Kansas City

Wrapping up the week with thoughts on oppression

Dave Farquhar Society , ,

I’m on my way to Kansas City to torque off NOW… I’m going to a Promise Keepers rally. I heard you go to things like that to learn how to oppress women. Although the way I read the PK message, it’s more along the lines of this: Get off the couch, turn off the football game and pay some attention to your family.
So, anyway, I’ll be spending some quality time at Arrowhead Stadium, far away from any computers. I’m rooming with three other guys my age, so this weekend will be just like college, only with better roommates. Those of you who’ve e-mailed me, I got your mail (I think), and I’ll get to it when I get back.

Speaking of oppression… One of my buddies e-mailed me at work with a link to a Fox News story (I can’t find it now). His only comment? [sigh]

The story, which I can’t find now like I said, talked about people forcing others to take down their flags because the United States is oppressive. (Yeah, buddy! The answer to oppression is more oppression! Rock on! Gotta get me some o’ that!) So when I wrote back, I was less succinct than he was:

If they feel oppressed, then let's ship 'em to Indonesia for a few years and then we'll see how they like the United States after that.

Bastards.

It’s an unfortunate fact of human life that we don’t all get the same opportunities. I go into the inner city and see lots of people who never had half the opportunities I had, even though they live all of about 15 miles from where I grew up. I feel bad about that. That’s part of the reason why I do some volunteer work. And when someone comes up to me and asks me to teach them how to do something, if it’s something I know how to do and how to teach, I do it.

Truth be told, I don’t run into complainers very often. Usually I run into people who are just trying to make the most of what they do have. I admire that. The reason why I have stuff is because my parents’ parents (on both sides) were the masters of making the most of what you have, and they taught my parents how to do the same, who in turn taught me.

And oppression is relative. There are plenty of people who will risk their lives and everything they have to be the poorest, most oppressed people in the United States, because that’s better than anything they’d attain back home.

In Indonesia, women are treated like sheep and cattle. They have no choice about wearing makeup–they can’t, period. Not that it matters because they have to wear veils. They have to cover themselves head to toe. The world would come to an end if one of them flashed an ankle. And you can’t go out–even dressed like that–without permission from your husband or brother.

We’ve got a long way to go.

As do they.

A nice Labor Day.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday was nice. I got up late, then bummed around all day. I did a couple of loads of laundry, and I put a different hard drive in my Duron-750. Then I ignored my e-mail, ignored the site for the most part, and installed Wintendo (er, Windows Me) and Baseball Mogul. Around 6 I went out and bought a CD changer. My old 25-disc Pioneer died around Christmas time and I never got around to replacing it until now.
I knew I didn’t want another Pioneer. I’ve taken that Pioneer apart to fix it before, and I wasn’t impressed with the workmanship at all. And current Pioneer models are made in China. So much for those. I looked at a Technics and a couple of Sonys. Finally, swallowing hard, I dropped $250 on a 300-disc Sony model (made in Malaysia). I still suspect it’ll be dead within five years, but maybe it’ll surprise me.

I am impressed with the sound quality. It sounds much better than my Pioneer ever did. It’s really sad when you can tell a difference in sound quality between two CD players, but I guess that just goes to show how many corners Pioneer cut on that model. Next time I go CD player shopping, I’m going to bring a disc or two along to listen to in the store so I can hear the difference.

Anyhoo, I played two seasons of Baseball Mogul and guided Boston to two world championships and a boatload of money. But something happened that made me mad. I noticed over in the AL Central, Tony Muser’s Losers, a.k.a. the Kansas City Royals, were above .500, with essentially the same team that’s looking to lose 100 games this season. Well, there was no Donnie Sadler, Muser’s secret weapon, currently batting about .137 (which also seems to be about Tony Muser’s IQ, seeing as he keeps playing the guy). So the Royals minus Muser and Sadler were a .500 club. That’s nice to know.

Then, for 2002, Kansas City went and got the biggest free-agent bat they could afford. They also didn’t trade superstar right fielder Jermaine Dye, and they re-signed shortstop Rey Sanchez. And what happened? Well, the first round of the playoffs was a Boston-Kansas City affair, that’s what. I’d used the previous year’s windfall to buy myself an All-Star team, so I rolled over Kansas City in four games. I felt kind of bad about that, but it was partly because of my record against KC’s rivals that year that they made it that far, so not too bad.

It’s all I can do to keep from e-mailing Royals GM Allaird Baird and asking him why, if Tony Muser insists on playing Donnie Sadler every day, he doesn’t consider letting the pitcher bat and have the DH hit for Sadler instead.

And shocking news. HP is buying Compaq. I didn’t believe it either. Compaq’s recent problems, after all, were partly due to its purchase of Digital Equipment Corp. and its inability to digest the huge company. The only benefit I see to this is HP getting Compaq’s service division and eliminating a competitor–Compaq’s acquisition of DEC made more sense than this does.

I’m gonna get in trouble… (Or: Why I believe in angels)

Dave Farquhar General

This is my sister’s story to tell, but I’m going to tell it anyway.
Di was driving to work one day last week, south on I-435 in Kansas City, when she spotted a car pulled over on the shoulder ahead of her. Well, it was kind of pulled over, but not very well. She moved over as far as she could in her own lane. Then she noticed something laying in her lane. She couldn’t tell what it was, but since it’s never a good idea to hit unknown objects on the road at 65-70 MPH, her instinct was to get away from it. But she couldn’t change lanes. So she swerved as much as she could within her own lane… and lost control of her car.

(Note to self: A car is only as safe as the tires that are on it. Another note to self: My Goodyears have been good, but I think I liked my Michelins better.)

Now, I’ve lost control of my car a couple of times, and so has Di, but never like this. She did three 360s across I-435 in rush hour, followed by a 180. She ended up on the grassy median between northbound and southbound I-435, facing north. Somehow she did all that without hitting anybody or anything.

That’s what impressed me the most, I think. I-435 doesn’t get as clogged up as, say, I-270 in St. Louis, but it sees plenty of cars. I sure wouldn’t ever try to cross it, or, for that matter, cut all the way across it in my car with a series of quick lane changes.

So Di’s sitting there in her car, absolutely freaking out. I know she was freaking out, because that’s what my family does. Myself included. She never saw that big white van pull up. A lady walked over to her car.

“Did I hit you?” Di asked.

“Oh no, no, you didn’t hit me,” she said. “Are you OK?”

“I think so. I’m just really shaken up.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m praying for you.”

Di looked up at her. “Thank you,” she said.

“This is the second accident like this one that I’ve seen this morning,” she said.

It was early in the morning. Di hadn’t seen any other accidents.

“Are you a good driver? Do you need me to get your car out of here?”

“I used to think I was a pretty good driver,” Di said. “I think I can get it out of here.”

Di needed to get the car out of there herself. I’m the same way. When we get into jams, we don’t like having to rely on someone else to get us out of it.

“OK,” she said. “But let me help you.”

So Di started her car again and started turning the car around. Meanwhile, this kind stranger walked back over to the highway and started directing traffic. Pretty soon, she cleared enough space for Di to get back on the road and get going.

Di never saw what became of that big, white van.

“That was probably an angel,” I told Di when she told me that story.

“I know,” she said. “Mom said the same thing.”

Yes, it might well have just been a well-meaning individual who was in the right place at the right time. On TV, angels call attention to themselves. In reality they don’t do that. But I’m convinced Di’s guardian angels (and probably a handful of mine) kept her from hitting any other cars that morning. I won’t write that one off as luck.

First jobs and masks

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

I just got a frantic sounding e-mail message from a friend. She’ll be OK, because she’s got a strong personality, but she’s a bit down right now. I understand.
She just graduated college about two months ago, and she’s a few weeks into her first job, and this week her boss and her senior sat her down and gave her a talking-to. It basically comes down to a personality conflict. And they gave her a list of things she had to change. They’re almost all personality traits.

I used to wear a lot of masks. I refused to wear them for a really long time. In grade school, I was what I was, take it or leave it. And what I was was a Kansas City native in a small town in eastern Missouri. I didn’t want to be a hick, and I didn’t want to grow up to be a farmer, a miner, or a truck driver. (I wanted to be CEO of IBM, or president of the United States. I had ambition, probably too much ambition. Some people didn’t like that.) I was the ultimate outsider, and by the time I was in 7th grade, my best friends were my dog, my Commodore, and my notebook.

Mercifully, we moved to St. Louis the next year. I got to start over. And I started over by wearing a mask. I got in trouble by showing ambition. So I stopped showing it when I was around most people. That was the biggest thing. St. Louis was a lot better, because I had friends who were actual, real, live human beings up there. But I wasn’t happy.

High school was tough, especially at first. It was jarring, so I forgot to wear my mask all the time. I had friends–the lunch table I sat at was always full–but I had plenty of enemies too. I got in fights. And if I had a nickel for every rumor that circulated about me… Eventually I learned to be entertained by that. Those rumors were a whole lot more interesting than the life I was living, or for that matter, the life most people were living. Eventually I reached a point where I didn’t wear masks around guys all that much anymore, and in my sophomore and junior years, I only got into one fight apiece. I didn’t get into any my senior year. But I still tried to figure out what girls wanted me to be, so I wore masks around them all the time. Needless to say, I had a hard time getting dates. Who wants to date a faker?

College was more of the same. No one really knew what to make of me, and at this point, I only have one close friend that I made in college that I’m still in contact with. I was wildly successful–one of the most prolific and widespread writers in my class; I nearly graduated with honors; I was treasurer, publicity, and scholarship chairman of my fraternity; I was the longest-running columnist of the 1990s in the official student newspaper; and after they kicked me off staff for being too conservative, I jumped ship and became managing editor of a rival Greek-targeted newspaper. I was successful and lots of people wanted to have a beer with me. But I didn’t know who I was anymore and I was always depressed.

I took my first job, with the university that gave me my diploma. I started dating a girl who knew who she wanted to marry. But that guy was engaged, so she decided to make me into him instead. I let her. I figured the mask she designed wouldn’t be any worse than the masks I designed–hey, she was a graphic designer, after all. My first job bit. I hated going to work. She made a nice distraction, so it was tolerable for a while. But her mask made me lose credibility. Everyone knew me–I’d been there four years as a student–and they knew that thing walking around in Dave’s body wasn’t really Dave. Eventually she realized she wouldn’t be able to make me into anything but a counterfeit, so she told me to take a hike. For whatever reason, I kept on wearing the mask. The depression kicked in harder and heavier, and my work performance tanked.

I went to a grueling 4-session seminar after I bottomed out. They helped me uncover the real me under those 10 years’ worth of masks. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience. But once I got out, wow! Someone actually saw me smile once. Work became mostly tolerable. I still wasn’t Mr. Popularity at work, but most people were a lot more pleasant. And when it became evident that I couldn’t advance and that certain unpleasant people weren’t ever going to cease being unpleasant, I left. I took a job in St. Louis.

I wasn’t Mr. Popularity there either, but my current employer values a job well done, and the majority of people I work with like me. And even though sometimes I’m short, I usually look like I’m distracted (I usually am), and I’m always vocal and always eccentric, they learned to live with it. I get the job done, get it done well, and it’s hard to find people who are good at what I do. They’re satisfied, and I’m happy most of the time.

I learned the hard way that wearing a mask for a girl is never worth it. And these days, when a lot of us change jobs faster than we change girlfriends and boyfriends, it’s definitely not worth wearing a mask for a job. If they can’t deal with you the way you are, they’re certainly not going to like you any more when you’re fake. Fakers are less likable and far less respectable. I guess I figure that if they want you to be someone else, you’re better off letting them deal with someone else.

Baseball Mogul 2002 offers a glimpse of the future…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , ,

I have seen the future, and it crashes a lot. I’ve been playing Baseball Mogul 2002 like a fiend, and I love it. I love statistical baseball and I love financial simulations, so for people like me, this game might as well be heroin.
My big annoyance is that it crashes a lot. It seems to get through the first season just fine, but I haven’t gotten through a second season yet without a crash. That’s annoying. Playing games in a month’s batches seems to make it worse. I suggest you play week by week, saving at the end of each week.

I started off with the Kansas City Royals, of course, and pretty soon I realized what dire straits the team is in if the game doesn’t change. Without a bunch of trades for can’t-miss prospects, it’s virtually impossible to lift the team over the .500 mark, and with free spenders like Cleveland and Chicago in the division, third place is about as well as you’ll do. An out-of-this-world manager like the late (and very sorely missed) Dick Howser could probably improve matters a ton, but Baseball Mogul’s manegerial model is a bit clunky. You can change how your manager manages, but it’s with a bunch of sliders. There’s no way to model, say, a Dick Howser based on the tendencies he used in the dugout and save it. That’s a feature Earl Weaver baseball had way back in the early ’90s and I can’t believe modern sims don’t copy it.

After two seasons with the Royals, I got frustrated. I needed something easier, but not necessarily too easy. So I took on the Curse of the Bambino and took the helm of the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox haven’t won a World Series since they sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1920 for an astronomical $100,000. (Ruth was already a superstar and guided the Bosox to three World Championships, but with him gone, the Sox have been heartbreakers ever since, appearing in four Series and losing each in Game 7. The Yankees have just been scum.)

But how to take on the high-revenue, free-spending Yankees? The Bosox were a challenge unto themselves. Nomar Garciaparra, the greatest shortstop alive today, was injured at the beginning of the 2001 season, of course. MVP candidate Manny Ramirez’ presence in the lineup helped soften it, but I had a cripple playing first base (Brian Daubach was nowhere to be found, not that he has enough punch to really justify holding down that position). So I traded for Toronto’s Brad Fullmer, to get some protection for Ramirez. And Boston limped its way to the playoffs. It wasn’t exactly pretty. The Boston bats racked up tons of runs. Pedro Martinez was masterful, of course, but behind him I had four No. 4 starters: Frank Castillo, Bret Saberhagen (I was glad to see him come off the shelf, but he was the epitome of clutch pitcher, one of those guys who’d give up 9 runs if you didn’t have to win, but when the pennant was on the line, he’d pitch a shutout), David Cone (another ex-Royal, dumped unceremoniously for salary years ago, like Sabes), and Hideo Nomo. Fortunately the Bosox had a solid bullpen. We beat Cleveland in the first round of the playoffs, in five. Pedro had to pitch twice. Sabes won the other game. Of course we faced the Yankees in the ALCS. Boston won in 6, again behind Pedro and Sabes. It would have been poetic justice to have Cone face them in the series and win, but I had to go by the numbers rather than entirely by emotions. That brought us to Larry Walker’s and Mike Hampton’s Colorado for the World Series. Pedro won Game 1. Sabes won Game 2, of course. Castillo lost Game 3. Pedro pitched Game 4 on short rest and lost. I didn’t want to pitch 37-year-old Sabes on such short rest, so I pitched Cone instead. He lost. Sabes came back for Game 6 and won. A shutout, of course. Pedro came back strong and won Game 7.

The curse was lifted. Pedro, with a 19-6 regular season record and a 5-1 record in the postseason, took home the Cy Young award and an All-Star appearance. Manny Ramirez also brought in an All-Star appearance, but most importantly, the team brought in the World Championship.

The 2002 season was where things went nuts. The big-market teams started looking like Rotisserie Leagues thanks to free agency. I went and grabbed Anaheim’s Troy Glaus to play third base and Cleveland’s Kenny Lofton to play left field and bat leadoff. Then I grabbed Minnesota’s Eric Milton to give Pedro a legitimate #2 starter behind him. A couple of weeks into the season I noticed Houston’s Billy Wagner was still unsigned, so I nabbed him to give closer Derek Lowe some help in the bullpen. We rolled through to a 109-53 record, obliterating Oakland and New York in the playoffs. This time there wasn’t even any danger of Pedro’s arm falling off. (He went 27-1 in the regular season with a sparkling 1.53 ERA.)

Then I ran into the free-spending Braves. The Braves’ pitching staff was mostly unchanged from the real 2001 roster. (It was already an All-Star team.) But the lineup… Rafael Furcal, ss. Andruw Jones, cf. Chipper Jones, 3b. Barry Bonds, lf. Sammy Sosa, rf. Tony Clark, 1b. Quilvio Veras, 2b. Paul Bako, c. With the exception of the bottom three, they had arguably the best player in the league at each position. (The other three would be the second- or third-best player on a lot of teams.) Oh yeah. They also had superstar Moises Alou riding the bench. I took a look at Atlanta’s finances. Yep, they were bankrupting the team, deficit spending in hopes of pulling in a World Series. It came down to Game 7, Greg Maddux vs. Pedro Martinez, a showdown of the two greatest pitchers playing today (and arguably the two greatest pitchers alive). Maddux beat Martinez 2-1 in a heartbreaker. (Hey, you try shutting out that lineup!)

After facing that, I felt a little less guilty about running a Rotisserie-style team out of Boston. I’d passed on signing Kerry Wood as a free agent the season before for just that reason. No longer. Atlanta, unable to afford Maddux and Glavine for the next season, let both of them walk. I signed Maddux to a four-year deal, which pretty much guaranteed he’d get his 300th win in a Boston uniform. And between the two of them, I could pretty much count on getting at least three wins in a 7-game postseason. Throw in another clutch performance by Sabes (re-signed for purely emotional reasons–I was either going to get Sabes another World Series ring to go with the one he got with the Royals in ’85 and my fictional Bosox in 2001 or I was going to ship both Sabes and Cone back home to Kansas City, to finish their careers where they both belonged all along. But Cone retired so I opted to go for another ring.) and I’m pretty sure I’d be able to lift the Curse of the Bambino again.

The game even fabricates newspaper accounts of the season’s big games. The picture is almost always the same, and you can usually tell the story was computer-generated rather than written by an intelligent human being, but it adds an element of drama to it.

I also noticed the injury model is fairly realistic. Keeping Pedro Martinez healthy for a full season is virtually impossible, both in this game and in real life. But there are players who will tough themselves through their injuries. Mike Sweeney suffers about one serious injury per year, an injury that would knock most players out of action for a couple of weeks, maybe a month. In Baseball Mogul, Sweeney sits. In real life, Sween tapes himself up and keeps going until he either gets better or the injury hampers his play so severely that even he realizes the Royals are better off with his backup playing. That doesn’t happen often.

The other glaring drawback is that you can’t watch the games. I’d love to watch the All-Star game and at least the World Series.

So. We’ve got a baseball simulation that crashes a lot, doesn’t let you watch the key games (or any of them, for that matter), where injuries are all or nothing, and the managerial model is more crude than I’d like.

Those are serious shortcomings. But the rest of the game is so fabulous that I can mostly overlook them.

Now, the question is, who pitches Opening Day 2003? Martinez or Maddux?

Odds and ends to start the week

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

Let’s talk about this site. So far, the forums are pretty much a flop. There’s a little activity over there, but not much, and the forums didn’t cut down on the amount of mail I receive by much. I’m not going to take them down because I like them, and a few other people like them, but since they’re not solving the problem they were designed to solve, I have to look at other methods.
So I’m going to put mail on a separate page. I’m using MHonArc to generate the pages. Mail messages end up on their own pages, which is a disadvantage to the traditional Daynotes method of handling mail, but they’re threaded, which is a big advantage. Discussions can continue indefinitely, you can follow them easily, and if the subject matter isn’t something that interests you, if you don’t click the link it won’t bother you. And I don’t spend long amounts of time reformatting mail–sometimes it takes longer to reformat mail than it does to write the day’s content–which is a huge advantage that I think outweighs not having all the mail on a single page. I used to solve that problem by forwarding all my mail to my sister for her to format and post, but she has less free time than I have these days.

I haven’t figured out how I’ll handle archiving just yet, but I know that’s a problem many have faced and many have conquered. (MHonArc’s been around since 1994.) I’m just happy to have it live and looking good.

One option in MHonArc totally mangles the e-mail addresses in headers, but not in message replies. I wised up to this and started nuking the addresses there manually. Some people want the privacy; nobody wants spam, so I figure this is the best way to handle it. I know spambots are harvesting addresses from this site so I don’t want to give them another bonanza.

Please continue using the discussion facilities here though. If you’re posting a response to a day’s entry, it makes a whole lot more sense to have them here than over in Mail.

My Royals make a smart move… And a dumb one! Smart move: My Royals re-acquired the catcher they never should have traded away. Brent Mayne was never going to be the next Johnny Bench; he looked more like he’d be the next John Wathan. But seeing as the Royals haven’t had a better catcher than John Wathan for the past, oh, six years since they gave Mayne away to the Mets… Mayne’s .251 average in 1995 didn’t tear up the league, but he handled pitchers decently, didn’t ground into a lot of double plays, in an emergency he could play a couple of different positions, and he could even steal a base. And he played cheap. That’s hard to find in a catcher. And in the years since the Royals dealt him away, he learned how to hit better.

He was batting .331 in hitter-friendly Coors Park when the Royals re-acquired him. I doubt he hits better than .270 in Royals Stadium, but when your catching platoon is the legendary A.J. Hinch, who’s batting about a hundred points below that, and future Hall of Famer Hector Ortiz, who’s batting about 50 points below that, Mayne looks awfully good.

Dumb move: To get Mayne, the Royals traded away Mac Suzuki. Last year, Suzuki was the Royals’ best pitcher. This year he’s struggled, but when you have no job security and no niche, it’s hard to do your best. It seems Tony Muser will banish his starters to the bullpen if he doesn’t like the way they tied their shoes that morning. Sometimes young pitchers have problems with that.

And not only that, Suzuki was a revenue pot. Suzuki was born in Japan. All of Suzuki’s starts were televised in Japan, because the Japanese are crazy about Japanese players playing in the States. (It was small-time compared to Mariners mania, who sport outfielder Ichiro Suzuki and closer Kachiro Sasaki, both bona-fide superstars, but when you’re the small-budget Kansas City Royals, you take what you can get.) With Suzuki on the mound, the Royals got television royalties in Japan. In all likelihood, more people watched those games in Japan than in Kansas City. Suzuki in all likelihood brought in more money than the Royals had to pay him, due to television and merchandising revenue, and the Royals are constantly moaning about how they have no money.

The Japanese couldn’t care less about Brent Mayne. Or any other player on the Royals’ roster, for that matter.

So now my Royals have a decent catcher, but at the expense of a pitcher who’s about 9 years younger and has a tremendous upside. But no one ever said Royals management had any common sense.

I’m back.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

Very interesting. Just as everyone’s proclaiming Linux dead, Red Hat goes and turns a profit for the first time. Yes, there are too many Linux companies. Yes, there’ll be consolidation. No, I’m not convinced that selling it at retail is necessarily the best way to proliferate the system.
I also find it humorous that people like ZDNet’s David Coursey can struggle all weekend setting up a Windows server, yet state that Linux is no threat to Microsoft, even as a server. The implication is that Linux is too difficult. Give me a weekend–actually, more like 5 minutes, if you’ll spot me TurboLinux and a 50X CD-ROM drive–and I can have DNS going on Linux, easy. Give me a day, and I can have a lovely mail server going too. (I intended to do that just this past weekend, actually, but I couldn’t come up with a working ISA SCSI controller to pair up with my army of SCSI CD-ROMs to make it happen.)

Needless to say, this past week I lost most of what little respect I had for Coursey. VMWare runs Windows under Linux better than VirtualPC runs Windows on the Mac, and Coursey’s obviously never heard of it (see that second link).

Don’t get me wrong, Linux setups drive me up the wall sometimes. But I’ve had instances where Windows flat out wouldn’t install on perfectly good hardware, for no good reason, too. And since Linux servers are unencumbered by a GUI, multimedia, Pinball, Internet Exploiter, and other desktop stupidity that has no business on servers, they’re a whole lot easier to troubleshoot. You’ve got a kernel, a daemon or two, and a plaintext configuration file. That’s not much to break. Actually it’s good engineering–a machine should have no unnecessary parts.

So long, Cal Ripken. Cal Ripken announced he’s hanging it up yesterday morning. I had the pleasure of seeing Ripken play shortstop a couple of times in the early 1990s when the Orioles were in Kansas City. Today, in this era of A-Rod and Nomar and Jeter, Ripken’s offensive stats don’t seem so hot. But in the 1980s (and before), if your shortstop could hit .270 and steal the occasional base, you counted yourself very, very lucky. In those days, Ripken not only hit .270, he was consistently one of the best defensive shortstops in the American League. He was never as flashy as Ozzie Smith, but how many shortstops ever fielded .996? You’re happy to get that kind of a fielding percentage out of your first baseman, and first base is the easiest position to play. Not only that, Ripken was also good for 20-25 homers and 80+ RBIs. These days that doesn’t sound too impressive either, but remember that Ripken played the bulk of his career in an era when people rarely hit 40 homers–someone who could pop 30 was considered a real power threat.

And besides all that, Ripken played 2,632 consecutive games, shattering Lou Gehrig’s record of 2,130. Ripken played the majority of those games at shortstop (he also played some third base at the beginning and at the end). Gehrig played his games at first base and in left field, both much less demanding positions. And while Gehrig played every inning of every game just once, Ripken did it four times, in consecutive years (1983-1986).

Ripken’s really slowed down the past three years, but he did end his streak on his own terms before being cut down by injuries his final three seasons. He’s nowhere near the player he used to be. Then again, at the end of his career, Ernie Banks couldn’t hit or field, and he was playing first base. Ripken refuses to move from third to a less demanding position–partly out of pride, but partly because he’s still capable of playing third.

And we can’t forget his loyalty. Ripken’s played his entire career, from 1981 up until now, with Baltimore. You don’t see that much anymore.

Conspiracies, conspiracies everywhere

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , ,

The topic of the day yesterday was Timothy McVeigh. I’d forgotten that yesterday was his day–I saw the lead story on The Kansas City Star announcing McVeigh was dead yesterday morning when I went to read up on the day’s events.
McVeigh raises a lot of uncomfortable questions. So let’s go back to a year after the Oklahoma City bombing, because that was when I got my wakeup call.

I was a crime reporter for the Columbia Missourian, a flaming liberal little daily newspaper in, frankly, what would be a worthless little town if it weren’t for the University of Missouri being there. But Columbia is situated in the middle of nowhere; aside from Columbia and Jefferson City, Central Missouri has no good-sized towns, and those two “cities” are cities only by Missouri standards. St. Louis has suburbs bigger than either of them. Central Missouri is backward, or rural, or backward and rural, depending on where you go.

Well, a guy by the name of Don Albright drove to Columbia one night and got drunk. He was pulled over, ticketed, and charged with driving while intoxicated. Albright maintained it was his constitutional right to drive drunk. Actually, he said his constitutional right to travel was being violated. “A driver is for hire,” Albright told me. “A traveler is a private citizen.”

I had a very long conversation with Albright. Albright was one of the biggest conspiracy theorists I’d ever talked to. He believed the United States was still technically a collection of British colonies; that there are actually two United States of Americas; that the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, and the Kennedy Assassination were all directly linked and part of the same conspiracy, and other bizarre beliefs. Another belief he shared with me was the New World Order, a belief Timothy McVeigh shared.

He was also militant. He took out liens on judges and prosecuting attorneys. And, on the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Albright, along with others, threatened to attack government buildings as well as press organizations that didn’t “tell what was really going on.”

By this time, I was on Albright’s black list. One of his friends anonymously called me one day and told me to watch my back, so I took the threats seriously. I consciously avoided the newsroom, courthouse, post office, and police station that day. Fortunately, nothing eventful happened.

I suspect Albright’s motivation was primarily racial. During that single conversation, he brought up plenty of racial overtones. When we investigated him further, what we discovered was a person who didn’t want to accept any responsibility for his own past.

Albright had numerous supporters in and around Columbia. I spoke with a number of them outside the Boone County courthouse on the day of one of Albright’s scheduled court appearances. The only one who would give me his name was a guy by the name of Hobbes (I think his first name was Ken). An older woman, who would only go by “Mrs. Hobbes,” (I assume she was his mother), talked to me a little bit less. They were certainly fundamentalist Christians. They gave me pamphlets, a Constitutional Driver’s License (whereby I could grant myself the right to travel the nation’s roads freely), a copy of the Constitution, information on how I could secede from the United States and become a sovereign citizen, and other materials. But they sang exactly the same song Albright did, though Albright appeared to be racially motivated.

In 1992, while a senior in high school, I met a conspiracy theorist of another feather. He was a fervent believer in the writings of George Adamski, a UFO author who claimed he had been visited by beings from a yet-undiscovered planet in the solar system. Adamski, as I recall, had been widely discredited in the 1960s. But this guy’s beliefs (I don’t recall his name anymore, unfortunately) fit these others like a hand in a glove. He, too, spoke of the New World Order, the Trilateral Commission, and other oddities.

So… There are plenty of kooks like McVeigh out there. Some of them, like the last one I mentioned, are quirky but harmless. Albright, I believe, could be extremely dangerous. And, interestingly enough, although each type begins with a different premise at heart, they all come to nearly identical conclusions.

The common thread is that none of them trust the government and none of them fully understand the world around them. That’s fine. I don’t trust the government and I certainly don’t understand everything about the world around me. You can do one of two things when that happens. You can just accept that you don’t know everything and you never will know everything, and just try to understand the things that interest you or the things that affect you as best as you possibly can.

Or you can explain it all away as a giant conspiracy. Of course you can’t be the one that’s messed up. The rest of the world around you is messed up. And they’re doing it on purpose!

Time for a reality check.

Hard Fact Number One: Members of the hard left are every bit as disillusioned as members of the hard right. Most of my college professors despised Bill Clinton every bit as much as I did. They were liberal. We’ve got people on the hard left who can’t get what they want. We’ve got people on the hard right who can’t get what they want. [observation]Isn’t that called compromise?[/observation]

Hard Fact Number Two: It’s difficult to get people to cooperate with one another. It’s even more difficult to get organizations to cooperate with one another. If you spend any length of time within an organization of any considerable size, you begin to wonder how it keeps from unraveling just because of internal politics. And these are people who share the same interests! Want an example of how conspiracies are so difficult? Fine. Here’s one: Oracle and Sun and the United States Government against Microsoft. Remember how they bungled that one? And why? None of the parties could figure out what exactly they wanted on their own, let alone what they wanted collectively.

Conspiracies can happen. But they’re rare and generally short-lived.

McVeigh killed 168 people. Or, at the very least, McVeigh participated in the killing of 168 people. We don’t know if he and Terry Nichols acted alone. Probably not–there was a John Doe No. 2 who was never found. But McVeigh did kill innocent people, and he did it willfully and he expressed no remorse.

Yes, the United States Government is partially responsible for that. The Clinton administration did a lot of detestable things. Part of that was because Bill Clinton is and was a hopeless idealist, and he surrounded himself with the same types of people. They didn’t know how to handle people who didn’t share their worldview. And most of them probably didn’t forsee the possibility of a McVeigh-like backlash to Waco and Ruby Ridge. Holding the government accountable for those actions is necessary. Not handing the presidency to Al Gore is a good start, but that’s only a start. And the country was bitterly divided over that.

If you want to take that argument to its logical conclusion, who was it that put that administration in office? Hint: If you live in the United States, scroll up to the top of this page, get a good look at my picture, then go look in the mirror. You and I did that. But you didn’t vote for him, you say? Neither did I. Fifty-seven percent of us didn’t. The problem was, the 57% of us who wanted someone else couldn’t agree on the someone else to put in office, and we paid the price. But the fact is, most of us don’t care. So, since we put this government in place, aren’t we also responsible for its actions, especially when we refuse to fundamentally change it?

But blaming the United States Government for Timothy McVeigh’s actions is childish. When I was in fifth grade, another kid named Benji used to act up and then blame his poor behavior on the outcome of the 1985 World Series. There is no difference. Benji wasn’t mature enough to deal with his disappointment about the baseball season in a socially responsible manner. Timothy McVeigh wasn’t mature enough to deal with his disappointment with the government’s behavior in a socially responsible manner. The St. Louis Cardinals didn’t make Benji misbehave, and the U.S. Government didn’t make McVeigh blow up that building. The victims of McVeigh’s atrocity deserve better than that kind of logic.

Yes, the government is partially responsible because McVeigh’s actions are the consequence of some of its own actions. And the government’s job is to clean up its own mess. I’m not convinced it’s totally done that. But McVeigh was guilty, and he even admitted his guilt. The U.S. Government did what its laws call for it to do. So it actually owned up for once.

Don’t get used to it. Except for it only partially cleaning up, that is.

And, like it or not, McVeigh is now a martyr in some circles. Actually he’s been a martyr since the day of his arrest. But there’s a grain of truth in McVeigh’s beliefs. Our government is out of control, it’s irresponsible, and it’s not accountable to anyone.

But that’s our fault. Our government is supposed to be accountable to us, and as long as our Congressmen send plenty of pork back home, we keep them in office. And we vote for our presidents whimsically. The government knows that as long as they give us bread and circuses, we don’t care about much else.

And if we want to keep this kind of crap from ever happening again, we’re going to have to start giving a crap about more than just food and entertainment.

I’m not holding my breath.

Dinner and network troubleshooting

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

Dinner with Gatermann last night. It’s almost become a ritual: Slingers at the Courtesy Diner, then off to Ted Drewes’ for frozen custard. We didn’t waste any time at Courtesy because the jukebox was especially bad last night. Backstreet Boys or ‘NSync or 98 Degrees were playing when we got in, followed by another one of the boy bands (they all sound the same), followed by Brittney Spears, followed by that really stupid “It Wasn’t Me” song–I’ve forgotten the name of the so-called artist, which is just as well. That was followed up by “All Star” by Smashmouth. Now, when I’m in my car and Smashmouth comes on the radio, I change the station, because that song was really overplayed when it came out, and it never was all that good to begin with. It’s really sad when that band is the best thing you hear all night when you go somewhere. I said something to Gatermann about buying a place like that, then putting nothing but goth on the jukebox. Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cult, The Cure, The Mission… What else do you need? We could call the place “Death’s Diner” or something. Since diner fare lowers your life expectancy anyway, why not, right?
But back to really overplayed songs… “All Star” was followed with “Cowboy” by Kid Rock. “Well I’ll pack up my bags and then I’ll head out west,” rapped the trash-mouth white boy from the trailer park. I looked at Gatermann. “Whaddya say we head out west and get outta here?” He agreed.

Drewes’ wasn’t especially crowded. There wasn’t much room in the parking lot, but once the weather warms up you normally can’t find a parking spot at all and have to park in the neighborhood.

We went back over to Gatermann’s, planning to play some Railroad Tycoon, since neither of us have played in months, if not over a year. Since he doesn’t have two Windows boxes anymore, I brought my IBM ThinkPad. I configured the network (I use a 192-net with DHCP; Tom uses a 10-net without DHCP),
then I plugged in using the cable from his Linux box, and I got lights on my Xircom PCMCIA NIC, but Tom noticed there weren’t any lights on the hub. I checked my network statistics. It had sent out a bunch of packets but never received any. I tried pinging out and just got timeouts. I re-seated the cable on both sides, then I re-seated the NIC’s dongle. Nothing changed. I wondered if I had a bad port or a bad cable. So I switched ports, to no avail. I powered the hub down and back up, thinking maybe it was confused. Nothing. We didn’t have any extra cables, so I plugged the cable I was using back into his Linux box. The lights on the card lit right up, as did the ports on the hub. I was able to ping too.

At one point I even stopped the card, ejected it, and plugged it back in. That didn’t help either. Tom’s network just didn’t seem to like my Xircom card, though it works great on my LAN.

Then I asked Tom if his hub was a straight 100-megabit hub or a dual-speed 10/100 hub. He said it was straight 100-megabit. That was the problem. My Xircom is a 10-megabit card. I started off with a 10-megabit LAN, then later upgraded to a dual-speed 10/100 hub so I wouldn’t have to replace all my cards. Later I added a four-port switch in the form of a Linksys cable/DSL router.

All of Tom’s cards are dual 10/100 (with the exception of a Kingston PCI NE2000 clone, but that card sits in his Linux router and runs to his DSL modem), so we could have solved the problem with a crossover cable. We’d lose Internet connectivity but that’s not necessary for two-player Railroad Tycoon. Tom has a crossover cable… in Kansas City. I have a crossover cable… at church. Neither was doing us any good.

So we didn’t play any Railroad Tycoon. We went through Tom’s files, found a few old pictures of me, and scanned one of them. The picture on my site right now is me in southern Illinois in May or June 1998. Some day I might even put up a current photo… Tom’s thinking I need to put on a pair of black jeans and a Joy Division t-shirt, then we can go find someplace with a shadowy, industrial feel to it and snap some pictures. He thinks it’d go well with the atmosphere I’ve got here. I tend to agree.

More Like This: Personal Networking

An evening with my one true love

Dave Farquhar General ,

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America
has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a
blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.
This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all
that once was good, and that could be again.”
–James Earl Jones, in “Field of Dreams”

After the last couple of days, with a Monday that had too much happening for my little brain to handle, and a Tuesday fighting with a laptop that was convinced I’d just invented wireless long-distance DSL (not to mention trying to deal with the sudden flood of pictures from my past), I needed to get away. I needed to spend some time with the love of my life.
I can’t help it. I’m a romantic fool. When I want to escape, I try, somehow, some way, to a broadcast of my beloved Kansas City Royals. At the very least, I turn on ESPN’s gamecast on the Web and follow the game, and usually they break my heart yet again.

I was going to say it’s my own damn fault, but maybe it’s not. I can’t help what I am. I’m Scottish. Clan Farquharson. Our motto: “Fide et Fortitudine.” That’s Gaelic for “Fidelity with fortitude.” Today we might say, “Loyalty with guts.” That’s why I’m a Royals fan in St. Louis. Or at least that sounds good.

In my younger days, I’d go out and play myself. I never was all that good, but I poured every last drop of my heart and soul into playing the game, and I’ve got enough of both that I didn’t spend too much time on the bench. My coaches always knew I’d give 200 percent if I had it, or, more likely, I’d die trying.

And I miss my younger days, the days when I was naive enough to think that baseball was life, the days when my biggest concern was whether I’d be playing left field or second base the next game. Well, the days when I could play honest-to-goodness baseball are long gone. But when I got wind of a softball team being organized at work, I signed up.

Our first practice was yesterday. I’ve played in exactly two softball games since 1996. By 1996, by skills had deterriorated to the point that I was strictly a second-string catcher. I could still hit, but I was a contact hitter with limited speed, and in the field I had limited range and my glove skills were shot. And my greatest skill as a catcher, by far, was talking up the pitcher and getting on the opposing team’s nerves.

Well, I’m probably in worse shape now than I was then, but, betting that my peers have deterriorated more than I have over the past five years (a fairly safe bet, seeing as I’ve pretty much always laid off the beer), I’m attempting a comeback anyway.

Practice went well. In a three-inning practice game, I went two for two with a pair of singles. The first was a close play at first, or should have been, but the first baseman didn’t handle the throw. I ran to second, but the second baseman fumbled, and by the time the shortstop managed to get to the ball, I was rounding third. What the heck, I thought, and I kept on going. The shortstop fired to the plate, the catcher took the throw cleanly, turned, and just managed to nick my lower right leg with the tag a half-step from the plate. Some people thought I was safe, but he got me.

My second hit was a looping single to right. I rounded first, trying to draw a throw, but I couldn’t get the right fielder to bite. The next play was a grounder to short. The shortstop threw to second for the force–I never had much of a chance. The second baseman was a female. Mac user. In my younger days, I’d have flattened the second baseman, just for being the second baseman and in my way. I didn’t this time. It was an intrasquad game, after all. And I guess I’ve mellowed out with age.

In pre-game BP, I ws trying to be a doubles and triples hitter, but once we actually had players on the field, I remembered that in softball, you don’t really want to do that. Unless you’re an honest power hitter (I’m not, at least not at the beginning of the season, and my wrists are still extremely weak so I may never hit for much power again), you just want to put the ball in play and force the other team to make mistakes. I think the game’s more fun that way anyway. I love being scrappy and disruptive.

In the field, I made two putouts. I played an inning at second, an inning in right, and an inning in right center. Nothing happened at second. In right, I got a sharp fly ball with no one on. I don’t even remember the last time I played right field, but I made the grab. That throw to second was harder to make than I remembered it being. In right-center, I pulled in a lazy fly ball from someone I expected to have more power than that. There was a runner on first, but she pretty much stayed put. I probably wasn’t a threat to throw her out anyway, but I don’t think anyone else knew that. When you make the catches, people tend to assume you have a good arm too, until you prove otherwise.

I’m not the slowest player on the team by a longshot, which is good. I’ve never been all that good defensively, but I think I know why now. I was talking to a coach last year, and he pointed out that fielding is a totally different mentality. You’ve gotta relax out there, then when the ball comes your direction, run to it, watch it, and grab it with two hands. I always used to tense up in the field, and I’m betting that was the problem. After trying to leg out that infield homer (actually it would have been a single and a three-base error), I was too tired to tense up, and I actually made all the plays.

Yeah, I’ll be sore in the morning, and probably the next morning too. But that’s good. I need a reminder of how much fun I had last night, trying to score on my own infield single.

Confound it, I shoulda slid.

More Like This: Baseball Softball Personal