This Sucks!!

Josh Beckett – Cruised through 7 innings then got killed by two HRs, ended up with a no decision because Mike Timlin, who relieved Beckett in the 7th with 2 outs, promptly allowed a HR to Troy Glaus to tie the game. Timlin you suck!

Zack Duke – Didn’t pitch all that bad, allowed 3 runs in 6 innings. But never really had a chance because the Pirates never gave him a lead.

John Patterson – Cruised through 7 innings then allowed 2 runs in the 8th. Mike Stanton came in to relieve Patterson and promptly allowed a single to tie the game. Another no decision. Stanton you suck and Frank Robinson you’re an idiot to bring Stanton in with a 1-run lead. Can you just freakin’ bring in Chad Cordero to get 4 outs??? Thanks a lot!

On the other hand, Chris Shelton continues his crash back to earth and Richie Sexson and Pat Burrell continue their suckitude.

This is the bane of playing fantasy baseball. If your guys don’t do something for you today, they suck. If they don’t do crap for several days, they really really suck. When your pitchers got robbed you want to beat the crap out of the relievers who gave up the lead. You’ll become a rather miserable person with playing fantasy baseball. You know the players can’t hit homeruns (unless he’s Albert Pujols) or pitch shutouts everyday, yet you’d still get mad when they don’t perform. *Sigh*

My Fantasy Team’s Modified Lineup and Its Power Outage

This is my fantasy baseball team’s modified lineup, about 15 games into the season:

C:    Joe Mauer
1B:   David Ortiz
2B:   Felipe López
3B:   Troy Glaus
SS:   Michael Young
OF:   Adam Dunn
OF:   Carl Crawford
OF:   Pat Burrell
Util: Richie Sexson
Util: Ryan Freel
BN:   JD Drew
BN:   Chris Shelton

SP:   Carlos Zambrano
SP:   John Patterson
SP:   Josh Beckett
SP:   Danny Haren
SP:   Freddy Garcia
SP:   Zack Duke
SP:   Greg Maddux
SP:   Justin Verlander

RP:   Chad Cordero
RP:   Derrick Turnbow
RP:   Trevor Hoffman
RP:   Bobby Jenks

Who’s gone:

• Mike Piazza – What’s up with that barely-above-mendoza-line AVG? What’s up with that pathetic OBP? And you didn’t do crap at Coors Field either. Goodbye, you suck.
• Paul Byrd – Thanks for getting lit up and put my team ERA above 6.00. You suck too.
• Ervin Santana – I had to drop him to get Shelton, can’t be helped.
• Francisco Liriano – I dropped him for Joe Borowski. Then I discovered Borowski isn’t going to get many save opportunities, so I dropped him for Verlander.

After a bunch of my starting pitchers getting their asses kicked I’ve been able to drop the team ERA to a less pathetic mid 4s, thanks to a few great starts by Beckett, Maddux, Patterson, and Zambrano.

On the other hand, for the first 10-12 games or so into the season, my team’s offense was in full throttle but now it’s starting to cool down. Chris Shelton is falling back to earth, guys like Sexson, Drew, Crawford, and Mauer haven’t been doing much. I’m in a free fall in the standings and if I don’t get a few more long balls soon I’ll find myself at the basement AGAIN pretty soon. UGH!

A Little Blessing from Japan — Ka-mi-CHU!

Couple of friends of mine who went to Japan last month brought me this souvenir: a Kamichu! phone strap. It’s pretty nice but I had a hard time putting it on my phone. The hole to hang strap is too small and it took me a while to put it on. I’m not exactly a phone strap person because with the way I use the phone I probably would break that tiny string within 3 days. So instead of ruining this nice little gift I’m going to put it back into its original packaging (see below) and keep it somewhere safe.

Big thanks to JC and EC for getting me this from Japan.

Alabama City Apologizes to Rosa Parks – Why Now?

It seems that the city of Montgomery, Alabama has suddenly decided they are going to apologize to Rosa Parks and others who had suffered the injustice and humiliation during the 1950s. Please give me a break. If they are going to apologize to someone, shouldn’t they do it when that person was still alive and apologize in person? Why bother when the said person has already passed away? The article also states that the Alabama Legislature has passed a bill that would pardon Ms. Parks and others who were arrested for violating segregation-era laws. Excuse me, how many years has it been since desegregation? What took them so long?

All these apologies and pardons should’ve been done many years ago. I can’t help but wonder whether this is nothing but a publicity/political stunt. It lacks sincerity and looks to be too little, too late.

Switching from Yahoo Mail to Gmail

Few days ago I decided to make the jump from Yahoo Mail to Gmail. I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time but I haven’t been able to make up my mind until now. I’ve been using “YMail” for more than 8 years and it was my primary email account. I also have another one that I use to sign up for message boards, online shopping, and acting as a “spam abyss.” While YMail does the job adequately it leaves something to be desired.

What I like about YMail:

• Does its job, emails arrive without much delay. I gave Hotmail a try before I signed up for YMail many years ago. I sent a test email from a Hotmail account and it didn’t show up at the recipient’s end for a couple of hours. I found that unacceptable and went with Yahoo instead.
• Plain text emails are displayed with monospaced font. It makes reading tabular text and code much easier on the eyes. I’m a subscriber of sans.org’s security newsletters, and it drives me crazy to read them without monospaced font.
• A wide, and at least customizable, text area for writing emails. The default width is actually pathetically narrow, but it at least gives you the option of expanding it to 99 characters wide. A big, wide text area makes writing long emails a lot easier.
• YMail also comes with a calendar and notes. I don’t use the notes feature but I do use the calendar to send myself reminders such as to pay rent and etc.

What I don’t like about YMail:

• Ads, huge ads. If you don’t use any ad blockers you’ll be bombarded with ads of ridiculous sizes. It’s not unusual to see ads that take up half the width of the browser window and their obnoxious colors (eg pink background, or even worse, Flash-based) will drive you crazy. I use Firefox with the Adblock Plus extension and a custom userContent.css file to block out the majority of the ads, but a few of them (mostly text-based with obnoxious background colors) still slip through.
• Yahoo’s servers have become slower and slower over the years. I can click on the check mail button, wait 30s and there’ll be no response. There are times where I wrote a pretty long email, click send, and after 30s the browser would tell me the server took too long to respond. When I click the back button, I would lose the email I just wrote. This is very frustrating.
• The UI is slow. The non-AJAX YMail UI feels slow compared to Gmail or Windows Live Mail (or even just Hotmail). When the “server not responding” problem kicks in, the frustration really adds up.

Basically my problems with YMail are mostly about speed, UI responsiveness, and obnoxious ads. Gmail mostly doesn’t have these problems, but after a few days of serious use, I discovered it has its share of problems too.

What I like about Gmail:

• Unobtrusive ads. Sure Gmail has ads but they are nowhere as obnoxious as some of YMail’s ads and they are relatively small. If I really wanted to I can block them with some Greasemonkey scripts, but even as it is they don’t really bother me unlike YMail’s.
• Responsive UI. Gmail’s UI is simply more responsive. This is a really big plus. Also, it automatically checks whether I have new emails, so I don’t have to click the check mail button manually. (Yes, I’m a lazy person. ;-)
• Google’s servers seem to be faster and more reliable. At least I don’t have to wait 30s trying to send an email and get a server not responding error at the end. (The autosave feature helps prevent losing the email that you spent an hour to write because the server craps out.) It also never gets stuck connecting to the server when checking for new emails.
• Google Calendar. I made up my mind to switch after Google released Gcalendar beta to public. I want a calendar that integrates nicely with my email application. Gmail and Gcalendar do it rather nicely. Gcalendar still needs some improvements (task list, anyone?) but as it is I still find it more usable than Yahoo’s. One feature I most looking forward to try is sending reminder via SMS. I don’t own a PDA nor a smartphone, so this is going to be pretty useful for me.
• More storage space than I’ll ever need. Each Gmail account gives me 2.7gb of storage and it is still increasing slowly. I think Yahoo’s 1gb is more than enough since I don’t keep a lot of emails, but hey, it doesn’t hurt to get an extra 1.7gb of space…
• Email forwarding. Gmail allows me to forward incoming emails to another account. This is very useful since it allows me set up several Gmail accounts for different purposes, and I can manage all the emails from just one account.
• POP3 access. Gmail lets me check my email through POP3. Yahoo doesn’t offer this feature (or rather, it used to but not anymore) and I have been using YPOPs! to download emails to my computer. The program works but it’s not very convenient. Also YPOPs! is essentially a screen scraper that if Yahoo changed anything in YMail the application may need to be updated to function properly.

What I don’t like about Gmail:

• Cannot break up conversations. Grouping emails into “conversations” is a neat idea. Unfortunately it can get annoying when it groups the wrong emails into unrelated conversations. There’s no way to break them up and it’s all up to Gmail to get it right. Gmail mistakenly grouped several unrelated emails (which unfortunately have the same generic subject line “Re: hey”) that I forwarded from YMail into one conversation. Since I couldn’t break them up I had to download them to my computer instead.
• Emails aren’t displayed in monospaced font. I prefer to read plain text emails in monospaced font. Gmail doesn’t do that and there’s no option to change it. One way to get around it is to click the “Show Original” option and it will show the entire email along with its full header in another browser tab/window, which is in monospaced font. Obviously this is very inconvenient especially when you have to go through a large number of emails. Another way is to get a Greasemonkey script that changes the CSS font attribute of the email body. It works pretty well but I still prefer Gmail provides this as an option so I don’t have to install the Greasemonkey extension to begin with. Plus, it wouldn’t work if I’m using another person’s computer.
• Small text area when replying emails in plain text mode. When I reply an email in plain text mode, Gmail gives me a tiny text area below the email I’m looking at to write your reply. This text area is simply too small to write anything other than a short reply. I can’t even use the Resizable Textarea extension to make it bigger. Sure I can click on that little icon and it will open up a new browser window where I can resize the text area to my heart’s content. But why do I have to go through all these hoops? Interestingly, the textarea will expand if I switch rich formatting mode. Unfortunately, I prefer writing my emails in plain text.

Overall though, I feel that Gmail’s advantages outweight its problems. I resolved the monospaced font issue with a Greasemonkey script and I guess I’ll just put up with the small text area for now. The issue with conversation can get ugly if it keeps grabbing unrelated emails and puts them into one conversation. Let’s see what happens when I get more emails in. For now, I’m mostly satisfied with the switch. And with all the hassles I went through during the transition, it’ll take something really bad for me to go back.

Fedora Core 5, Updates, and Firefox

Last night Fedora has released a pretty big batch of updates for Fedora Core 5, which included upgrades to Gnome 2.14.1 and KDE 3.5.2. They also released the Firefox 1.5.0.2 update as well. I was hoping these updates would fix some of my pet peeves I’ve been experiencing, but alas, they didn’t and it actually added some more.

My biggest pet peeve: for some reason some entries under the Places menu in Gnome have broken. When I tried to select any of them they would show me an error message like this:

In this case, I clicked on the “Desktop” link under Places, and this is what I got. I mean, not only it doesn’t work, the error message it shows doesn’t offer anything that would help me to resolve this problem. If you’re going to show me an error message when something doesn’t work as expected, you better give me more details than a crappy message like this. I’ve googled around and I couldn’t find anything. I was hoping an update to v2.14.1 may fix this issue, but it didn’t. If anyone knows what’s going on, please let me know. Geez.

Update – April 20: Okay I finally found a solution to this stupid problem. I knew the reason I got an error when opening those links is that Gnome somehow forgot what application to use when opening a link to a directory. (It should be Nautilus.) Basically the MIME types screwed up for whatever stupid reasons. Anyway, I hadn’t been able to find where they store these MIME types but after more digging through Google I finally found it. It’s under /usr/share/applications/. Take a look at the file /usr/share/applications/defaults.list,
and add this line to the file:

inode/directory=gnome-nautilus-folder-handler.desktop;

then run this command to update the MIME database (you need to do this as root):

update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

Basically this tells gnome to use that gnome-nautilus-folder-handler thing to open directories by default and update the MIME database so it will take effect right away. I found this problem to be very annoying as there’s absolutely nothing that tells you where you can edit the MIME types. You can’t even do it in GConf, which is supposed to be a tool for “advanced users” to customize Gnome further and etc. This shows just how far they are willing to “dumb down” Gnome and make things difficult in unexpected ways.

I also had problems after Firefox was upgraded to 1.5.0.2. Put it simply: my extensions were all broken. When I started Firefox after it was upgraded, it complained something about install.rdf, and I knew something’s wrong with the extensions. Then I found that none of my extensions worked anymore. At the end, I uninstalled all of the extensions, reinstalled Firefox, and then installed the extensions again. It worked this time but it sure was annoying.

Update – April 20: It seems that Fedora devs screwed up with some of the language packs and they had to release an update to the 1.5.0.2 update. Unfortunately this update gave me the same error message when I restarted Firefox, although it didn’t cause my extensions to break this time. I can’t help but ask why they have to include 15 million language packs in the Firefox package. I think they should be separate and optional only for users who need them. I don’t use any of them and it adds a lot of bloat to the already huge Firefox.

24, the Fifth Day, at the 18th Hour

AS USUAL – SPOILER WARNING!

The good guys were all in big trouble in this episode. I couldn’t believe how careless/stupid James Heller was, and it really led to his own downfall at the end.

• I was surprised Jack would call Bill Buchanan right from the start. He didn’t even explain to Bill why he was set up to take the fall. It seemed that Bill didn’t mind at all though. Geez, Jack should at least let Bill hear the recording.
• I was *very* surprised by how Heller dealt with Jack after he received the recording. I really thought Heller was going to cooperate just like that. Heller’s reasoning for why it’s a bad idea to go public with the recording makes sense, but he wasn’t careful enough to think things through before he acted.
• That Miles bastard is really a bastard. How dare he set up our cult heroine Chloe like that! >:| On the other hand, I think Chloe should take some of the blame for trusting that paranoia chick. I mean, she just met her a few hours ago.
• Karen from DHS was getting suspicious about what’s going on inside the Administration. I wonder when she will wake up.
• I didn’t know besides being a geek, Chloe is such a good pickpocket. Miles is not just an ass, he’s a stupid one at that. By the way, how the hell did Chloe find out where Miles put his keycard anyway??
• I really laughed out loud when Chloe threatened that chick to put her through psychiatric evaluation if she reported Chloe. The look on that chick’s face was just too funny. Not to mention the way Chloe made her threat. She is just too funny to watch.
• The First Lady wanted to know what’s going on when Heller showed up to see Logan. Again she turned to Aaron Pierce for help. (The way she asked for help was kind of….errr, wasn’t very First Lady-like.) When she went to the staple to meet Aaron, she only found his cellphone at the meeting place. Was Aaron being found out by Logan and killed??
• This is where James Heller was being careless/stupid: he was right that he shouldn’t keep the recording himself. He was dead wrong to leave Jack, Audrey, and two of his guys behind at the airport. Come on, the airport is not a safe place by any means. Since he already had Jack tied up, he could’ve just dump him inside the trunk of his car, and drove them to a safer location before he went to meet with Logan. It was this mistake that led to Jack giving up the recording when Henderson arrived and took Audrey hostage. When Henderson got the recording, Heller’s plan of getting Logan to resign and go quietly collapsed.
• The move by Henderson of cutting Audrey’s artery to force Jack’s hand was really smart. It was effective and there was nothing Jack could do, unless he would let Audrey die just like that.

From the preview of next week’s episode, it seems that Henderson couldn’t get very far away before Jack catches up to him. Audrey seems to be alright as well although she was wounded pretty badly and lost quite a bit of blood. Logan said he has dealt with his wife, I wonder if he really killed her. Let’s see what happens next week.

Hello, Firefox 1.5.0.2, Where Art Thou?

Mozilla announced that Firefox 1.5.0.2 is released. Great, more bug fixes and all. The problem is, the software update in my 1.5.0.1 keeps saying there’s no updates available. I would think if it’s released they should at least make sure it’ll be available through Firefox’s software update? Or is the update mechanism failed to work AGAIN? Really, for things like software update, if they can’t get it to work correctly, please disable it until it works again. I guess I’ll have to download the freakin’ setup program again and do the uninstall-install cycle again. PITA.

Google Calendar Beta

I just found out Google opened its Google Calendar Beta to the public. Anyone who has a Google/Gmail account can give it a try. As I’ve said in another post I’ve been looking for a calendar program and I settled with Outlook. I’ve used a little bit of Yahoo Mail’s calendar but I found it too slow to my liking. I’m curious to see if Google Calendar would offer a more usable/responsive UI as a “ajaxified” web application.

(click for the larger view)

This is your usual day/week/month view of the calendar. If you click on a day (or hour if you’re in day/week view) a box will appear that allows you to add an event to that time frame. It’s a quick and dirty way to add events.

(click for the larger view)

If you click on the “Create Event” link in the upper left area this is what you’ll see. It gives you many more options when creating an event, such as adding descriptions, to set repeats/reminders, making the event public/private, and etc.

(click for the larger view)

This is the search options box for Google Calendar. There’s really nothing special, just the same as Gmail’s.

(click for the larger view)

This is where you can change settings for Google Calendar. These are the general settings.

(click for the larger view)

This is where you can add, delete, and share your calendar.

(click for the larger view)

These are the notification settngs. Notice you can have reminders/invitations send to your cell phone as SMS messages. I have not tried it with my phone but this can be a very convenient feature.

(click for the larger view)

One thing that I found not working is adding holidays to my calendar. I tried adding US holidays but it gave me an error message saying I don’t have access to it. What kind of special access do I need to add US holidays anyway?

Update: I tried again an hour later and it worked! What’s up with that?

I’ve only spent a very short time with it but I like what I see so far. The more responsive UI makes it feels a lot more like a desktop calendar program and I definitely feel more comfortable with it than Yahoo’s. As expected from a beta that just opens to the public, there are quite a few rough edges. Besides that weird error when adding holidays, it’s also not as integrated with Gmail as I would’ve liked. Google Calendar itself has a link to your Gmail account but not vice versa. You can’t get to Google Calendar from within Gmail. I would like to see a tighter integration with Gmail, possibly “merging” the two together that I can click on a tab/link in Gmail and be able to see my calendars/events. Another thing that is missing is a task list. I can substitute it with events but it is still nice to have. Hopefully they will add this feature later.

As soon as Google straightens out some of these rough edges, I’m ready to dump Yahoo Mail for good and move onto Gmail. I know there’s the very promising new Yahoo Mail coming, but I’ve signed up for the beta for more than half a year and I still haven’t heard anything from Yahoo besides “it’ll be ready VERY SOON.” I’m just a little tired of waiting. I signed up for Windows Live Mail beta and I received my invitation within a couple of months. Not that I think Yahoo really cares about a Joe Blow user like me, but I’m as good as gone if Yahoo doesn’t show me anything new quickly. Both Google and Microsoft have been showing people what they have to offer and the handful of screenshots from Yahoo Mail’s closed beta simply isn’t good enough.

Crash N’ Burn! My Starting Rotation!

*Sigh* Today is just a bad day for my fantasy team and it shows what a crappy starting rotation I have. I started John Patterson and Zack Duke. Patterson pitched okay but got a no decision and Duke simply got “duked.” A pitching line like 5 innings 8 hits 7 earned runs 2 walks is going to put a big dent on my team’s pitching stats, and my team’s already ranks last in WHIP. Duke you suck.

On the other hand, for whatever stupid reason I didn’t start Freddy Garcia and he actually pitched well and got the win. Even worse, I somehow put Jenks on the bench by mistake and I didn’t get the save! What the hell was I thinking??

With today’s results I think my team will probably drop to 5th or 6th place by tomorrow morning.

P.S. It was good news for *real* baseball: the Sox signed Big Papi for a contract extension that will last until 2010 with an option for 2011. They didn’t announce the actual value of the contract though. It’s nice to know Papi will be around for the next few years. I hope he’ll continue to crush the baseball until then.

Update: Actually now it says the deal is worth 52 million over 4 years with a club option for 2011.