How to reinvigorate the Royals

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

Please indulge me one last time this season to write about my beloved, who have currently lost 99 games and are going to make one last valiant attempt to avoid losing 100 this year.
The Royals are a small market. Small-market teams have a rough go of it, yes. But the Minnesota Twins have been doing OK. The Twins have some vision and a plan and they stick with their plan, and that’s part of it. So here’s what we need to do to duplicate that success.

1. Build a superstar. Back in George Brett’s heyday, the Royals had no payroll problems. The fans came out to see Brett, the Royals spent that money to get more players, and since the Royals had winning records, the fans kept coming. In the late 1980s, a bad season meant the Royals didn’t win any championships. But they had winning records. The Royals nearly have that superstar. His name is Mike Sweeney. He’s got a sweet swing like Brett. He’s got plate discipline like Brett. And he’s even more likeable than Brett. When Brett was Sween’s age, he partied as hard as he played. Sween takes care of himself and he takes care of his fiancee and he takes care of his community. The only people who don’t like Mike Sweeney are opposing pitchers.

But Mike Sweeney’s protection in the order is The Mighty Raul Ibanez. Now, The Mighty Ibanez has turned into a good hitter, but he’s not an All-Star. He’s a better hitter than a 50-year-old George Brett. That’s saying something. But to build a superstar, what the Royals really need to do it

And Mike Sweeney needs to get together with Dave Dravecky to put together a project talking about the Christian symbolism in baseball. (Pitchers can’t hit but it’s part of their job. Designated hitters come in and do that part of their job for them. Sound kinda like Christianity? I think so. I think God’s in favor of the DH.)

2. Sign Jim Thome. Jim Thome doesn’t fit into Cleveland’s plans anymore. Blame it on mass insanity. Blame it on tightfistedness. Blame it on whatever. But the Indians don’t want Jim Thome. And guess what? Jim Thome likes Kansas City. I don’t blame him. In Kansas City, if you’re on the highway and you want to change lanes, you use your turn signal and someone lets you. In Kansas City, strangers smile at you for no reason. When the now-departed Miguel Batista arrived in Kansas City at the airport after a trade, some little old lady walked up to him and said, “You’re our new pitcher. Let me get one of your bags.” People are just nice.

Yes, Jim Thome’s going to cost buckets of money. But guess what? He won’t cost more than Roberto Hernandez and Neifi Perez cost combined. So here’s what you do. Rotate Jim Thome and Mike Sweeney between first base and designated hitter. Then try out this lineup:

Michael Tucker, 2b
Carlos Beltran, cf
Mike Sweeney, 1b
Jim Thome, dh
Raul Ibanez, rf
Joe Randa, 3b
Mark Quinn/Dee Brown lf
Angel Berroa, ss
Brent Mayne, c

We’ll talk about the Michael Tucker insanity in a second. Jim Thome’s .300 average and 52 home runs will make Mike Sweeney look a whole lot better to pitch to. It virtually guarantees he’ll hit .340 again, because pitchers will look forward to the half of the time he makes an out. Jim Thome will see good pitches because Mike Sweeney’s on base. Or someone else is. The Royals will score lots more runs. Meanwhile, Mark Quinn and Dee Brown have Jim Thome to learn from. The Royals’ lineup suddenly starts to look like the great Cardinals teams of the 1980s that had lots of jackrabbits who could hit doubles and one really big bat in the middle. Except Mike Sweeney and Raul Ibanez offer better protection than Jack Clark ever had in a Cardinal uniform.

3. Try Michael Tucker at second base. The Royals need a second baseman who can hit. Tucker’s not a great hitter for an outfielder, but he’s a really good hitter for a second baseman. He won’t be a great fielder. But the 1984 Padres solved two problems by moving Alan Wiggins from left field to second base. They got a good hitter at the position, and they freed left field for another bat. The Padres kept Jerry Royster around to play second in the late innings. The Royals can keep Carlos Febles for defense late in the game.

4. If the Tucker experiment fails, move Carlos Beltran to leadoff and Joe Randa to the #2 spot in the batting order. The Royals don’t score any runs because Mike Sweeney doesn’t have enough people on base in front of him. The Royals often give away their first out by having people like Chuck Knoblauch and Neifi Perez and Carlos Febles hitting leadoff. Joe Randa’s no speed demon anymore, but he gets on base. And he’s got enough power that a lot of times, when he gets on base, he gets on second base. Carlos Beltran gets on base. Mike Sweeney needs to hit with people on base. If the Royals were to sign Jim Thome, he’d be worthless without people on base. So disregard the traditional idea that your first two hitters should be your fastest runners, and just get some people on base. Carlos Beltran is your leadoff hitter anyway with him hitting second. Might as well accept reality and work with it.

5. Develop young pitchers. In 1985, the Royals brought in Jim Sundberg, a veteran catcher who couldn’t hit to handle their young pitchers. The formula of young pitchers with lots of good stuff and a catcher who knew how to guide them brought them to the World Series, and, ultimately, to a World Championship. Time will tell if any of today’s young pitchers will turn into Bret Saberhagen or even Mark Gubicza. Since the Royals can’t afford to go sign Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux (and since they wouldn’t score any runs for them anyway), they don’t have much choice but to take the chance. But since the Royals have been throwing their young pitchers’ arms out (witness Jose Rosado, Chad Durbin, and Dan Reichert) they need to re-think the way they develop their young pitchers. Throw fewer innings and watch more videotape.

And be patient. Greg Maddux spent two years as a so-so relief pitcher and sometime starter before he blossomed into the greatest pitcher of his generation.

Hmm. I’m already looking forward to April 2003.

Reviving a laptop

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

The drive in my work laptop gave a S.M.A.R.T. error over the weekend. I never have had much luck with Hitachi laptop drives. Micron sent a replacement drive–an IBM, thankfully–and, doubly thankfully, the Hitachi hung on until today. So I whipped out Bart’s magic network boot disk–to which I’d added the 3c556 module necessary to get this Micron Transport LT on the network–and ran my copy of Ghost from a network drive. (It won’t fit on that disk, no way, no how. Not with all the other stuff crammed onto it.)
Depending on how far gone the drive is, Ghost can cope with failing hard drives, because you can use the -FRO switch to make it work around bad clusters to the best of its ability. So I initiated Ghost with ghost -z9 -fro (the -z9 tells it to use maximum compression, since the network is the bottleneck here) and made a copy of my disk to a network drive. An hour and a half later (ugh–do I ever miss Token Ring) I had a backup. So I swapped in the IBM drive and repeated the process in reverse. An hour and a half up, an hour and a half down. The data compression wasn’t the bottleneck.

And in the end, I had a healthy laptop again. The IBM drive is quieter and seems faster. I noticed it wasn’t the nice new 5400 RPM model (it’s a 4200 rpm drive) but it’s not a slouch. And it definitely doesn’t clunk as much as the Hitachi always did. I love Hitachi’s video equipment, but their hard drives have always given me trouble. IBM’s laptop drives have always been fine for me. And I know IBM took a lot of black eyes over the GXP desktop series, but think about the things that are known to cause problems with IDE drives:

Rounded cables
PCI bus overclocked beyond 33 MHz
Heat
Cables longer than 18 inches (the length of the wire–not the cable itself)
Certain VIA chipsets in conjunction with Sound Blaster Live! sound cards

IBM 75GXP and 60GXP drives were typically bought by people seeking performance. People seeking performance often do at least one of the above, intentionally or unintentionally. During the 75GXP’s heyday, the hottest chipsets on the block were made by VIA (Intel was still embroiled in the whole Rambus fiasco), and the sound card everyone had to have was the SB Live. I suspect the GXPs were more sensitive to these factors than some other drives and they really weren’t as bad as their reputation.

While rounded cables are good for airflow, they’re bad for signal integrity. Rounded SCSI cables are common, especially in servers, and have been for years, but SCSI takes precautions with its signals–most notably, termination–that IDE doesn’t. That’s part of the reason why IDE is cheaper. So yes, though ribbon cables do look really retro, replacing them with fancy rounded cables isn’t a good idea unless you like replacing hard drives. Get Serial ATA adapters and run your drives serial if you don’t think retro is cool. I’ve been conspiring for the last couple of years to get something semi-modern into my vintage IBM AT case, so I happen to like retro.

But I digress. I hope when the merger between Hitachi’s and IBM’s storage divisions happens, we get the best aspects of both rather than the worst.

Looking for stock video footage?

Dave Farquhar Video , ,

I’ve talked about archive.org before. I revisited it this evening. As usual, another hundred or so films have been added. A handful of selections from another library, owned by the University of South Carolina, have trickled in.
But most importantly, many of the films in the Prelinger collection, which currently numbers 1,255 films, now have descriptions and the ability to view with RealPlayer in streaming format. So if you need a clip showing New York City, you can do a search and view the films to see if the clip is suitable before you spend a lot of time downloading a monster MPEG-2 file.

And since the copyright on these films has long since lapsed (if ever it was copyrighted in the first place), you can use it.

Some of the films are interesting to watch in their own right. The film The Challenge of Ideas shows just how much we’ve changed in 40 years. Some of the changes are good–virtually all of the narrators held lit cigarettes in their right hand as they spoke.

But as I watched, I couldn’t help but think the ACLU would never permit this film to be made by the U.S. Government today. For one thing, it showed churches and used the now-controversial phrase “Nation under God.”

The film talked about winning to Cold War in people’s minds. But the film’s description of the Soviets sounds an awful lot like today’s United States. Meanwhile, our values infiltrated the former Soviet Union. So who really did win the Cold War?

There’s also a lot of footage that shows the flip-side of the fifties. I remember in my 20th Century U.S. History class in college, my professor drove home the thought that Happy Days was a myth–there was a darker side. The films in this archive certainly show that–the beginnings of the demolition of historic neighborhoods to build pre-fab buildings, drug addiction, oppression. And of course there was the ever-present threat of war. I don’t know that the Fabulous Fifties were actually any darker than the decades that followed it. But they don’t seem to have been much better.

This stuff almost makes me want to be a history teacher.

But I’ll probably just abuse it as stock footage instead. I don’t have to go back to school to do that.

Am I going to hell?

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I led a workshop at a retreat this weekend. It was awesome. I want to do this again. Several times a year, ideally.
I had someone in my workshop ask a question. A really good question. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “I’m divorced. If I remarry, I’m committing adultery?”

Well, a seminary student and I disagreed on that point. I have a book by a scholar who understands Jesus’ words in the original Greek a whole lot better than I ever will who says the original speaks of implied adultery. Don’t divorce for no good reason, because it makes your former spouse look like he or she’s committing adultery when she or he remarries. So he or she appears guilty but isn’t actually guilty, I argued.

He argued that if you’re divorced and remarry, you are guilty of adultery, period.

He won the argument for the same reason I’d have won the argument if the question was about computers. Though I still know I’m right. Just ask me.

What’s inarguable is that the cause of the sin lies with the one who initiates the divorce, and Jesus had pretty stern words for those who cause others to sin.

“So if I remarry, I’m going to hell? I have a hard time believing that,” she said.

As she should.

The last two years my dad was alive, he never went to church, largely because he’d spent the prior ten years hearing from church people that he was going to hell for one reason or another, whether it was because he believed the wrong thing about one doctrine or another, or because of something I did or my sister did. (I never did figure out what the things I did or my sister did had to do with Dad–you can raise your kids right and they’ll still do stupid things. If Dad went to hell because of the things I did or my sister did, then I don’t want to think about how many pastors are in hell.)

Here’s Christianity’s dirty little secret, and it seems to be a really well-kept one: Christianity, when you boil it down, is just the answer to one question: Why are we worthy to spend eternity with God? And the answer to that question is one word: Jesus.

Charlie Sebold and I don’t agree on much. We probably differ more than any other Christian I’ve ever met. But we agree on that point. Either I’m wrong about 98% of Christianity or he is. All that means is that one or the other of us could be a lot healthier on this earth than we are. But we’re going the same place, because we both know the answer to the question.

Now, I know in the United States, everyone thinks the unforgivable sin is committing adultery. Or something resembling adultery. I think some people think if you’ve ever seen a copy of Penthouse you’re going to hell. I’m sure if you told those same people that you’ve actually bought a copy, they’ll tell you God will find a way to send you to hell twice. That Puritanical belief is a lie from hell. (So are a lot of their other beliefs, but we won’t get into that. They knew the answer to the question too, so a lot of them are in heaven even though they spread a lot of lies.)

The only unforgivable sin is unbelief. The thief on the cross did nothing worthwhile with his life, that we know of. He knew that. That was why he was crucified. But in his final hours of life, he realized there was something to this Jesus who was dying next to him. For all we know, he broke all 10 commandments every day in his life. But in the end he believed. And Jesus told him explicitly he’d be in heaven. If He ever told any of the 11 surviving disciples that explicitly that they’d be in heaven, His four biographers didn’t see fit to record it. (John did see fit to tell you and me that explicitly though: Check out 1 John 5:13.)

Aside from unbelief, sin is sin. Some sins hurt more people than others or lead to more sins than others. But some sins lie along the path of most resistance. Being divorced and remarrying can prevent future sins. It can improve your life. So if you go into it asking God to help you get it right this time and sin against this person just as little as possible, no, God won’t send you to hell for it.

So while we need to consider our actions and ask whether they hurt God and others, we also need to consider what lies down the alternate road.

And we need to realize that in the case of believers, hell rarely lies down the alternate road.

And for pity’s sake, never, ever tell another believer he or she is going to hell. I’ll hit you with a broom if you do. Unless you’re a girl. In which case I’ll get another girl to hit you with a broom.

Pretentious Pontifications: Finally, a respectable entry-level system

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , ,

David is still messing around with that ancient 500-MHz Compaq Proliant server, so I am filling in for him today. I threw all of my Pentium III-based systems out for the swine to trample months ago and I suggested David do the same. But, as usual, David refuses to listen to reason.
I see the peasants over at Ars Technica have finally started to show signs of coming to their senses. They have finally designed a personal computer that would be good enough to put in my bathroom. You can read about it there, if you must.

You can tell the people at Ars Technica are peasants, since people with special relationships with Intel (or people who know people with special relatonships with Intel have been running 3.6 GHz Pentium IV systems for weeks. Like I said, the entry-level PC described at Ars Technica is suitable for use in my bathroom. I feel sorry for those who have to putt-putt along on slower equipment in their main PCs. As I have said many times in the past (I am not a revisionist unlike some people), it is incredibly hard to get any serious work done at less than 3.5 GHz.

However, I must salute Ars Technica for getting it correct by using Rambus memory. Rambus memory is demonstrably superior in all regards to the DDR memory used by tyros. Any simple-minded twit can come to that conclusion simply by reading the benchmarks of trustworthy Web sites and looking at the price tag. One does not have to have insider sources like I do to know that.

Unfortunately, I must take issue with their use of IBM hard drives. IBM hard drives are demonstrably inferior to Seagate and Maxtor drives. Everybody knows you cannot power on an IBM hard drive for more than 8 hours a day. Why hundreds of thousands of people use IBM drives in their mission-critical servers is beyond me.

I’m back.

Dave Farquhar General ,

My DSL was down for about 36 hours, possibly longer. Southwestern Bell evidently was able to fix it during the night.
I’ve got to get in to work to babysit a server and call Compaq and scream bloody murder for not dispatching a technician when they said they would. I’ll be back in a while.

How to get started in the IT industry

Dave Farquhar General ,

Someone asked me today what I do.
“You know those computers the size of a dorm fridge? I work on those,” I said. And yes, sometimes that means crawling around and sticking my head inside one, I added.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll break something?”

“Oh, I break stuff all the time,” I said. “Then I fix it.”

And that reminded me of a story.

One day when I was about 17, my Dad came home one afternoon and found me in the basement, with our computer disassembled–completely–and sprawled out across his table. His eyes got really big. “You gonna be able to put that thing back together?” he asked, without much hope in his voice. “Sure!” I said. He watched me pry a ROM chip out with a screwdriver, pop in a new one, then reinstall all the drives, the power supply, and the expansion cards and replace the cover. I didn’t have any pieces left over, which I think he took as a good sign, and then he watched me plug it into the keyboard and monitor. I fired it up, and it worked perfectly.

I still had an awful lot to learn though. At work, you’re supposed to have pieces left over. What, you think employers actually buy their techs those great PCs on their desks? Ha! And a tip for you beginners: After the new system performs like swamp sump because you just swapped out all the good parts with parts from the old clunker on your desk, just blame the disappointing performance on Microsoft bloatware. Works every time.

(And when your boss starts asking how all these parts with Micron stickers on them ended up inside a Compaq server, just say, “Dan must have done it.” Who’s Dan? Who cares! He’s not you!)

Nobody knew that I knew how to do that. Every once in a while when I was the only one home, I’d take the computer apart. That afternoon, I just happened to get caught.

You are looking at a genu-ine inventor

Dave Farquhar General , ,

In yesterday’s comments, I suggested you take the David Crowder Band’s CD, Can You Hear Us?, and put it in your CD player and glue it shut because you won’t want to change it anyway. (I really ought to write up a proper review. I’ve managed to graduate to their other disc. It’s good. Not glue-worthy though. Unless you’ve got a changer.)
Well, I should have patented the technique. Maybe I could still file. A method of protecting intellectual property, I’ll call it. Why?

Because Sony’s in the habit of sending out review CDs in Discmans that have been glued shut to prevent unauthorized bootlegging. They also permanently attach the headphones–no copying out the headphone jack, naughty naughty.

I guess they didn’t count on a journalist being handy with snips and a soldering iron, did they? Oh, wait. I’m not exactly a practicing journalist anymore. Well, not professionally, anyway.

I smell a way to make some money and stick it to an RIAA member, don’t you?

The best band you’ve never heard of

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , ,

I went to a Bebo Norman concert last night. Bebo Norman is a Christian singer/songwriter. I saw him open for Third Day a few months ago, and as good as Third Day was, Bebo kind of stole the show.
What goes around comes around. One of Bebo’s opening acts was the David Crowder Band. All I knew about them going in was they were from Waco, Texas. I didn’t expect much. But they blew me away.

David Crowder has an unusual voice. Sometimes it reminds me some of the lead singer for Toad the Wet Sprocket, if you remember them. And sometimes it reminds me of Elvis Costello. But I find I’m really reaching. It’s different enough to grab you, but not so different as to make you uncomfortable. There, how’s that?

He has an appearance that’ll grab you and might make you uncomfortable. He has really wild hair, thick eyebrows and a goatee that’s a good three inches long. He wears glasses with the thick black frames, similar to the standard military-issue glasses. Normally I’d call them unstylish, but they look fine on him.

The band is loud. Really loud. And in addition to the expected electric and acoustic guitars (lots of ’em), bass, and drum, they frequently mix in synthesizers, samples, and violin. It’s been a long time since a band has floored me with its sound, but these guys did. All of their songs could have been about motor oil and I would have bought all their records. Since I was pretty sure I heard them mention God a few times (it was hard to tell over all that double-time clapping) I had double excuse to buy all their records. So I went to their booth at intermission and bought all their records.

The current one is called “Can You Hear Us?” It’s loud. I don’t think David Crowder’s favorite Psalm is “Be still and know I am God.” But you know how a lot of bands are an angry loud, or at least an angst-y loud? DCB is a happy loud.

It starts off fairly slow and easy and segues into loud and fast. The album roughly alternates fast and slow numbers for the duration. I think there needs to be a radio station that does nothing but play it over and over. So I guess I like it, but I can’t nail down exactly why. It’s loud and quirky and uses a lot of instruments. But just as Butt-Head knew it takes more than bears to make a video cool (even though Beavis didn’t), it takes more than volume and quirks and lots of instruments to make a record cool. I don’t know what that is but they’ve got it.

One of my favorite bands of all time is The Cars, and I think part of what I liked about them was how they mixed quirkiness with really good musicianship. I wouldn’t say DCB sounds like The Cars. But they take that formula another direction.

David Crowder got his start by recruiting college students for worship services, which led to him co-founding a church called University Baptist Church in Waco, and eventually he started writing his own songs. I don’t know about using some of the songs for a church service, at least not in Mehlville and Oakville, Missouri, but I’ll listen to it when I’m not in church, that’s for certain.

And if I’m ever in Waco, I’ll check out his church to see how they make those songs work in that setting.