Stupid Yahoo or Stupid Comcast or Stupid Akamai

Tons of people in the northeast who use Comcast can't get to Yahoo Mail/Fantasy Sports.

My laptop is one of the affected machines.

My desktop isn't.

Thank god. I've got a ton of fantasy deals that are pending, as I completely rework my team.

Anyway, the point of this is that this is one of the big reasons moving to internet services vs. fat clients is a bad idea. Someone flips a switch somewhere and all of a sudden you can't access X.

In this case, for me, it's a pretty minor thing. I really don't use Yahoo Mail for anything major. Fantasy sports are pretty much the only thing I care about on Yahoo. But for those folks who use Yahoo Mail as their primary mail account, this could be costing them business. Granted, they deserve it for using Yahoo Mail as their primary account, but still.

I will always choose to use a fat client over a web service. At least internet ISPs (and corporations running servers) figure out what they're doing.

As always, the moral is: I'm a dumbass.

Played softball with the company at a little outing today. Did pretty well for not swinging a bat in the past year or so.

Alas, didn't use any sunscreen on my arms or legs. So half of each arm and the tops of both my legs are radish-red.

Someday I'll remember that I'm Irish.

Yes, that's what we said. But it's not what we meant. Look over there, it's a bear.

Per Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo we have the morning White House press gaggle.

It's amazing. On the one hand, you've got the VP still saying that Iraq/Hussein and Bin Laden were working together. Scott McClellan (the Press Secretary) basically confirms this.

On the other hand, you've got the President who said that there was no link between Iraq/Hussein and Bin Laden. McClellan attemps to redirect this question into whether or not Iraq supported Palestinian terrorism, because you know, all Arabs are the same to this administration.

Oh, and the President has taken on an attorney to advise him in the matter of the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA work.

If only the Democrats had some sack, they'd be hauling his ass before Congress.

Wait - they tried that with the criminal Attorney General, who decided that the law didn't apply to him.

You seriously couldn't make up an administration this inept and corrupt. People would accuse you of going over the top. No one would believe it.

Hell, we're living it and I don't believe it.

Digging through the attic ...

Well, not so much digging through the attic as digging through the nooks and crannies of my computer.

I'm a packrat, both in the real world and digitally. For whatever reason, I decided to peruse some of the directories on my machine this evening. I started out looking for some pictures I had saved a few years back, but pretty quickly I got sucked into looking at obscurely named text files and trying to figure out what they are and why I saved them. It's amazing the memories that stream back as you're looking at a 7 or 8 year old email you saved.

I don't tend to save meaningless stuff. A lot of the stuff was web articles written about VT during our peak years in 96-99. A batch more were emails that were legitimately funny, as opposed to some of the ones that people claim are funny (like the lameass one with the Yankees and Red Sox jerseys - if you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about). Stuff like this is funny (I think I found this on a mailing list in 98):

The Top 16 Rejected Motel 6 Slogans

16. We're working on that smell thing, too.
15. Because you deserve better than the backseat of some car.
14. As seen on "COPS"
13. If We'd Known You Were Staying All Night, We'd Have Changed the Sheets
12. Not just for nooners anymore.
11. We left off the 9, but you know it's there.
10. You rented the room, now buy the video.
9. Sure, you could stay someplace nicer, but then you wouldn't have money left over for a hooker.
8. We'll leave the Lysol for ya!
7. Hey, we're not the Ritz, but just try banging your secretary there on *your* salary, pal!
6. We don't make the adultery. We make the adultery *better*
5. It's Hookerriffic!
4. Official Lodging of the 1998 Florida Marlins
3. Blurring the line between stains and avant garde sheet art since 1962!
2. Cheap and Easy -- Just Like Your Mother
and the Number 1 Rejected Motel 6 Slogan...
1. We put the "Ho" in "Motel"

Anyway, it was a fun jaunt down memory lane. And a welcome respite from trying to explain to folks why torture is bad and how it is perpetually amazing to me that the current administration still has a large portion of the American people fooled. But that's something for another day.

This is where I bitch ...

I hate blogs where people bitch about their personal lives rather than giving a personal take on some universal issue. Tonight, I'll bitch. Soon, I promise, I'm going to have a post trying to explain my general political views and trying to pinpoint exactly when it became uncool to be a liberal (just one reason I'm uncool). Or possibly my post about the recent arrival of Kevin Youkilis in the major leagues and how it's sort of a fun point of demarcation for the statheads versus the baseball luddites. But for now, I get to bitch.

About 3 weeks ago, I was running and felt a twinge in my left knee. I've had sort of minor knee issues since high school, so I figured I'd do the studly tough thing and just run through it. Except I couldn't. So I walked the 2.5 miles or so home from Davis Square. After every quarter mile or so, I'd notice that my knee didn't hurt, I'd try to run and after limping for 5 or 6 steps, I'd quickly go back to walking. Obviously, I don't learn my lesson very quickly. I'm kind of a dumbass.

Over the next week, I rested my knee, hoping time would work it back into shape. No go. After a week and a half of not being able to do anything but walk without having excruciating pain in my knee, I made an appointment to see my doctor (whoo hoo for health insurance). My doctor (whom I'd never met before) was very cool, but couldn't pinpoint it. His best guess was patellar tendinitis. So of course I google it to see whether or not I agree, and it turns out that his medical schooling was probably worth it.

Patellar tendinitis was a much better diagnosis than ruptured this or torn that, but it also meant that there wasn't a sure solution. I just can't go have someone open my knee up and make it all better. Stupid science. Instead, I have to do a bunch of exercises and take some naproxen to keep the swelling down.

Thankfully, I've been able to start running and playing basketball again. It's probably not the smartest thing to do, but the weather is getting nice and I can't just sit on my ass and watch stuff I've Netflix'd (that reminds me -- I'm going to try and get my Netflix queue up here at some point). I definitely sucked playing ball this morning. I can't quite go at full speed, nor cut as effectively as normal. Hopefully I'll get back to 100% over the next couple of weeks.

Anyway, that's my bitch session. My knee sucks. I'm too young for my body to start falling apart. Scarily, J.D. Drew has had chronic patellar tendinits throughout his major league career, and has never quite lived up to the expectations he had coming out of Florida State. This year, however, he's looking pretty studly at the plate and in the outfield (7 HRs in 105 ABs, which is just off the pace he set in his career year of 2001). Apparently all I need to overcome a bad knee is a few years and the resources of 2 baseball teams.

Well ... I finally got around to it

For about the last oh, ... forever, I've been thinking about creating a blog. I really just needed a place to dump all of my random idea and opinions. Having a place to actually write stuff and formulate cogent thoughts isn't such a bad thing either.

So, this is it, the defining moment, the first post.

Honestly, it's hard not to be let down. But everyone starts somewhere.

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