Baseball and SOMETHING Else

with the world series in full swing, i decided to make a baseball-related post. i saw this article the other day and wasn't at all surprised that baseball tv ratings have just plummeted.

i used to kinda deny it a bit, but c'mon, an entire baseball game is, well, fuckin boring to be honest with you. even when you go to a game, if you don't go with a group of friends or something, it can really be agonizing. and i say this as having only ever gone to texas rangers games myself, and usually they just suck. but even playoff baseball games that actually matter, watching the entire game is a real chore. commercials between innings, on pitcher changes, injuries, etc; pitchers with slow pacing, games with very little offense, boring matchups.

i've found the best solution is to actually have the baseball game on, but to have something else you're interested in to turn to when the game gets in a lull. for me i usually go with a selection of games on the NHL Center Ice package, or have my laptop at hand when the game's on. i don't know how that would count in a nielsen ratings entry, but i don't really blame the people that just don't bother to watch at all anymore.

you look back at the ratings soaring back in the late 70's early 80's and you can tell people just had a lot less options for what to do with their time. i mean i'm a baseball fan, and if it was 1978 and there was no internet, not a huge selection of channels or choices for sports coverage, of course i'd be watching a world series game. i think that's basically all the ratings say, is that now we've got a lot more options for what to do with our spare time. the same guys that are blowing off a world series game now to play video games online for a few hours were the same ones that would have been watching the game at home 20-something years ago.

and if MLB makes streaming highlights of every game available at the end of every night, what's so bad about tuning into see the highlights of the game? even if you looked at highlights and some in-depth analysis following along with a preview of the next game, that's what, maybe 5 minutes to get you up to speed? if you had something (read: anything) better to do with the 3-4 hours the game took, who can blame you for saving yourself some time and keeping up with baseball in a highly condensed form?

--j

Telecommuting like it's 1999

with a lot of code to write, little to test on hardware and not needing a lot of one-on-one time with other engineers, combined with the ailing back and riding painkillers the last few weeks, i've worked at home a lot lately. of course, with approval from the ol' boss.

there's obviously pros & cons. i can't really complain about working from home on a nice 70 degree friday afternoon. i've got a nice setup with work running on one computer, and fun stuff like IM and iTunes on the other. windows (that would be like real windows, y'know made out of glass?) open, and i've got an iTunes smart playlist shuffling what i call "AltRock Middle School" which for me means only playing alternative rock from 1993-1995. now and then i'll have a song come on that instantly takes me back to riding the bus in 8th grade, heh.

the screenshot from my yahoo! traffic dashboard widget you see included with this post reminded me of one of the definite perks of working from home -- not having to drive. i only live 15-minutes-on-a-bad-day away from work, so traffic doesn't impact me that much. still, traffic sucks, and i'm glad i'm not dealing with it. i guess all in all, i'd take a pain-free back and 15 minutes of traffic over what i've got at the moment, but eh, whatever.

happy weekend.

--j

Any excuse to be on the couch...

i've written some lately about my back problems, and as part of that i have to make an active attempt to avoid uselessly (meaning not being paid for it) sitting at the computer. whether it's gaming, tv, whatever, as long as i can relax a bit more on the couch it should be beneficial for me.

since the new NHL season started up last week, i've been quickly reminded how much i love my direcTV Center Ice package, which gets me all the league games. it's great when there's like 8 games on in a night and you can just pick and choose which ones to switch between based on rivalries, scores, etc. it kinda sucks that more teams are in the northeast and insist on starting at 7pm local (so 6pm for me) so those games are done by 8:30. because of that, i end up unconsciously following the more western teams since more of their games start at 8 and 9 o'clock.

i've been impressed that we've had some decent HD hockey coverage lately. between thursday and saturday night games on HDnet, monday or tuesday HD games on versus and direcTV showing one regional coverage game in HD most nights with the CI package i can get a decent amount of high-def eye candy.

between paying roughly $130 a season for the satellite package and several hundred for our 10-game stars season tickets, i think we're pretty firmly cementing that we're hockey fans over other sports. since i started dating alayna i became a lot more of an NBA fan, so i'm definitely a big fan of basketball in the last few years (obviously fixed finals series NOT included, of course). i've always been a football fan, but for some reason lately i've soured on it a bit. i still sloth it up most sunday afternoons on the couch flipping between several HD games, but i'm so often annoyed by the circus element that the NFL carries these days. the NHL might be reduced to the 5th favorite sport in this country at this point, but i don't really care. it sure doesn't carry the same bullshit theatrics that the NFL does.

it is baseball playoff season though, and i haven't forgotten about that. the games have looked good on fox, and they seem to have toned down some of the godawful graphics and sounds they used in the past. and as i said before, any year in which the yankees won't be winning it all can't be THAT bad.

--j

Another Stab at PC Gaming

so a couple years ago when i was putting my HTPC together, i was all excited at the idea of running PC games on a 50" DLP display in the living room. i tried out several en vogue games, like doom 3 and call of duty. i was proud of setting everything up to have a great time gaming on the PC, which i hadn't really done since counterstrike in my college freshmen days.

the experiment... kinda worked. the same ol' shit from years past plagued me yet again -- hardware instability. most games despite playing with display settings i'd have random game crashes and all-too-frequent reboots where the graphics card couldn't even show the screen for ten minutes after. one of the few games that didn't cause too many problems was halo, which is really the only one i got even serious at all about. of course it was just a ripped copy, so i just played the single campaign.

well i had decided i'd heard enough good things about a few PC games lately, i'd try out a few again. mind you, i've still got largely unplayed stuff just sitting on the HTPC already, like c&c:generals and doom 3, but i figured i could try out some new stuff. i had heard that you could have endless fun with oblivion, as well as the civilization series. so naturally, i went and grabbed a DVD image of oblivion and some CD images of civilization IV. i was all geared up to try something new...

oblivion's installation instructions popped up in french. i figured there was some kind of language settings i could mess with to change that, but i never found anything. i fumbled through the menus and got things installed. i load up the game and it's the same thing, it's all in french. no language control to be found anywhere. in frustration, i uninstalled the game and threw the useless DVD in the trash.

i figured okay that was just bad luck, let's try out civilization IV. i got it installed, and was instantly reminded of all the shit you have to go through to get a PC game to work properly on a custom HDTV display. i searched forums, tweaked settings, edited .ini files and finally got the game to load up. an hour later, i come to find that the game is unable to run widescreen 1280x720, the highest my DLP TV supports. i'm not gonna play it in a window, it's distracting. so basically, another failed experiment.

so i guess i can try to alleviate these issues my downloading a different oblivion rip and seeing if that one's in english. i could run civilization IV on my office XP box, but i just changed up my office setup so that both macs are using the side by side monitors and i just login to the XP screen whenever i want. the whole appeal was to be able to play on the comfort of a couch with a sweet big display. maybe that's a bad idea for a strategy-type game though, i dunno.

the point is within like a day i remembered why when people ask me if i play games, i make sure i answer "yes, console games."

--j

Breakfast Anytime

hmm, well apparently i'm in quite the posting mood lately. i think it's funny how i read gaming blogs more often than CNN, so i get random news like mcdonald's considering offering breakfast all day long from 8bit joystick instead of ABC news. not to mention like two weeks later, heh.

not that that's necessarily a healthy idea, but alayna & i were quite disappointed one night in allen when our 1am request at the local mcdonald's for the delicious #4 breakfast was denied, as breakfast didn't start till 4:30am. i guess we were spoiled by the all-night breakfast the college station mcdonald's across from a&m offered. there was nothing quite like having an egg mcmuffin at 3:30am while all the chairs were stacked on the tables and a guy was mopping the floors. thus, i approve of this proposed all-day idea.

--j

Watch TV Show, Write Essay

y'know i'm as excited as the next guy that Lost has started back up, but i've never seen a show cause so much over-analysis in my life. you can tell the writers do their absolute best to only move the plot along as little as they can to keep viewers coming back, and because of that avid fans spend gobs and gobs of time analyzing what they saw and what they speculate could happen next.

a post like this is exactly what i'm talking about. it's like people are typing up little paragraphs generally voicing their opinion on the episode and somebody like this just drops this friggin essay in the middle of the thread. what's sad is that you just know as they're watching the show they're taking notes on a yellow legal pad to rush over to their computers with 3 minutes after it's over. what's even worse than that are the people that post opinions as the show's still in progress, like 20 minutes in.

i've come to enjoy the TiVo Community board more than others i've seen cuz the people are generally pretty down-to-earth, but i've noticed my post count is ridiculously low cuz sometimes i can't believe what giant losers these people come across as. i may enjoy television and i may be an analytical person, but jesus, sit down on your goddamn couch and just enjoy being entertained without telling everybody else what you thought about each minute after it ends.

got that little rant out of my system.

--j

Rick's HFCS Diet

so after hearing so much bad buzz about high fructose corn syrup over the last few months and seeing rick's successful shedding by giving up cokes, i've tried myself to avoid HFCS as best as i can.

it's actually more difficult than i had originally thought, because so many things these days seem to have it. i'm not exactly the type to go scouring through food labels looking for ingredients or calorie counts or anything so sometimes i won't even realize something has HFCS till i stop and think to look. i was surprised that stuff like cans of country time lemonade and a V8 smoothie bottle had it. it almost seems like you have to find something that's specifically marked as healthier (such as including splenda) to avoid it.

i don't wanna act like it makes the biggest difference in the world, but i think avoiding HFCS is something that's relatively manageable for me. i can't pretend like i have a "weight problem" so i'm not looking to really diet hardcore or start massively portion controlling or anything like that. but i had gotten to a point where i was usually drinking one 20oz. coke at work, a 12oz. can with dinner and another 12oz. can before midnight everyday. that's 44oz. of coke a day, which is obviously waaay too much. i started to get better by subbing in other drinks like juices and sugar-free lemonades instead of the cokes, as well as trying and liking coke zero.

with the exception of occasionally getting "real" cokes at restaurants, i've largely stopped drinking real soda with HFCS. when i can find coke zero (which can be dodgy at work) i always go for that. i'd say at this point it tastes about 90% as good as coke, and still has caffeine, so it works for me. i've basically found that if i avoid real cokes for several days, i'll generally be 4-5 pounds lighter on the scale, as long as i'm doing cardio a few times a week. that basically puts me at my goal weight of 195, and i've even been a few pounds below that a bit.

in truth you kinda never want to achieve your goal, because then you don't have a goal left. as long as i'm hovering around 195 i guess i kinda don't care that much how things go. i've actually done a great job at cutting way back on fast food, although i can't really say it's dropped much off of me. i think the only realistic way i'm gonna flirt with maybe 190 is to work out more, but 4 times a week is realistically the best i can't hope for, which also isn't gonna gain me much.

so i don't really know what my new year's resolution's gonna be, at least food-wise. but i guess that can't be too bad a predicament, hey?

--j

A Rare Shot at Self-Discipline

i've decided to try to enforce some rules upon myself to help be more "entertainment productive" at night so i don't get stuck reading whatever blog or site bloglines tells me has a new post, or scrolling through fanboyish posts on digg or slashdot or reading TV episode discussion at TiVo Community for way too long every night. when i say "entertainment productive," i mean knocking out movies and TV eps, logging a few hours on a game, reading a book, etc. my reasons for this include both aiding recuperation for my still ailing back as well as just plain making more significant progress on getting other things done in life.

i came across a few GTD-related programs that might help self-discipline a bit. one is this simple little OS X program called Fob that simply puts a countdown timer in your dock to remind you how much longer you have till [x] event happens. in my case, i'm using it to countdown how much longer i should be sitting at my computers.

the other piece of software i came across today is called DailyLogger, which is a ridiculously simple program that simply keeps a log of everything you enter into it. for my own purposes, i intend to enter into it what specific tasks i got involved with online, to justify why i spent a few hours in my office when i've already spent hours sitting upright all day at work.

hopefully a little discipline could maybe help me alter my still-weird-after-all-these-years hours just a bit.

--j