Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Author: fish1964

  • Football Season

    As a Yankee fan, normally this time of year I’d be totally into the end of the baseball regular season and upcoming playoffs. Oh well, that’s what happens when you put your season in the hands of rookie pitchers.

    So on to football. It’s weird not seeing Brett Favre playing for the Packers. I find myself rooting for the Packers and paying attention to the Jets. It was good to see Brett have a good (not great, he clearly doesn’t know the offense yet) first game. And it was even better to see Aaron Rodgers look good for the Packers. You don’t want to lose to the Vikings in week one.

    This whole season there will probably be a weekly comparison of Rodgers’ and Favre’s stats. That’s unfair on both sides. Rodgers has a better team around him and is working in an offense he’s known for years. But he doesn’t have to be Brett, he just has to win. So far, so good.

    But he has to work on his vertical on his Lambeau Leap (go to the 2:55 mark)…

  • NFL Game Coverage

    Here’s a cool site forwarded to me by Elven Corder. It shows (unofficially) what NFL games will be shown in what parts of the country. It’s a classic Google Maps mashup and it’s pretty cool.

    I also find it interesting that CBS will be showing Jets-Dolphins to most of the country. A couple of months ago you wouldn’t have expected that to be a high profile match-up. Brett Favre clearly has an impact on NFL TV coverage…

  • Google Chrome – Not bad

    I downloaded Google Chrome today. While only a beta (though Google seems to leave things in beta mode forever) it seems to achieve it’s goal. It is a simple, fast and pretty stable browser.

    I like to check out browsers. I currently have IE, Firefox, Opera and now Chrome installed. I had Safari for a while but it didn’t do anything for me.

    Why switch if you use something else? Probably no great reason if you like your current browser. I’m a Firefox fan. Chrome seems a bit faster. I do like the “each tab in its own process” concept so that one stuck tab won’t crash the whole browser.

    There’s even a Chrome version of Task Manager showing all the tabs (and damn, Flash takes a lot of memory).

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    Today, Chrome supports no extensions. That may be a big killer for lots of power users. But I like to experiment, so Chrome will be my default browser for the next week or so. We’ll see if it lasts longer…

  • Best (family) vacation ever

    We just got back from two weeks in Cape Cod. It was in a house right on Skaket Beach in Orleans, MA. For the record, our vacation house was here.

    Part of the reason the vacation was great was that we did two weeks. I have so rarely taken a two week vacation, it’s really way better. But the main reason was location, location, location.

    Our backyard was literally the beach. We had our own private beach right next to the public beach. We could have breakfast and walk out to the beach. The place we rented was a bit bigger than we needed. So we took the opportunity to invite people to join us. We arrived on Sunday. On Monday, my wife’s sister Abby, her husband Jim, sons Michael and Matthew and Michael’s girlfriend Sandy showed up. Michael will be a junior in college and Matthew is a sophomore in high school. So the “kids” were really pretty old which made the overall grown-up to kid ratio quite favorable. That made things easy.

    One night we went bowling, only it turned out to be Candlepin bowling. I had never heard of it before, but it was quite fun and very good for Danielle because the balls are much smaller (Victoria was asleep).

    They all had to leave on Thursday to get Michael and Sandy back to college. On Friday a friend of my wife’s came and stayed until Monday. Those were the quietest days. Then on Tuesday some friends of ours came with their 3 year old twins (boy and girl). Plus they brought up Danielle’s best friend. Suddenly the grown-up to kid ratio dropped below 1. Zone defense time. But it was big fun. The kids played together well.

    And the star attraction was the beach. There are tons of beaches in Cape Cod, but we never went to another one. Why would we? Skaket Beach is on the bay side which makes it warm. It is very shallow with lots of sand bars. This is ideal for kids. It has huge variation from the tides. And you get a great sunset every night.

    I might as well start posting pictures. That’s where this blog was headed from the start. This is the first morning we were there. Danielle is still in her PJs. That’s our deck and that’s our beach before anyone shows up.

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    This one is a bit later that same morning. I’ve just finished a run on the beach and Danielle and Victoria are digging. Tori is still in her PJs.

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    These pictures try to capture the effect of the tides. The first picture is at low tide. You can see the bands of sand bars and how shallow it is. You can walk about a mile straight out.

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    But a couple of hours later the tide starts in. Here it is at about the halfway point.

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    And here is the tide nearly full. If you want to really swim, you need to wait for high tide.

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    But low tide is great for catching minnows and hermit crabs. You see all the kids out there with their nets. Here is Danielle and her friend Kenzie holding some tiny hermit crabs (you can really only see the shells). We probably caught about 100 tiny crabs and 100 tiny minnows over the vacation.

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    And any time is good for playing in the sand. There was plenty of digging (Victoria was generally a hazard with the shovel).

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    There was plenty of burying:

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    Our place had WiFi so you could take a break on the deck and play some games online.

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    We did get out a few times. There was a “Zooquarium” nearby that was good for the kids. It included pony rides:

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    And one day we went to Provincetown, which is a cool and amusing town on the tip of Cape Cod. After a nice dinner

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    we took a walk and found a street musician (if you haven’t been to P-town, as it is known, it is very artsy) and Victoria had to dance.

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    The funny thing is that I know I blogged the last time we went to Cape Cod and P-town about two years ago and there’s a very similar picture of Danielle.

    And of course, there were sunsets. Lots of sunsets. In general I don’t like sunset pictures because they never look as good on film (unless you’re a pro). You usually end up saying, “but it was even more beautiful”. So with that caveat, here are the pictures, ending with my favorite one (OK, it isn’t the sunset that I think is beautiful).

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    So there you have it. A simply fantastic family vacation…

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  • Chemical Free

    I’m amused by this British post (from the Guardian) primarily for the use of the phrase:

    gob-smackingly untrue

    For the record, this blog is 100% chemical free…

  • I love the Olympics but…

    As I watch the Olympics it reinforces my personal rules about sports:

    1. If the costume matters, or makeup is applied, it’s not a sport
    2. If you can’t tell who won without a judge (all the time, not once in a while) it’s not a sport
    3. If the name has the word “synchronized” in it, it’s not sport

    I’m not saying that things that aren’t by my definition sports aren’t important, interesting, worthwhile, etc.. I’m just saying they aren’t sports.

    Remember I used to be a trumpet player. Trumpet is a very physical instrument. You have to be in shape, endurance matters, etc. It is as physical as archery, marksmanship, many actual sports. But ultimately the judging of good trumpet playing is artistic. There are high profile trumpet competitions. Lots of pressure. Real money (generally scholarships) on the line. But it’s clearly not a sport.

    So I always keep that in mind. My daughter was watching gymnastics and she liked one Chinese girl because she was wearing glitter eye shadow. Sorry, rule number one (and number two, actually). Diving? Rule number two. Synchronized diving? (when did this get added anyway?) Rules number 2 and 3. And while I would normally consider boxing a sport, I have to say no based on rule number 2, particularly amateur boxing where knockouts are rare (and judging suspect).

    So I love the swimming. Of course I love the basketball. Volleyball rocks (both beach and regular).  Soccer, excellent. Softball, sure (not sure how international it is, but whatever). Track, of course, totally classic. You get the picture. I find the gymnastics fantastic and amazing, but unless someone wipes out I’m not qualified to decide who did better. Turn the sound off so you can’t listen to the announcers and then try to predict the winners. I think diving is very cool but it’s the same thing. Sure, if they screw up I can tell, but if you showed me video of the gold, silver and bronze winners and asked me to pick which was which, I would get it wrong and so would most people.

    If a casual fan can’t tell who won, it’s not a sport.

    Doesn’t mean it’s not worth watching, that’s just my definition. And synchronized diving is like synchronized swimming – just goofy.

    Go USA basketball…

  • Moon Hoax Mythbuster

    I’m always amazed to discover how many people there are who still think that NASA faked the moon landing. I’ve pointed out this guy’s blog before and it was recently picked up by the Discovery Channel. He did a long mythbusting blog a while back that is considered one of the better ones.

    Apparently the Discovery channel has a Mythbuster show and in an upcoming episode they will be addressing the common “moon landing was faked evidence” that the moon photographs clearly show multiple light sources (as opposed to one sun) which proves they were done in a studio. Conspiracy theorists will say that this photo:

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    shows shadows going in different directions, so it was clearly done in a studio, not on the moon. The show will apparently recreate this to show how it happens (this blog does it fairly well)

    I’m assuming that the new X-Files movie poster is a subtle reference to this part of the moon hoax conspiracy theory.

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    Really, I just like this Bad Astronomy post because he uses the phrase

    I will give you a million bajillion dollars…

  • Geek Humor

    I’ve pointed out the Kloonigames site for its amusing games before. He is currently hyping the game Braid which he says is so amazing that he went out and bought an Xbox just to play this game.

    What amuses me is the blog post title, which is only funny to a C programmer…

  • Apple thinks my neighborhood is cool

    At least that’s my conclusion based on the recent iPhone ad. The “some people will like finding their way twice as fast” part where they show Google Maps is my part of Brooklyn…

  • Amusing Game

    I love this guy’s games, because they have a simple but great sense of humor. I’ve blogged about them before, but if you don’t recall, this guy creates small simple games that take a maximum of 7 days to create. He usually puts out one a month.

    This month’s installment is a simple shoot ’em up. You are trying to blast robots. But there’s a twist. When you die, you press the spacebar to go back in time.

    What actually happens is that the game remembers exactly what you did the first time and “you” automatically do exactly that (up to and including getting killed) while the new “you” gets to operate along side. So in this game dying is advantageous because eventually there are ten of your blasting robots simultaneously.

    Amusing…