Another look at Enhanced Gameday
Digging into the tremendous amount of information offered by MLB.com's new Enhanced Gameday, from a pitcher's average velocity in a particular part of a strike zone to the amount of break on his pitches. (Read on Source)
Betemit ill, much like the third-base situation
SAN DIEGO — A .133 batting average could make anyone sick, and sure enough, Wilson Betemit had an upset stomach and was throwing up before the game. (Read on Source)
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Random Reds News
Which in all honesty is what should have happened to the begin with. If the Reds are not going to bring up Homer Bailey, Saarloos needs to be put into the 5th starter role. (Read on Source)
Full Sail Announces New Graphic Design Associate of Science Degree
Full Sail Real World Education is pleased to announce the start of an Associate of Science Degree in Graphic Design beginning in July 2007. (PRWeb Jun 6, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/UHJvZi1QaWdnLVpldGEtU2luZy1UaGlyLVplcm8=
UPI NewsTrack Business
Wall Street winners, losers a wash ... Undergrads rank Google No.1 employer ... NBC, Microsoft thought about Dow Jones bid ... Two-week vacation going by wayside ... News from United Press International.
T-Mobile prepping VoIP service?
Blog: T-Mobile and Linksys have filed documents with the FCC for a new Wi-Fi router that could allow T-Mobile to offer fixed-line VoIP service.
Chasing rainbows
A summer of sun and showers here in the west of Ireland, which means lots of rainbows. The other evening we watched a bow that persisted out there in Dingle Bay for 45 minutes, and perhaps longer (since it may have been there a while before we noticed it). I can't remember seeing a bow of longer duration. The Irish meteorologist, Brendan ... (Read on Source)
Adobe's AIR strategy: First platform, then applications, exec says
Blog: Adobe Systems is supporting start-ups that build Web-based Office alternatives, while it focuses on building a development platform.
Lerach Retires Under Investigation Cloud
Renowned plaintiffs attorney William Lerach, lead partner at Lerach Coughlin, announced Tuesday he's stepping down from the firm he started when he split off the West Coast offices of what is now Milberg Weiss. Lerach said he's planning to take some time off. That could include going to prison, or at least the U.S. Attorney's Office. Lerach is said to be nearing a deal with federal prosecutors related to legally questionable payments Milberg Weiss made to its lead plaintiffs and a former expert witness.
Imperium: A Review by Mary Harrsch
By Mary Harrsch
Well, I just finished listening to "Imperium" by Robert Harris. 
Once more, Harris delves into the inner workings of the Roman Empire only this time, he retreats back to the Republican era and creates a fictional biography of Marcus Tullius Cicero as seen through the eyes of his slave secreatary, Tiro.
Since I was originally seduced into my passion for learning about the Roman Empire by Colleen McCullough and her "Masters of Rome" series of novels, I naturally began this investigation of the life of Cicero with misgivings since Cicero is less than heroic in McCullough's books that tend to present Julius Caesar as the more admirable character.
Harris does not really change that perception of Cicero so much as provide the context for his opposition to Caesar and his fated alliance with the optimates, the group of aristocrats who formed the core of the faction that opposed Caesar in the senate and eventually, the civil war.
However, despite the fact that Cicero was not a sympathetic protagonist, I came to admire his tenacity in the face of social discrimination. His efforts to joust legally and politically within a system heavily weighted in favor of the wealthy and powerful were equally commendable.
As a "new man" Cicero could not rely on a long established patrician heritage to ease his climb up the coursus honorum to the seat of consul, the ultimate imperium, or symbol of authority, in the empire. He was also not militarily inclined so he did not seek the traditional path to political power through conquest either. Instead, he chooses to rely on his keen perception of political strategy and oratory skill to fight his way to the top through the law courts and Roman courts were as rife with personal danger, both literally and politically, as they were with bribery. The obstacles Cicero faced extended to his personal life as well.
Married to an aristocratic wife, Terentia Varrones, Cicero often walked a thin line with his efforts to thwart the designs of rich governors who plundered provinces or attempted to bribe their way into office or out of trouble. She often berated him for alienating her own social class.
Terentia maintained control of a huge dowry that was probably the primary reason Cicero married her. But, Cicero had to request a loan from her through her business manager as if she was just another moneylender in the forum. At one point, he had to present his entire legal defense to her to convince her she would get her money's worth. In fact, Cicero's wife was so hard-nosed and autocratic, I was surprised when half way through the book she has a thirtieth birthday. I thought from her forceful behavior she must have been much older.
The confrontations in the courtroom, the senate and the frenzied voting pens of the Campus Martius provide as much tension as a Roman battlefield and Harris does a masterful job of peopling these scenes with memorable characters. He does not shy away from presenting Cicero's "warts" either.Cicero takes calculated risks to obtain his objectives but he is also a pragmatist and, like most politicians, must form and break alliances as opportunities present themselves. Although he prosecutes a corrupt governor early in his career to gain stature as Rome's preeminent advocate, Cicero later defends a corrupt governor to regain the favor of the moneyed classes as his year to run for consul approaches.I was unaware of how deep-seated an enemy Crassus was to Cicero, at least as presented by Harris. In fact, Crassus was presented with a vicious edge, more dangerous than simply a wealthy wannabe.
I also found it ironic that Pompey had little affection for Cicero either even though both were "new" men. Cicero aspired to become consul, but he seemed satisfied with the overall structure of the Roman Republic. He was appalled when Pompey pressured him to support Pompey's own attempt at wresting control of the empire from the aristocrats of the senate (years before the civil war with Caesar) with his campaign for the award of sweeping powers to eliminate an upsurge in pirate activity. It must have seemed hipocritical to Cicero later when Pompey and the optimates opposed Julius Caesar on the grounds that he was attempting to take sole control of the empire, although the book ended with Cicero's election to consul.
Another surprise was the villainous portrayal of Catalina as a violent, brute of a man who had openly murdered people who stood in his way. I had kind of come to admire Catalina as the misunderstood sometimes-rascal presented in Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder mystery, "Catalina's Riddle". Now I'm going to have to do more research of original sources to come to my own conclusion about this historical enigma.
I had also always assumed that the aristocrats opposition to Caesar's proposed land reforms was based on greed. In "Imperium" however, Harris makes a plausible case for the aristocrats' fear of absolute power that Caesar would gain through the patron-client relationships that would result from land redistribution.
Harris presents an absorbing study of politics and the culture of power in the late Roman Republic and I find "Imperium" to be a worthy successor to Harris' "Pompeii".
Vidic ruled out of Serbia qualifiers
Manchester United defender Nemanja Vidic is out of Serbia?s Euro 2008 qualifying matches with Armenia and Azerbaijan.
U. of Houston Plans to Buy an Illumina Sequencer for New Science and Engineering Center
NEWSBRIEF (Read on Source)
Justice Official Defends Rough CIA Interrogations
The Bush administration allowed CIA interrogators to use tactics that were "quite distressing, uncomfortable, even frightening," as long as they did not cause enough severe and lasting pain to constitute illegal torture, a senior Justice Department official said last week.
Inspecting disk IO performance with fio
Storage performance has failed to keep up with that of other major components of computer systems. Hard disks have gotten larger, but their speed has not kept pace with the relative speed improvements in RAM and CPU technology. The potential for your hard drive to be your system's performance bottleneck makes knowing how fast your disks and filesystems are and getting quantitative measurements on any improvements you can make to the disk subsystem important. One way to make disk access faster is to use more disks in combination, as in a RAID-5 configuration.
The Power of Commenting On Other Blogs
It was one of the first tips that I was given on how to find new readers for my blog five years ago and it’s one of the first pieces of advice that I hear most people giving still today. It’s so common in fact that I think that many of us gloss over it looking for a ’sexier’ way to drive readers to our blogs. (Read on Source)
Morning News
Futures are pointing to a lower openIn Japan the Nikkei 225 closed down 2In Hong...
An Advocacy Story: Cloning Bootable USB Sticks for the Audience
Chao-Kuei's Notes: "I strongly believe that spreading GNU/Linux on usb sticks is a highly effective advocacy strategy. For example, it renders the debate about which OS to pre-install pointless if hardware vendors can be persuaded to sell diskless computers. As another example, InstallFest can be much lighter now: participants don't need to bring their notebook computers, and they don't have to spend time learning the "technical details" of the (scary!) 7 steps required to install Ubuntu. They can bring their usb sticks and hand them over to the organizer, and have a chat or watch app demos while their usb sticks are being cloned with one single command."
Jade 1.2 adds Flickr, EXIF, save features
DataMind has announced Jade v1.2, an update to its digital image processing and browsing software. Added in v1.2 are an upload to Flickr feature, EXIF data support, new save features and more. Jade is also available as an Aperture plug-in, iPhoto image processor and iPhone application. Jade offers one-button automated image enhancement and batch-pr...
Linus Torvalds On Managing Developers
In an "as told to" article for CIO.com, Linus Torvalds explains how he keeps the Linux people and software on-track. Arguably the most surprising facet of Linus' management style is that he's perfectly willing to flame people when he thinks they're wrong--though he's also happy to be corrected himself. "Part of that, by the way, is not feeling shy about saying impolite things or showing some emotion. So I'd rather flame people for doing stupid things and call them stupid, rather than try to be too polite to the point where people didn't understand how strongly I felt about something." That's particularly interesting in light of several OSCON presenters who believe that the way to grow the open source community is to make projects more welcoming to would-be contributors. Do these attitudes actually contradict one another?
Woodward favorite Curlin nears money mark - USA Today
 New York Daily News | Woodward favorite Curlin nears money mark USA Today - By Garry Jones, AP By Tom Pedulla, USA TODAY Horse racing fans will look for brilliance when Curlin struts his stuff Saturday in the $500000 Woodward Stakes at New York's Saratoga Race Course. Curlin The Woodward Favorite Finally showtime for Curlin at Spa |
Nokia CEO wowed by iPhone, sights on BlackBerry
By Eric Auchard SANTA CLARA, California (Reuters) - The chief executive of Nokia, the world mobile phone leader, gave credit to new competitors from the computer world on Wednesday, but said his company was set to respond to all challengers. No...
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Digital Hardware
Digital Cameras, printers and scanners are not absolutely essential hardware for your PC but by and large, you will rarely find a small business nowadays without at least two of the three peripherals....
Linux-Kongress: Corbet Presents New Kernel 2.6.27
Linux Magazine: "In the second keynote of the Linux-Kongress in Hamburg, Germany, cofounder of LWN.net and kernel developer Jonathan Corbet presented details on yesterday's released Kernel 2.6.27, but also described some of the work Linux Torvalds and his group of hackers have been up to."
Google, Microsoft, & Yahoo All Up....In the Stock Market
As you probably heard yesterday the Dow Jones Industrial had its largest rise in history within an increase of over 930 points. The Dow Jones industrial average shot upward a stunning 936 points -- a record one-day point gain -- to close at 9,387.61. By day's end, investors had regained $1.2 trillion of the estimated $2.4 trillion in shareholder ... (Read on Source)
The Creatures That Ate Hollywood
:
When a giant sperm whale rammed a whaling vessel in 1820, the deadly encounter inspired Herman Melville's classic novel, Moby Dick.
Melville's story, inspired by real-life man-versus-beast mayhem from the 1800s, made it to movie screens in the 1950s. Director John Huston's Moby Dick was evidence of Hollywood's growing fascination with giant, thrashing creatures.
Here are some of the best beasties ever captured on celluloid.
Left:
Captain Ahab (played by Gregory Peck) battles the great white whale in Moby Dick.
: A giant squid battles Captain Nemo (played by James Mason) in Walt Disney's 1954 production, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
: Another great white terror of the deep surfaced in 1975's Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg. The blockbuster scared beachgoers and spawned three sequels.
: Not nearly as big as a whale, a giant squid or a great white shark, the Gill Man nevertheless emerged from murky waters to menace humans in 1954's Creature From the Black Lagoon, by director Jack Arnold.
: In a battle of the box office titans, Godzilla battles King Kong in the 1962 Japanese film, Kingu Kongu tai Gojira. Only unlucky structures get between the behemoths in director Ishirô Honda's movie.
: Bigger isn't always better. Suspense master Alfred Hitchcock turned seemingly innocuous seagulls into a giant, crowdsourced flying nightmare in 1963's The Birds.
: A dinosaur foolishly liberated from the Forbidden Valley goes on a rampage in The Valley of Gwangi. Stop-motion animation great Ray Harryhausen created the creature for director Jim O'Connolly's 1969 flick.
: Fussy intergalactic fat-ass Jabba the Hutt smokes out, Star Wars-style, in Return of the Jedi. The beast is known for his bad temper — and for keeping Princess Leia, dressed in her sexy slave girl outfit, on a chain.
: Cuddly creatures turn into nightmarish beasts in 1984's Gremlins and again in 1990's sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch.
: Creature-feature fans saw two classic extraterrestrials face off in 2004's AVP: Alien vs. Predator, by director Paul W.S. Anderson, and in Colin Strause's 2007 follow-up, AVPR: Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem.
: A hideous beast from god knows where thrashes Manhattan in 2008's Cloverfield. Director Matt Reeves did a masterful job of unveiling the monster, one blurry bit at a time.
name: MAGPIE