NuclearDonkey.net

The Evolution of Pantsilious Gigantus

I'm still a little embarrassed about the one with the crotch mouth. Yes, I'm one of the most mature people you'll ever meet.

They should put sensor tags on each player's cap/uniform/shoes/whatever to track their exact positions on the field. Then, use the readings from that to generate a live view at the top of your screen of where all the fielders and runners are. This would be way cooler than the standard static image of the diamond, indicating which bases have runners on. Instead of just knowing that there's a runner on first, you could actually see how much of a lead he's taking, where the first-baseman is in relation to him, and what positions the outfielders are in for the person at bat.

MLB.com has a $10 iPhone app that gives you video highlights, live game stats, and Gameday Audio (streams of the radio broadcasts for both the home and away teams) that all work over both wi-fi and EDGE (I assume 3G as well, but I still have the original iPhone).

The only down-side, as with any iPhone app, is that you're at the mercy of AT&T's substandard network. But, if you're in an area with a good signal, then this is pretty neat. While I won't lose too much sleep over $10, it would be nice if they included the iPhone app when you pay ~$100 for MLB.tv.

Due to my previously trusty Dell crapping its pants, it recently became time for a new laptop. Sadly, I couldn't find anyone other than Apple who makes a sturdy laptop that's reasonably light and has a decent video card. So I tried to put out of my mind how much I hated Mac OS last time I used it, and a refurbished 15" MacBook Pro arrived yesterday. Well...

Installing applications in Mac OS is just stupid. Instead of downloading, clicking, and installing a program, you have to download it, mount the downloaded file as a disk image (who knows why), run the installer from that mount point, then click and drag an icon off the application over an icon of your hard drive from within the installer. This is completely pointless and not at all intuitive if you've never used OS X before (or if you haven't used it in several years and have forgotten everything about it.

Adium is a reasonable substitute for Pidgin, but iChat (comes with the OS) is worthless and won't even connect to multiple IM accounts at once. There is a build of Pidgin available for Mac, but it's not supported. I don't like how Adium doesn't distinguish between a buddy being away and away+idle -- both display as a red icon and that's it.

Why are all the expansion ports on the left side of the laptop and the CD drive on the right? Do other people find that more convenient? Personally, I'd much rather have power and USB connectors on the right.

Even without the optional SSD, the MBP is almost silent -- way quieter than the Dell was. It's also impressively compact for a 15" notebook. Compared to my 12" Dell, the MBP is thinner, about 1.5" wider, and just about as deep (though that's due to the extended life battery sticking out the back of the Dell). The size difference is hardly even noticeable until I look at the screen itself and see how much more desktop space there is.

It definitely feels sturdy. The Dell had a noticeable flex to it. I don't know if this caused its video card to start dying, but constant bending of the motherboard certainly couldn't have helped. The unibody construction on the Mac is pretty damn impressive, and will hopefully lead to it lasting longer than the Dell.

I feel a lot better about the dock bar than I used to. My biggest complaint previously was the lack of any equivalent to the Windows start menu or Linux applications menu, where you can see all the applications you have installed. Adding the Applications folder to the dock as a stack (drag and drop the folder to the dock) fixes this.

I am having trouble finding a good music player for Mac OS. iTunes has no directory browser (all my music is organized by directory and a lot of the older stuff has no ID3 tags for iTunes to read) and, like most database-driven music players, crashes when trying to load my entire library. Songbird does run on the Mac, but the directory browser plugin is pretty sluggish.

According to MLB.com, the highest quality HD streams on MLB.tv run at 3Mb/sec. So let's do some math.

3 Mb/sec * 3600 sec/hr * 3 hr appx game legnth = 32400 Mb/game

32400 Mb/game / 1024 mb/gb / 8 bits/byte = 3.95 GB/game

Jetbroadband's* fastest, highest-cap plan has a bandwidth cap of 100GB. Something is very wrong here.

I understand that ISPs don't want people downloading hundreds of gigabytes of torrents every month, but this is a perfectly legitimate and legal use of my bandwidth. I must just be a fringe case at this point, but it'll be interesting to see what happens when the collision hits for mainstream internet users between their bandwidth needs for always-improving online video and their bandwidth restrictions put in place by always-evil ISPs.

* Yes, I switched back to Jetbroadband recently after suffering one too many outages at the hands of NRV Unwired. While their speeds are still erratic at best, they seem to have fixed their system to only dip down as low as ~1.5Mb/sec during peak hours instead of being consistently below 56k, where it was a year ago. Just FYI for anyone else in Christiansburg.

I finally gave in this year and ordered the MLB.tv premium service for the new baseball season. For any baseball fans not familiar with it, MLB.tv is just what it sounds like -- a subscription service for streaming webcasts of every Major League Baseball game (with some exceptions) during the season. This year, the basic service runs $79.95 and gets you a basic quality single video feed of each available game. For $30 extra, they add "HD quality" picture, the ability to watch up to four games in a splitscreen, optional home/away feeds, and a few other extras.

After the first week of nearly non-stop baseball, here are my thoughts on the good and bad thus far.

Play ball!

• I get all the baseball I could possibly want to watch, including almost all the Red Sox and Cubs games.
• The "HD-quality" feeds (which they call NexDef) aren't really HD in the sense of HDTV, but they're great quality for streaming video.
• It's all online, so I can always have a game playing in the background whether I'm at home or work. And I can continue living without cable/satellite TV (too much money for almost nothing worth watching).
• The splitscreen and picture-in-picture options are very cool for days when the Sox and Cubbies are playing at the same time.
• The home/away feed option is also neat. I can always watch games with the announcers from Boston/Chicago.

Game in rain delay

• Games are subject to blackout restrictions that make little sense. Despite being 300 miles away from them, I'm not allowed to watch any Nationals or Orioles games. They seem to base this on IP address, though, so you just need to proxy through a server outside the blacked out region.
• Also blacked out are *all* of the 4pm Saturday games each week. Apparently Fox owns exclusive rights to broadcasting them.
• A subscription only includes the regular season. The playoffs remain in the realm of regular old television.
• The NexDef feeds require a third-party plugin that only runs on Windows and MacOS. This did give me an excuse to try out the Windows 7 beta, but it's a shame they don't have a Linux version.
• The feeds (especially using NexDef) can thrash even the mightiest PC. This seems to have been resolved after the first few days, but it was unsettling to see a simple video stream eating up 100% of my CPU and half a gig of RAM.
• There have been other issues as well. For example, there have been a few occasions where my feed of choice has gone offline and I've had to revert to the other.
• It's all online, so the video quality is subject to your internet connection's speed and stability. My home internet connection always seems to hiccup during the most important pitches. The feed does automatically adjust its quality based on connection speed, but sudden stutters will still cause the video to pause momentarily.

Overall, now that they seem to have most of the kinks worked out, I'm pretty pleased. But give me a NexDef client for Linux, keep the feed outages to a minimum, and get my ISP to stabilize their service and I'll be ecstatic.

At the Christiansburg Walmart, a single donut is $0.33. A box of six donuts is $2.50.

Is the extra $0.52 a convenience fee for having your donuts already boxed? I don't get it. I try to not think about it too hard lest my brain explode, but it bugs me any time I go in to get donut tastiness.

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One, but only the first time it's done. They'll write a ten-line Bash script to handle that and all future light bulb changing automatically.

Note: I don't think I'm stealing someone else's joke, but I'm sorry if this is one that somebody told me and I've since forgotten