Nats win! Twice in one night!
The Nationals beat the Mets tonight 5-1, on the strength of Livan Hernandez's pitching, as well as his bat. Livan was last year's "Silver Slugger", awarded to the best hitting pitcher, and he hit a solo home run while pitching 8 innings and only giving up 1 run.
And the Nationals won in another way tonight too. DirecTV announced it will air 68 more games on channel 626, the new Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (unfortunately owned primarily by Peter Angelos). They will also carry the games that we in the Washington area get on channel 20, in case your antenna can't pick it up. This means viewers from Harrisburg, PA to Charlotte, NC will get all 135 games on MASN. But the big point is that we'll now get to watch OUR Nats every game! Hooray! DirecTV rules!
NCAA is all about the Benjamins
The NCAA has approved a plan to add a 12th game to the football schedule. Apparently, adding a playoff system, in which a maximum of 2 teams would play 2 more games than they normally would, would be a detriment to the student athlete, but just adding one more regular season game wouldn't. What a crock. They're doing it all for the money, and we all know it.
Portage III: Return of the Land Line
We got our landline dial tone back this morning. It seems the Cavalier Telephone had a "network outage" in our area yesterday, but by this morning, it was back in action. So, I'm on hold right now waiting to cancel our Verizon phones. The land line going out like that does seem like an omen though, doesn't it?
I like T-Mobile a lot already. When I called yesterday to port my number, even with all the transferring and waiting, I am pretty sure the whole process took less than 10 minutes. I guess that's why they won the JD Power awards. To cancel with Verizon, I was on hold for 12 minutes before anyone even answered, but to the customer service rep's credit, even though she tried to get me to stay for a bit, she cancelled everything within 3 minutes.
How not to increase your approval ratings
So, in spite of a 60 day tour to promote his Social Security plan, the president's approval ratings are dropping all the time. What's a president to do? Call a prime time press conference, of course! Ooh, but not during May sweeps on Thursday night, the most competitive TV ratings night. Lisa De Moraes has a good wrapup of the debacle, starting with the arm-twisting required by the White House to even get the Networks to carry the press conference, to the reactions of fans of the preempted shows. Regardless of your political beliefs, this paragraph is really funny.
"Wanna know how you can get those poll numbers up, Mr. President? Don't schedule a press conference during 'Survivor,' 'CSI' and 'The Apprentice,'." wrote one skeptic on the Web site DamianPenny.com. An "O.C." fan observed on that show's Web site: "He started the war in Iraq which was totally wrong, caters to big business ..... , lets big corporations pollute our air & water, but the worst thing he could ever do is pre-empt The OC!"
Yes, President Bush, we all know that more people are watching TV on Thursday night than any other time, but this is becoming a trend that is not endearing you to anyone. It's most definitely not a good way to get your approval ratings up.
Weed burner
Burn those weeds!
Portage, part deux
Just a quick update from yesterday's note about cell phone porting. It appears that everything went swimmingly, and my old cell phone number is now my new one! I'll be cancelling the old ones, as soon as I'm sure that our land line phone service is back in operation (long story there, ahem).
Even Wynn can’t escape them
Heh. They're everywhere, even at the new Wynn! The place looks really nice, as expected. Yahoo's article doesn't talk about the gambling though, so here's the Las Vegas Advisor review (summary: $15 minimums on the tables, mostly standard everywhere else, but a smaller than expected sports book. The restaurants are really expensive too)
The trees are weeping
Have you ever been reading something, a Word document, a web page, whatever, and said to yourself, "Self, this is really useful, you should print it out." And then you print it out. And the pages start pouring out of the printer. And they keep coming and coming. Finally, 93 pages later it's done.
Trees, I apologize. I had no idea that article was 93 pages long.
Sudip update
I just posted a new article on Sudip over on his site. It's from a magazine called "India Abroad", and it takes a lot of material from the website itself. That's pretty cool in my book. I just set the thing up for him so that his friends and family could have an easy way of reading his updates. Did I mention that he wrote a book and is looking for a publisher? My skinny little cross country buddy is a celebrity!
Line the blog
I have started experimenting with Bloglines recently. Previously, I had been using the "Sage" extension to Firefox to read the RSS feeds of the web sites I like. RSS is basically a way to just pull the new stuff off the web site quickly, without having to go to all the individual pages.
Well, much like I can now use del.icio.us to organize my bookmarks that I used to have on computers at work and at home, and were never quite exactly the same, I can now use Bloglines to keep track of RSS feeds from home and work in the same way. It seems to be working pretty well, although I'm not sure how frequently it updates pages, and whether I'm getting everything as it is posted. I also added a "blogroll" to the sidebar on the right, which takes the stuff I am subscribed to on Bloglines, and puts it in the sidebar automagically. Nifty.
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