All posts by jason

General, Uncategorized

Resolving

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As recently mentioned in other Internet quarters around the globe, making “resolutions” for activities or behaviors that one wishes to undertake around January 1 is completely arbitrary.  If you decide that you should be doing something different with your life, you should probably just do it.

I think the spirit of the “New Year’s Resolution,” though, is that if you HAVEN’T been taking stock of your various states of affairs throughout the year, maybe the turn of another year will make you pause and reflect.  And while reflecting on your past year, maybe it will dawn on you that some things need to change.

A friend and I have been talking over the last couple days about the litany of tasks that we have been procrastinating on for various lengths of time, all of them too long.  We’re going to make a concerted effort to hold each other accountable to completing these things over the course of these coming months.

One of the things that didn’t make my list was returning to my blog; I figure that you, O Internet, can hold me accountable for that.  I really fell off the wagon when I was working up in Oshkosh again, and I never made the time to get back to it when I started working in Madison.

So anyway, why not a new start in a new year?  Like all of the things that I’m going to be writing in 2011, please don’t expect consistent quality.  Just expect consistent content, which, in and of itself, is likely to breed higher quality over time.

Sports, Uncategorized

In the Wake of a Trade for Marcum, Brewers Need a Slight Re-Direction

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The Brewers went back to Toronto for the second time in three days when they traded 2B prospect and former #1 pick Brett Lawrie to the Blue Jays for Shaun Marcum on Sunday.  No matter what the minions of the blog commenters would have you believe, this is a good, reasonable move.  Here are the justifications:
  • Lawrie is a good prospect who played well at a young age in AA last year, but Milwaukee is going to get a long-term contract done with Rickie Weeks.  There won’t be any room at second base up here for at least 5 years or so.
  • Marcum is coming off a 2009 Tommy John surgery, but he threw 200 innings in 2010 with a 13-8 record and 3.64 ERA (which would make him better than the majority of Milwaukee’s current stable of pitchers).  Tommy John surgery is not the death-knell that the media generally hypes it up to be.  It is a complicated surgery with a long recovery period, but many players have returned to success after the procedure.  Marcum is not “damaged goods” just for having had this surgery.
  • This solidifies about 70% of the Brewers rotation for 2011.  They plan to go with Gallardo, Wolf, Marcum, and Narveson somewhere near the back (I count Narveson for about half a starter, which gets me to 70%).  Not to say this is a world championship rotation, but the top three look stronger than what we were going with a year ago (which, don’t forget – included Jeff Suppan), and the youth movement that emerged in the bullpen in 2010 is a step in the right direction, too.  If the Brewers can swing a deal for another #2- or #3-caliber starter (perhaps Casey McGehee or Mat Gamel and/or Carlos Gomez again, along with some minor leaguers?), combined with the prospects of giving Mark Rogers and/or Jeremy Jeffress a shot at a few starts… there is definitely more *hope* for the pitching in this scenario.  Maybe better performance, maybe not, but more upside for sure.

Here’s the facts, Brewers faithful: we are not going to be able to move Prince for the sort of stud pitching we once dreamed of.  Tom Haudricourt from the Journal-Sentinel has eloquently explained this several times since the end of the 2010 season.  The market is not there, and the few trade partners that seemed possible are just going to buy what they need instead.  To give up Prince for a Marcum would be highway robbery.  But Marcum is the sort of pitcher that was available, and Lawrie is a reasonable price to pay.

What to do with Fielder, though, when the clock is ticking on this final season of arbitration?  I am now of the opinion that the goal in trading Prince has to change.  We can raid the farm system to pick up some mid-level pitching, but that is going to leave us in trouble 2-4 years down the road.  There is no longer a team willing to pay the appropriate asking price for Fielder (top-of-the-rotation pitching), given that he is a one-year rental who will be a free agent next winter.  Melvin should be taking a page out his playbook from days gone by, when the Brewers featured a trio of Richie Sexson, Jeromy Burnitz and Geoff Jenkins, and move Fielder for as many prospects as he can get.

Where is the drawback, really?  We were considering moving a player that’s already on the roster over to first base anyway, in the event that Prince was gone.  If we trade someone else (or a few someone else’s) for another starting pitcher, that hole is plugged as well.  The Brewers are not going to be able to get the quality that they seek for Fielder, so they should just go for quantity instead.  I’m not saying that they shouldn’t still have some criteria– clearly, you’d want to look at prospects that have shown some major-league ability, and try to balance out the rosters at Huntsville and Nashville as best you can, but beyond that– just go for as many as you can.  I’m thinking that for the right team, who needs a big lefty bat to lift them this year, the Crew could get at least 3, maybe 4 prospects.  That’s one or two more draft picks than they would end up with if they stick with him this season and just let him go in free agency.

Personally, I don’t think there’s any shame in *how* you get there, just as long as you still meet your overall goals for the off-season:

  • Pick up 2 starting pitchers
  • Move Fielder
  • Minimal damage to the farm system
  • Still have a first baseman on opening day

Let’s get it done, Doug.

Hollywood, Uncategorized

Found?

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Wanted to offer a summary of my thoughts after the conclusion of LOST.  To give you the short-short version, I was satisfied, and the outcome made sense to me.

The only real frustrating thing from my perspective was that we didn’t find out specifically:

  • what the point of the light at the heart of the island is
  • why Desmond was the one who had to go down to move the rock
  • what the island’s real purpose is

… I guess that makes me want to go back and re-watch certain episodes to dig for the nuggets of wisdom on those topics that were dropped along the way.  In the end, it seems like we need to take the words of Jacob, his mother, and the findings of the Dharma researchers at face value.  Maybe there is no greater explanation than what Jacob explained, and the mysterious powers of the island are just what they appeared to be.

The final conclusion of the show seemed to imply that those things that we were all asking and theorizing about don’t matter that much, though.  Great allegory for human existence and a demonstration of the teachings of most of the world’s religions (demo’ed in the idolatry of so many in the room where Jack and his dad met): the things in this life don’t matter as much as what’s to come next.  What the island is or how it works or what it’s there for isn’t as important as the reality that the castaways spent the most important parts of their lives together; that they found one another; that the loves forged on the island were the most essential ones that any of the characters would have.

I think it’s a bold way to handle the conclusion of show like this (and really, when you think about the path we’ve been led down all this while, should have come as no surprise), to say about the characters: well, in the end they all die.  In the end, we ALL DIE.  What is the most important thing?  That we loved one another.  What happened to Sawyer, Kate, Richard, Miles, and Frank wasn’t important anymore.  What happened to Hurley and Ben wasn’t important anymore.  This was the story of this group of people at this point in their lives, and at the VERY END, they ended up where we all wanted them to be.

It’s actually a very satisfying way to handle it, because you get to kill and not kill everyone; you leave all their fates open to interpretation and speculation while specifying all of them.

My interpretations or ideas about certain key elements:

  1. Did any of the “events” in the flash sideways take place?  What about things like Jack’s son, or Locke’s fiance, or stuff like that? No, none of those things actually occurred; I am fine with Christian’s explanation that the flash sideways was a construct of the castaways shared consciousness immediately following their deaths.
  2. What happened to the island after Hurley became the caretaker? I like to think that he did exactly as Ben suggested (and judging by their conversation outside the church, I’m sure that’s right), and he took care of anyone that found their way there after him.  Whereas Jacob brought people that were alone and struggling through their lives (in the same sorts of ways that HE was), I figure Hurley helped those that were lost find their way home if that’s what they wanted, or helped those that wanted to stay to get along.  Groups of people also consistently came to the island struggling to control its power, whether it was the people who the Man in Black lived with, or the Army after the War, or the Dharma Initiative later on.  I assume others would come and go in similar fashion over time, with minimal interference from the island’s caretaker.  One thing that seemed assured for all those people: the island is too powerful to be controlled by them, and their greed will be eventually be their undoing.  We didn’t get any indication that that would change, so I imagine it didn’t.
  3. To extend that line of thinking, it seems important to note that the mystery behind Jacob/Man In Black’s story seems distinct from the story of the mysterious power of the island in the space-time continuum. I don’t get the impression that Jacob or anyone that came after him understood the nature of the island’s power, but some of them did learn how to wield it.  I think that maybe the island should be understood as a sort of focal point or wormhole in the universe.  Based on the travels of Ben and Locke after turning the wheel, it seems like the wormhole goes to a specific place, and the electromagnetic interference generated by the island is probably a byproduct of that conduit.

However, I still don’t understand what the light and the rock and the pool are doing to keep the island intact.  I don’t quite get how (or if) that relates to the wormhole.  In the end, I think I’m going to try NOT to focus on those elements that may be hard to explain or open to speculation, and drink the creator’s kool-aid in saying, “None of that really matters.  At the very end of everything, what we really care about is where the characters ended up.  And they all seemed to be in a very good place.”

General, Sports, Uncategorized

All Systems Screwed

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Computers down @ work today, but thankfully not the Intertubes.

Gave me plenty of time to read an article on Lifehacker about cleaning up your music collection metadata.  In conjunction with my pending upgrade/clean-install that I’ll be doing on my home machines, this is a good time to be thinking about this.

Also, enjoy the early afternoon Brewers game.

Sports, Uncategorized

Opener Time

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Another summer full of promise gets underway today.  I’ve spent a lot of time and words in this space in the past making assessments and speculating on the fate of the local 9 from year to year.  There’s so much to read, though, in so many places, so I’ll try to keep my comments more brief.  Here’s a list of 10 things I think we’ll see from the Brewers this season.

  1. Trevor Hoffman will become the first pitcher in baseball history to hit 600 saves for his career, before June 1.
  2. Veteran outfielder Jim Edmonds will get more playing time between center and right than anyone would have predicted when he signed.
  3. Ryan Braun will hit over .300 again, and pace the ballclub in batting average.
  4. Prince Fielder will hit over 40 homeruns again, and will get  mentioned again when we reach MVP chatter time.
  5. Alcides Escobar will be a Rookie of the Year candidate, and he’ll win it if he can hit over .260.
  6. Yovanni Gallardo will win 15 games.
  7. One of the team’s young catching prospects (Angel Salome or Jonathan Lucroy) will be called up to the team by the 4th of July.
  8. Jeff Suppan will be traded or released before July 1.
  9. We’re going to watch the opener in open-air sunshine.
  10. The Brewers will win 86 games.

Enjoy the season!

"Roll Your Own", General, Uncategorized

How Much Weight Can Clouds Hold?

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I have been running my computers primarily on an Ubuntu system since Sept 2006.  Over time, through a lot of tinkering and experimenting, I have generally “gunked up” my laptop installation.  With the next Long-Term Service release of Ubuntu now in beta, with the final release due later this month, I decided that the new version will be a good point for a complete format-and-reinstall on that machine.

So if you’re going to roll with that sort of program, you have to do a lot of backing up.  My /home folders are all due for a sound cleaning out; a bigger project than one might realize.  Lifehacker coincidentally had a post late in March that I begrudgingly took to heart (get rid of your ‘Miscellaneous’ filing category) as I set upon this task.  I have always had trouble locating anything on my computers without at least a halfway-decent organizational structure, so a lot of what I need to do is just clean up stuff that’s been straggling, maybe add some new categories here or there.

When I checked out what I have on my server, there are lots of folders that are just going to be huge by nature–Movies, TV, Music, Photos, setup files–all are major data hogs.  I can’t and don’t expect to pare those down much.  After you isolate those big swaths of info, though, what I have left isn’t taking up much room at all– for me, it was just barely over 4 gigs.  This is the area I can attack.

I’m using the free version of Dropbox for a variety of things: it’s an easy way to stash small files (word processing docs, spreadsheets, PDFs, maybe photos) that you’re planning to use in multiple places.  I have a folder for “employment” documents, for example (resumes, cover letters, reference lists), that saves me from worrying if I remembered to grab something that I need before I left the house.  Also, it’s tons smoother than logging in to the server at work for those occasions that I’m working remotely.  Lists that I frequently need all have their place in the Dropbox ((Did I mention that I don’t need to sweat having one of *my* computers, with the client installed, immediately available, either?  Because there’s a web interface.  Pretty nice.))

Between the 2 gigs that I can get for zero monies from Dropbox, and another 2 that are available through the Ubuntu One service (almost exactly the same thing as Dropbox), I just about have myself covered.  Why not just leave all this backup stress behind and toss my non-media data into the cloud?  *sigh*  Well, there are a few things:

  • First, and obviously, one 2-gig service isn’t going to give me enough space.  I’d be spreading myself out on multiple services, and that sort of negates the inherent efficiency of moving in this direction.  Do I value the convenience enough to pay a hundred bucks a year (the going Dropbox rate) for 50 GB?
  • Also, we’ve got your typical cloud-pushing paranoia.  “Can I trust someone else to secure my data?”  “I’ve never seen where this data is physically located,” etc., etc., etc.  I have to say I’m starting to get over this one (these services all appropriately tout their security features), but it’s going to take time.
  • Any technical limitations that I wouldn’t have with everything being stored “locally”?  Doesn’t seem like it, but in my experience, you need some thorough real-world testing to know for sure.

I guess the toughest pill for me to swallow right now is the 100 bucks.  You want me to plunk down a fairly significant wad of cash for 25 times more storage.  What I would really prefer is slightly more storage (say, 20 or 25 gigs) at half the annual price.  That would make it easier for me.

But either way, make no mistake – as we link our digital lives to more and more devices, seamless interoperability and access across multiple platforms becomes more and more important.  I don’t know for sure if I’m ready to completely leap into cloud-based storage, but I’m going to have to think long and hard about it ((That’s what she said.)), and this probably won’t be the last time.