musical ditty turns good quotes from his TV series and a couple Stephen Hawking bits into a pretty damn decent track. Check it out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc
BTW – how does one embed YouTube into the blog? It seems to just post a link if I use the upload / insert function in the editor…
The old MacBook/new MacBook Pro 13″ seems like an amazingly sweet little computer. I liked it before it gained the “Pro” name, but a 7 hour battery makes it the perfect little portable machine.
My views on the 15″ have changed a little though. I mean, longer lasting batteries are great, but why did they get rid of the ExpressCard slot? (Well, I know the answer, it’s probably something to do with the fact that 2% of owners actually use the slot.) Replacing it with a SD card reader doesn’t help me though. (It does help the 90% of people who have digital cameras with SD cards though.) The end result though is that if you want to do anything with fast data throughput like eSATA, you have to spring for the 17″ now.
I might spring for an iPhone 3S. My current phone is two years old now so I can get a cheap upgrade. On the other hand, the only real benefit that I see to the way I do things is the fact that the new phones have a real gps in them. The improved camera, video, etc doesn’t do much since I already have much better tools to do all that.
I wasn’t fortunate enough to ever get to watch Niekro, and was pretty young when Candiotti was still pitching, so the only knuckleballers that I’ve watched with any kind of critical eye have been Charlie Hough and Tim Wakefield. I remember being transfixed when (I think it was) Fox debuted their super-slow-mo camera showing Hough’s knuckler as it dodged and darted, and so with Wake coming just a few outs short of a no-no a couple days ago, I decided to delve into PitchF/X and see what I could do.
Turns out that process was a lot easier than expected, thanks to Dan Brooks. I still want to write my own PFX tool, but for this post I’ll get started with his stuff.
What’s amazing about Wake is that when he’s on, he’s able to control this ball that essentially travels 50 feet and then is a study in random walks. Let’s start with perhaps the most basic of PitchF/X charts, showing the strike zone superimposed on each pitch’s location (marked as a ball, strike, or put in play (X):
So, this wasn’t a case of Ron Kulpa getting fooled into calling strikes; Wake seemed to have pretty good control of the thing.
Anyway, now let’s look at one of my favorite charts, showing the horizontal and vertical movement of Wake’s pitches:
What’s so fancy about that? Well, nothing, it looks like a random mess of splatter-paint, but that’s exactly the point! For comparison, here’s what Houston’s Mike Hampton did that same night, with a more conventional arsenal:
… where here you can see each type of pitch and how it moves – the four-seam fastball (FF) stays up relative to the two-seamer (FT), his big-breaking curve is rather distinct from his slider, and note that one reason for his success on Tuesday night was that his change-up had movement very similar to the two-seamer.
So with that comparison, you see why I love the blind-man-with-a-paintball-gun result of Wake’s Break Chart. Up, Down, Left, Right, it was moving all over… and big kudos to our rookie backstop Kottaras for handling both the weight of the moment and the bite of the knuckler.
The family and I were down in San Diego over the weekend for M+K’s wedding and had a great time visiting (although M+K were, needless to say, somewhat tied up with things besides socializing with us… ). Hung out a lot with Nick and Courtney and had good times hanging with good peeps.
Anyway, Michael and Karli, I was going to give you the advice that you should enjoy your wedding weekend since you only get one of them… but you do get to have another one in only a couple of months! Haha.
