Bias in the media?

Is there bias in the media? I mean the baseball media? I mean, east coast, New York-centric media?

On the day the Indians become the first team in all of baseball to clinch their division title, here are the offerings on the baseball portion of MSNBC:



Yankee's clinch? No. Sox Clinch? No. Indians? YES. Story about Cleveland? NO.

Magic Number: 5

For some reason, I enjoy reading the opposing team's home town paper to get their take on their sports team. Again, from the Detroit Free Press's Michael Rosenberg:

Well, I always wondered what it's like to be an obituary writer.

The Tigers are dead. Finished. Sans pulse. They are sleeping with the fishes, by which I mean the Marlins.

The Tigers are now 6 1/2 games behind the Indians with 10 to play. That's like being 6 1/2 miles behind in a five-mile race. Their wild-card hopes aren't much better: They are five games behind the Yankees in the loss column.

When the Tigers show up at Jacobs Fields this morning, they ought to wear black uniforms. Sure, it would be weird, but black would go nicely with their red faces.

Something like this is rare for Cleveland fans so we have to enjoy it while we can. But it's nice to see the diligence of a long-term plan coming to fruition. No panic, just stay the course. I like that.

Magic Number: 7

From the Detroit Free Press:

I won't say the Tigers are finished. But if my life depended on them making the playoffs, I'd buy a lot more life insurance.

In the bottom of the 11th inning Monday night, Cleveland's Casey Blake hit one out of the park, and that means the Tigers will likely be out of the postseason.

Wish I could be in NEO, I'd be at a few of these games!

540 extension added to Google Maps

FINALLY, directions from our house to somewhere in north Raleigh will start out correctly. No longer will we be directed all the way over the Triangle Town Blvd to pick up 540 but the maps have now been updated with the nine-month old extension that goes down to 64. What's interesting is that if you click over to the hybrid or satellite view, you'll see 540 still under construction. Also, the western side of 540 into RTP has not been updated. A bit of lag time at Google Maps...

I Use Adium

There was a time, not too long ago when I first migrated to OS X (from OS 9--that was a long wait for me! but that's another story all together) that I signed up for iChat. At first I ignored it. I never used it. My reasons were simple. First, I resented being interrupted at any given moment by someone, anyone who sees me online. Second, there's the phone. There's email. There are cell phones. There were already a variety of ways to reach me. And of course, most compelling, the two people at the time with whom I would most likely share a chat were in the offices next to me. So why bother?

After moving to NC, I decided to resurrect iChat. I played with it for a while but soon discovered that some of my friends, litterally from all over the world, were on several different chat services. As it turned out, I unwittingly had accounts on many of these chat services already in place. I was an early adapter of ICQ, back in the dial up days.
I rarely used it. I have a Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and AIM account (iChat works on AIM). How could I see if my friends were online without having to check all these different services?

Enter Adium. This is a great little program for MAC OS X. It combines all of your various chat accounts into one place. As you can see, you may access me from any one of these services below:


You can organize your contacts in various ways, by a custom-assigned buddy list, or by account. My list automatically resizes as people come and go. It lives in the bottom right hand corner of my screen. It may look like any of these windows at various times:


I've now decided that the reason I live with chat on so much has more to do with just knowing that I can reach someone quickly and easily. (Yes, I'll admit, email has become just too slow!). I've enjoyed the instant contact with someone who may be across the hall or half way around the world. Just like most chat clients, you can set away messages if you're busy, or sometimes, you just can't reply to someone right way--no different then not answering your phone just because someone calls.

For those of you wondering what the Windows equivalent of this program would be, I would suggest Trillian, though since I tried it last, it didn't compete with Adium's slickness.

Send me your chat address!