Author: BillSaysThis

How is it that out of 18 players named for today’s MLS All-Star side, only one plays for the tops in the league San Jose Earthquakes? That one player–Landon Donovan–was chosen for name recognition, not his current play since he’s missed almost half the games playing for the US National Team; to add insult, Donovan isn’t even in the starting team. Pat Onstad, the Quakes goalie, leads the league statistically and in wins but instead Kevin Hartman of the host LA Galaxy was chosen. For that matter five Galaxy players were chosen even though the team is in fourth place in the Western Conference. Earthquake players like leading scorer Brian Mullan and emotional and defensive leader Jeff Agoos were told not to bother coming. I don’t think people should wonder why, despite taking the title in 2001 and running at the top all year long, San Jose draws an average of only 7,500 spectators per game.

Donovan came on for the beginning of the second half (I’m writing this just as the half starts). One reason there are so few players on the MLS squad is because instead of two teams (East-West or US-World as in the past), one squad was named and are playing against Chivas de Guadalajara, a top Mexican team. The game is not being played as a friendly exhibition, though, with lots of scoring and little defense. Chivas starts their season Tuesday and is using this as a final tuneup while most players on both sides are treating this as a proxy Mexico-America battle. The commentators can’t stop reminding us that Chivas is the most Mexican of Mexican clubs, having never used a player not born in their nation. Anyway, this the first MLS All-Star game where more yellow cards were given than goals (2-nil) and the quality is pretty decent.

Another reason that Chivas is the opposition today–don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of it–is because MLS is planning to expand back to 12 teams the season after next and Chivas will operate one of the two new teams. Not sure where this team will be located yet (Phoenix? San Antonio?) but having some new blood in the management ranks can only be helpful since currently more than half the teams are operated by one group (Anschutz Entertainment Group runs San Jose, plus the Colorado Rapids, Chicago Fire, Los Angeles Galaxy, D.C. United and NJ MetroStars).

Still, the Earthquakes got shafted and this needs to be fixed for next year. When the MLS side finally opened the scoring about 10 minutes into the second half, who was responsible? Landon Donovan, of course, with an absolutely beautiful steal at the top of the box and smooth move to juke the keeper out of position so that his pass to Ante Razov was sure to find net.

Can someone explain the NRA to me? I mean seriously. Why are they so insistent on opposing any new legislation and eliminating all existing legislation related to guns? A reasonable set of laws can be put in place so that gun sellers are watched to ensure guns are only sold to, say, people without felony convictions, that gun buyers are registered, and guns themselves equipped with protective and tracking/signature devices so when used in a crime could be identified. This would not prevent Americans from having their hunting rifles and handguns for personal protection and might eliminate a lot of danger to all of us. What a silly dream, eh?

Has any movie in recent history gotten worse reviews than the new flick from Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez? Every single review I’ve seen has not only said don’t bother to see this self-indulgent waste of film stock but also called it terrible, sad, unwatchable. I can tell you two people who won’t be paying any cash to see it, trust me.

Excellent linkage by garret last night to a site called Amercian Rhetoric! The site, developed by Michael E. Eidenmuller (a professor at the University of Texas at Tyler), includes many recordings of famous speeches (audio and video) as well as transcripts where possible. I was browsing through his list of the Top 100 American Speeches and thought: If only the words spoken in those speeches were realized in our lives, well, we’d probably find other things to kvetch about since that is the human condition. But we’d be kvetching from a much higher plateau!

Now is not really a great time for me to buy a new PC, you know why, but nonetheless I found myself at Fry’s early this afternoon doing just that. I got a sweet little machine, a shade off the leading edge (which would be a Toshiba S507, I think), in the form of a Toshiba A15. Littlesteven, as it’s been named, has 512MB of RAM, built-in WiFi, CD-RW/DVD-ROM and a very sharp screen. My 30 month old Sony Vaio was apparently about ready to give up the ghost according to Norton System Doctor, hence the earlier than expected expenditure and an all day exercise in installing and configuring software. Still need to install Office and copy over music files but all good otherwise. Ah well.

Investment Dealers Digest is a little out of the loop for most bloggerseven though many of us are investors, I think, so this article about investment banking firm UBS and it’s innovative approach to research in the post-Enron environment, developed by managing director Erika Karp, ought to be worth a few minutes to read. As someone who’s followed the market for 30+ years, the big industry question approach does seem to be more than just old sauce in a new bag.

The classic George Thorogood tune kept running through my head as the soundtrack to this NY Times article about the amazingly strange activity by a hedge fund manager named Scott R. Sacane. This guy somehow managed to acquire 33% of the stock in one small company and 78% of another and claims he totally missed it due to flaws in his software. Both the two companies’ shareholders and Sacane’s own fund investors are going to wind up screwed by this as he unloads the positions–one of the companies could potentially activate a poison pill that might help its other shareholders somewhat–but I can only imagine that this guy’s career and life are going to be shredded. Criminal charges, civil lawsuits, SEC bans, he’s going to get hit with the whole shebang. But Sacane can only point his finger at the software.

From today’s Krugman, with no comment needed from me: “Whether pretending that the war on terror — not tax cuts, which have cost the Treasury three times as much — is responsible for record deficits, or that those hugely elitist tax cuts are targeted on working families, or that opening up wilderness areas to loggers is a fire-prevention plan, Mr. Bush has taken misrepresentation of his own policies to a level never before seen in America.”

From Report: Social Security Deficit to Boom: “By 2018, taxes paid into Social Security will be insufficient to cover promised benefits. The government also must find a way to pay back the billions of Social Security dollars it has spent and now owes the system. Assuming it can find the money, those funds will be depleted in 2042.”

Contrast that to Bush Team Touts Positive Economic Signs: “President Bush’s economic team traveled through America’s heartland Tuesday seeking to dispel gloom with a forecast that the U.S. economy is poised to come roaring back, aided by the president’s tax cut package. However, even as the Cabinet officials were delivering that optimistic assessment, The Conference Board in New York reported that consumer confidence took a sharp tumble in July as Americans reacted with nervousness to the unemployment rate’s hitting a 9-year high of 6.4 percent in June… All the attention highlights the administration’s concerns that Bush could be vulnerable to Democratic charges that his three successive tax cuts, totaling more than $1.8 trillion through 2011, have driven the budget deficit to record levels while doing little to help the economy.”

Rob Fahrni, my favorite Fresno Microsoftie, had a bad experience with a company the other day and wrote it up on his blog (No integrity). Now that Google and it’s dependents are so attuned to blogs, I’m guessing that within a few days or less, people searching on the web for Viking Ready Mix concrete will see Rob’s entry as high or higher than the company’s own website (if they have one) and think twice about doing business with them. So, Gloria, I’d think twice about bullshitting a bullshitter–just fess up and pay for Rob’s damage, that’s what your insurance is for. And Rob, I’d file a report with either the Fresno Police or CHP.

At the urging of my fellow SpoFites, I broke down and entered the EPL Fantasy League for the upcoming season. I’ve never played any fantasy sports before and have no clue if I picked a decent group of players, but here is the lineup for BillSaysThisSCORES!! (we were asked to include our user names in the team name, or something like that).

In goal, I have the great American keeper Brad Friedel of the Blackburn Rovers. My back line is Liverpool’s Sami Hyypia (Finnish international) and Norwegian international John Arne Riise, Manchester United’s young comer John O’Shea (English national team), and Northern Ireland Under-21 international Mark Clyde of the newly promoted Wolverhampton. In midfield are Everton’s Danish international Thomas Gravesen, Birmingham’s Welsh international Robbie Savage, Blackburn’s Turkish international Kerimoglu Tugay, and Newcastle’s Jermaine Jenas.

Up front are Liverpool’s goal scoring machine and English national team star Michael Owen and Australian international Mark Viduka of Leeds. On the substitute bench I have the number two American goalkeeper Kasey Keller, Fullham striker Luis Boa Morte (Portuguese international), Leicester’s Northern Ireland international Gerrie Taggart for defense, and Wolverhamptons’ midfielder Kevin Cooper. Of my 15 players, only one does not feature for his national team, and that one is my substitute midfielder. Not bad, I guess, but since I don’t really understand how the scoring works, I was happy just to get 15 players from my allotted 100 points.

Let me say upfront that I don’t much care for the UI design on this site but I will do my best to kick butt on the others, because I SCORE!!

We just saw a preview of the upcoming Jackie Chan movie, The Medallion, and couldn’t help but think that it sounds like the producers decided to reuse the script from Chow Yun Fat’s film from this past Spring, Bulletproof Monk. A martial arts master must guard an ancient object that bestows incredible power on its possessor, some evil guy finds out about it and decides he must have it, thereby imperiling the entire world. Plus there’s a hot chick fight between two stunning women who are also martial arts masters. Couldn’t they at least have called it a re-imagining?

At least when it comes to program code, that is. I realized that as the number of strips in the Waiting for a Sunny Day comic grew, there were just too many to load onto a single page and so I wrote some code over the last day to break it up into more manageable chunks. But I kept getting an odd divide by zero error, one that I couldn’t track down. Then I realized that I was calling the function giving the error before setting the value of some variables that were used in the calculation. D’oh! On the other hand, I now have a nice bit of well-factored code that can be reused if I re-write the photo gallery classes and make those easier to use as well.

Yes, Monsieur FT has new company, someone sweet…looking.

(Only one teaser panel, but there are two strips/six panel when you click through.)

Where have all the great three guitar armies gone?

garret posted some comments about weblogs.com today, including an idea that maybe, if a mechanism can be worked out, that it’s time to start charging for the service. At a very small amount, of course, but I had an interesting alternative thought in response.

How many blog users, I thought, actually pay for the software/service they use? Most Blogger (esp. Blog*spot), Weblogs.com, Live Journal, and GotDotNet users don’t even pay for their hosting, and I doubt that many people will pay $23.95/month for AOL just to get a Journal. So what makes you think they’d pay a penny per ping for the weblogs.com service? Assume, say, five posts (pings) per day, that’s about $1.50/month, so with which micropayment services would that work? And bloggers who don’t want to pay, are they excluded?

I think perhaps it’s time to organize an industry group called, say, Weblog Providers Association (WPA, get it?) that blog vendors and such can join and it should do things like control/fund weblogs.com, manage standards process like RSS and not-Echo, plus do promotion and lobbying for blogs and personal web publishing.

Hey, this sounds like a job for me! Ben, Mena, Ev, Dave, Anil, Sam, Brad and all the rest of you blog tycoons, what do you say?

What a strange feeling today. Should not really be tired, slept well, went to the gym, had coffee and tasty breakfast. But just hardly have any energy. Read Chapter Two of VC# Kickstart. Old Roseanne, still funny. Drew Carey insane. Wow, you got invited to a party? Phil is on vacation, blame him. What is Karl being so mysterious about? I do not need Human Growth Hormone Therapy, trust me, stop asking me to buy it you fuckers. This is an ingenious story…[it] rocks. Pure cash rocks.

Later, a cow walked into a bar but saw that a priest, a minister, and a rabbi were already there. Still, he gritted his teeth, such as they were, and when the bartender asked for his order, said “White Russian.” The rabbi looked him over and said it was okay with him, no circumcision means not a Jewish cow. The minister told the barkeep that no good Irishman would drink Vodka, so go ahead and pour. The priest wanted to know if the cow realized that the drink had milk in it; the cow said sure, and what do you care, I saw you pick your nose and eat it.

If you all did not watch the first episode yet, make sure you catch it–it’s on twice more between now and the next new episode on Tuesday night. Wow. It’s on F/X if you haven’t read about it and this does for plastic surgery what Shield and Sopranos do for cops and robbers. Wow. Just finished watching the pilot and the first thing I’m doing is writing you this heads up. Definitely on the nasty and bloody side of things, so be aware. Stars yet another hunky Australian guy, Julian McMahon as the slick, sexier brother–I though I recognized him all along but couldn’t say from where and it turns out he used to play Cole, who was also a demon, on Charmed.

I finished Herb Schildt’s C#: A Beginner’s Guide on Tuesday and almost right on schedule cracked open book 2 in my self-paced programming class, Microsoft Visual C# .NET 2003 Kick Start, this morning. Read all of chapter one, in which author Steven Holzner covers nearly half the material Schildt managed in his entire book, though Holzner does skip the pop quizzes and pages of useless source code demonstrating value types. While I never could find a website for Schildt, I’m almost sorry I found Holzner’s but fortunately the book seems like a much better example of his writing.