22 May 1999: Yes, I've Been a Busy Boy

Saturday, 22 May 1999:

Yes, I've Been a Busy Boy

I haven't been writing for a variety of reasons, but the main two are: Nothing was happening, or I was too busy to write.

Monday and Tuesday were the former: I went to work, did my thing, ran some errands, came home, watched TV, did laundry, etc. etc. Yawn, right?

Wednesday, things got busy.

Work was busy, but mostly not especially interesting to write about. Just a lot of testing. The high point came on Thursday, when I finally started pushing to get a particular bug resolved, and ended up with several programmers in my cubie staring at the monitor and stepping through code to figure out what was wrong. It had taken several days to find the person who knew where in the large code stack the bug was occurring, and it took an hour - maybe more - for him to track down the actual bug. At the end, he pronounced it a "good bug", which was cool. It was pretty insidious, and It'll be good to have it fixed. Woo-hoo!

In addition to playing Starcraft with my boss, he's also been playing foosball with me as we take on a few pairs of opponents. Neither of us is very good; JP's got the power shot, but isn't much better at aiming his shots than I am. I'm getting better at blocking shots, but have no power. Well, practice makes perfect.

Oh, and yes, we did play Starcraft one day this week: JP kicked my ass. It wasn't even funny; I had been building up these defenses and he just swept through them like they weren't even there. Gah! He's awesome at that game.

Wednesday night was gaming night, and we played a couple of games of Settlers. The first game, a 6-player one, was pretty standard, all of us fighting it out. The second game was a 4-player game and was highly frustrating; all three of the other players kept putting the robber on me, so I kept losing all my cards early on. It took me forever to get going, and then both Subrata and Ben beat me to key locations on the board by only a turn or two. I ended up with 9 points, one short of victory, when Subrata won. Gah! Still, I obviously did okay, so maybe they were right in assessing me as the main threat. Moreover, I did score a consolation victory by placing 6 road segments in one turn. Woo-hoo!

In among all these losing gaming experiences, we played Bridge on Thursday evening, and I feel that my bidding game is really coming together. My play is getting better, but I'm still fuzzy on some things. I was happy to learn that my bids were generally pretty reasonable this time, and even the ones I was doubtful of were close calls anyway.

Friday evening Ceej and I went to see the Giants play the Astros at Commercialstick Park. We both cut out of work a little early, met at her place (where I got to pet her and David's Yorkies [isn't that a baseball team? The New Yank Yorkies?]), and we drove to the game. Turns out we got there well over an hour early, and got to see all of batting practice, and sit in the sun for a while before it set.

The game was a good one: Giants pitcher Mark Gardner pitched probably his best game of the season so far. CJ asked me a number of questions about baseball, and in the second or third inning, Gardner came to the plate to bat, and we talked about pitchers batting, why we like the DH rule in the American League, and how hitting and pitching are such different skill sets that pitchers rarely bat well for a whole season.

And at this point Gardner hit a high fly ball to left field, which cleared the bleachers for a two-run homer, his first career home run.

The crowd went wild, cheering and applauding and forcing Gardner to come out for a curtain call, waving his batting helmet to the crowd from the dugout. (Curtain calls seem to be getting more common in baseball; seems like five or six years ago they never happened, because players didn't want to 'show up' the opposing pitcher. But apparently fans like 'em, so they happen.)

That's what I love about this game: Anytime you go to the park, you could see something that you might never see again (unless you go to a lot of games). I may never again see a pitcher hit a home run in person. I've also seen my runner picked off first base, and runner thrown out while trying to steal home. Other sports don't seem to quite have the same sort of potential.

So, the Giants won, 4-3, a good tight game the whole way through. CJ - who had been lamenting before the game that with Gardner pitching, the Giants would likely be crushed (not a bad bet, in fact) - pronounced it a fine game and a good night at the park (even if she did feel a little ill from the garlic fries). We went home, I played David in a game of Starcraft - I won - and I headed home to bed.

One more point of baseball news: My team, the Red Sox, have won 13 of their last 16 games, are leading the AL East, and have the best earned run average in the American League. Hard to believe, but very nice to see!

I picked up some material things this week. Chief among them, Thelonious Monk's Complete Riverside Sessions CD box set, which is quite good. I'm only about a third of the way through listening to it. It will keep me busy for a while, music-wise.

Also, to continue to feed my Starcraft habit, I bought an Ethernet card for my Powerbook, and then got some cabling and a hub for home, and found that yes, it really is simple to hook up Ethernet to Macs and make it work. I love Macintoshes.

My printer, unfortunately, doesn't have an Ethernet jack, so I'm not sure if I can hook it into the network. Maybe there's some sort of Ethernet/Localtalk adaptor I can buy. That would be cool. I've had this printer for a while, but it's perfectly suited to my needs and I really see no reason to buy a new one.

Had a fairly quiet day today. The main action was Bill and Julie calling to ask if I wanted to drive down to Santa Cruz. So we stopped by Bill's office (he works for OnRadio), then went to SC and had lunch downtown, and then drove to the shore and walked along the bluffs and down to the beach below. There were many surfers out, and they seemed to be having a fine time, despite the fairly small waves. There were also dogs on the beach, having a very fine time.

At home this evening, I watched the final episode of Homicide. It works fairly well as the series finale, although I felt the motivations for Bayliss' departure from the unit were a little forced. But his actual departure was very nicely handled, with a montage of scenes from the last seven years as he looked over the unit for the last time. My one real disappointment was that I thought Giardello's handling of his promotion to Captain was extremely lame and out-of-character.

The series' final dialogue:

Sheppard: "Life is a mystery. Accept it." Lewis: "Yeah? That's the problem with this job: it ain't got nothing to do with life."

(Turns out Lewis is using a line from his old partner, Crosetti. But who cares?)

Michael Rawdon (Contact)