BASEBALL: FANTASY LEAGUE

This year, I'm trying my hand at owning a team in a fantasy baseball league. So far, it's been a very enjoyable process and highlighted the massive gap in my baseball knowledge to any player that doesn't wear a Angel's uniform.

So, here's my 2004 team!



I'm most excited about picking up Vladimir Guerrero, one of the newest Angels players, and arguably one of the top 5 players in baseball. I also signed hurler Tim Hudson of the Oakland A's and another great pitcher, Octavio Dotel of the Astros. I think I have a very strong team, with my weakest position at catcher right now. I do have a trade in the works so hopefully that position will be upgraded shortly.

What's interesting about this is that you become fans of specific players instead of focusing on a team. From what I've read, I'll have to stay active on a daily basis in order to manage the team, but it's going to be really good time watching how my players progress throughout the year.

DISNEY: BIG THUNDER RAILROAD

This past week, Big Thunder Railroad was quietly reopened at Disneyland. They took the opportunity while fixing the ride to also refurbish it quite extensively. I have yet to take a ride, but I am glad that it is back up and running as the park is always packed lately because of all the ride closures.


Big Thunder reopened last week

Here's some interesting photographs of the accident. These pictures are just of the ride vehicle and track; nothing objectional.

GAMING: CALL OF DUTY

There was a time in my life where I would go and watch movies on opening weekend and get the latest and greatest games on release. These days, I get to movies usually when they are on pay-per-view or HBO. I’m better about games, and those games that most people like, I usually get to within a year.

I finally got around to purchasing Call of Duty. Let me begin by saying that I am not a giant First Person Shooter (FPS) fan. I enjoy FPS’s, but primarily when I’m playing my friends, as it’s more of the social interaction with them that I enjoy than the game itself.

There has been one notable exception: Half-Life. I remember being completely addicted to Half-Life, and even playing the game in a darkened room with the sound cranked up so that the head crabs jumping out of the ceiling tiles would literally scare me enough to get me to jump.

I don’t want to say that I’m as addicted to Call of Duty as I was to Half-Life, because then I’d have to make an admission about a problem that I don’t want to fix. I love Call of Duty. I have only played a couple of multiplayer games, but the single player campaign is fabulous! The detail, the sheer number of models, the quality of the graphics and sound; all of these add up to more than the sum of their parts.

So far my favorite is the Russian campaign, simply because of how they set the mood. You find yourself rushing a hill, but there’s only a few weapons to be handed out, and lucky me, I get 5 bullets. I guess I can toss them at the Germans. So after you make it through this mess, you are told to charge across Red Square into machine gun fire. If, you decide to turn back, you will be shot. This was brutally brought home as I ran forward, grabbed a weapon on the ground, assumed the prone position and started laying down suppression fire for my comrades. My lack of rushing the machine guns was noticed, and an Russian officer shot me. Rush, means rush. Got it.

If the devil is in the details, then he’s completely intertwined in this game. I highly recommend this game to anyone who has a passing interest in World War II.

I’ve always been in a bind living in Southern California and loving baseball. When I was growing up, my cousin was a starting pitcher for the San Francisco Giants. Naturally, I grew to love the Giants. Since their mortal enemies are the Los Angeles Dodgers, I have a natural aversion to Chavez Ravine.

So, I have to go to Angels games. Now, they’ve been very entertaining over the years. Not because of the astounding baseball, but because of the really bizarre plays and errors that you would rarely see from a top notch organization.

That all changed in 2002 with their first World Series Championship in club history. The Disney Corporation decided it was time to sell the ball club in 2003 and new owner Arte Moreno took the reins.


Arte Moreno, Anaheim Angels owner

The new owner has been outstanding for the Angels. The first week he took over he lowered beer prices. He lowered ticket prices to fill the stadium. He has spent an additional $75 million on signing new players. He is upgrading the stadium scoreboards.

And now word comes that he is in negotiations to have approximately 150 games televised! Wow! That’s a 300% increase from last year. The manner in which he is going about this is really amazing. Instead of convincing stations to carry the games, he is simply buying the airtime and then the Angels will sell the commercials. Talk about balls.

I’m very excited about the future of the club, and more importantly the value of my season seats when I need to sell quite a few of them each season!

Even if all of his spending and effort fails to produce several winning seasons in the future, it’s good to know that there’s an owner that is doing everything within his power to ensure that the Anaheim Angels are a great team and are great to their fans.

I hate Pepsi, but the iTunes promotion has me trying to get by with this inferior product. Thanks to some geeks that have found a way to determine if a bottle is a winner my efforts are not in vain.

On to more important things. WebSphere Studio is outstanding. The IDE is everything I've always wanted in an environment such as this. Some really cool features:

Scrapbook Pages--Every time I want to try out something, I have to build a bunch of code around it to get it to work and see if it will fit my need. Scrapbook pages eliminate this. They work very similar to a SQL query tool, where you type the code you want, highlight what you want to execute and wham, off it goes. Pretty damn sweet. It's basically a scratchpad for code; wicked cool.

Debugger--The debugger in this product is the best I have ever seen. It allows you to virtually change everything to your code as it exectutes and has full error trapping functionality with the ability to trace back the stack calls to find out where your problem originated. Much higher code quality is bound to ensue from anyone that uses this tool.

Back to the books.

My evolution as a Java programmer is slowing gaining speed.

After working a bit with Websphere Studio and being constantly reminded each time that the software starts that it will only work for 60 days, it became clear that I needed something free. Because free is good. And because a retail single user license for Websphere Studio Application Developer is $4300.00. Hey, IBM, you realize that I can get MSDN Enterprise for less than that!

Since Websphere Studio is built on top of Eclipse, I decided to download the standard Eclipse software and installed Sun’s Java SDK to integrate with Eclipse. Free. Did I mention that I like free?

Anyway, I’ve been working my way through one of my older Java programming books that I worked through before. Everything is coming back to me, and I’m really, really enjoying the Eclipse IDE. For me, missing a nicely designed IDE is the one thing that really made Java programming a hassle in comparison to Visual Studio. The little wizard to build a simple class is just wicked cool. I don't even have to remember "public static void main(String [] args)" again!

VisualAge for Java was overly complex for no reason, which is one of the reasons it is no longer a product, so it’s nice to see that IBM’s influence on Eclipse turned out very well.

I hate people. This is no secret. I especially hated several people at the San Diego Zoo on Sunday.

While viewing the hippos, you may choose one of two bi-level paths. The back path is a bit more raised so that you can see over the people that have chosen the front path. We chose the back path because the front path was crowded.

Person #1: Turns around to see if anyone is standing behind her. She sees me, and looks directly at my two year old son. Despite this, she steps up onto a bench so now she is directly blocking all of our views.

Since I’m in touch with my inner asshole, I loudly pronounce to the kids that we should move down “where we can see past the rude people.” She looked back as if I were the rude one for calling her rude.

Man, it really should be legal to punch someone in the face when they act like an imbecile.


A punch in the face to solve stupidity


So, the kids and make our way to the other side of the hippo enclosure, and come down to the front path to sit on a bench and watch the hippos play in the water.

Person #2: She begins to incessantly talk in a baby voice that “they love each other” and “they are playing with each other, awwww.” What’s with the baby voice?

Again, this merits a punch in the face.