NY Times Baseball articles

[NY Times]: MLB is putting in a new ball-strike computer monitoring system in all 30 stadiums. It's about time.

[NY Times]: Neat article about Mets' pitching coach Dan Warthen.

[NY Times]: There are seats with obstructed views at the new Yankee Stadium and Citi Field. Big deal, most stadiums have obstructed views, including the old Yankee and Shea Stadiums.

9th Wonder in the Studio

10 minute video of 9th Wonder in the studio making a track, and cracking jokes.

Bucky Dent w/ 2 Babes

The lucky dude in the middle is Bucky Dent. Australian model Paige Butcher is on the left, and Jennifer Ohlsson's on the right. [Watchdog]

Phil Jackson in defense of Bynum

Phil Jackson comments on the picture of Bynum at the Playboy mansion:

“You know what, I think there’s a lot being made out of that that’s unnecessary … Andrew’s a 21-year-old guy who’s been out of basketball for six weeks, and he’s got to have some energy and have some fun. I don’t know if putting a girl on your shoulders or not is (the way to go) … But the fact that people are beating him up about it, I think that’s crazy. Andrew’s doing fine and he’s going to be fine.”

[ Lakers.com Basketblog]

Shawn Johnson's dancing partner

Shawn Johnson's Dancing With The Stars partner appears to have a boner caught on camera. Picture swiped from Deadspin.

Bynum at the Playboy Mansion

Andrew Bynum is spotted at the Playboy Mansion w/ Playmate Nicole Narain on his shoulders. Who says that you can't have a good time when you're on rehab?

Patriots' cheerleader tryouts

The Boston Globe has nice pictures of the Patriots' cheerleader tryouts.

Citi Field Flicks

Metgrrl's Flickr has some really great pictures of the Mets new ballpark.

Citi Field looks really similar to Safeco Field and the new Busch Stadium. I wish the Mets would have gone w/ a completely modern approach to designing the stadium. Instead, Citi Field is just another cookie cutter version of Camden Yards.

BS Report w/ ESPN Ombudsman

Two part interview w/ Le Anne Schreiber. Surprisingly bland, despite the length. Schreiber must be some kind of genius. After two years as the Times' Sports Editor, she forced her way to becoming the Books Review Editor by actually resigning from her Sports Editor position. Hey I demand that you give me my dream job because I'm quitting! I wish I had that kind of power over my boss.

And now BS is all gaga over her nomination as Ombudsman. Is she a Saint too?

Part One

Part Two

New ways to organize garbage

Inspired by Taipei's garbage system, I decided to change my habits when it comes to throwing away garbage.



The first important step is to separate your food garbage from your regular garbage. I put my food in little tupper wares just like the one pictured above.



The 2nd picture shows the tupper ware w/ the blue lid on. It is extremely important to have the lid on because it eliminates the stench of rotting food.

I keep my tupper ware in the fridge in the bottom drawer. It slows down the rotting process and also out of sight. I have 4 small sized tupper ware containers that get filled up with my throwaway food about once a week.

Now to the fun part. After I separated my food from my other garbage, I have two basic types of garbage left over. They are separated into the two small green containers that you see below.



They are 12 inches in height, and 7 inches in width. Not a whole lot of space.

In the container on the right, I put all my paper type garbage, and all items that are small. Almost anything that is not made of plastic wrapping goes in the right container. In the picture, you see a bunch of tissue papers in the right container.



In the left container, I am very specific about what goes into it. The first type of item are all clear plastic vegetable and fruit bags, such as the ones you get from the super market when you buy vegetables and fruits. The second type is ziploc bags. Basically, its all the clear plastic that I use to store meat and vegetables in the fridge, or transport meat and vegetables from the market to the home.



Now that I've filtered my garbage into these three main categories, all the items left over are all recycle-able. I have a bigger sized garbage bin for all my hard cardboard paper and office paper. I also have another garbage bin for all my plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and milk cartons.

$50 Million MLB Draft Pick?

San Diego State's pitching prospect, Stephen Strasburg, is being touted as "a once-in-a-decade talent," and could be commanding upwards of $50 Million to sign w/ a MLB team once he gets drafted.

His agent is Scott Boras so I'm not entirely surprised here. Boras allegedly told an executive that Strasburg "is Sidd [bleeping] Finch," the fictional player invented by S.I. in 1985.

Skype on iPhone starting tomorrow

Skype will be available on the iPhone starting tomorrow as a free download. As reported in RLSLOG.

J*Davey "Slow"

The video for one of the best songs off their EP.

People are suddenly questioning my courage

"The one thing that everyone has always known about me is that I'm a warrior -- the doctors would say I'd be out two-four weeks, and I'd come back in a week," he said. "So now I have an injury I've never had before -- one that was bothering me -- and people are suddenly questioning my courage. That was hard, but I know positive stories don't sell." Allen Iverson.

Powerful quote from A.I. in which he addresses the rumours out there that he was dogging it and only claiming to have a back injury to avoid the demotion to the bench. Although I admit I was a bit skeptical at first, I tend to believe A.I. because it doesn't seem to serve him any good to go on the D.L. during his contract year.

Maverick Sessions One

Amazing cover. I'm checking out Reggie B's Belief and so far, I am not blown away by it. Copped this off Moovment.

Lori Rubinson w/ MLB.com's Ian Browne on the Fan

Lori's interview w/ Ian Browne now up on WFAN.com. Browne's AL EAST picks 1) Red Sox, 2) Rays, 3) Yankees, 4) Orioles, 5) Blue Jays. Although he considered the Yankees as the 3rd best team in all of baseball.

According to Browne, Smoltz told the Red Sox that he can pitch right now if they needed him. The Red Sox, however, are extra cautious and just want him to be ready come June 1st.

Fresh Selects Radio

Fresh Selects just came out w/ a fresh new mix on their blog. It has some nice artists on it like Waajeed and Sa-Ra.

New Sa-RA LP

I was pretty excited to find out a couple of days ago that Sa-Ra is coming out w/ a new LP this summer, titled "Nuclear Evolution: The Age of Love". Moovmnt posted a couple of snippets on their site. Neither track really stood out in my opinion.

Asking for more from internet provider

It's definitely worth a try to call your internet provider and tell them that you're considering switching companies. They are pretty sensitive to this kind of bargaining power and will try to offer incentives to let you stay.

When I called Shaw, I was able to get upgraded to Xtreme-I for 6 months while still paying for the lower tier service, called High Speed. The Xtreme-I value is $10 more per month than High Speed so I got about $60 in value.

Addendum to No Internet For 6 Days

I got to admit that the Shaw tech that showed up to my house was very professional. He seemed like a smart guy and was definitely able to solve my problem ASAP. If I were Shaw, I would divert more money to the cable tech guys that actually help you solve your problem.

The first customer rep who helped me over the phone was rude to me. She scoffed when I mentioned to her that I had a theory for what was causing the problem. Rather than listen to a customer's first hand experience at what might be causing the problem, she cut me off because she didn't want to speculate at my theories. Listen honey, if you and I are NOT speculating and using our brains, then what the hell are we good for? You have to use your brains to speculate causes for a problem, otherwise shit don't get solved, you hear?

It just varies from person to person. I've called Shaw probably over 100 times over the last 6 years and I would estimate that at least 50% of them are pretty nice over the phone.

Today, when I called Shaw to complain about my 6 days of no internet, the customer rep at first bluntly said that I should receive 6 days of internet credit to make up for my lost time. 6 Days? Are you kidding me? After the crap that I've been through over the last days, it would be laughable to accept 6 measly days of credit.

I explained to her that not having internet caused extreme inconveniences on my life. I don't own either a cell phone or landline telephone, so w/out the internet I can't get any calls or make any calls. I resorted to spending the last 6 days at a local internet cafe wearing my headset while I made calls to work and answer all emails. Then there's the whole assortment of podcasts that I download and listen to on a daily basis and you can just start to imagine how much trouble I had to go through to keep up w/ all of them.

I estimate that I've visited the local cafe 12 times this week, at an average of $3 a visit. That's $36 dollars that I had to spend to get very limited internet access. What a crappy deal.

So after moaning to the customer rep about why I was so disappointed w/ my lack of internet for 6 days, she finally relented and put me on hold for about 5 minutes. I guess it gave her enough time to ask her boss to hook me up w/ 1 month of internet credit, a total value of about $45.

You might say I had a small victory here because in theory, I made $9 in internet credits but I don't think it was worth it.

6 Days w/out the Internet

I just had my wonderful internet connection restored about 2 hours ago and damn did I miss that thing. A whopping 6 full days has passed during this period of no internet at home.

I came back home from SF on Tuesday at almost exactly 4PM. I discovered almost immediately that I had no internet connection at home. I called Shaw, my internet provider, at around 6PM hoping that it was a simple mix-up and that it could be resolved over the phone. 2 hours and 3 phone calls later, my internet connection was still not back on.

The phone technicians repeatedly gave me ridiculously stupid suggestions such as tightening the cable wire, unplugging and then replugging the power cord, checking for splitters, and checking for routers. In fact, I've called Shaw so many times over my life that I've figured out their entire script.

It's always exactly the same four things that I've just described in the previous sentence. It's tightening, unplugging, splitters, and routers. It seems like this is basically all the knowledge that you need to work as a phone tech for them.

And if these fixing internet techniques don't work, you're stuck w/ a cable tech guy who is going to show up at your apt. 2 days later at an extremely inconvenient time.

Most people work b/w 8AM to 6PM, so then why do they always schedule their visits 8AM - 12PM, 12-4PM, and 4-8PM? If you're a single guy in an apt and have any kind of work b/w 8AM to 8PM, it becomes almost impossible to have time to wait for a cable technician to show up.

So w/ my story, after finding out on Tuesday night that I couldn't fix the internet over the phone, I had to wait for an appointment on Thursday afternoon 12-4PM to fix my problem. However, later on Wednesday, I got called into work for Thurs. and I had to reschedule for now Friday morning 8AM-12PM.

By Thursday night, I got called into work again for Friday so I had to reschedule again, this time for Sunday 8AM-12PM.

By Sunday morning, I waited patiently for the cable tech to show up and he didn't. At 12PM, when I called Shaw to reschedule again, they were able to give me another appointment for Sunday, 2-4PM.

At 2:05 PM today, a very nice Shaw tech guy showed up to my apt. and worked on my problem for about 30 minutes. At first he had to test and make sure that I was actually getting signals sent to my modem. There were no problems at all and then he tested my modem to make sure there wasn't nothing wrong w/ my modem.

Well, it turns that there were something going on w/ my modem. After phoning in to his Shaw telephone help, it was determined that the serial number on my modem was misrepresented in their computer, which meant that my modem couldn't actually receive the signal coming in. It's much more simple to explain than that really. The modem's serial number needs to be read by the main Shaw computer in order for the internet to work. And for some reason, my file got erased which disabled my modem connection.

I couldn't believe that it took 5 days for somebody to figure out that my serial number was wrong. It would definitely be one of my first questions for fixing the cable modem over the phone. "Hey, can you please read me your serial number?, " would be a very easy question to ask. It's certainly more valuable than their preferred 4 questions that never helps me resolve my problem.