0-3

Game 2 was rough. We let a few kids who had never pitched before pitch and it was a walk-fest. The good news was we hit the ball a little better, but wasn't able to make up all the walked in runs.

Game 3 this past Saturday was a little better. We pitched another new pitcher, but he threw strikes. The other team was hitting everything he threw, but that's better than walks. On the offensive side, we got the bases loaded a couple of times but couldn't really take advantage of it. Z did steal 2 bases, 1 of which was home, scoring the first run of the game. We put in our star pitcher the last 2 innings and shut them down, but we couldn't mount enough offense to come back.

Baseball game

Well, my record as head coach is now 0-1. We lost our game last night 4-3. We definitely need some work on hitting. I haven't reviewed the scorebook yet, but I'm pretty sure all 3 runs were from walks and steals.

Next game is Monday night.

Racism and Christianity

Wow, our church service today was amazing. The pastor spoke about racism. Growing up in the south, even in the 80's, I was exposed to a lot of racist attitudes. My parents and their friends often told racial jokes and made comments. It was just something I never really thought much about until I was an adult. Because I have been able to work and interact with people of different races and nationalities, I realized that you cannot judge a person by their color.

We watched part of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech from 1963. It moved me to tears because I realized that it's been a couple of weeks shy of 43 years since he gave that speech and most of what he spoke about has not come to pass. And the truly sad part is that a lot of the people who still harbor prejudice towards other races were sitting in churches today. I personally know several people who regularly attend church, yet use racist words to describe entire groups of people. How can they reconcile this? I knew a woman who told me that I shouldn't let my son read the Harry Potter books because they were evil, when she freely used the "N" word around her son. Our children will learn from us. We should be teaching them to love, not to hate.

There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. -Galatians 3:28

Will Hoge

Just found out that Will Hoge will be playing at the Exit Inn Sep 29 @ 9:00pm. So far, I've managed to miss his show every time I've planned to go. I will be there this time. Anyone else going?

Happy Birthday

to me! I've been 34 for about 3 hours now. There's nothing like having a birthday and having your son start high school the next day to make you feel old.

I'm celebrating by picking A and Z up tonight, going to dinner and then a round of mini-golf.

First night of baseball practice

Well, I survived my first night of coaching the baseball team Monday night. I had a couple of dads volunteer to help out and we split the kids up and had some hitting practice balls and the rest taking infield. We've got some pretty good kids. There are 2 that have never played before, so I want to make sure I work with them. I have 6 more practices to get them all ready to play.

One thing I learned about being the coach. There is no leaving right after practice. I ended up talking to various parents for 15 minutes after practice. Z and I had just enough time to run through Wendy's drive-through and make it to the high school for A's band meeting.

Our next practice is Saturday at high noon. I hope it's not too hot.

Coaching

I found out Monday that I will be the head coach for Z's fall baseball team. Z is very excited about it. I went to the coach's meeting/draft last night. I think this will be very fun. I've assistant coached before back when A played ball, but never head coached. I ended up w/ ten 8, 9 & 10 year olds, 2 w/ pitching experience. The fall league is a lot more relaxed than spring. There's only going to be 3 teams in our age group. It will be good for the kids to work on the fundamentals of the game and not have as much pressure to win. I think striving to win is important, but I don't like the situations where I've seen coaches focus all their attention on those 5 or 6 good players and forget about the 3 or 4 that could be good if they just had some instruction.

Advantages of Government Surveillance

This is hilarious...
http://www.slate.com/id/2145415/fr/rss/

Gatlinburg

I am on vacation this week and it has been the week A and Z stay with me in the summer. We went to Gatlinburg for a couple of days and had a great time. We went to the aquarium which is awesome. We went to a place called Wonderworks which was dubbed as "An amusement park for the mind." It was fun, but a little crowded. Later that night, we went on a 3D ride which was fun. The next day, we drove up to Newfound Gap and hiked up a trail. It was very cool to get away from all the crowds and be the only 3 people in sight. I got a lot of good pictures, i'll include a few here

Shark at the aquarium


Wonderworks (yes the building is upside down)


View from Newfound Gap


A & Z during our hike


A big log + 10 second timer = picture of all 3 of us


River in the Smokies

Baseball playoffs

Z's team played in their 2nd playoff game last night and won 7-1. They are playing the championship game tonight. They have played great all year, but last night they were just awesome. They were very fired up. The game was 1-1 up until the 4th inning when his team scored 6 more runs. There were several defensive plays late in the game that kept the other team from scoring. Z struck out once and hit a fly out to 1st base.

We're heading to the championship game now.

Nashville Zoo

This weekend, my company had a picnic at the Nashville Zoo. I got to take A & Z even though it wasn't my weekend. They've improved the zoo since it moved to Grassmere, but they still need to expand it (which they are). We had a pretty good time and some good food. Here are some pictures...

Elephants


The newest addition, giraffes (they were pretty far away)


"Are you lookin at me?"


Big anaconda


Iguana


Huge turtle. I took one w/ Z standing next to it to get some scale, but it was dark in the room w/ the aquarium lighted, so I used a flash and it darkened the aquarium. Trust me, it was huge.


The antelope looking animal is a Bongo.

Summer Movies

This has been the weekend for summer blockbusters. Sunday, I took A & Z to see X-Men: The Last Stand. You could tell Bryan Singer wasn't at the helm for this one, because it just didn't have the character development like 1 & 2. Also, I despise Halle Berry because she, from what I heard, bucked for more screen time for her character, Storm. Storm happens to be my least favorite character in the franchise, so thanks Halle. Yea, you look good in a leather suit, but your character is lame.

Today, I went to see Mission Impossible 3. The following paragraph will contain discussion about scenes from the movie, not spoilers, I will sanitize it so I don't give anything away. But if you don't want to know anything about the movie, don't read anymore.


I have yet to see MI:2, but I don't think anything carried over. Let's face it, these aren't exactly Lord of the Rings. Anyway, the movie itself was pretty good, very action packed. One thing I didn't like was, even though we are following the hero (Ethan Hunt), there were several action sequences when we don't know his objective. One second, he's deciding to go to city X, then it cuts to him running through a factory planting bombs. It was pretty easy to figure out what he was after, but how bout a little setup? Also, I'm fine with suspension of disbelief. I believe I have written on here before about it being okay to change the rules of the universe, but you must follow the rules the movie sets up. I can believe there really is a gov't agency called IMF that has highly trained agents. I can believe that Ethan Hunt can do these awesome stunts and not get hurt. But if you are going to use real world objects, don't change the rules just to build dramatic affect. A defibrillator that takes 30 seconds to charge? How useful would that be? These things are meant to save a person's life in an emergency, you can't tell me they take 30 seconds to turn on. My laptop boots faster than that. I may be wrong, it just seems they did it to build drama. Another thing I'm sick of seeing: someone getting shot and flying backwards. There's this annoying little thing we have called physics. In fact, in one scene Ethan is doing some calculations as a nod to physics, so why do they have to have one scene (no one else who is shot in the movie flys backwards) where someone gets shot and they go flying out the window behind them? There's that little law about equal and opposite reactions. Basically, in order for a bullet to strike someone with that much force, it would have to expend the same amount of force in the opposite direction, blowing the shooter back the same way the shootee was. Another nitpick, why cut down the time left to accomplish the mission to a point where it becomes unbelievable? At one point, they have 2 hours left til their objective and they are just now planning it. They come up w/ a lot of specialized equipment within 1.5 hours, plus apparently do more planning since things happen that we didn't see them talking about. We're talking stuff you don't go pick up at the corner Walgreens. My point is, it would have been more dramatic to say they had 6 hours left, then they pull it off at the last minute; instead of having this totally unbelievable time remaining.

Proud dad

I am very proud of A, my oldest son. Tonight was his school's awards ceremony. For the second year in a row, he won Best Percussionist for his grade.

Upcoming Concerts

Awesome, I just heard The Black Crowes are playing this summer and Robert Randolph and the Family Band is opening.

June 27 at Starwood, tickets go on sale Saturday (May 13). Anyone want to go?

And as mentioned by the photogenic Jane, Steely Dan is playing Starwood on July 10, tickets are on sale now.

I need to start saving my pennies for tickets.

New Music

I've been sitting on this post for a week and a half, I just haven't had time to throw it out here.

A couple of new bands and an old band w/ new music...

Damone - Out Here All Night. I got the title track as a free iTunes download and liked it. It reminds me of 80's hard rock. I listened to the samples of the rest of the album and bought it. It's pretty good. I don't imagine it will stay in heavy rotation once it falls out of my "New Songs" playlist, but it's nice to hear a guitar solo that's more than 3 notes in modern music.

Wolfmother - Dimensions EP. I got Dimension as a free iTunes download and just went and bought the 4 song EP. Awesome. Take 3 Aussies, lock them in a room with a guitar, bass, drums and keyboard. Only let them listen to Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Who and Pink Floyd for 6 months and this is what you get. They just released a full LP, but I haven't picked it up yet. Target has it for $7.99 vs. iTunes at $9.99.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium. It's not out yet, but I grabbed the single "Dani California" and it's really good. I haven't been really into RHCP since Mother's Milk/Blood Sugar Sex Magic, but their new one is on my wishlist.

Minimum Wage Update

I received a comment from State Representative Susan Lynn, who was quoted in my recent rant on Minimum Wage. It turns out she has a blog. Since I called her comments "idiotic", I thought I would be nice and include her comment to me and a link to the article she references.

Dear Jeff,

I was pretty frustrated by the article too. Please remember, articles omit a lot of other comments.

Actually, I wrote a guest column in the Nashville City Paper. You can see that article on my blog: http://susan-lynn.blogspot.com

The article is called: Public Policy & Raising the Minimum Wage

Thank you for allowing me to respond.

Rep. Susan Lynn

Public Policy & Raising the Minimum Wage

I'm betting she found my rant by doing a "vanity search", but I still think it is great that lawmakers are taking the time to see what the public is saying about them and sharing information via blogs. What's even more impressive is that I'm not one of her constituents, I don't even know where the 57th district is. So it wasn't a case of "vote grubbing."

Online Movie Rental

I think online movie rentals is a great idea. I had been considering trying one of the services for a while and finally decided to give it a whirl last month. I kept seeing billboards for www.gamezandflicks.com and I checked them out. They were cheaper than NetFlix AND offered video game rentals, so it seemed like a no brainer. I wasn't real jazzed about NetFlix anyway after reading about them "throttling" their high volume users.

So I paid my $16.99 and added some movies and a couple of games to my queue. They quickly shipped 2 movies and a game and I had them within two days. As I started trying to add movies to my queue, I realized why they were so cheap. Their selection was very limited. And when you selected the New Releases category, they listed all the movies that were recently released to DVD. Now, I know that makes it a new release, but I shouldn't have to browse through 6 pages of 70's movies to find a new movie. When you go to the video store, they don't put Smokey and the Bandit 2 in the New Release section just because it was just released on DVD.

Their navigation also left a lot to be desired. When you added a movie to your queue, they didn't provide a way for you to return to where you were when you added the movie. So you end up hitting the Back button and as a web developer, that's never a good thing when you are submitting information to a site. I just looked today to get the link and it looks like they have done a redesign, so maybe that is not an issue now.

Their customer service also pissed me off. They don't provide any phone contact, so it's all done through the website and email. They even have a help request for finding out if they carry a particular movie. I submitted a request because they didn't have The Sopranos Season 5. I found Season 4, but not 5. They just closed the ticket, no response, just closed it.

So I started searching for an alternative. I found a guy on the web (I can't find the link now) who compared all the services and rated Intelliflix highly. I check them out and they had either a $16.95 plan for 3 movies at a time or $24.95 if you wanted to be able to checkout games also. $24.95 is a little steep, so I decided the game rental could be done locally because I really don't rent many of them anyway. Plus, I generally only want them on the weekends A & Z are over and one thing I've learned from this online movie adventure is you can't control what you get or when you get it. So I sign up for the $16.95 plan and add about 50 movies to my queue. I was very pleased with their selection and when you click New Releases, you get new releases.

Alas, things were too good to be true. I notice my bank says the charge from Intelliflix was $18.45. No big deal, probably some sign up fee that I overlooked when registering. So I head to the site, go to Help and submit a ticket. They don't let you type more than 500 characters when submitting a ticket. Now, they do have a couple of dropdowns that let you narrow you ticket type down, but 500 characters is still pretty limiting. Still, no big thing. I send them a quick note asking what the extra $1.50 was. Get an immediate "Your ticket was received and is number ######, we'll get back to you shortly." A day passes and I get an email from support saying that it was forwarded to the billing department. Then nothing. No more response from anyone. I head back to the site and look for somewhere I can enter the number they assigned my ticket to see the status. Hmm, there's nowhere to do that. All you can do is submit new tickets. I just let the $1.50 slide and kind of forgot about it.

While this is going on, I've been watching movies. I got my first 3 and sent them back and then received 3 more. I noticed shipping was a little slower than G&F, because G&F seemed to be shipping everything from Kentucky, but Intelliflix was all over the map. What's an extra day though? After a couple of cycles, I noticed they had received all my returns, but hadn't shipped anything. They had been shipping 1-2 days after receiving a return. I waited 2 days and submitted another ticket saying "Hey, you're not sending movies, I've got 50 in the queue, surely something is in." I got back a response saying "We're sorry, we are looking into the problem and we made sure somethign got shipped to you." Sure enough, I get an email saying something was shipping out that night.

Now it comes time for the monthly charge. I have MSFT Money set to automatically enter the $16.95 and it does. I check my bank and surprise! They charge me $18.45. Another ticket, another forwarding to billing, but this time I get a response. It simply says that it is a processing fee. Hey, don't flood me in information here. What kind of processing fee? I'm not going to let them off that easy. I reply and ask what kind and is it an avoidable fee and if it is not, why is it charged separatly and not advertised? No response. Now I'm pissed.

I had gotten another batch of 3 and returned them. They marked one received on the 19th and the other two on the 20th. As of the 21st, they had not shipped anything, so once again I submit a ticket. And included my questions about the processing fee. I hit the 500 character limit (you knew that would come back up, didn't you?) and probably sounded like an idiot. Hey, it's hard to rant in 500 characters or less. And I get the exact same response (about shipping new movies) as before, just from a different person. So one movie ships on 22nd. I replied to the canned response and repeated my complaints about slow service and the processing fee question not being answered. I requested that my ticket be escalated to someone who would give me more than a canned response because they were in danger of losing me as a customer. That was on Monday, today is Wednesday and I have heard nothing from them. I haven't received the movie that shipped on Saturday and they haven't shipped anything else, even though my other 2 movies have been back for almost a week now.

I don't expect to get 100 movies a month for $17, but I do expect them to provide a basic level of service. If it takes 3 days transit both ways, I should be able to expect to have at least one new movie every weekend. My boys and I watched 2 movies 2 weekends ago and I sent one back on that Saturday and one on that Monday and I still haven't gotten a new movie.

Intelliflix has lost me as a customer. I'm going to finish this month since I paid for it, but I'm looking at the two remaining services. Blockbuster and NetFlix. I know people that use both, so I'm torn. I've never really liked Blockbuster and I don't like the idea of NetFlix manipulating customer's queues but I'm sure all of them do it. They are both the same price ($17.99), but Blockbuster adds the feature that you can print a coupon once a week to get a free in-store rental. Maybe that is my option, so if they aren't shipping movies or I don't have anything kid friendly on my kid weekends, I can just run down to the local Blockbuster and pick something up.

Anyone had experience with either of these and have any input?

Mein Gott! This is a long post. I apologize, I just got started and couldn't stop.

Does our government meet this criteria?

"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government."

--Thomas Jefferson

IRS, FCC, USDA, ATF, SEC (not that SEC), Departments of Energy, Commerce, Labor, Transportation, Education, DEA, EPA, etc. Hmm, I don't think so.

Speaking of the ATF, "Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms" should be the name of a store, not a government agency. I know I would shop there.

Fewer calories, less filling

I'm not much of a grammar policeman, I do love spotting misspellings, but I normally let the grammar mistakes go. Probably because I make so many myself. But if I were writing an advertisement, I would probably pay more attention to it. I noticed a sign on the way home today that has been there for years and I never really paid attention to it. It was at The Mac Authority in Nashville. The sign mentioned that Macs have 97,000 less viruses than PCs. Since you can count the individual viruses, it should be 97,000 fewer viruses.

Now back to your regularly scheduled life.

Eagle Eye Webcam

I had to share this link. It's a webcam viewing an eagle's nest. There are two eagles incubating two eggs.

Eagle Webcam