I was feeling pretty sluggish a half-hour or so ago, to the point that I was all, “Screw this, I’m goin’ home.” My allergies are still nuts [hey, it's smart to buy Claritin ... it's smarter to take it home with you so you can take it before you go to bed], the quote I spent yesterday and today working is so piddling small that it’s not worth doing, and … just yeah. My motivation tank hit E. So I looked forlornly at my overflowing INBOX on top of my filing cabinet—which reminds me that I should photograph my office layout, save that pesky company policy about digital cameras at work— and decided to get it emptied.

It is empty now, and I have enough energy to sustain me through to the end of the day, I do believe.

This little blurb is overdue, but it’s awesome that UAH’s Jared Ross was the second player selected in the UHL’s North American amateur draft and that he’s now playing on a line with locked-out NHLer Bryan Smolinski. I bet it’s a bit different than having Craig Bushey on your wing … best of luck to you, Roscoe.

Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus has devised a thought experiment to try and see if there’s a discernible effect from a population of baseball players taking steroids. His result: nothing that’s notable, really.

If you’ve never taken a statistics course in your life, you’ll want to know this: the standard deviation is the measure of how far away from the average, on average, the data lies. Like, we know that the average U.S. male is five-foot-nine; a standard deviation of this value [probably three inches] would tell you, on average, how far a random person is likely to vary from that value. You can think of it as the fudge factor, the same kind of stuff you see in polling [52% ± 3%], if you want. [It's not really the same thing, but it's close enough for my concerns.]

And people wonder why I really don’t get all that excited about the whole performance-enhancing-drugs-in-baseball thing; honestly, it’s not much different than scuffing a ball or corking a bat. Of course, it’s a lot more expensive and potentially a lot riskier to your health, but the net effect just isn’t that big.

Jeff pointed me to a new product from SanDisk: 802.11b + 256MB data storage in an SD card. I think I’d buy one right now for my Treo if I knew there were drivers to make it work.

Man, I really want a Treo with WiFi onboard … honestly, Bluetooth isn’t as important to me as WiFi.

Laura K. Pahl, a student at Eastern Illinois University, is a plagiarist.

I didn’t even read the paper [I'm not enough of a student of Hindu culture and religion to get many of the jokes], but that some college student thought she could get someone to write a paper for her in 2005, a year smack in the middle of the nascent Weblog Era, and not have the other person on the end 1) mess with her and 2) get her caught? Wow.

She gets whatever punishment the school metes out to her. We get a little Schadenfreude in the meantime.

Alex pointed out to me just now that Goombah now has a Windows port available for download. Goombah mines your iTunes library information and compares you to other Goombah users to give your recommendations.

The software is still rough around the edges, but if you’re on the look for new music … give it a whirl.

Mark and I just had a brief conversation about the NHL, and I know what I’d do if I were Commissioner:

1. Remove the two-line pass. It would increase scoring and make the game more exciting. It’s the only rules change that needs to be made, honestly.
2. Consider going to collegiate offsides.
3. Contract 24 teams and return to the Original Six: Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, New York, and Toronto. Force Bill Wirtz to sell the Blackhawks to an owner that gives a damn; maybe you force Jeremy Jacobs to sell the B’s, too. Allow the NHL to expand, but limit it to no more than two teams in any offseason and four in any four-year period. Expansion should stay above the 40th parallel, and I’d start with Minneapolis, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, etc.
4. If the contraction idea doesn’t get traction, contract to 16 or 20 teams, with an equal number of teams in Canada and the US. The Stanley Cup would be played for border bragging rights. Nothing like nationalism to spark interest.

Or something like that.

Tops on the list? Water problems (presumably leaks in the underground piping) cropping up in the middle of the night, forcing Huntsville Utilities to shut off the water at the main. I got up a little bit ago to throw some clothes in the washer, then pulled the knob … nothin’. [minor amount of swearing] I walk into the adjoining hall bathroom and turn on the faucet … nothin’. [:sigh:] I then waited for Leonard or Michelle to wake up so that I could let one of them know; turns out that I got Michelle, who, when I told her, gave me a horrible look of panic … undoubtedly because, of all the things you don’t want to have happen on your first day in your new job, being without water at your place of residence is not one of them.

Real Live Preacher had a conversation with his daugher where she admitted to not having faith in God. If you’re not familiar with RLP, he’s a pastor at a church in Texas. Now, take all your knowledge about Pastor’s Kids, and all your thoughts about how you’d expect a pastor to respond, throw them out the window, and read his response.

Two things I want to quote:

How and what we humans think about God is usually enmeshed with what is going on in our lives at any particular time. God language is deeply rooted in our psyche and perhaps our collective unconscious, if you believe in that sort of thing. I’m not sure I do, but it certainly seems to explain a lot. That’s why even those who do not believe in a diety might still yell, “Jesus Christ!” or “Oh my God!” in a moment of anger, passion, or fear. The language of God is deep and old and practically inescapable for most people.

When someone is giving you their theology, their God words, you should listen hard and be very gentle. The time to deliver your God words is when you are asked.

You see, I’ve taken this journey that she is beginning. This God stuff is my specialty, you might say. Like if a brick layer’s son was talking about building his first wall. And if I’m not careful, I’ll rush in with my answers and my story. If I’m not careful I will overwhelm her with my own journey.

And this is her journey. I will willingly and passionately share my own journey with her, when the time is right. God help me with the timing on this. She needs enough of me and not too much.

This is so true, and Lord knows that, when I talk with friends about their doubting of faith, I invert the “two ears, one mouth” principle and speak as if I have two mouths and one ear [and sometimes none! :cringe:].

My daughter doesn’t believe in God right now. Why do I feel so happy?

Because she wasn’t afraid to tell me.

Blessed Assurance.

Happy Good Friday.

Easter is just around the corner. Hallelujah! Every day, I’m reminded of just how much I need that risen Savior who paid my penalty for me.

So, too, is Over The Rhine’s Drunkard’s Prayer around the corner. You’ll see that I’m listening to Ohio today in anticipation of where the new one will be …

A month ago, I went to a Derek Webb show and got to hang out with my good friend before the show for several hours. In the middle of that time, we carved out 40 minutes or so to talk while being recorded. I’ve got lots of thoughts about all of this, and they’re worth discussing at some point, but for now … I’ll just point you to the interview.

Two weeks without having written. That’s kinda sad.

I’ve been wondering lately why I don’t write more “private” posts, ones written mainly for myself as diary entries, not initially exposed to the world, but selectively published after the fact. I think that I should do more of that, if only because it would get me to writing more often, and I think that writing’s important for self-awareness.

It’s been kinda crazy lately; until this week, work’s been extremely busy, but now I’m in a tiny lull that will go away in another few days, as I’m about to head to Houston for a week. [!] Work has its daily frustrations, things that make me glad that I don’t grow my hair out long—so I can’t easily pull it out, ya know? But it’s been good, even if, right now, I’m being nickled-and-dimed to death with all these teeny-tiny jobs while we wait for Shuttle to launch and things to start back through the system.

I got told today that I needed to take a vacation. Heh. Come on … I get asked for a number multiple times a day, and so I can spout it off with no problem: 70804.02.004.04.03.06. Easy.

Okay, not really.

I’d like that vacation, but I don’t know what I’d do with it.

House stuff is pretty fluid. It’s happening faster than I’d planned, in some ways, and while that’s cool, it’s also scary in that “I’m not ready for this” kind of way. I know it’s going to work out, but man … it’s all kinda nutty.

Hope things are good on your end, dear reader. Use the comment space to tell a story of your day or something … whatever you like.

The new Usable Security weblog, pointed out to me by Matt, has an interesting piece on the path of least resistance in popular logwares, specifically relating to releasing posts into the wild. It’s a worthwhile read, even if the author never really comes to a definite conclusion. I often wonder, as I run a Weblog community, if I need to make this kind of thing more clear to my users …

I’ve added a couple tools to my comment spam toolkit: Scott Buchanan’s plugin that disallows direct access to wp-trackback.php, and Chris J. Davis’s Spam Nuker to pull any false positive comments out of the database.

I’m still trying to figure out if marking a comment as spam pushes WordPress to grab the relevant data [IP and URL, mainly] and stuff them in the moderation queue greylist. If not, I want to see if I can hack on Kitten’s SpamWords some and make it do that for me, because frankly, I like the idea of keeping the spam in the database so that you have a knowledgebase for what’s spam and what’s ham.

Q Daily News has good exposition on both the whole of the Terry Schiavo case as well as commentary on Congress’s asinine “intervention”.

Some people just can’t give up.

Awesome! I just found a bunch of my CDs that had gone missing in my apartment, including my entire Blues Traveler collection and most of my Caedmon’s Call stuff.

I should move things randomly around more often.

My present Blogger Code: B9 d++ t+ k+ s- u f i+ o x- e+ l- c-

In the past: B8 d++ t+ k+ s u f++ i o+ x- e l- c-, B5 d++ t+ k+ s++ u- f++ i+ o+ x- e l+ c-, and B4 d++ t+ k+ s++ u- f+ i o+ x e l+ c– have been my Blogger Codes. It’s one of those funky things to pull up from time to time.

I’m shocked that I’m doing this four years later. Appropriate that I, with my share of Irish backgrounds, would have unwittingly started this on St. Patrick’s Day. Oh well, Morris men are prone to putting such things on notable days; after all, my parents did get married on D-Day.

Steve Minutillo has teased the madding Feed on Feeds crowd.

Tips for Mastering E-Mail Overload. The best ones discussed include subject writing, message trimming, etc. I find myself lapsing from some of these at times at work, and there’s always pain and suffering as a result.

The sad thing is … reading through this, I almost was able to construct an argument radically in favor of top-posting. I’m not going to think any more about that, because I don’t want to light myself on fire.

For the record: I’ve established pretty early with rmfo-blogs on that it takes about twenty minutes to upgrade a relatively vanilla WP 1.2.x install to WP 1.5 while keeping the user’s 1.2.x-era theme, etc., uploaded files, etc.

My runtime would probably be down if I was a shell scripter and could have the shell script do all the work for me. I kinda like doing the manual looks because I get to make sure I’m not overlooking something; people could have made things non-standard without me knowing, so I need to look over things. Trickier ones have run about thirty minutes, but twenty seems to be the sweet spot.

When I go to Houston in a couple weeks—it’s confirmed—that’ll be the first time I’ve been in Texas since 1983, other than a quick plane transfer at DFW a couple years ago.

That’s really kinda surprising.

Not that I’ve missed it, really.

Mommy, make it stop! It’s almost St. Patrick’s Day, and it was almost 80F this weekend!

I knew that it’d be cool out today. I even knew that it’d be near-freezing this morning. But sleet? What the heck?

I’m not sure what’s scarier: that I agreed to be at work at 0700 today, or that, despite my old alarm clock massively failing, I still woke up about an hour before I needed to be anywhere.

I mean, I’m not like my dad … I would rather stay up later and go in later and stay at work later than go in at the buttcrack of dawn and leave at the normal end of the day. I seem to work better after hours. Oh well, either way, it’s pretty certain that I’ll be there after hours tonight given how things are going right now. Aiiieeeeeeeee.

The Economist has an insightful article on how the Iran Non-proliferation Act could very well kill the International Space Station.