Legalization of online gambling looks like a sure bet.

From The American Conservative.

10th Anniversary Live Event

I'm gonna try to go to this.

Thought of the Day

Stop rewarding bad behavior.

Why would television executives decide to pay millions of dollars to have good actors performing well written material when people keep watching stupid shit like d-list celebrities and washed-up politicians dancing or bad amateur singers badly singing bad music?

Ask yourself that.

Team Info

The New York Yankees, based in the Bronx, N.Y., participate in Major League Baseball (MLB) and are a member of the American League East Division. The Yankees were founded as the Baltimore Orioles in 1901 and moved to New York in 1903 as the New York Highlanders. They became the New York Yankees in 1913. As of Opening Day 2009, the Yankees will play home games at the New Yankee Stadium, which was built next to the original Yankee Stadium. The club has 26 World Series Championships (1923, 1927, 1928, 1932, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1941, 1943, 1947, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1956, 1958, 1961, 1962, 1977, 1978, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000).

I've been a Yankee fan all my life. My folks have pictures of me as a toddler in Yankee gear. I have actually worked for the Yankee organization. I received a paycheck with the Yankee logo in the corner. I love the New York Yankees. I am a fan.

I hate it when people think that all Yankee fans only support the team because they win. I'm sure there are those that do. But I grew up in the 80s, and if you look at that list of World Series wins you don't see a lot of 80s in there. In fact, the Yankees didn't play a playoff game for 13 straight years from 1982 to 1994. (They did finish in first place in the AL east in 1994 though.)

I'm not going to say it wasn't nice when I moved to New York in the late 90s and the Yanks only lost one game in three straight World Series. It's always fun when your favorite team in your favorite sport wins. But it's something someone else achieved. It's nothing I did. Root and hope all you like, it doesn't affect the outcome. You just follow it.

I do take a lot of joy when other people are crushed because their teams lose. I don't think it counts as sadism though. Sadists take joy in other people's pain and suffering. And the pain you feel when your sports teams lose isn't real. I laugh at people who actually let the results of a sports contest affect their lives, their moods, their outlook. Those people are silly. They're the kind of people who refer to their favorite team as "we" as in "we won a big game." Really? What was your batting average?

I love sports. My heart races for important games and I feel the thrills and exhilaration when a team I love succeeds or the heartbreak when it fails. But at the end of the season I can put it away. At the end of the day it's just a game. If you actually have part of your life tied up into whether a bunch of overpaid entertainers succeed or fail, then you need to re-examine your priorities.

Another Example of Why Watching Fox News Is Bad For You

No wonder their viewers are retarded.

From Fail Blog

To Red Sox Fans:

Dear Red Sox Fan:



Love: Yankee Fan

Gotta Love Em

I love stuff like this.

"We're good moral Christians but if you FUCKING try to TOUCH our GODDAMN MONEY we will FUCKING KILL you!"

Poor Ed Brayton is obviously obsessed with WND but damn he links some funny shit from there.

Crap, they found it!

Amazon's Database is Weird

Interesting

It's interesting that I got my first experience with the new Full Tilt interface last night. It's more interesting that I didn't even know there WAS a new Full Tilt interface, and I read dozens of "so called" poker blogs. Hm.

I fired it up, checked my balance, played a NL $10 table for two rounds, won 88 cents and quit because I was bored.

But my WoW alt got exalted status with Kirin Tor, got his engineering skill up past the level of making cool enchants, leveled his latest pet up to max level and switched his rep path to Ebon Hold. A very good night if you consider I mostly played my main in Ulduar.

From one hobby with ridiculous jargon to another.

At least it's not spit.

Now that the auto industry is dead in this country, this is the only job I can get:

Deafening

I'm almost afraid to disturb the silence. It's so peaceful.

Things are still on shaky ground here work-wise. The new car was awarded to the plant in Michigan instead of Tennessee or Wisconsin. I lot of people around here cried because it went to a blue state, but those people are silly. Tennessee is a truck plant, Janesville is already closed and idled. Orion Michigan is a car plant (they're currently making Chevy Malibu overflow from Kansas City.) The choice was pretty obvious, and thank goodness it was.

Some people started acting very depressed after the announcement. I guess when you're faced with a shitty proposal and nothing, you hope for shitty. But man, would it have been a disaster. The Chevy Spark was originally supposed to be built in China, but the U.S. Government thought it would be politically incorrect to build a plant in another country when there are plants being shut down in the states. So they ordered GM to build that car on shore.

That car is cursed to fail. GM has repeatedly proven it can't compete in the small car market. In order to even have a shot they would have to build that car three shifts a day seven days a week. And they certainly wouldn't expand our staff. So somehow we would have to provide 11 more shifts per week of coverage with the same staff. In my particular role there are only four of us. That's almost three more eight hour shifts per week each of us would have to cover. Would you be happy if you suddenly had to work 24 more hours per week? Oh, and for less pay than you were getting a year ago. No thanks.

The rumor now is that Tennessee will be getting the new Cadillac Escalade, which is based on the platform that the truck currently being produced shares. There is also some talk of the pickup trucks from Shreveport being moved here when the Louisiana plant closes in 2012.

64

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It's a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they'd never match
my sweet imagination
everything looks worse in black and white

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

RIP 1936-2009

Textbook

In case you were wondering what a textbook example of what a hypocrite might be, here's one:

"I don't understand why Letterman would say that about a young woman. They deserve some kind of protection from being the butt of late-night hosts."---John McCain 2009

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno."---John McCain 1998

Nice work.

Paraphrased

All successful bloggers are ceaseless complainers and prone to start arguments. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

Fuck Google. Use Bing.

Fight the power. Stick it to the man.

Use Bing for your web searches instead of Google. It's zippy fast and the results are pretty good, at least as good as a Google search.

Sure it's a Microsoft product and they're the man too.

But they don't discriminate against blogs like Google does.

Bing away.

Life is Good

When I was driving into work this morning, I followed an SUV with the spare tire on the outside. The tire cover said "Life is Good." I like the Life is Good products. I have a few of the shirts and one of my dogs loves the Frisbee they make. She carries it around the house with her wherever she goes, just in case someone somewhere wants to throw it to her.

Life is good. I'm healthy, happy and I make enough money to keep myself that way.

GM will declare bankruptcy on Monday. When Chrysler declared they locked the doors and didn't let any employees through the doors for a week. GM's bankruptcy won't be a "quicky" so predictions are we will be able to come to work on Monday. There is a contingency plan, everyone is supposed to meet at the Cracker Barrel.

So now the government gets do decide if the plant stays open or gets liquidated. Supposedly the closings will be based on profitability, but we have just barely begun producing this SUV, how does one know if it is profitable? I think it's like being in love. If you don't know, you aren't.

"May you live in interesting times." --Chinese curse.

Craps Refresher Refresher

Almost exactly 4 years ago, I wrote a how to play craps post.

It doesn't seem so long ago, but it's not a bad little instructional on how to play craps, and why to not play craps.

I'm Not a "Completer"

From an administration perspective, one of the most difficult things about running World of Warcraft is managing the economy.

In WoW the economy is a very delicate balance. The currency of the game is earned very slowly but by millions of players at a time. In order to balance the economy the game has built in money sinks. The most famous of these is the cost of flight. (There was a widely reported indecent of a woman trading sex for the cost of her flying mount.) But there have always been various money sinks in the game to try to keep inflation under control.

But the latest expansion introduced the most brilliant money sink. Historically money sinks have been a reward system. You sink x amount of money, you get y as a reward. Five thousand gold gets you flight training. But what the developers needed was a way to take money out of the game without any rewards given. And they came up with the "Achievement" system.

With achievements, the game tracks the tasks you have to complete, and when you complete the task it gives you "achievement points." And that's it. The achievement points aren't worth anything. You can't spend them on items or rewards of any kind. It's just a tracking system. You basically get a "check mark" saying you have completed that task.

And the players have gone crazy for the achievements. They are spending hours upon days upon weeks completing these tasks for literally zero rewards. They spend all their resources until they aren't even able to participate in actual gameplay because they've exhausted themselves chasing achievements.

It appeals to the obsessive compulsive nature of all people. People are very naturally "box-checkers" and love to complete things. They have to complete their collection of everything. Without it they feel incomplete. They feel a nearly physical need to finish things. It's amazing to watch.

I'm just not a box-checker. I don't feel the need to finish something "just to finish" it. If there is a reward for completing a task I feel a sense of accomplishment, but if I complete something just to have done it I usually feel disappointed.

When doing achievements in WoW I begin to feel used and manipulated. I rarely try to complete them intentionally, and when I do I feel almost ashamed.

I still enjoy the game, and I have actually built a respectable player up. I'm the 32nd ranked resto druid on the realm I play, which is really not bad. I can keep up with the best players in the game, so I really feel like I can contribute to a group when I play. I take a great deal of pleasure in being an instrumental part of a raid, helping the group achieve a particularly difficult goal (as long as that goal includes a reward that improves the group.)

I guess I'm not very OCD, and if you have a problem with OCD I wouldn't recommend World of Warcraft. But if you just really get off on checking boxes, it may be the game for you.

Tennessee...Sigh

Just when you tell people that living in Tennessee isn't that strange and that it's not really the "deep south" and there aren't THAT many rednecks, the top story in the biggest newspaper in the state has this headline:

Cockfight Raid Results in Arrests of Hundreds

That's right, hundreds. This isn't a dozen rednecks getting together and doing something stupid. This was an organized event where people gathered to sell drugs and abuse animals. Whee.