The re-segregation of baseball

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , , , , ,

The Kansas City Star had a piece today about the sharp decline in the number of African-Americans playing baseball. Of course, when I grew up, the Royals relied heavily on African-Americans. George Brett was the star, but without Willie Wilson and Frank White hitting ahead of him and Hal McRae and Willie Aikens or John Mayberry hitting behind him, opposing pitchers would have never thrown Brett a hittable pitch.

Today, the Royals’ starting position players, their five starting pitchers and all of their key relief pitchers are all either white or Hispanic. The only African-American on their roster right now is speedy outfielder Jarrod Dyson.

I think I know why.

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Another benefit of not having debt

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , ,

I’ve written about how not having debt gives you power, though I can’t find the particular post at the moment. But I remember when I got my first mortgage. I went to a party, and my boss was there, along with my five other bosses, and the big boss got this look in his eye when I said I’d bought a house. That look in his eye said one thing: I own you, and I can do whatever I want to you.

And he did. From that day forward, all of the assignments nobody else wanted fell on me. Anything that was destined to fail went to me. And the cycle followed me from job to job, then stopped, like turning out a light, the day after my wife and I paid off our mortgage. It was the closest thing to magic I’ve ever seen. One day, I was the guy who got assignments at 3 PM on a Friday that were going to take me 8 hours to get done–and they had to be done by 8 AM on Monday, and one day, I wasn’t that guy anymore.

I tested it again this month. I turned down a job that offered me a $7,000 pay cut. Nothing unusual about that, right? Not in this case. In this case, rejecting that pay cut meant I didn’t have a job anymore. Read more

Exploiting Twitter

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , ,

It’s interesting that I read two things about buying Twitter publicity today: John C Dvorak’s experiment for PC Magazine and an interview with my classmate and friend Ken. The idea is that people buy Twitter followers to make themselves look bigger than they are, whether they’re celebrities trying to make themselves look like they’re on their way up rather than down, or, like the scam my friend discovered, indie book authors trying to build a following.

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A collection of old photographs to help your model-making

Dave Farquhar Model Building, model railroading, Toy trains

It’s hard to make models of old buildings without knowing what they looked like in the past. Over a period of about 30 years, Charles Cushman, an exceptionally gifted amateur photographer, took about 14,000 slides of everyday life, mostly in color. After his death in 1972, his family donated the slides to Indiana University, which digitized the collection and put it online. Key in what you’re looking for–buildings, automobiles, people, whatever–and you can study photos taken from 1939 to 1969. Then you can make your people, buildings, or cars look like they did during the time period you’re after. If you like a particular city, you may even be able to find pictures of that city in the collection.

I love driving through the older parts of St. Louis and imagining what the city looked like in the past, but sometimes it’s not easy to imagine what’s behind the boarded-up windows, and what the streets and sidewalks would look like with people milling around. Seeing the Cushman photos makes it easier to imagine what the buildings that survive today looked like in their glory days.

If you use a Linksys router, you need to drop everything now and upgrade it

Dave Farquhar security , , ,

If you own a Linksys WRT54GL or EA2700 router, both devices have serious security vulnerabilities. Serious enough that the only way to continue using them safely is to load an alternative firmware such as DD-WRT on them. That’s not entirely a bad thing; DD-WRT is more capable, and unlike most consumer-oriented firmware, allows you to disable WPS.

The EA2700, in particular, is so trivially easy to hack it’s laughable–all it takes is entering a predictable URL into a web browser. That’s it.

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