First-time fair vendor Dean Margarites of Monmouth County said he likely will skip setting up his Greek-A-Licious stand here next year because of poor sales.
“If I have something else going on, I’ll probably stick to something closer,” Margarites said.
As far as I am concerned that will improve the fair. Greek-a-Licious served me the absolute worst gyro I have ever eaten . . . Several years ago I noticed that BlogNetNews.com had picked up eCache in its feeds. It’s an interesting site, although it never generated much traffic here. A couple years ago the url for eCache changed. I contacted them to update it several times. They never did and I stopped trying. Just now in one of my feeds, I stumbled across this site again. I too a quick look. Not only have they not updated my feed, they have me classified as liberal. Bahaaaawwww . . . “Terrell Owens says he’s concerned teams are swayed by the perception that he’s a troublemaker and that’s why none have signed the free-agent receiver.” You think? I will be sorry to see Terrell retire. Since we have the same surname, my students always feel a kindred spirit. I use T.O. as an example throughout the year whenever my students fall into “me first” mode. We pound our chests just like the clueless one. Who will I use when he is no longer relevant? . . . Newspapers employing paywalls is poor business, imo, but Lancaster Online has taken the cake. Their new model uses a paywall only for obituaries. After reading seven obits, one will have to pay for the eighth. Yeah, that will work . . . Scoble is a media whore. He’s been pimping his “secret” all week. We’re all impressed . . . The other evening the handle fell off my Weber Performer. The grill i eight years old. The handle had rusted. I e-mailed the company, forwarded photographs, etc. In the mail right now to me is a replacement lid and thermometer free of charge. Weber has outstanding customer service . . .
Well, my summer projects aren’t going quite as planned. I bored of organizing photographs. I did manage to squeeze out one movie of my son for my wife. That’ll buy me more time. I am up to 55,000 photographs. A lot of what I have to sort through are geocache photos from the last nine years. Many of them are duplicates and culling through them is so boring.
So I moved onto the books. Once again I am changing services. I began with anobii. I can’t get my export because those folks won’t acknowledge my e-mails. I briefly went to Library Thing. I left there for GoodReads. I decided that Shelfari was where it is. Amazon.com came in and all looked great. But it’s not. I am now going back to GoodReads. I have learned this is a good thing since Shelfari won’t export the damn reviews. Sigh . . . it’s one at a time again. I have tired of this too, but I plug along.
Helping the transition is my return to BookCrossing. “Return” really isn’t accurate. Despite having an account for more than five years, I’ve never released a book. That’s going to change. As I enter my books into GoodReads, I am weeding out some of the stuff I know I don’t need/want. I have a box going of what I am going to release. Keep an eye out Millville.
The other day while I was in the basement (freezing) working on the books, I reached for a CD. Ah, the music. Back in 2002 I gave away 1200 CDs. They were live recordings. That was in my purge stage. I am trying to get back to that. Anyhow, it’s the first time I went playing with the CDs for a while. That sparked an idea.
For years I have sought a social network for music. I occasionally ask. I am sure there are references here at eCache somewhere that talks about it. I asked about for some help. Then it dawned on me; I need to rip all this music onto a drive, oss it up on our network and I’ll have access to it all over. That’ll make selling the old stereo easier.
Off I went to purchase another 1TB drive. I figure I have a lot of music . . .
That has gotten me playing with iTunes a lot over the last couple days. I’ve been using it for two and one-half years, but I have known all along that I wasn’t using it correctly. As a deadhead, I generally input several shows, dump it to Silver (my iPod), and scrobble it to last.fm. Once listened to, I delete it and import new shows. I use the Live Music Archive @ archive.org a lot, although I get shows from other sources to. Occasionally I would rip a CD or two, but again, I deleted it afterward always keeping things neat and tidy.
No longer. As of this sentence, I have ripped 154 CDs onto the network wirelessly. There’s plenty more to come. I’m liking this so far. Yet, I find iTunes to be severely lacking in some areas.
Why doesn’t iTunes separate the first and last name of the artist? That’s like the first thing anyone who works with databases does. I want to be able to order my artists so Alan Silvestri is not up front. Just for the record, that is a disc Gert brought into the relationship.
Why does a two-disc set import as two different albums? The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is one conceptual album, but it displays as two albums in iTunes with seemingly no way to list it otherwise.
I like that I can substitute album art. First decision was to load the original cover for Roger Waters’ The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking . . . the uncensored one! I’m learning that I should import all the album art to associate with the songs.
Apple needs to get with opening up to share these data with social networks. iTunes feels dated in that I can’t share to Twitter, Facebook, and other networks (like eCache).
Dafos (Mickey Hart, Airto & Flora Purim ) choked big time upon importing. It made it, but the optical drive shook, rattled, and I was prepared for it to roll away.
Can I pass the tags I am entering into iTunes to last.fm? That would be so kewl to do.
It is lovely to preserve some music that is not holding up as well . . . like my Michelle Shocked disc that was stuck to the paper insert.
The only album art I have struggled with thus far is the Holiday Traditions with John Tesh CD. You’re correct if you pinpointed that as another Gert purchase. John Tesh, ABBA, All 4 One, and lots of other rubbish music I will never listen to is now available.
I will eventually need to address some things with iTunes. A master list for the web site will be needed. My initial look does not look terribly promising of updating the currently listened to sings onto the blog. I’ll delve into that later.
So here I am organizing (a pastime it seems), but it is a project I hadn’t planned to tackle. It has me thinking that perhaps movies may find itself on the network too. Hmmm . . .
Yes, I am a baseball fan. I don’t collect memorabilia. I am not a player. And I don’t engage much these days in the endless sabermetrics that having one poring over minutia. But I am a scorer. To me, scoring a game is both science and an art.
Hand scoring a game is one of those simple “old time” things. My mother taught me how to do that decades ago. I’ve developed my own scorecard over the years. It’s based upon a “traditional” card, but I record a lot of extra data.
Several years ago I found Fixed It’s Baseball Scorecard. It’s an electronic scorecard. Over a few years they created a very good piece of software. It works well. Baseball is a complicated game and designing software to accommodate all situations is trying. They have done a good job with their software. I know there’s a guy who has been complaining about some oddity the software doesn’t handle well, but it has never affected me.
The one drawback I have found is that lineups have to be set prior to scoring the game. That can be a real PITA. Those who score Little League or high school games may get the lineup moments before the commencement of the game. I tend to score MLB games. Even there, I need to enter rosters and then be ready a half hour beforehand to be able to score a game. With little ones around, that doesn’t happen as often as I like.
Advance forward to today. Summer vacation has finally settled in. I am in baseball mode, despite my Phillies losing three of four to the Pirates this weekend. I decided I wanted to score tonight’s game. Halladay was on the mound. Perfect.
I’ve been looking around for an app for the phone for a while. There was one that was pulled. It apparently was not very good. Somebody else recently wrote one. He did so to give a paper-and-pencil feel. I like that. I know there are some limitations to it, so I’ve held off. I finally decided to install it today.
At first I didn’t think I was going to like it. There are limitations to the program. It didn’t help that after I spent some considerable time typing the 40-man rosters of the Braves and the Phillies, setting up the lineups, and preparing the game, when I went to use 6-4-3 (the name of the software), the lineups were gone. The first pitch was on the way and I was stuck with Braves #1, Braves #2, etc. for the lineup.
Despite the snafu, 6-4-3 excels in lineup manipulation. One can add either from the roster or by hand on the fly. This will be appreciated by those of us who don’t have it all prepared prior to the beginning of the game. It took an inning before I realized I could do more than the current batter by going into the roster. I like how this works.
Scoring the play-by-play is rather straightforward. The ball and strike buttons are nice and big. Once I got comfortable, it was no big deal scoring. Things move smoothly.
The problems I ran into with 6-4-3 is correcting mistakes. Once one moves to the next batter, there is no way to rectify mistakes. That is a problem, particularly when one finds himself amid a strange issue. As a newcomer to the app, I stressed in the first inning over a couple things. I can easily see being at a game when I don’t have Gameday running to check what I might miss and there being a complicated pickle that I need to wait for the Official Scorer to post the play. Meanwhile, the next batter is batting. Or what happens if the OS changes a ruling an inning later? Being able to edit after the fact is needed in this app.
It wasn’t until late in the game I realized I was marking hits incorrectly. I was pulling up my finger at each base. Therefore, Chipper Jones’ first inning homerun is marked a single, even though I had him rounding the bases. This is a perfect example of needing to be able to go back. I can see making this mistake again and not realizing it until it is too late.
The normal is handled well in 6-4-3. I imagine the more I use it, the more comfortable it will feel. The end of the game did present issues. After the Braves batted in the ninth, the app allowed me to go to the bottom of the inning despite the game being over. I saw no way to end the game. I am fortunate I read at that point or I would have lost all my work. Had I, I would have returned the app and gotten my money back. One needs to export the game as two images, one for the home team and one for the visiting. This is the only record, it appears, of the game. There is no game file. I do not like that aspect of this at all.
Overall, it is a decent attempt. I would easily jump at another app that was more refined. I am hopeful this one will mature. It has some promise to it.
As I scored the game, I took some notes. The following are things I noticed and what I recommend:
second word in team name should default to capitalize When I begin typing Atlanta Braves as a team name, when I click the space key, the keyboard should go to prepare a capital letter. Entering a player in the roster works likes this.
notes needed for each play Some plays require a note. A fan runs onto the field, a power outage, it was so-and-so’s 3,000th hit, etc. Being able to log a note that would provide an asterisk/footnote at the bottom of the card would be appreciated.
be able to modify after the fact (end of game) Discussed above. This is how a mistake is going to be corrected. Limiting fixing until one clicks Next Batter may not give the scorer enough time to deal with complications in the play.
dots for balls, strikes, and outs are confusing It took me a couple innings to catch on. Even still, since one is using a phone’s screen, seven dots all the same color are hard for older eyes to differentiate. At least color the outs a different (red) color to distinguish them from the pitches.
throws to first, etc. I like to record everything in a game. There is no way to record none pitches.
the font is a bit funky. I understand the font was selected to resemble the hand scoring feel. This font, however, is not a prominent font, imo. Something more tame or perhaps a choice of what font to use would be good.
fora It would be wonderful to have a discussion area set up so users can congregate and share various tips, etc. with one another.
location of hit ball I know others have mentioned it, but the location of the batted ball is critical for a hand-scored game.
foul should have a bat sound One of the simple things Fixed It’s software has is a sound associated with certain events. Most notably, when one clicks foul, a short ball hitting bat sound is heard. That would differentiate the event from accidentally hitting the wrong button. Plus, I find it a neat feature.
advance when runner advances on throw, SB, etc. Most scorers I know indicate on the line drawn on the diamond how the runner advanced. If he is on second from a double and then heads to third on a fielder’s choice by the next batter, that advancement should be noted on the diamond. There are lots of advancements like that that should be added.
quick mechanism to see what batter has previously done in the game Later in the game, it would be nice to be able to call up the batter’s previous ABs. TBS always shows the scorecard for the individual batter. I was thinking of clicking a menu button would pull up the line from the card for the batter at the plate. Clicking back would return to the current AB.
batter name more prominent One thing I noted as I scored the game was that I was constantly verifying I had the correct batter up. Fearing I somehow hadn’t advanced correctly or something, I kept looking for the batter’s name. It does not stand out well in the top bar, particularly when there is a longer name that does not provide a space before BOT 7 (or whatever). Perhaps bolding the batter or putting it in the title bar would help it stand out.
how to make a defensive substitution I am not certain I know how to make a defensive substitution. I figured out how to do it with the batter, but if a new left fielder comes in at the half inning, does one just go to lineup and make the change? I was hesitant to try. But thinking it through, that would allow me to call up substitution. I’ll try that next time.
end/save game to edit later on Discussed above. One should be able to return to the game another day. As far as I can see, that is not able to happen. What if there was a rain stoppage? More to my concern, I could easily see being distracted and finishing the scoring with the replay.
Pitching designations The game I had did not have a declared winning or losing pitcher. There was no save in my game, but I suspect saves are not indicated either. This would be a welcomed addition.
after the game, when I plugged into laptop, forced closed app; lost game Fortunately, I figured out how to save the .PNGs before this happened. I think I got up for a minute or two and the phone turned off. When I came back to it, 6-4-3 had been forcibly closed by the system. Whatever was going on made the phone want the program closed. Because there is no game file, as far as I know, associated with the game, I was prompted for a new game. I would have been disappointed if I didn’t already generate the scorecard.
how to enter start and end times and attendance? I noted on the scorecard there were fields for start and end times as well as attendance. I cannot figure out where that information is entered.
import rosters Even with Fixed It’s program, entering the rosters is a PITA. On a cellphone, it is even a bigger pain. Being able to import a roster to the cellphone would be most welcomed. Ben collates the MLB rosters daily on his Pitch-By-Pitch site. I don’t know how 6-4-3 handles the roster, but being able to construct it on a computer and importing it to the phone would be a huge benefit!
I was never this good at finger painting. This was originally broadcast live. The medium is merely an Apple iPad and the brushes app. I am not a big fan of the iPad, but this is very kewl!
We purchased our daughter a DSi for her birthday. I am not a gamer at all. Being six, she struggles a bit with the games. She is playing some maze type game. She has not mastered moving up the levels. She’ll try, but she becomes frustrated, she runs in and hands me the unit. She keeps pointing to things, putting her fingers in my limited view. It’s cute. I’ve learned enough about the game to know how to jump and run. So far that’s been good enough to get through the doors to the next level.
Beetle is so appreciative. “Thank you so much, Daddy,” she says as she races away to play some more.
My little girl is a gamer . . . an enthusiastically polite one.
Anyhow, it’s the first time I went playing with the CDs for a while. That sparked an idea.
