It's the ninth inning and the game is tied with three runs each. The bases are loaded, two outs, and the count is 0-2. Would you be able to lay off the next four pitches to send the winning run in on a walk? I wouldn't, but after having struck out in his three previous at bats (in the fifth, seventh, and eight) Mike Matheny was able to hold back and become the hero of tonight's Cardinals game. What a great way to start a four game series with the Cubs.

But now lets talk about Al Hrabosky. I've been a staunch defender of the mad Hungarian for quite a while, but tonight was too much, even for me. He spent the evening misunderstanding comments that Joe Buck made or repeating the same two or three phrases for the full three hours of the game. So I'm done with him.

On the other hand, Joe Buck is the best announcer in baseball -- at least when he does local games. He's a bit more straight-laced for the national games, but he's pretty laid back when he's on FSM. I remember a game from last season when he spied a person in the stands playing Tetris on their cellphone. First he made fun of her for going to the ball game and playing video games, then he spent half an inning doing Tetris play-by-play over the unsuspecting lady's shoulder. It was awesome. So if Al Hrabosky is the price I have to pay for Joe Buck, I'll grin and bear it. Besides, its not like there are any good color commentators in baseball -- they all have their annoying quirks.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 30 April 2004 at 10:09 PM

Imagine that you're sitting in a meeting. Across the table from you and outside the windows is a balcony. Now imagine that you see something similar to the following on the balcony:

How easy would it be for you to pay attention during the meeting? How long could you, and everyone else in the meeting, pretend that there weren't huge, ugly turkey vultures a few feet away?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 29 April 2004 at 3:03 PM

I don't like teleconferences. They aren't too bad in a one-on-one situation, but if there are a bunch of people at each end of the phone, they just become unworkable. Its tough to make a point because you can't use visual cues to indicate that you'd like to interject. I often find that one side of the phone conversation dominates the discussion simply because they start talking first and the people on the other side can never get a word in.

The technology used for the teleconference can make a big difference in the meeting quality as well. I'm sure you've all seen the big teleconference phones: they're often triangular and sit flat on a table. The better ones have extension mics that can be run to either end of a long table. These things are worth their weight in gold. No one has to shout to be heard and no one has to sit with their ears near the phone in order to hear when these things are employed at both ends of the meeting. Normal phones with a speakerphone option are fine when one or two people are talking at each end, but if you have four or more people, they just aren't enough.

So, in summary, I wish I didn't have to participate in so many teleconferences.

Comments: 3 Posted by david on 28 April 2004 at 2:08 PM

I have the feeling that a video game lounge similar to the ones discussed in this article could be fairly successful on the loop. The only open question I still have is whether the lounge would cater to 20-somethings and have a bar or cater to a younger crowd and not serve drinks. Of course, a Blueberry Hill-style setup where you're all ages in the day and check IDs at night could also be successful.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 21 April 2004 at 9:17 AM

The Great Apartment Search '04 continues. As many of you already know, michael, Jim, and I have been searching for a three person apartment for the last few weeks. We've found two awesome places, but both have managed to slip through our fingers. (It's a long story.) The first good news we've had in quite a while came yesterday, when our current landlord agreed to extend our lease by one and only one month, so we now have until the end of May rather than the end of April to find a place to live. (If you happen to know of any three bedroom apartments, condos, or houses for rent in close proximity to WashU, we'd appreciate hearing about it.)

In the last few days I've been doing, of all things, some genealogy research. I don't have the knowledge or inclination to go back any further than my great-grandparents, but I enjoy searching the old census rolls for them. Its also quite convenient. If you have an idea of where your relatives lived (and their names) you can search for them fairly effectively. And you can pick up some interesting information by doing so. For example, when my paternal grandfather was growing up he lived at 2353 Dodier in north St. Louis. My paternal grandmother lived a few blocks away at 2500 Salisbury. So next time I'm in the area I might have to look those addresses up. A more interesting story takes place on my mother's side, but that can be the topic of a future post.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 20 April 2004 at 2:34 PM

Blatantly stolen from Romenesko:

Dems accuse GOP of punishing Post-Dispatch for editorial
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
House Republicans in Missouri voted Wednesday to repeal a sales tax exemption currently allowed for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Kansas City Star. Democrats say the move is retaliation for Sunday's Post-Dispatch "House of Hypocrites" editorial that criticized some GOPers for cuts in Medicaid eligibility. The paper said: "Republicans argued that there just isn't enough money for the state to pay Medicaid and children's health insurance. The cost of their own state-paid coverage apparently didn't faze them."

Comments: 4 Posted by david on 15 April 2004 at 10:32 PM

I've been neglecting this site as of late. I've been writing quite a bit, but most of it has been comments I've left on other people's sites. One of the longer comments I've left recently was a response to the Minutia Press post about the WashU web scripting class. Since I wrote my comment there, I've been thinking about the class quite a bit. It seems to me that in teaching "web scripting" you might very well be doing a disservice to the students taking the class. Web scripting is plenty useful -- I employ it on this site, and our entire back-end is Perl-based cgi (i.e., movable type) -- but its the past and present, not the future, of web-based development. Although even that might be a bit generous. The old saying "the future is upon us" seems to clearly apply in this arena.

Beginning with .NET a few years ago, a new model for web-based applications has quickly taken over in most large development houses. While not yet fully fleshed out in the Java world (JavaServer Faces, which were just approved, catches Java up on this, and perhaps propels them a bit ahead of the pack), .NET offers a model that shows you where things are going. The key is separation of your business logic from your presentation layer. Previous technologies embedded the business logic directly into the HTML. This is now considered a bad practice (and should have been recognized as a bad idea when languages like asp and php were first being developed). The idea is that your business rules and requirements should be separate from your presentation layer. There are multiple reasons for this. One key idea is that you shouldn't have to embed business rules into pages, requiring you to repeat rules here, there, and everywhere. You then have a nightmare scenario on your hands when you need to change one of them. But the more important concept is that your presentation layer should be able to change independently of back-end implementation. This allows you to have multiple renderings of your site for different media (normal browsers vs. WAP for example). This is similar to providing multiple stylesheets for different media, but takes things much further. It also means that changes to your front-end can happen without any impact to the actual logic running the site. (So I don't need to retest all of my SQL queries when I rebuild the front-end.) Also, for those of you who like patterns, these new web development standards are implementations of the Model-View-Control pattern that has been the norm in GUI development for quite a while.

These changes are interesting because they are building up a separation of hobbyist developers and professional developers. In many ways its overkill for a hobbyist to use some of these newer techniques unless they have the tools available to professional developers (in which case it becomes a lot easier). So things like php will be around for quite a while, but they won't see much use in a professional environment in the future.

Which brings us back to the topic of teaching pure "web scripting." Web scripting only takes students to a certain point on a path; it does not walk them all the way down. It leaves a whole host of products and methodologies unexplored. So it seems that teaching web scripting as an entire class is a bad idea. I'd rather see a web development course that incorporates web scripting as one of its topics, but also covers the newer trends in web development as well.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 13 April 2004 at 6:37 PM

Here are two different takes on Linux for the (desktops of the) masses. In the first, Dan Gillmor argues that "Linux on the desktop" is no longer a "non-starter." In the second article, John Gruber argues that the open source development model makes it difficult to design and implement intuitive user interfaces, and that the mindset behind this ("the hard work of development is in building the underlying foundation, and that the easy part is writing a 'GUI wrapper'") will prevent Linux from making serious in-roads on the desktop. I've made the latter argument in this spot before (or at the least linked to those who do) and am still convinced that it holds true. Anyone want to persuade me of the merits of the first article?

Comments: 3 Posted by david on 6 April 2004 at 1:47 PM