A Good Start....

....If you are an Indians fan. One game down, 161 to go. It was a good day for offense, not what one would expect when looking on paper at a pitching match up featuring CC Sabathia and Mark Buehrle. I rounded up some poor guys who could care less about baseball and we met at Champs, requested that they put on the game, and watched the whole thing--at least I did.

The two things that I don't care for are highlighted above. First, Victor pulled a hamstring (evidently) while running from 1st to 2nd on a wild pitch. Pulled up short and was tagged out. He's a force in the line up and you hate to see him go down. Something similar happened to him in game one last season when he pulled a quad while running to 1st.

The 2nd thing is "Progressive Field." I'm not a fan of that. It's nothing against Progressive, it's just hard to think of the place as anything other than Jacob's Field.

How did your team do on opening day?

A glimpse of my future

This will be me in 30 years....

My chat with Leo

The back story, for the two people reading that might be interested is this: When we bought our first house, I opted for Dish Network over cable. It was new-ish, it was 1998, and hey, we had a house! We had the basic packaging that at the time included this obscure but wonderful TV channel called Tech TV. This is where I'm losing most of you.

Well, on Tech TV there was this show called "The Screen Savers." It was hosted by Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton (among many other soon-to-become-well-known-in-the-tech-world contributors) where they would review new gear, various websites, tips, tools, etc, and would also take calls and answer questions.

I watched it regularly-- much to my wife's dismay, but Leo and Patrick became my buddies --sort of. It was a one way relationship.

Years went by, we moved, I dropped dish all together and went to "free" TV. No more Tech TV, but it turned out that once G4 bought it, it kinda became a shadow of it's former self, most of the cast either were fired or moved on and it became history.

But Leo Laporte began doing podcasts--a new medium he kind of became the pioneer of in some ways, developing this entire network of podcasts (which he actually calls "netcasts") around the central "This Week in Tech," or "TWiT" for short.

So anyway, one of his regular non-podcast gigs, (though he does make it into a podcast) is a "Tech Guy" radio call-in show. He recently started streaming video of himself while on the air (radio) answering questions for callers, then opening up a chat channel for comments of anyone who wants to watch and listen to him streaming. I happened to catch it today and I was quite interested. When the radio show went to commercial, Leo turned his attention to the chat screen and starts having conversations with all the one-liners.

So I throw my 2 cents in today and totally side tracks him--Here it is below:



He answers my question with a "because I'm totally loaded on caffeine, derjazzmeister," and the proceeds to get up our of his chair, walk across the room while he's still mumbling (of course, we can't really hear him) and talks about this great coffee he's been drinking. Here's a screen capture of him holding the product below.



He seems to take advantage of any chance he can to promote whatever product he likes, whether they support him or not. I think this is the key to why he does so well, if he likes your product or service, he'll promote it whether you're paying him to or not!

Anyway, the highlight of my Saturday. Pretty exciting, eh?

In the Nick of Time

I heard this might be coming, and I couldn't believe it. I have never heard of such a thing, but it looks like more and more municipalities are adopting measures to eliminate Garbage Disposals.

First, can we all please agree on what these things are called? Are they Garbage Disposals? Garbage Disposers? or, Erators?

We have one in our house. The imprint on the drain collar actually says "InsinkErator" on top and "Food Disposer" on the bottom. All this is fresh in my mind because I just installed it last weekend.

I hated the one that was in there--probably the original one and praise the Lord, it quit working a couple of weeks ago. A perfect excuse to get a new one. This thing was amazing. When you turned it on, it sounded like the whole kitchen was about to take off--or fall apart. And to make things even better, it didn't ever seem to want to do it's job. Usually when you turn these things on, they suck down whatever food is lying nearby. But with this one, you had to run the water AND shove the food scraps down in there!

So, it quit working. First, it made a terrible rattling noise. I shined a light inside. Couldn't really see anything--not that I knew what I was looking for--flipped the switch, more grating noise. A day or two later, nothing. Just a buzz. Wouldn't move. PERFECT!

I bought a new one a few days later. A Badger. A $100, 3/4 HP, 3 year in home warranty, "noise baffling" disposal (disposer). I spent last Saturday afternoon taking the old one out, putting the new one in and it works great! It's so quiet! It chops up the food. I never knew I could be so excited over a garbage disposal (disposer).

So now, there is this news item informing me that I squeaked it in under the wire. The city is banning disposals.

Under the ban, homeowners can continue to use existing disposals, but no new devices can be installed and existing ones can't be replaced when they quit working....Violators face fines of up to $25,000 per day.

Why pick on the lowly disposal (erator)?

City officials said putting food and grease through a disposal and into the municipal sewer system clogs the lines and frequently causes back-ups and overflows.

Raleigh has had almost 100 sewer overflows in the last three years, with raw sewage sometimes flowing into area streams. The state Division of Water Quality has threatened to fine the city for each overflow if it doesn't correct the problem.

Really? So this is going to cause people to put less down the drain? Grease will slide down with or without a disposal (disposer) and whatever food items can go down the drain will likely be larger than if they had first run through an erator (disposal, disposer). I just hope ours lasts for years and years, or until they alleviate the ban!

Wait, Wha.....?

I created a little space by emptying my trash and didn't see this message the rest of the day, but that still doesn't make me feel much better...