Jeff

I love baseball. It is such an amazing sport in all of it’s peculiarities and quirks. It is a stat driven game, with all sorts of numbers and analytics to give some perspective of what is happening and what to expect. Which makes it even better when that doesn’t happen. It’s beauty is in the details, the drama, the spectacle. It is hard to describe what I love about the game so much, but I will try.

The chess match of the pitcher and batter is such a dynamic duel. The pitcher (and catcher) decide on a pitch to throw, whether a two seamer, a four seamer, a sinker, a slider, a curveball, or a change-up, and then they select where to throw it. The pitcher then winds up and throws it, daring the batter to try and hit it. The batter then needs to decide whether they want to hit it, if it is going to be a ball and to take it or if the pitcher messed up the placement and left it out over the plate. Does the batter want to watch a few pitches to get a feel for what is being thrown or jump on the aggressiveness of a pitcher trying to blow a fastball right by him on the first pitch. Ah, the back and forth, the guessing, the strategy. The pitcher can try to climb the ladder throwing faster and faster and slowly going up in the zone. The pitcher can try going in and out and mess with the perception of the batter. The batter can reach out of the strike zone and get a good swing on a wide ball. I could go on and on of all the peculiarities and strategy going on with every pitch.

Then there is the fielding. The 7 guys behind the pitcher (and the catcher in front) who try to keep a hit ball from getting the batter on base. The beauty of a diving catch or turning a double play. Chasing a foul ball into the stands or the cut off jumping a toss to catch someone getting greedy on the base paths. The cat and mouse game of a base runner and the pitcher, trying to get a strong lead off while not getting thrown out for straying too far. Intentionally walking a batter to get the force out. Stealing a homer from over the fence.

Then you get the base running, the guy who goes first to third on a single or the runner who goes in hard to second to try and break up the double play. The suicide squeeze or the double steal. Sending the runners on a full count because you trust the guy at the plate will walk or put the bat on the ball. The art of deciding whether to tag up on a borderline fly or advance in case it isn’t caught. Trying to beat the throw after a deep fly.

Finally there is the epic strategy of the two managers. Do you pull your pitcher who is having a great game because he is up to bat with two guys on or do you let him hit and keep him pitching? Do you keep the lefty in to face a right handed hitter because two lefties are behind him? Double switch? Put the pitcher in left so you can use him for the next batter? Do you go with the hot bat or the guy who is hitting good against righties? Is it time to switch the big bats in the field for the guys who are better with the glove?

In what other sport can a team always have a chance of winning? It doesn’t matter if you are down by 1 or 5, until you get the last out, you always have a chance of winning. And this fact, alone, creates some of the greatest drama in sports. The day to day struggles of each team who need to rest their stars because they haven’t had a day off for 2 weeks. Ah, I could go on and on about all these beautiful bits that make baseball such an amazing game to watch. sigh

tagged with:
• baseball

So last week (the week of memorial day) I got to spend the week in San Francisco. It was to attend a software conference for work, but I tagged on a few days and flew out with Kim to get a semi vacation in. We had talked about visiting San Francisco while she was still in college, but she opted to go to Las Vegas with her friends. It was odd trying to cram an entire vacation into 3 days (We arrived Thursday night and she left Monday morning) but it was very revitalizing (in ways).

The first day we got up early (still on central time) and I got her to climb one of the infamous hills of the city. The hills really add an awesome character to the city, especially compared to the ultra flat Chicago. The craziest part of these hills is how incredibly steep they get. But when we reached the top, we were rewarded with a very good view of the city. We then went down the north side towards the bay, checking out Lombard on the way down (it was super crowded early in the day, on a Friday). One of the neat things is that it seems every building in the downtown area has bay windows, so walking down the streets you get to feel a different “texture” on the sides compared to a relatively flat wall of houses in most other cities. While we were walking along the bay coast, there was practice going on for the America’s Cup which was very interesting to watch. There were three teams practicing, Italy, America, and New Zealand. The ships all had hydrofoils and were ultra light, so they would quickly get out of the water and could outrun the speedboats that were following along.

Friday night, we were going to meet one of my friends from when I worked in Indianapolis. He left to take a job working at facebook, so I got to hear about all of the interesting stuff going on there. He took us to this really awesome “gastropub” that had both great food and great beer. Afterwards we went to a few bars and eventually were sent back to our hotel in a cab (I wish I could take a cab home from drinking downtown… soon).

Saturday I was a bit hungover, so we slept in and then walked to Chinatown to check it out. It is a really cool Chinatown in how they have incorporated a lot of the Chinese style into such an American city. There were a number of street musicians and a bunch of shop owners out trying to get you to go into their shop (just like in Hong Kong!). We had dim sum at this place where it was all you can eat for $6, sadly I did not have much of an appetite after the previous night, but I will definitely return here sometime, hungry. We eventually ventured back to our room as Kim was going to meet a friend for happy hour at some pirate themed bar. I rested for a while, then met them in Japantown for some sushi. Japantown was a very surprising area in how small but very secular it is. There is a clear point where you go from San Francisco to Japan, which is pretty neat. We had a nice sushi meal with her friend, talking about his time in the city (he moved recently for grad school).

On Sunday, we ventured down to Fisherman’s Wharf to see the sites there. We were going to talk a cable car, but the line was insane (protip: catch the cable car at the next station, even though there is a line, they never fill a car at the end so there is still room for other people to hop on at the next few stops). We walked through Chinatown and then little Italy (man did the food smell amazing). Then we walked around the wharf some. Had clam chowder for lunch, saw the seals, got to see the street performers, and explored random places in the area. We then took a cable car back to the hotel area, had to wait about an hour in line (only 4 cars left in that time!) but got to experience one of those token experiences of the city. We then went back and dinner so Kim could meet her friend to go to some club.

… That’s a lot, I will write a second part soon

tagged with:
• travel

So I rolled a new design a few months ago, but I have been pretty unhappy with it since. It just felt very… kiddy. I like light on dark for personal things, but the look of it on a public website just felt almost naive. That feeling, along with some new things I had heard while at a conference in San Francisco (that post is in the works still), I spent my flight home writing the majority of the design. And then today, I roll it out.

I went with an almost class newspaper sort of look. I use classic aesthetics in the main print and try to limit the craziness to as little as possible. The styles are very tied to modern browsers (so if it looks like crap, either switch to the latest Chrome or wait for me to eventually add in the legacy detection and support). It should also be very responsive (a lot of that work was done when I worked on my programming blog design) so it should scale nicely down to mobile devices, but the detection for those could be borked. There are, again, no images used in the site design (of course there are pictures in the gallery, which does have the stuff from San Francisco, those actually were uploaded while I was still on the trip, more on that in a bit), I need to do some optimizations on how the page loads still, but it should also load fairly fast (the font loading blocks rendering, should defer loading those until the page is rendered or see about some class change to trigger that. Whatever, those are details I will work out in time.

The pictures from my trip I uploaded to flickr while still on the trip. It was an experiment to see how well it worked and what sort of issues I had. The only real problem I experienced was the slow upload speeds (hotel lobby wifi is going to be like that). The real issue is that the server doesn’t have any system that auto recompiles all of the pages unless I tell it to. I will be trying a few ways to try and automate this, so the site will update regularly, whether I like it or not.

tagged with:
• site
• design