A recent post at my friend Marie’s blog made me think about travelling abroad, which of course brought to mind fond memories. Funny how most travel memories involve food, at least for me.
I never got around to writing the all-encompassing narrative that was our trip to Japan. Such a task would be a lot of work to do properly. Perhaps random anecdotes are a better route to go.
Wow, it’s been a while since my last entry. A lot has changed since then.
In the meantime, Deb and I have relocated to Jersey City. I’m now consulting for Infusion Development. One of the may neat things about working at Infusion is the opportunity to develop for Microsoft’s Surface computer. My first task at Infusion was to work on a Business Intelligence demonstration for Microsoft utilizing the Surface. They’ve posted a video of that demonstration on YouTube. I wrote the controls she uses to view the data.
Baseball has been slowing growing a following in Europe of the past couple decades. You might have heard the International Olympic Committee voted to remove Baseball from the Olympics. Normally, I wouldn’t care about what the Olympics did, but the baseball programs of some European countries, like Ireland, get much of their funding from their national Olympic Committees.
In an effort to get the IOC to reconsider, the World Baseball Classic in 2009 will be held at various venues across Europe (rather than in Cuba as originally planned). Furthermore, a European wide professional league would expose the sport to more Europeans than the small leagues that currently exist in many of the countries.
An excellent introduction to European baseball can be found in the documentary The Emerald Diamond.
Just in case you were looking for ideas.
Probably. Although, spectrographic analysis would be conclusive.
A Buddhist couple in Arizona has been within 15 feet of each other every minute for the last ten years. These reporters tried it for 24 hours. Part of me is curious to try this. Deb would be pretty bored at my work, but then I could say, “Did you see/hear that? That is what I’m talking about it at night.”
I want to get a t-shirt or something to commerate my presence and participation in the best sf convention panel ever. I’m speaking, of course, about the Build a World panel at Wiscon 32. A full write up can be found here. Ted does an excellent job of recapturing the spirit of the thing.
I claim credit for the following:
Deb came up with the Chocolate Mint.
I laughed so hard at this panel, my eyes started to water.
(Incidentally, I’ve also attended the nadir of con programming, a panel on advice to new writers at (IIRC) Torcon 3 with Robert Silverberg and a wannabe who shall remain nameless. Ask me about that one in private.)
There’s something not right with the world when a squid anthology can be compiled without a story by Greg van Eekhout.
Baseball and science go together like chocolate and peanut butter. This image shows the timing required by a batter to hit a ball. The image is based on the work of Robert Adair, who literally wrote the book on the Physics of Baseball. 15 milliseconds (0.015 seconds) is all that separates a fair ball from a foul.
More: NASA has a java applet that simulates pitches based on user criteria. You can even simulate pitches on Mt. Everest or on Mars. I must note that it doesn’t properly simulate a knuckleball (a pitch with no rotation that travels erratically).