Monthly Archives: May 2005

Baseball

83.5

Looks like Lohse isn’t starting tonight, meaing I have only 9 projected starts for the week. The Twins are sitting Lohse so the rest of the rotation stays in synch. Looks like Lohse’s stiff shoulder is going to be an ongoing problem. Between Colon starting tonight and the rest of the weekend, I have 6 starts coming up, with only two of my pitchers going head-to-head. We’ll see how they do.

Only had 17 At-Bats last night, and 2 hits (.118 avg). It was a travelling day for most teams.

Geek Stuff

Wherefore Art Thou, Smart Homes?

Column from PC Magazine: Wherefore Art Thou, Smart Homes?

I once had high hopes of creating a ‘smart’ house. I have a bunch of X10 remotely controlled light switches and plug-ins and IR motion detectors and remote camera monitoring modules. I even got some software to control them all.

And it didn’t provide a very satisfactory environment, for two reasons. First, when you are walking from room to room, it is easier to turn the lights on and off as you walk by the switch rather than trying to find the remote control that isn’t where you usually leave it. Second, I am trying to migrate to compact flourescent lighting and the X10 modules don’t work with flourescents.

So all my remote lighting control is down to my being able to turn the lights in the TV room on and off from my chair.

The remote camera is still up in the barn to monitor the horses, but the only time you want to monitor them is when it is too dark to see anything and those cameras weren’t very good anyway. You could tell if there as a horse in frame and if it was standing or laying down. I don’t think you could tell which horse it was.

I never found the need to try remote HVAC controls. We don’t have a zoned house and the thermostat is outside the bedroom door.

I can see that a ‘smart ‘ building is an energy efficient method for office buildings and other large structures that have energy zones. In the standard home, it seems like a lot of overkill.

Why do I need a tool to turn off all the lights in the house at one time. 99% of the time the only lights in the house to be turned off are the ones in the room I am in. We usually turnoff lights when we leave rooms and a final walkthrough the house in the evening catches any lingering lights.

So the upshot for ‘smart’ homes is they aren’t worth the time, money and effort unless you want to really geek out.

Baseball

84

This is starting to get scary. A more realistic value to strive for is in the low 70’s.

I did figure out what happened to the Shamu Scoring mixup. Shamu dropped a relief pitcher in the Monday moves and replaced him with a starter. But the commisioner didn’t enter the moves until Tuesday morning so I saw the pre move stat first and once the relief pitcher was dropped fromthe roster adn the starter was added, Shamu lost the save and added the starter’s win from Monday night.

Lots of groin injuries and slight sprains starting to crop up, buty they will play hurt. And these guys only have 20 more weeks to go.

Baseball

Weird

I’m not sure what happened, but I now have 2 more points for those 2 wins instead of 2.5. And I had lost .5 points in saves since I didn’t have one and The Shamus did and we were now tied. For a net 2 point gain.

I just looked again and found that The Shamus are now now tied with me for wins since they got 2 last night, as well, and that they don’t have the save and I didn’t lose the .5 point for the tie. For a net gain of 2.

Somewhere in the past few hours, a statistician decided that the Shamus got a win instead of a save and corrected the numbers. Either that or my mind is completely shot.

Baseball

83.5

Wow, two wins last night gave me 2.5 points. And Meche didn’t get blasted too badly. (3 runs in 6 innings)