Bill Bavasi Fired

My beloved baseball team the Seattle Mariners just fired Bill Bavasi, who is the architect of a $117 million team with the worst record in Baseball. The saddest part here is that some of the smartest baseball people I know of have been predicting the Mariners struggles for some time. The information to properly analyze what a baseball team should be expected to do has been out there for quite awhile, go read a site like U.S.S. Mariner if you don’t believe me.

I can only hope that they’ll hire someone with a modicum of knowledge about the new tools available to front offices, but my confidence in such a move is small. The problems with the Mariners were more than just the general manager, there’s widespread misunderstanding from top to bottom in the organization about how to build a winning team.

Obama Wins

Thank God it’s over!

Please God, let it be over…

I Could Have Been a Scientist

This article from the New York Times on the nature of Dark Matter and why its pissing off scientists makes me wonder why I wasted my time with a liberal arts degree. I could have been doing really important work. Sigh.

Obama/Clinton Ticket: Yes or No?

I can’t figure out which I agree with more:

Yes: An Obama/Clinton ticket would do the most important thing necessary for the Democrats right now, unite the party. The reality is that the days when a running mate could carry a state or region for you are long behind us. Having a ticket that would make 99% of Democrats happy and get them to turn out and vote in November is the most important thing to consider and Obama/Clinton would achieve that.

No: Hillary Clinton is one of the most polarizing figures in politics and adding her to Obama’s ticket is just asking for trouble. The fact that’s she’s done well with blue collar Democrats does not mean that she’ll do well with independents, in fact she’s likely to turn off independents. Give McCain’s strength with that constituency that’s just asking to give away the election.

I need pretty things

I wrote a few days ago about switching from Google Reader to Net New Wire to handle my RSS feeds. One of the reasons I made that switch was because I much prefer the mac-like experience in Net News Wire over the more generic interface of Google Reader.

Let’s face it, the reality is that what this really means is that I like working with pretty things. As such, in the interests of open disclosure and personality regurgitation, here is a list of the things I use not beause they’re necessarily better, but because they’re pretty:

Mac Mail over Gmail
Things over Omnifocus
Blogo over Marsedit
Pages over Word
Numbers over Excel
iChat over Adium
Safari over Firefox

I don’t feel like I give up much functionality, in fact in many cases I think the prettier application is better, but I also have to admit that one of the reasons I think its better is because its prettier -. I also want to point out that the alternative program is not necessarily bad, in many cases I either use it regularly in addition, or have used it extensively in the past, but my preference is the former.

Was Harold Ickes right?

Today the Democrats finally settled the Florida and Michigan disaster. I’m of two minds over the final result. On the one hand I feel like the decision to cut every delegate’s vote in is a good compromise.

On the other hand I have something of a bad taste in my mouth about divying up the Michigan delegate 69/59 as the Michigan democratic party proposed. On the one hand I don’t think there could be an example of a more meaningless primary than the one held in Michigan, on the other hand I somewhat agree with the following sentiment from Kagro X at Daily Kos:

So Harold Ickes is right. This was a violation of the bedrock principle that a vote has to be counted as what it was, not what we wish, guess, or hope it was.

I would have been much more happy if Michigan had been able to hold a Caucus or even a State Convention to decide on the delegate split. Either way the impact on the race would have been negligible. Even if all 59, actually 29.5, delegates went for Clinton it wouldn’t make a significant difference in the race. Which begs the question: why not leave them uncommited?

Web 2.0: Web Applications?

I made the move from a completely web based application for RSS feeds, Google Reader, to a desktop application that’s web enabled, Net News Wire. My reasons are thin and esoteric, I like the “feel” of a desktop application and I like to “own” my data. Am I just struggling against an inevitable transition? Perhaps, but for the time being I’m enough of a Mac user to want a Mac-like experience on a daily basis, and that means using Mac applications rather than their generally ugly, if just as efficient, web based counterparts.

P.S. if you don’t know what an RSS feed is read this article.

It’s Over

About a month after I vented my frustration about the length of the Democratic primary race, see the post below, I feel like I can really and truly say it’s over now. Pundits have pretty much declared it over since Obama won in North Carolina and narrowly lost in Indiana last week. What really put the last nail in the coffin for me, however, was that NARAL today endorsed Obama. Given that Clinton is a historic female candidate having one of the largest female oriented organizations in the country support her competitor means that they know her campaign is over. It will take a few more weeks for the exit strategy to be completed, but for all practical purposes Barack Obama is the Democratic Nominee.

The Democratic Primaries are making me angry

After tonight’s results in the Pennsylvania primary I’ve had to come to grips with something about the primary process: it’s making me pretty angry. I’m angry with Clinton for not accepting that she has virtually no chance of winning the nomination. I’m angry with Obama for not sealing the deal. I’m angry with Democrats who are racist, conservative, bastards who refuse to vote for a Black man, and I’m angry with myself for getting so angry.

The truth is that this is our best chance to legitimately win a presidential election in a generation. It’s been that long since a Democrat gathered more than 50% of the vote. I guess what makes me angriest of all is that we seem to be fucking that chance up pretty good.

Obligatory Oscar Post

So the oscars are playing tonight and there were a couple of films mentioned that I wanted to recommend to everyone. First up is Juno, a great comedy and not a surprise for anyone, I’m sure. Second up is a little more obscure, a movie called Once. This movie was described by its director as a “visual album” and it’s a very apt description. If you like good music and are something of a sap you’ll love this movie. If you haven’t seen either of these movies yet, check them out.

P.S. As I’m writing this Once won the Oscar for best original song in a movie, it’s well deserved. Juno also has great music, so after you see the movies go out and buy the soundtracks for both these films as well.