It’s hard to know what to make of Jose Canseco’s steroid allegations

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , ,

I remember back when the words "Jose Canseco money" meant something, even among people who weren’t really all that interested in baseball.

You see, Jose Canseco was a huge name. He hit long home runs in large quantities, and people paid him huge amounts of money to do it. For a time, he was the most popular and highest-paid player in the game.

Today, the money’s gone and he can’t get a job, and reading about his tell-all book is pretty sad.Terry Steinbach, a former teammate of Canseco, summed it up pretty well. Canseco worked pretty hard his first couple of years, and he actually got better during those first few years in Oakland. He worked on improving his outfield defense and got promoted from left field to right field. He worked on improving his speed and became the first man to ever hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in the same season.

But something happened. Steinbach says he stopped taking extra outfield practice, and it showed. The player who once was lauded for his defense became a full-time designated hitter. In one notorious incident after the Athletics had traded him to the Texas Rangers, a catchable fly ball bounced off Canseco’s head and into the stands, turning a long flyout into a home run.

And if you look at Canseco’s numbers, it’s almost like you can tell what years he was trying. Take 1998 for instance. That year, he stole 28 bases. But he stole 8 bases the year before and 3 bases the year after. He was out of baseball after 2001. He made some comeback attempts but to no avail. He complained about a conspiracy. Conspiracy? By 2001, he was good for a .250 batting average and 15 home runs per year. Why should anyone break out the Jose Canseco money a guy who can’t field and who puts up Steve Balboni-esque numbers at the plate?

So I think part of it is jealousy. Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro came up about the same time Canseco did, and they played longer and put up better numbers. Both seem destined for the Hall of Fame. It’s hard to believe now that in 1987, Canseco was by far the most complete player of the trio. But both McGwire and Palmeiro worked on improving their defense, and Palmeiro worked on improving his power numbers and McGwire worked on his contact.

Meanwhile, Canseco was plagued by legal troubles. Speeding tickets (like 120 in a 55), allegations of spousal abuse, financial troubles… Seems he may have learned a thing or two from Pete Rose.

So, he’s likely a bit short on good character references.

But who better to recognize steroid users than another steroid user? And while much has been made of Barry Bonds’ transformation from a lanky guy into something that resembles a professional wrestler, a look at Mark McGwire’s 1987 Topps rookie card shows he made a similar transformation in the years between his 49-homer rookie season and his 70-homer binge. Was it just the andro?

It’s been said so many times that it’s cliche that taking steroids won’t help you keep up with Randy Johnson’s fastball and it certainly won’t make you able to hit a curveball. Whether you’re juiced or not, it’s a lot of work to stay in the big leagues. That’s why Canseco played his last game at age 37 while Julio Franco is still in the big leagues at age 45.

But the steroids will change long fly balls into homers. They may turn a hooking foul ball into a fair ball, or a broken-bat grounder to short into a broken-bat single.

And while the conspiracy that Canseco alleges may very well not exist, there’s no question that owners and the players’ union like the effects that steroids have. Fans like home runs, so more home runs means more fans, which means more money in the owners’ coffers. And the players’ union loves home runs, because nothing drives a player’s salary more than his ability to hit a long one. Ozzie Smith may have saved two runs a game with his glove, but he never made as much money as the guys who averaged a homer every 3-4 games.

Like it or not, regardless of how much truth there is in Canseco’s book, there’s a problem in baseball, and Canseco’s loud mouth is only a symptom. The bigger problem is that a drug that’s illegal for you and me to use is getting used by these professional athletes. The risk to their health is enormous, but worse yet, these men are idolized by millions of boys. Most of them are anything but good role models for children anyway, even without the steroids, but the steroids make it even worse.

In 1983, the Kansas City Royals realized they had a problem. A good half-dozen of their players had massive cocaine habits, including nearly every core player aside from George Brett. One by one, the Royals traded or released every last one of those players except for leadoff hitter Willie Wilson, who spent the first couple of months of the 1984 season in rehab. The Royals knew they were decimating their team–which had finished second the year before, and the same basic team had been in place since 1976 and been a contender every year–but they did it anyway. Surprisingly, the team of castoffs and rookies did well that year, winning its division.

Will any team have the guts today to purge itself of its steroid abusers?

I doubt it. But I guess I can hope.

How to build and paint miniature buildings (and make kids have fun with what they learn in school)

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , ,

I found this tutorial on building a miniature building and a companion article on painting. The intended audience is wargaming, but the same tricks work for buildings for train layouts, or for kids to build cities for their Matchbox/Hot Wheels-brand cars or their action figures.To me, the gem was the technique on painting windows. I have never figured out how to draw or paint a glare on a window that looked the least bit convincing.

The most convincing way to get a glare or reflection on a window is to cut out the window, cut a piece of slide glass–or, in a pinch, plastic packaging–and glue it into the window. Or if you’re not going to detail the interior of the building, cut a piece from a gallon milk jug. Nothing looks more like a window than a window.

But for those times when that’s impractical, or for those times when you want a bit more of a toy look, the technique in this article is exactly what you need.

Don’t discount this as a fun craft for kids. Kids get bored easily, but this allows them to use their creativity, and it teaches them hand-eye coordination, problem solving, and it’s the only fun and interesting application of math I’ve ever found. If a child is struggling with division, like I did, here’s a motivation.

How do you turn this into a math lesson? Instead of eyeballing the size, encourage the child to figure out how big the building ought to be. If the building is intended for die-cast cars, measure a toy car. Then measure a real car. You now have a ratio. (Most die-cast cars scale out to somewhere between 1:64 and 1:76 scale). So, figuring that a one-story house is about 12 feet tall, multiply that by your ratio to figure out how big a floor should be. Measure doors and windows and multiply that by the ratio to figure out how big those should be.

The result will be toys that look better because some thought went into their proportions, and your kids might learn to enjoy math a little bit. I know I would have paid a lot more attention in math class if I’d realized I could use it to make cool toys.

At some point you might want to head down to Radio Shack to pick up some miniature light bulbs and teach your kids a little science lesson too. Horror of horrors, they might find they like that too.

Or, if your child is very inclined towards math and science, and hates art class, this might be a way to give them a bit more appeciation of what they learn in those classes.

Another story of eminent domain gone wrong

Dave Farquhar St. Louis ,

Eminent domain is supposed to be used for the greater good, such as when a building is falling down and endangering people but the owner refuses to take care of the problem, or when a road is needed and there’s no choice but to take out buildings that stand in the way.

It’s not supposed to be used to bulldoze an auto repair business to make room for an art gallery.St. Louis is rife with stories about homes and small businesses being bulldozed to make way for Lowes and other big-box stores. Never mind the Missouri Constitution prohibits seizure of private land for private use. In St. Louis and its suburbs, we never let laws stand in the way of progress.

Republicans love it because they love big business, and Democrats love it because they see tax dollars. It’s ridiculous. People came to the United States from Europe because you couldn’t buy land unless you already had land and money. Now, unless you have a certain amount of land and money, it’s getting to be difficult to hold on to what you have (and don’t expect to get a fair price for it either).

Now we have a former mayor, Vincent Schoemel, deciding that the city needs an arts district, and Jim Day’s independent garage, which has stood there for 20 years, making a profit, paying taxes, and serving its neighbors, stands in the way. A year and a half ago he was offered $125,000 to sell out. He declined. That’s a generous offer for the land but it’s not enough to allow him to relocate his business.

Two months later, he received a counter-offer, which is still on the table: $67,500, which is nearly $13,000 less than the city says his land is worth.

Sometimes Schoemel only offers $1.

When the mafia does things like this, it’s called extortion. But when Schoemel does this, it’s called progress. That’s funny. I don’t see any difference.

Let’s give Schoemel a dollar to slither back under a rock and stay there.

The story of MTH vs. Lionel

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , ,

Inc. Magazine published a story about the MTH v. Lionel lawsuit which ultimately led to a $40 million judgment against Lionel.The article has a lot of good information in it, including insights on how Lionel and MTH came to be such bitter rivals. There’s lots of hearsay out there but aside from combing through very old magazine articles I never found much about the MTH/Lionel relationship that existed in the 1990s. This article isn’t a complete picture either but it gives details that I hadn’t seen elsewhere.

The article mostly paints a sympathetic picture of MTH, at one place saying “[MTH owner] Mike [Wolf] is not sparkling lily white in all this,” but not really elaborating. But I can’t blame the author for this.
Mike Wolf and MTH are willing to talk and Lionel isn’t.

It’s a story of industrial espionage and the downsides of using (or being) contractors, outsourcing, and overproduction, and the rise and fall of the American Dream. The question, yet unresolved, is whether it’s Mike Wolf’s American Dream that’s falling, or Joshua Lionel Cowen’s. Or both.

Side note: Speaking as a journalist, this article is a good reason why it’s good to talk to the press, even when your lawyers may not want you to. You have to win, or at least compete, in the court of public opinion as well as in the court of law. Run what you say through the lawyers if you have to, but make sure you say something. If you decline comment, the next-best place for the writer to get information about you is from the other side, which is the last place you want information about you to come from.

In this case, to look less like the bad guy, Lionel wouldn’t have had to say much of anything that damaged the case. Make some general statement about the case. Even if it’s rehashed from a press release, it looks better than “Lionel and its owners declined to comment for this story.” And then go in for the kill. “Why don’t you ask QSI what it thinks of MTH?” QSI is a former MTH subcontractor currently engaged in a separate lawsuit. QSI might not say much, but now the writer has some dirt on the rival to go chase down. It might have only resulted in one more line being in the story, something like, “Ironically, MTH, years after being a Lionel subcontractor, is now engaged in a separate and unrelated lawsuit with QSI, one of its former subcontractors.” With that information in the story, Lionel still doesn’t look like a poor, innocent little puppy (it isn’t), but it makes MTH look less like one (it isn’t either).

The government exists to protect and serve its citizens, not the other way around

Dave Farquhar Society , ,

“If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson

Today, half of U.S. high school students surveyed believe newspaper stories should require government approval. Pravda, anyone?We shouldn’t be surprised. Freedom of the press died in the U.S. schoolroom on January 13, 1988 when the Supreme Court ruled that high schools can censor student newspapers.

As an outspoken high school newspaper editor in the early 1990s, I argued that in the 1950s the biggest problems were kids running in the halls and chewing gum in class. By the 1990s, teen pregnancy wasn’t even in the top two. Drugs and guns had pushed it out.

I argued that high school journalists should be permited to pursue tough issues. Their chances of solving any of those issues approaches zero, but their chances of helping their readers to feel less alone were pretty good. And I wouldn’t have minded if the newspapers made the administration a bit more accountable too–this was only a year or two after Pump up the Volume came out, after all.

I also argued that school’s job was to teach kids how to operate in the real world, and if they spent their late teens in a totalitarian regime, then they wouldn’t know what to do with their freedom when they turned 18.

Does this new study prove I was right?

Democrats and Republicans both agree that the government’s job is to protect its citizens from thugs. Where they disagree is on the definition of the word “thugs,” and, to a lesser degree, on how to go about doing the protecting.

But that’s irrelevant. The government’s job is to protect its citizens from thugs is turning into Citizens’ job is to protect the government from thugs. That’s backwards.

Maybe we need to worry less about test scores and start making sure we teach the basics. I knew what libel was when I was in the seventh grade. We re-enacted the Trial of John Peter Zenger. I don’t know how many of my classmates remember it, but we were presented with the concept and we all knew, if only for a moment, why it was important. Chances are even if the names and dates and other details are forgotten, one who studied the case in school will at least be left with the gut feeling that government censorship of newspapers is wrong.

I don’t know what history and civics teachers are being told to teach today, but obviously the constitution is lacking in the curriculum.

And that’s a problem, because once the First Amendment falls, most of the others will fall right with it, and the few that manage to remain won’t be worth having anymore anyway. I suspect that’s why Jefferson, who couldn’t open a newspaper without reading someone blasting something he’d done or not done, still considered newspapers more important than government.

I’ve been messing around with Backup Exec 10

Dave Farquhar Software , , ,

Veritas is trying mightily to unseat Microsoft as my least-favorite software company. I do believe Backup Exec to be the worst piece of software of any kind on the market. In fact, babysitting Backup Exec is the reason I haven’t been around much.

I’m looking to version 10 for some relief (and the much-needed 1.0 quality that Microsoft usually delivers around version 3–when Veritas will deliver it probably is an interesting Calculus problem).The downside to version 10: I’m told there’s no more Windows NT 4.0 support. Can’t back ’em up. I haven’t actually tried installing the remote agent on an NT4 box to see if it’s unsupported as in we-won’t-help-when-it-breaks or unsupported as in no-can-do. Smart businesses hocked their NT4 servers a couple of years ago. I won’t say anything else, except that not every business is smart.

More downside: If a tape fills up and you can’t change it because the server is offsite and/or behind locked doors that require approval from 14 middle managers and a note from your mother to get to, under some circumstances Backup Exec 10 will hang indefinitely while cancelling the job. Version 9 had the same problem. Bouncing the services will usually relieve the hang, but sometimes you have to reboot.

It’s tempting to put Backup Exec and your tape drive on your biggest file server to get faster backups. But trust me, if you put it on a server that’s dedicated to backups–its day job can be as a domain controller or some other task that’s shared by multiple, redundant mahcines–you’ll thank yourself. It’s very nice to be able to reboot your Backup Exec server without giving your seven bosses something else besides the cover sheet on your TPS reports to grumble about.

If you must put Backup Exec on your file server, set up DFS and mirror the file shares to another server. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy–just something that can prop things up while the server’s rebooting. And run Windows 2003, because it boots fast.

The upside: I can make Backup Exec 9.1 die every time by creating a direct-to-tape job and running it concurrently with a disk-to-disk-to-tape job. The tape portion of the second job will bomb every time. Veritas technical support tells me that bug was fixed in 9.1SP1. It wasn’t. But it’s fixed in 10.

There are some other features in 10, like synthetic backups, that promise to speed backups along. That would be very nice. It would also be nice if it would be reliable.

I’m not going to put it in production yet–when I first deployed 9, it fixed a lot of problems but it made a whole bunch of new ones–but maybe, just maybe, Backup Exec 10 will do what it’s supposed to do well enough that I can work something close to regular hours again.

Otherwise I’ll look forward to Backup Exec 11 and hope that it features more changes than just a new Symantec black-and-gold color scheme and wizards featuring Peter Norton. We’ll see.

So we\’re complaining about our economy…

Dave Farquhar Society , , ,

OK, so this is a bit late coming, and I haven’t really been able to think this through as well as I should, so I hope some other people will think through it with me. The problem: Our trade deficit is up.

The solution is to devalue the dollar. Supposedly.Americans crave cheap, foreign-made products. Multinational corporations crave cheaply made products from third-world countries that they can mark up astronomically because of the brand recognition and achieve monstrous profits that they can report to their shareholders every quarter.

To that end, the United States has encouraged outsourcing and granted most-favored nation trading status to totalitarian regimes such as China who are willing to create favorable conditions for this way of doing business.

And now the United States is complaining about continually breaking its own records for trade deficits.

The current administration is responding by devaluing the dollar. That’s a classic idea. By devaluing your currency, you make your own goods less expensive abroad and you make foreign goods more expensive inside your own borders.

But I see at least two problems with that policy. The ruthless Chinese tie the value of their currency to the U.S. Dollar. So devaluing the dollar does absolutely nothing to help our trade deficit with China. Chinese goods continue to cost the same amount of money here, and the price of U.S. goods in China remains the same.

The price of a BMW or Mercedes automobile goes up, but the people who are willing to spend $60,000 on a car are probably also willing to spend $65,000. It only increases the monthly payment by about $80. It might make the price of a Cadillac look a little bit better, but there are plenty of people who believe the BMW is the better car and will pay the extra money. Meanwhile, Europeans will continue to not buy U.S. cars, because Europeans just aren’t very fond of them.

The second problem is that the United States just doesn’t produce all that much anymore. Consumer electronics are almost exclusively made in China, with the main exception being some high-end consumer electronics still produced in South Korea or Taiwan. Toys are almost exclusively made in China. Some large items such as appliances are made here because they are too expensive to ship overseas, but that cuts both ways.

Buying American helps. But we didn’t do that 20 years ago when we still made stuff here. Now it just might be too late.

Part of me also thinks that we need to quit complaining. Look at these plans for a bungalow house from 1912. This house cost $900 to build–assuming one paid someone else to do it. You provided the land. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $17,000 today. Our grandparents were raised in houses like this. By comparison, my house is a mansion.

Today, without blinking, we’ll pay that much for a car.

Just two or three miles away from me, houses fitting the modern idea of a proper size for raising a family are being built. They’re about twice the size of mine and they sell for about $400,000. Houses like those from 1912, no longer suitable for storing our lawnmowers, are claimed under eminent domain and razed to make room for big-box stores to sell more foreign-made goods. I’m not sure what becomes of the people who by their own choice were still living in them.

Republicans like to blame high taxes for what they call the decline of the traditional American family, where only one parent had to work. Democrats ask what was so great about that, and blame the modern struggle to make ends meet on low wages or discrimination.

But if we lived within our means, we’d be able to afford to buy U.S.-made goods from stores owned by our neighbors, who are far less likely to abuse eminent domain and deprive people of their property rights.

This is a mess of our own making. The government may have encouraged it somewhat, but the government didn’t make it and the government can’t fix it. That job belongs to us.

Assuming it isn’t too late, that is.

Troubleshooting Packagefortheweb packages

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Under some circumstances when installing an app from a Packagefortheweb archive, such as Sun’s JRE, I get a goofy error message like “Cannot run 16-bit Windows Program” or a message about a failure to find a path with long filenames in it.

It’s a bit of a pain but you can fix it.The trick is to extract the file rather than run it. I found PowerArchiver can do it. Winzip may also be able to. I wish I had a command-line utility to do it but I don’t.

Extract it to a short directory name, then move it to the root drive. Then run your setup.exe. That should be the end of your problems. Clean up afterward to eliminate directory clutter.

Making a Marx run like a Marx again

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , ,

After a couple of marathon days at work, I unwound on Martin Luther King Jr. Day by refurbishing an old Marx Canadian Pacific-style tinplate locomotive.

At first, its problem wasn’t obvious.The usual prescription for a misbehaving Marx is to remove the motor from the locomotive frame, douse it in contact cleaner (I got some zero-residue contact cleaner from Advance Auto Parts for $1.99, which is the best price I’ve seen) to remove or at least soften the decades’ worth of grime and no-longer-effective aged lubricants, then conservatively re-lube, applying some sewing machine-type oil to the axles and bearings, and some light grease to the gears.

I did that, and the thing still would only run about three feet at best. It smoked better than most modern Lionel locomotives do, but the problem is, this particular train doesn’t have a smoke generator. Ahem. I get worried when a non-smoking locomotive smokes better than my smokers.

Since this CP came from a store, I took it back whence it came–to Marty’s Model Railroads in Affton. Lionel (the co-owner, not the train company) flipped it over, took one look at the wheels, and pointed. "That’s either steel wool or cat hair." Sure enough, there was lots of hair wound around the axles next to the gear-bearing wheels. Marty took a look at it and decided the wheels were too tight, so he broke out his wheel puller and pulled the wheels out a fraction of an inch from the frame. The locomotive mostly came to life. The e-unit still buzzed, so he grabbed a can of special lubricated contact cleaner and blasted a couple of squirts of that into the e-unit. He warned me to make sure I let it evaporate, otherwise I’d see a really big spark and maybe some smoke. Then he oiled the axles for good measure. It ran. Not like a Marx usually runs, but it could make it around the track under its own power for several minutes at a time.

The locomotive was still running hot though, so I attacked the hair wrapped around the axles with a #11 Xacto blade. I can’t really describe the process other than cut, pull, repeat. Work the blade until it feels like you’ve cut something, then see if you can use the side of the blade to pull it out. Lots of old hair came out. When I couldn’t get any more, I ran it on the track for a few minutes, first in forward, then in reverse. That would usually loosen things up enough that I could yank more hair out or at least cut some more.

After about half an hour of this, the locomotive was to the point where it could run on its own power for 10-15 minutes and only be warm to the touch afterward. That was a huge improvement; earlier it could only manage a couple of laps before the motor would be too hot to comfortably touch.

I ran it for about 20 minutes. At some point the locomotive suddenly sped up and didn’t slow back down. Some piece of debris had worked itself loose from the running, and suddenly it was running like a Marx again. The cheaper (or older) Marx locomotives were geared really high, and they basically only had three speeds: off, fast, and so fast it’ll fly off the track (and not pick up any speed from gravity while falling).

Most people who had Marx trains set the track up on the floor temporarily, ran the trains, then took the track back apart and boxed it back up. That’s why it’s so common to see 50-year-old Marx sets still in their original boxes. But setting the trains up on the carpet meant all sorts of stuff could find its way up from the carpet into the gears and wind its way around the axles. Some of my more experienced Marx buddies tell me almost every locomotive they buy has this problem.

So, if you’ve got an old train from your attic or basement and you’ve set it up and it just won’t budge, flip it over and take a good look at its axles under a strong light. What you find might be what’s keeping your train from running.

Seen on Slashdot: PC cases made of Lego

Dave Farquhar General

Yes, it’s the kid in me, but these Lego PCs are really cool.

I especially like the one on the bottom, where he made his own cube-shaped mini-PC out of what appears to be a standard microATX board.His idea of putting the power supply under the motherboard is a novel one. I’d try to give the motherboard a little more cooling than what it gets just from the CPU fan, but it’s a great idea and the result looks good.

I still have mine from when I was a kid. And yes, that has me thinking.

These would be easiest to build with motherboards that have video, network, and sound integrated, so you wouldn’t have to think about PCI slots, but he obviously did several with PCI cards, including a Pentium II-based machine.

I like the idea for a small system that only has a hard drive and single CD/DVD-ROM drive. It would be small because it’s totally custom, and would be a good conversation piece, aside from being functional. No one would have one just like it.