Sports NightBollocks.Cleveland beat Boston 11-1 today in a disastrous outing for Bret Saberhagen in Game Two of their AL Division Series. I thought the Sox could get to Tribe starter Charles Nagy - he of the 4.95 ERA - but apparently I was wrong. This could be a quick exit from the postseason for the Sox.
 I've mentioned before that we play foosball at work as a break in the afternoon. Usually I team up with my boss, JP, and we play Ray and Daryl, a couple of other QAers in the department. Now, JP has a devastating power shot which is incredibly hard to block, and makes up for the weaknesses in his game, usually. JP and I usually come out on top. I seem to be the second-best player among our regulars (who don't include the really good players in the department, who can usually wipe the floor with any of us), so when we're not doing that match-up (which we keep doing for historical reasons), JP and I are usually on opposite teams, which means I'm usually on the losing team. Yesterday, though, Ray wasn't available, so we got Kory, another QAer, to fill in. JP, feeling pumped, said, "Who wants to win?" when we were choosing sides. It was only fair that Daryl and I team up against him and Kory. So we started playing. Suddenly, I started focusing on positioning my men on defense very carefully, and JP's kill shots kept running smack into my men, instead of into the goal. And I focused on hitting for more power from the back, and had some success (although my wrists got sore after a not too much of that). And we won the first game. Then, I switch to offense, and we won the second game. Then, we switched again, and won the third game. In the best-of-five set. Daryl and I were pumped. We kept playing - and we won the other two games, too! I don't know exactly what it was, but we'd nullified JP's advantage, and though it was still a contest (two of our wins were 5-4), we somehow won all five games. JP pleaded being sick (he does have a cold). Today, we couldn't find a fourth, so JP railroaded my cow-orker Tom (a developer) into playing with him. Tom doesn't play, so he didn't muster a lot of offense, although he did score a couple of goals and did pretty well at blocking. But, Daryl and I still won the set, 3 games to 1, again mostly nullifying JP's kill shot, and having to win the third game by coming back from a 4-2 deficit. So, it seems we've achieved some sort of breakthrough. Why am I going on about this, aside from just being pumped about winning some games? Well, I've felt for a while like I'm not very strong on hand-eye coordination, and I haven't felt for a while like I've been improving much at this particular skill (however meaningless), and it's really a big boost to see that I am making adjustments and growing in this little way. It gives me a little more confidence where everything else is concerned.
Speaking of growing, this morning I managed to jog about 2/3ds of my route before having to stop and walk, which I think is very nearly a full mile. Not bad! I'm doing the whole nearly-1.5-mile route in just over 14 minutes (having shaved about 40 seconds off my time in the last week or so). I'd been starting to worry that it just wasn't going to get any easier, and although it's not by a long shot easy, again, I now have hope. Also, I went over for my annual flu shot. I've gotten them for free at Epic the last couple of years, and this year I got a free one (actually, covered by my health plan) from Apple. I also dragged Tom over, and we got there during a lull, so he got one, too, despite not having an appointment. I've heard on the news that there are some advanced flu strains going around this year, so I figure a shot is a good idea. Also at work, I got through a bunch of testing and qualifying in the last couple of days, and had a couple of developers show me some new stuff on the way to finding or fixing a couple of problems. So it's been nice to make progress there, too. My next self-appointed task is that I want to review and evolve our test suites for the application, and see if I can make a good stab at achieving (and showing that we're achieving) full coverage of the app. (A challenging goal - it's a flexible and complex app which therefore means it's not only a good app, but a large and difficult one to test completely.) I think we have a framework in place to at least make an attempt at this.
CJ just put up a couple of photos I took during one of our hikes last spring. They turned out rather well, I think.
Watched two TV episodes tonight: Law & Order (taped from Wednesday) involved a judge who was shot and paralyzed in her garage by an apparent car thief. The actual culprit makes for a complex case, especially when the judge decides she can't bear the pain of going on living. The district attorneys go through some difficult mental acrobatics to decide what they need to do to do their jobs, versus what the right and moral thing to do regarding the people involved is. It's pretty powerful. Guess I'll keep watching this series for a while. Better yet, I watched the season premiere of Sports Night (taped from Tuesday). I'd seen one episode in re-runs over the summer, and was fairly impressed with it. This episode was even better, and I think I'm hooked. Things I like about it:
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