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Game 101: Pirates at Rockies
Paul Maholm and the very, very good-looking third baseman who just showed up take on the big, strong, powerful man Ubaldo Jimenez at three-ten.
The hapless Rockies have lost eight in a row and are struggling terribly.
SOUND OFF: Is $7 Million Justice for Sean Bell’s Murder Death?
This week the City awarded the Bell estate a large award ending the 4 year battle but questions will always remain
Set List - 2010-07-06
P.D.'s Pub - Pittsburgh, PA USA (Purple Tuesdays Open Stage)
- Willie the Wimp (Stevie Ray Vaughn)
[on Strat w/Jay (bass), Matt (drums), Kip (keys)] - Hollywood Nights (Bob Seger)
[on Strat w/Jay (bass), Matt (drums), Kip (keys)] - Before Long (original)
[on Strat w/Jay (bass), Matt (drums), Kip (keys)]
Let's Just Do the Tuition Tax 14 Times!
Opposition to leasing out our precious parking spaces -- which would raise over $200 million to pay for what the City has put off many times over -- is coalescing around a familiar theme:
the ministry of reconciliation
public speaking terrifies me. it doesn't matter how prepared i am or how passionate about the topic: i will stumble awkwardly over my words, and i will turn red.
it starts at my chest: blotchy patches climb and spread up my neck like poison ivy and my fair cheeks flush with embarrassment. i sweat. it's awful.
despite all that, i agreed to be the speaker at worship at camp last sunday. they asked, and it was one of those things i felt i "should" do. not out of obligation--it's a big staff and someone else could have done it. i said yes because it's important to hear women's voices, especially in the Church, and saying no felt like a step backward.
i spoke about a passage in 2 corinthians about reconciliation and being a new creation in Christ. it's a favorite passage, but i can't explain why it stood out to me as a topic for camp.
summer camp requires jim to work most hours he's awake. to say he's not home much doesn't really get at the scope of his commitment there. we try to go to camp to see him for meals, but dozens of staff vie for his attention (not to mention our two little ones), and we don't connect.
last night, after the kids went to bed, we had one of those discussions that twists your stomach in knots. the kind where time ticks by and no progress is made.
but this time, we didn't give up. we didn't yell or walk away frustrated. we chose not to surrender to disconnect or lack of understanding.
we did the work of reconciliation.
we listened and heard and understood. we apologized. we experienced the grace of being known and loved still. we glimpsed in one another what it is to re-created:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.
the new has come. day by day, moment by moment, God's grace reveals itself.
and we are transformed.
Learning a Language From an Expert, on the Web
The message from the 14-year-old Tunisian skateboarder was curt. "Totally wrong," he said of my French. My conjugation was off and I should study spelling. On a scale of one to five, he said, my French practice essay was worth a one. Then he disappeared into the anonymity of the Internet.
Telefónica Wins Full Control of Brazil Phone Venture
MADRID -- Telefónica, the Spanish telecommunications company, has won full control of Vivo, the mobile phone venture it had with Portugal Telecom in Brazil, after raising its bid for a third time, to €7.5 billion, thereby overcoming opposition from the Portuguese government.
In Price War, New Kindle Sells for $139
SEATTLE -- Amazon.com will introduce two new versions of the Kindle e-reader on Thursday, one for $139, the lowest price yet for the device.
Apps Help the iPad Print, but There Are Caveats
Bright Lights,
Reliable Dictation, to a 'T'
Nuance, the company that makes Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows, is in a pretty sweet position: It's essentially a monopoly. One by one, its competitors in the speech-recognition business have either left the market (Philips), gone out of business (Lernout & Hauspie) or turned over its product to Nuance (I.B.M.). Even the sole Mac speech-recognition program, MacSpeech Dictate, can no longer be considered a kind of rival; Nuance bought it this year.
FF Interview with Eric Tangradi and Zach Sill
Two quick interviews with two tough characters – Eric Tangradi and Zach Sill.
DJ Trajikk Promo
-Agent Ska-
The Wall
I think today I hit the wall. This is day 9 without much of a break. I tired to take some time yesterday but failed, plus this was the first day on my own after several days with my sister. The first few hours today... just really very hard to get going.
First thing today, second estate lady called to tell me that actually she and her partner aren't interested. So all the angsting over having approached the thing wrong was probably a waste and we're right back in the road we were in before my meeting yesterday. I guess you could look at that as half full or half empty.
Based on my coarse to do list from yesterday, today was supposed to be the remaining bedroom. That's the room that my dad had pretty much used for everything, it was a bedroom and an office. I wouldn't be surprised to find out he ate meals there too. Basically it was a one room apartment in the middle of a 1600 sq ft house. Because of this it is maybe the densest room in the house in terms of content. The other day my cousin and I took a run at it and made a good start but had to stop because there was just too much that needed to be looked at carefully and it just bogged down to a halt. That happened again today and I wound up going at the room three separate times with other things sandwiched in when I couldn't press on. As a result I still am not done in there, but I did make some headroom in other places too.
I also can't stress how important it is to not go too fast. Today I found cash in sealed envelopes amongst unused office supplies. Would have been real easy for that to have wound up in the trash.
So that room was maybe 50% before, now I think I'm up to about 85%.
To did:
- phone with the estate lady, she won't be working with us
- phone with the attorney, set up an appointment later in the day
- called the trash people for another "special"
- called one of Dad's doctor offices to try to figure out what to do with his defibrillator telemetry device
T.I. feat. Keri Hilson - "Got Your Back"
I know...I know...This is totally overplayed on the radio. But well...whatever.
-Agent Ska-
Fish to Pond Ratio
I've been spending some time lately considering the problem of the fish to pond ratio. It's a simple enough idea: as a filmmaker (or really any artist), there's obvious value in having lots of resources at hand, but there's also the value of being one of the more well-known people in town. You lose the problem of competing with the big guns.
I guess the thing that's been bugging me is this: how big of a fish do I want to be in how big of a pond? And how big does that pond need to be for me to accomplish what I need to?
Or maybe, just maybe, there is no pond. Maybe the pond is really the ocean of film and I'm looking at this all wrong.
"Thursday's Bacon" - Episode 9 ("Warped Pittsburgh Memories" with the Seback's)
July 29, 2010Host - Frank Murgia Source Credits - talent network, inc, Frank Murgia, JS, JB, TM ---Welcome to the first episode of "Thursday's Bacon" that does NOT include David Sedelmeier a key piece of bacon in the grease. David is out of the country eating healthy and lean same-day bacon. With David away, Frank holds down the griddle as he welcomes into the talent network studios Dick
sandals
Jay Electronica's Eternal Sunshine Act 1
-Agent Ska-
Jones, McCutch Hot; Rox Not
The Bucs went down quietly in the first to Aaron Cook; the Rox came back with a messy - and scary - bottom half.
Ohlie gave up a leadoff single to Seth Smith, and he was doubled off by Neil Walker who snagged a soft liner. Carlos Gonzalez singled with a bouncer up the middle, went to third on a pick-off throw that went through Garrett Jones, and scored on a Troy Tulowitzki liner.
The scary part? Tulowitzki's liner went off Ross Ohlendorf's head; it was hit so hard that it landed in short right on the fly. Ohlie never went down - those Texans are tough - but he was immediately yanked and taken by ambulance for treatment.
But he appears OK. He was alert all the time, and the hospital says he has a bad contusion and an abrasion, basically a cut and bruise. He even returned to Coors Field, and was joking with Jeff Karstens and the other guys in the dugout, and was part of the post game high-five conga line.
Bob Walk of FSN had the best line of the night, when after Ohlie was declared OK by the docs and on his way back to the park, said that his head was so hard because it was so jammed with facts, referring to his Princeton degree.
Still, it was reminiscent of the ball Lance Berkman drilled off Chris Jakubauskas; eerily, both were hit by the fourth batter of the game in the first. Sean Gallagher came on to get, in effect, his first start as a Pirate. And it was a good beginning; he struck out Brad Hawpe.
Jones evened it up in the second when he bopped his thirteenth long fly, driving this one into the evergreens by the Pirates right center field bullpen.
The Rox gift wrapped the third, and the Pirates reacted like kids at Christmas. Gallagher walked, Andrew McCutchen got aboard on a dropped fly, and Jose Tabata legged out a Baltimore Chop when the first baseman wandered away from the sack.
Neil Walker singled in two, and Jones and Pedro each singled home another. Manny Corpas came on the end the onslaught, but it was 5-1 Bucs going into the bottom of the third.
Lego StarCraft
What? No Zerg?
Eight days of music (remaining)
For Jews at a certain level of observance or orthodoxy, certain prayer services can't be conducted without ten men being present (or, further away from the orthodoxy, ten adults). This is called a minyan, and so one of the things you might hear growing up Jewish is that you are needed to make minyan at your synagogue or temple. However, if you heed the call and leave your place of residence in order to go pray, you may well discover that someone explicitly counts you as being not there - as in, if you're (say) the third person being counted, you will be "not-three." Why? Because Jews have all kinds of superstitions, one of which is that if you count people then the angel of death knows where they are. (As I recall there's something similar that happens with baby names, but I forget the details.) All of this is to say that it makes me a little nervous to list a song for my wedding without even having a girlfriend - but, I admit, not as nervous as the prospect of "busting rocks at San Quentin for the next 75 years," so here goes.
You may not know this, but the common bridal march is from Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin, and - spoiler alert - it plays at the beginning of the third act for a couple who, by the end of the third act, is half-departed-for-a-foreign-country and half-dead. I feel, therefore, as though I have good reason to want to replace it with something with a less fraught history. Perhaps something like "Marie Floating Over The Backyard" by eels, which is not on YouTube at all but can be found in full on the official eels website. I think it could work as a processional, given a live chorus and the right arrangement. The only issue is whether the song actually does have a less fraught history than Wagner's, cause eels can be pretty fraught at times.
Real-Time Super Stats And Hockey Success
The NHL publishes data for what it calls "Real-Time Super Stats." These stats include most of the subjective judgments like blocked shots, giveaways, missed shots, and hits. Some coaches have structured their game plan around dominating in these areas, and there are players that are sought after specifically for their ability to succeed in one of these categories.
The question I'm going to look into today is how these categories contribute to winning hockey games. I'll be using a simple correlation analysis that looks at multiple years of data. Join me after the jump.
I collected data from NHL.com for four of the real-time super stats: blocked shots, hits, giveaways, and takeaways. I then aggregated the team totals over the last five seasons to come up with a large sample. I also aggregated the total number of regular season points earned by each team over the last five years to serve as a proxy for winning. The table below presents those five year totals:
Hits A Guide to GangsternomicsSyndicated from The Ideas Bucket on July 28, 2010 - 11:04pm :: All Blog Headlines
"The former head of a military contractor is on trial in Long Island for fraud, having allegedly used company funds to buy porn for his son, a burial plot for his mother, prostitutes for his employees and a ruby-encrusted American flag belt buckle worth $100,000. David H. Brooks, the founder and former chief of body armor manufacturer DHB, is facing charges of fraud, insider trading and using millions of dollars in corporate cash to fund, as the New York Times puts it, "personal extravagance." Using the company coffers -- which were flush with Pentagon money -- Brooks allegedly bought gifts for his family, including pornographic videos for his son, plastic surgery for his wife and textbooks for his daughter. He also bought luxury cars, country club memberships and a stable full of racehorses." -Agent Ska- http://agentska.blogspot.com/atom.xml
 What I “had” for summer?Syndicated from Working Stiffs on July 28, 2010 - 11:01pm :: All Blog Headlines
 I know the theme on this blog has been what I did for summer, but what about what I had? What I ate? What I dreamed of doing? I’ve recently been published. The Long Quiche Goodbye, the first in A Cheese Shop Mystery series, debuted July 6. So guess what I had/ate/dreamed of doing this summer?  That’s right. Something with cheese! Yummy, delicious, scrumptious cheese. I’m so lucky because I love my research. I shop, I taste, I cook...and then I write. Cheese has become a passion. Many of the cheese shops near me know me by name. I ask what’s new. They offer a taste. I savor. And I write some more.Internet gambling gets a second lookSyndicated from Post Gazette's Techman on July 28, 2010 - 11:00pm :: All Blog Headlines
WASHINGTON -- With pressure mounting on the federal government to find new revenues, Congress is considering legalizing, and taxing, an activity it banned just four years ago: Internet gambling. Police chief sues AT&T for giving wife phone recordsSyndicated from Post Gazette's Techman on July 28, 2010 - 11:00pm :: All Blog Headlines
The police chief for Industry filed a lawsuit against AT&T Mobility recently, claiming the company improperly released his cell phone records to his wife. Gorillaz - Stylo (feat. Mos Def & Bobby Womack)Syndicated from The Ideas Bucket on July 28, 2010 - 10:52pm :: All Blog Headlines
-Agent Ska- http://agentska.blogspot.com/atom.xml
 Billy Wimsatt Speaks 2.0Syndicated from The Ideas Bucket on July 28, 2010 - 10:38pm :: All Blog Headlines
I received the following in an email today. See below. --------- Hey old friend, do you miss the Indy Voters? Do you miss local voter guides? I do. Biko and I had a brilliant idea. We decided to have me bring them back! Not just for the League, but for the movement as a whole in 2010. We wanted to take a quick survey and see how many people out there would like to help make a local voter guide in your town this fall. Interested? I'll help you do it! Just email me back with some info: YOUR NAME With love for the League, ---- -Agent Ska- http://agentska.blogspot.com/atom.xml
 M.I.A.: XXXO Remix Ft. Jay-ZSyndicated from The Ideas Bucket on July 28, 2010 - 10:23pm :: All Blog Headlines
-Agent Ska- http://agentska.blogspot.com/atom.xml
 Mechanical Banks Draw Interest at RSLSyndicated from Urban Art and Antiques on July 28, 2010 - 9:50pm :: All Blog Headlines | antiques | auction | bank | bill bertoia | collecting | Football | harvard | kilgore mfg. | richard c. stevens | rsl auction | yale
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