Order Restored

Thanks in part to Melvin Mora, who stranded 11 base runners for Baltimore today, order has been restored for the AL East over the All-star break. The Sox got into several jams but Baltimore really struggle to get a timely hit.

	W	L	GB
Boston	57	40	---
Tampa Bay	55	39	0.5
New York	50	45	6.0
Toronto	47	48	9.0
Baltimore	45	48	10.0

The Red Sox biggest problem, obviously, is not being able to play well on the road and the lack of middle reliever consistency. They really need Hansen, Delcarmen, or both to step up while they await Masterson making the transition to the pen in the minors. It would also be nice if Bucholz can come back and pitch effectively and David Ortiz can get back in the lineup. At any rate, I think the Red Sox still have to be the favorites to win the division at this point.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

I think Ben summed it up pretty nicely. My largest source of disappointment with this issue is certainly the fact that Obama voted in favor of this crap. I guess abusing the privacy of others without court involvement really is ok, so long as you promise to fill out some paperwork within a week.

I'm also particularly fond of providing immunity for those that broke the law in its previous form. That was a nice added touch, no horrendous abuse of power there.

Urg.

Black Holes Are Totally Racist

So Micah sent me an article from the Dallas Morning News: Dallas County officials spar over 'black hole' comment.

Apparently Commissioner John Wiley Price got upset when Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield made a quip about the county office being a black hole and than insisted it was in fact a white hole. Judge Thomas Jones further decided Mayfield should apologize for being racially insensitive.

Congratulations Commissioner John Wiley Price and Judge Thomas Jones, you two just might be the most retarded people on the planet.

For those of you that didn't know, a white hole in physics is actually the time reversal of a black hole. Boy would it be interesting if the Dallas County Commissioners office irrupted with all the shit that had been lost in there over the years. FEMA would probably have to get involved.

By the way, have I ever mentioned how happy I am I don't live in Texas?

Phone Number Recycling

They really need to lengthen the amount of time they wait before they recycle phone numbers. As amusing as it is to get calls at really strange times of the night and text messages with pictures of fat chicks naked swimming in water I'm sure the intended recipient would appreciate it more so then I do... or maybe that is why he changed his number.

So to recap: Nobody named Steve lives here, and I prefer if your going to send me texts with naked chicks in them they should at least be marginally attractive.

The month of June is over... I think I did way less of a good job writing posts this month as May. Perhaps that is because I seem to get busier and busier as time goes on.

It finally got hot this week in Seattle. I really hope they aren't lying when they say this weather doesn't last too long. 80F outside makes it pretty unbearably hot in an apartment without A/C.

I'm officially a resident of Washington!

So I went over to the DMV this morning and got my Washington State drivers license. What a lovely picture too. On the color version you can even see my gray hair...

Btw, if your looking for a DMV in the Seattle area be careful if you use Google Maps. They double screw you. If you search for 205 Spring St, Seattle, WA 98104 (the real license office address) they send you to the wrong place. If you search for Drivers License Office they give you an office that doesn't exist. I submitted both changes... but we will see how long it takes for them to fix it. Interestingly enough, Google Maps for mobile did a better job when searching by address....

Your Killing Me Apple

So it is no secret that I'm a huge fan of pretty much all the Apple produces of recent. The one I held off on, despite wanting to purchase it every time I saw on in the local Apple store, was the iPhone.

My main complaints in the past were as follows:

1) Lack of 3G service.
2) No GPS
3) No exchange support.
4) Kinda expensive.
5) I had to carry around a blackberry from work and I didn't want too big phones.

Well it looks like all four of those points have been rectified leaving no more blocking conditions between me and a new iPhone.... oh wait.. what is that you say? THEY AREN'T SHIPPING YET? When? JULY 11?!?!?!

Urg, I guess I'll wait some more.

Does SPAM really work anymore?

So just a few minutes ago I was doing a weekly clean up of my spam folder. Why do I do it? I guess I'm just still paranoid that some false positive is going to cause me to delete some important e-mail I'll wish later I had received... even though Google hasn't had one false positive in the last year that I've notice.

Anyway... So there weren't many in the box this week (396, down 216 from last week), but one caught my eye: The "Full Meg Ryan CD" e-mail. Seriously folks?!? Meg Ryan?!? What is this? The 80's?!? Meg Ryan hasn't actually been in a good movie since When Harry Met Sally in 1989. Really the only other good movie she was ever in was Top Gun in 1986. Sorry if I offend you, but everything else she has done was total mindless crap... though sadly her career did nearly take off again with that absolutely retarded 2 hour AOL advertisement she did in 1998.

Anyway, all this leads me to wonder if SPAM really works against anyone anymore? I mean, do you really expect me to believe that a demographic exusts who is looking for mortgage loans from people who can't spell the word mortgage? V!agr!a? P3nis 3nlarg3m3nts?

Now I realize a lot of the ridiculous substitution goes on because the creative spammers don't want us to easily be able to filter their e-mail to the trash. However, food for thought, I have received 3 spam messages in my inbox on Google since April 1, 2008 (when I started keeping tabs), I routinely get about 600/week that are filtered into my SPAM folder, and I've had 0 false positives. So is the ridiculous substitution working? Doesn't appear so.

If I were a spammer I'd change my approach back to the good old days. Give up on beating the filters and just hope your e-mail is legible enough that somebody might take the two seconds to read it and actually click on the link inside. I've just got to believe that would have a higher rate of success then "HAVE THE BIGG3ST BR3STS ON THE BLOCK!" approach.

Then again... I did just spend like 20 minutes writing about SPAM because of the Meg Ryan Full CD e-mail so maybe I'm just full of sh!t.