Moving Around

This was a two-baseball-game week.

Tuesday we went to see the only Red Sox game I'm likely to see this season, since it's their only trip to Oakland and the Sox are mostly going to be out of town the week I'm visiting my folks this summer. Debbi got tickets through her company, and we invited Syd and his girlfriend Jade to join us. The seats were nifty: First row right by the mound of the visitors' bullpen. ("Nifty" seems to be my word of the month, by the way. You've been warned!)

Sox ace Pedro Martinez was starting vs. the A's Corey Lidle. (Lidle's on my fantasy team, which didn't keep me from rooting for the Sox. I was even wearing my hat and all!) Pedro was hurt most of last year, and it seems clear to me that he has a permanent shoulder injury which will keep him from ever being what he once was. But he's still a good pitcher.

Not tonight, though: Both Pedro and Lidle got rocked early, and both were gone by the sixth inning. Syd (rooting for the A's, for whom he has partial season tickets) noted that whenever I went to get food the A's scored, and then when I came back the Sox scored. So after my second trip I settled in to see the rest of the game.

It was a slugfest: The Sox were slamming doubles to left-center, and Trot Nixon (also on my fantasy team) hit a solo homer to right field. We entertained ourselves watching Sox third baseman Shea Hillenbrand take pitches. Hillenbrand was a noted impatient hitter last season, but he started this season with the declaration that he would walk at least 40 times this season, and with patience has come surprising power. Considering I expected him to do nothing this year (I even picked him for my HACKING MASS team) this is a nice thing to see.

Few pitchers in the game distinguished themselves, but the Sox' hitters managed to be more prolific and worked out a 9-7 victory. This left the Sox with the best record in baseball, and they've gone on to sweep the A's and build a 9-game winning streak.

In exchange for the tickets for Tuesday's game, Syd gave Subrata and I tickets to tonight's A's game, against the Blue Jays. The Jays have - somewhat surprisingly - been one of the patsies of the American League this year, but they managed to pound A's starter Mark Mulder - fresh from the disabled list - to earn a 6-2 victory. This game was not as much fun as Tuesday's, but it was enjoyable nonetheless.

This was a strange week at work since it was the week of Apple's annual Worldwide Developer's Conference. Most of my department was down there for the whole week, and the rest of us rotated between the office and the conference (at San Jose's McEnery Convention Center) as time and our conference responsibilities permitted. (I was "on call" for the two Project Builder sessions, though I ended up only answering a few questions outside of the on-stage presentations.)

Conference attendees and speakers also got a complimentary copy of the new book, Developing Cocoa Applications from its publisher. It's always nifty to get free stuff.

I'm not as into WWDC as some of my cow-orkers are. Some of them like to go down and spend the whole week there, attending sessions and hanging out with developers. I tend to choose some specific sessions I want to see and otherwise stay in the office. The most interesting session I attended was on making Cocoa applications on Mac OS X AppleScriptable, which seems useful both for work and for any apps I want to write for myself at home.

WWDC also features a Thursday-evening party on the Apple campus to which attendees are invited. This features good food, a live band, and Apple developers walking around in special T-shirts to answer developer questions. (The food seems to be far and away the most important of those three to the attendees, from what I've observed.) I hung around at this longer than I'd expected - two hours - since I kept running into people I wanted to chat with.

WWDC is always an interesting diversion in the year. Of course, I haven't yet had to spend the time to prepare a presentation before the conference, so maybe I "get off easy".

Other news this week is that now that I've moved to Mountain View, many of my friends who have been renting up here are buying houses down near where I used to live! Gaming buddies Mark and Yvette have bought a place down there and are doing some work on it before moving in. Cow-orker Mike (whom I used to work with in Madison) and his wife Angela are buying a place down there, and our friends in the other half of their duplex, Chad and Camille, are thinking about doing likewise since their landlady is thinking of selling the property.

I don't really mind, though. I'll still see 'em all. My Mom said to me a while back that it's better to pick a place to live based on where the things you like to go to are located, not because that's where your friends are, because friends can move and/or fall out of touch. So I guess that's true. But it is the case that most of what I do is up here on the peninsula, and I don't regret moving up here at all.

Besides, I commute against traffic to get to work, and that's worth a lot all by itself!