On the first weekday of this vacation I had this fantastic seafood omelet and grits at We Got Brunch.
Yesterday the Cubs beat the Braves, who by record is the best team in the National League. Today will be a test to see whether the Cubs can beat a better team in a series. Given how this is playing out, I think the experience of playing meaningful games through September is going to be huge for the near future Cub teams. Even if they lose Stroman and Bellinger during the offseason this experience for the maturity of the team is with every penny spent.
To figure out how to get the country past its current impasse, we need to look at reality as it is, not as we imagine it might be. And the reality is that our deep political divide is rooted, first and foremost, in profound and largely irreconcilable views of who America is for and what its social hierarchy should look like. That may be unpleasant for Brooks — and all of us — to contemplate, but reality’s ugliness doesn’t provide an excuse for ignoring it.
I am seeing lots of articles about the demise of the PAC-12 college conference. To an older guy such as myself I find the current conference names no longer make sense. Granted, the Big Ten doesn’t explicitly name a region but it has been for Midwest colleges all my life, west coast colleges mess that up. So, I say you might as well just change the conference names.
One thing I do wonder, with the PAC-12 disbanded what of the Rose Bowl? While the CFB championship long ago broke the Big Ten/PAC-12 match ups, they did try to hold to that when not hosting the championship. Now what?
Beginning a summer vacation week at my favorite place under these trees.
Reading what I wrote about the results at the end of the MLB trade deadline last year where the Chicago Cubs did not sell Wilson Contreras or Ian Happ, amazed by how much changes in one season. The Cubs extended Happ this year and honestly have not missed Contreras. Further, it seems the new cornerstone of the Cubs is Nico Hoerner and Dansby Swanson. Better yet, the Cubs bought at this trade deadline and their playoff chances are very much alive.
The game last night encapsulates why it has been frustrating to follow the Chicago Cubs this season. They have the hitting to put up a huge number of runs and the pitching to enable them to win, but as prone they are to score 20 runs in one night, today they might score only 2. Too many losing streaks up to this season has prevented them from being in first place right now. Good new is that they have more games against the Brewers and Reds that enable them to close the gap.
The Chicago Cubs winning streak ended at eight games today with a loss to the Cardinals in the last game of the season against their division rival. (Let that sink in a moment, thanks due to the new “balanced” MLB schedule.) Obviously, the streak had to end eventually, but the Cards have proven to be very beatable and we had every reason to expect the Cubs to win today too. Tomorrow night the Cubs start a four game series against the Reds at home, and they need to win the first game as they can no longer afford losing streaks. Even more importantly, the Cubs are 3.5 games behind the Reds in the NL Central standings and we do not want to fall further behind. The Cubs have an opportunity to pull closer to the Reds and Brewers this week and therefore solidify being in the hunt for the remainder of the season. Losing 3 out of 4 of these games against the Reds might actually be too difficult to overcome. Ross needs to be putting the best lineup in every game for this series, I do not want to see Mancini at first and Morel in place other than DH. Play Gomes in all of these games. Cubs need to treat this series like the playoffs!
Once again I am looking for the best replacement for Evernote. I have found that I can import my Evernote notes into Obsidian and notes that contained attached or embedded items, like pictures and PDFs, look the same in Obsidian. Problem is that I don’t think Obsidian is the best replacement for how I use Evernote, which is as a repository for documents and web clips from the Internet. I am seeking a new web clipper and OneNote is an option but it there is no longer an OneNote clipper extension for Firefox, so the search continues. If you have suggestions for a multi-platform, multi-browser web clipper and repository please share them.
Here is a really good article titled the “Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism.” At the conclusion the words “be careful what you ask for, you might just get it come to mind.” A functional American society is born out of a tug of war between ideas, when one side let’s go of the rope everyone falls over.
The Chicago Cubs beat St. Louis last night and evened their record to 51-51, and sit at 5.5 games behind first place in the NL Central and 4 games back in the Wild Card. In short, a better record and potential than last year. The sell off really didn’t happen last year, but this year there is much debate about what they should do with Cody Bellinger and Marcus Stroman, both who are really good but with whom the Cubs lose contract control at the end of the season. I think the Cubs' chances to make the playoffs this year are real, and at a minimum ownership owes the fans a competitive team for the remainder of the season. I say they should keep both Bellinger and Stroman and make serious intent to sign them at the end of the season. The farm system is not in dire need of prospects.
Today is the one year anniversary of when I started tracking my walks in the Walk The Distance app. In that one year I have walked 1,231 miles, which is equivalent to walking the Appalachain Trail from Georgia to New Jersey. I’ve walked the equivalent of 61% of the trail, so I think I am track to finishing the distance next spring.
Spoiler, every industry in the United States is “Big Tobacco,” not just Big Tech. It is the American form of capitalism that makes it ok for one to profit off the suffering of the other, which may be America’s original sin.
Right now Cody Bellinger is carrying the Chicago Cubs, so when he is traded some time in the next couple of weeks the Cubs will stop being competitive for a playoff position. Once again the season will be about watching guys called up from the minors. Ricketts has to make a clean sweep of the front office and manager, he can’t keep accepting mediocrity.
Read this morning that Tony Bennett has passed away, and what a life of 96 years to celebrate! Happy to be able to say that I got to see him perform in person, more than ten years go, at the Fox Theater in Detroit.
Danah Boyd’s take on the emergent Twitter alternatives is worth the read. I think a point not made is whether the emergent service is driven to dominate the world or satisfied to meet a niche. Case in point is micro.blog, which appears to aspire to nothing more than nurturing a relatively small community and yet I assume it generates enough revenue to cover costs and provides enough income for it’s employees. The ideas of “enough” and “nurturing” are what is missing behind nearly all of the alternatives except for perhaps Mastodon, which appears to be dedicated to nurturing an open source alternative.
Last month I wrote about impact the wildfires in Canada had on the air quality at my home. Last week there was another occurrence in which the air patterns changed to bring the smoke pollution back toward us and this time I had in place an indoor Airthings Pollution Monitor that provides PM2.5 readings. What I saw is that the outdoor smoke pollution definitely affects the quality of the air in the second floor of our condo, and therefore I think the monitor can provide indication that the outdoor pollution is worse. We didn’t have the windows open and it wasn’t so hot outside to cause our central air conditioning to run more than normal, but obviously the house is not hermetically sealed and we did open doors to go outside. What I don’t know is what to do when the air gets bad? I am thinking get more internal air circulation, either with floor fans or the fan in our HVAC or buy air purifiers.
In the neighborhood where I live I have developed the reputation as the guy who walks a lot. The reputation may be aided by the fact that I usually wear a Tilley hat. I have type 2 diabetes and have been managing my glucose/A1C in the pre-diabetic range mostly through exercise and diet. I have found that taking a walk is the easiest/quickest way to lower my glucose, and this New York Times article cites studies showing that just a two or five minute walk has positive affects. Ideally, I take four walks each day, one after each meal and an extra in the afternoon. The time and distance I walk is dictated by my schedule and the weather. During the work day I treat these walks as “coffee breaks” that are aided by the fact that I work from home.
I am a proponent of the idea that computer science education should be cross-curriculum rather than focused solely on singular classes and college advanced placement. Computing should be seen as fundamental as reading and writing as it now touches ever aspect of our lives. A step in this direction is application of computer science to liberal arts and humanities, such as being done at the University of Michigan. I particularly like the three themes: computing for discovery, computing for expression, and computing for justice. Watch this presentation by Mark Guzdial to learn more.
Yesterday I added a TP-Link switch that supports Matter to my smarthome configuration. The installation process was not as smooth as advertised, but after some fiddling I did succeed at adding the switch to Google Home. You can read about my experience posted to my day notes.