Essays
Definition of Insanity
Home Run hitting is vulnerable to breaking down. Combine that fact with an aging starting rotation and an inconsistent bullpen and you have a summary of the Chicago Cub’s last two seasons.
The Cubs currently have 5 batters with 20 or more home runs, and one more, Jason Heyward at 19. No Cubs hitter has a batting average of .300 or better, Anthony Rizzo is hitting .286. Even if you add Ben Zobrist to the mix, the Cubs lineup is too much the same making it easy to defend.
I understand the resistance in parting ways with the talent that got you the World Series three years ago, but I think it should be clear now that unless there are some diferent players in the lineup next year, you are going to end up with the same result.
Many will put blame on the manager, but he is not the person responsible for the roster, that lies with the front office. You clearly see a bias towards a single style of player that is good but not diverse enough, and that really doesn’t give Madden many options to change things up.
Ownership has some hard decisions to make during the off season. It’s easy to decide whether or not to spend money, it is much harder to decide whether the people running your team know how to change and if you do replace them, with whom?
I expect the Cubs to replace Madden because that is the easy choice that just about every team makes at this point. A different leadership style might spark a different emotional result, but it won’t change how teams pitch to the Cubs.
Chromecast Overheating
I’ve been using Chromecast ever since Google first started selling them, and upgraded to the Ultras when they became available. One is attached to each of our two TVs, however I also have an Apple TV connected to the basement TV. I primarily use the Apple TV because I find the apps are better, for example the MLB app has a catch up feature only available on Apple TV.
I do occasionally stream ball games using the Chromecast on the Living Room TV but it has he annoying behavior of performance degrading after a couple hours of streaming. All of a sudden what I am watching starts stuttering and becomes unwatchable.
I don’t have solid evidence, but I suspect the Chromecast is overheating to the point after a few hours the performance suffers. The OS on the device might be throttling down performance to protect the CPU. The Chromecast is very hot when I touch it. I probably should get an HDMI extension to move it further away from the back of the TV.
Given my experience, if someone is in the market for a streaming video device I recommend the Apple TV unless you find the price prohibitive. I think the UI is good and it has had solid performance.
Go Cubs Go
The Chicago Cubs have one of the best home records and one of the worst road records, and they have the best run differential in their division. People seem to be scratching their head over how the same team can be so good at home and so bad on the road. The problem is not the hitting, although they could be more consistent. To me the problem is the bullpen, they are giving up too many runs in the 6 thru 9th innings. Nobody in the pen is reliable.
Twenty years ago the bullpen wasn’t so important because starting pitchers pitched more innings and more often completed games. Now, starting pitchers are only expected to pitch six innings and that means you got have more pitching than ever before.
The Cubs overall pitching staff is not good enough. You might see an uptick in performance if they make the playoffs because the starters tend to go longer and you tend to narrow the pen down to a handful of pitchers, but I don’t expect the Cubs to get beyond be first round if they do make the playoffs.
I don’t know what specific things the Cubs need to do for next year. I don’t think the problem is with the managing or coaching, it seems to point to the talent in pitching. Lester and Hamel will be a year older and there doesn’t appear to be any replacements coming from the minors. The window on the talent the Cubs do have is getting smaller and it will be a shame if they only make it to one World Series.
On Our Twenty Third Wedding Anniversary
Each year we try to celebrate our wedding anniversary on vacation to spend time together. This year we traveled to Marquette, Michigan, stayed at the Landmark Inn, took a tour of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Munising, and then on our way back spent an evening at Headlands International Dark Sky Park near Mackinaw City.
Here are pictures that we took during the trip:
I defintely recommend all three venues. Pictured Rocks might be the closest thing I’ve seen to the Grand Canyon east of the Mississippi. The Dark Sky Park is a great place for star gazing, just be sure the moon isn’t too bright and you have clear skies.
The Risk Of Identifying As A Platform
In a YouTube video recently posted, Bill Gates said something along the line of his greatest failure was to not lead Microsoft to produce a mobile operating system that would have been as successful as Android.
I had an up front view of Microsoft’s mobile operating systems in the early 2000s and for Microsoft to create an Android would have required something akin to a labotomy. The Microsoft of the early 2000s saw itself as a platform company, that platform being Windows, and as a consequence, its prime objective was to protect the platform because to do so was to protect its existence.
To make something like Android Microsoft would have had to be willing to create a new platform rather than try to extend a desktop platform to mobile, which was doomed for failure. Microsoft could not fathom creating a second platform because to do so, in their mind, was to put Windows at risk. (Microsoft also applied the same thinking to the Internet.)
In my opinion the most important thing Satya Nadella did when we took over Microsoft is return to Microsoft’s roots as a software developer and move away from identifying itself as a platform company. As a software developer Microsoft does not see it’s entire existence depending on Windows, which allows it to embrace other platforms such a making a robust version of Microsoft Office for iOS and Android and even to integrate Linux with Windows.
Had Microsoft not got drunk on the Windows platform, starting with Windows 95, it might have been willing to embrace the Internet and mobile more fully and maintained itself as, in Bill Gate’s words, “the” leading software company rather than “a” leading software company. It’s easy to get drunk on the amount of money successful platforms provide and appear to provide forever.
Platforms are an institution, and most institutions naturally expend tremendous effort on self preservation. In my opinion the only way a platform company can truly exist over time is by being willing to put it’s current platforms at risk of extinction through the creation of more viable future platforms. In my opinion some people in Google know this and that appears to be the reason why they are quiently working on Fuchsia but only time will tell whether this insight is fully embraced by those who are running the company.
For A President, Congress Is The Law
I wonder, if the Republicans controlled the House, whether there would already be an impreachment inquiry open. Mueller served the role as investigator, collecting evidence and documenting his findings. The Constitution gives the House the job of prosecuting attorney (not the Attorney General) in determining whether to charge the President with a crime, which for the President has the unique label of impreachment.
A Republican inquiry would review the evidence, formally declare there is none to bring charges, and then the case is closed. Until the House says it is closed, the case is not closed no matter what Trump or Barr says. That is the Constitution.
To uphold their oath to the Constitution, Democrats in the House must open the impeachment inquiry and determine whether or not to vote articles of impeachment. They must be willing to take the political risk, if that exists, to fulfill their role in our government. It’s not about politics, it’s about the rule of law.
In fact, I think Congress should produce new presidential special consule legislation that states that all presidential special consule investigations require an impeachment inquiry to formalize the conclusions of the investigation.
If the criminal justice system cannot bring charges against a sitting president then Congress has to take serious this responsibility. That is unless Congress thinks the President really is above the law.
A Crostini Meltdown
The Crostini Linux containers on my Google Pixelbook melted down after I upgraded the Pixelbook to the stable release of Chrome OS 74, a reminder that Linux Apps (Crostini) is very much in beta.
I’ve written the details of what occurred, the trigger seems to be that I had two containers. After Chrome OS 74 installs and you launch a container, such as by starting the Terminal app, you see a message telling you that the Linux apps is being upgraded and the app you wish to run will load after the upgrade completes.
I saw the message for the primary container, named penguin, and everything worked as planned. The meltdown began when I started Gnome Terminal, which was in the second container, the one in which I was running Docker. The upgrade message appeared but the upgrade did not seem to complete. After letting it run for an hour, which was much longer than the prior upgrade, I restarted the Pixelbook, and either that or the upgrade rendered the container usable.
From here a few attempts to fix the problem cascaded the meltdown to primary container too. My attempts to re-build and restore the primary container from a backup failed and I am left to re-building from scratch. Not totally awful given that I had no real data in either container, just apps with a bit of data synced to a cloud or github.
I am not entirely sure what happened. I might have been too impatient and the second container may have upgraded had I just let it run. Or, it might be that running Docker in the second container created problems.
The moral of this blog post is that even if you are sticking to the Chrome OS stable channel, Linux Apps (Crostini) is still in beta and thus breakage can and will occur.
Migrating To A New iPad
I got a new iPad Mini for my birthday. It is noticeably faster than the Mini 4 and I am happy to be able to use the Apple Pencil with it. I have found that GoodNotes can be configured for vertical scrolling rather than horizontal so it best approximates the Newton notepad.
The setup process for moving from one iPad to another is pretty neat. It automatically detects the old nearby iPad and establishes a connection to it by scanning a barcode with the camera. All the settings transfer and apps restore from a recent backup. Not all app settings, particularly logins, restore so I am finding that I have to check each app individually.
Breaking And Fixing Things
I have been having fun breaking and fixing my wiki over the last several days, and in the process learned more about wiki. Wiki is written in nodejs and there is a wiki-server and a wiki-client along with several plugins. My adventures began when an update was made to wiki-client that broke the ability to use HTML forms in a wiki page. A fix was made to wiki-client that resolved the problem but my server was not getting the update.
It appears that somewhere along the line I managed to install wiki in two different directories on my server. The install from which I was running wiki was not updating when I ran npm install -g wiki and it took me a while to figure out how to run the global install instance of wiki that I was updating.
Today I removed the “second” installation but now I have to provide the full path to the correct, current, installation of wiki. When I just run wiki it tries to run it from a directory in which it is no longer located. I must have an alias or script pointing it in that direction but for now I haven’t figured it out.
Anyway, I now have the current verison of wiki-client so I can now fill in html forms, one of which is for a search plugin that now appears to be broken. Oy vey! Search works on a older installation on my Pixelbook, but the new version/current version is not working.
At least I did manage to get the graphviz plugin installed (you can see it in action on this page), figuring out how to set up myself as an admin user to do the installation took time to suss out.
Breaking and fixing things is a important part of the learning process when learning software.
Journalism Yes, Media No
I have been reading Dave Winer’s writing for a long time, and a common theme of his writing is journalism. My translation of what he has been saying is that news has become a platform, and as such anyone can do it, and those who are employed as journalists need to shift from being gatekeepers to being participants. True platforms route around gatekeepers.
The reason why this message is not well received by journalists is obvious, it’s because what they hear is that you no longer have a job. Staying employed is important to these people and you cannot blame them because it is how they support their families.
When the constitution was written people like Benjamin Franklin viewed journalism as a vocation because frankly the idea of a “job” didn’t really exist. When vocations became professions, a shift in priorities took place, with maintaining employment moving to the top. When journalism transformed to media thanks to corporate consolidation, the move to journalism being about money became complete.
The honest question that has been avoided ever since is, is what we have, journalism as media to make profits, consistent with the “fourth estate” established by the First Amendment? If the prime objective of the Consitution, of which the First Amendment is a part, is to be the United in the United States of America, then today’s media is not that which the first amendment refers to because there is more profits generated from disunity than unity.
Citizens instinctively know that the profits that corporate ownership demands is corupting, and therefore they do not trust media because they know there is a bias towards making money over telling truth.
Of course Fox News is giving their viewers what they want to hear, that is how they make money! Of course MSNBC is giving their viewers what they want to hear, that is how they make money! Of course the New York Times is giving their readers what they want to red, that is how they make money!
On and on it goes. It is another example of how hyper capitalism is destroying republican democracy and thus destroying our country.