Listening to a cool collection of Japanese Koto music. The melodies are ethereal and soothing. A good antidote to stress.

Baseball

Here’s a troubling split in an admittedly small sample. Jake Peavy vs RHB: .213/.243/.284; vs LHB: .318/.393/.551. FWIW, Peavy had no trouble with lefties in the minors. They hit .239/.312/.310 against him at Mobile this season.

There is concern in some circles about Adam Eaton, who struggled again last night. There needn’t be. His fastball is right up around 91-94 MPH, same as it used to be. The command just isn’t there yet, and it won’t be for a while. Eaton’s out pitch is an overhand curve, which is a feel pitch. He’s throwing it now without pain. The next step is to locate it. If you want an idea of what Eaton’s comeback might look like, check out the game logs of Kris Benson. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Eaton is going to return to form but expect some bumps in the road next season.

Nice pinch-hitting appearance by Sean Burroughs last night. Mike Fetters jumped ahead of him, 0-2, before Burroughs fouled off some good pitches and laid off some bad ones to draw a walk.

The Storm dropped the first game of their series against Stockton, 4-2. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to get up to the Diamond Sunday night if there’s a game.

Beer

Two kinds in the fridge at the moment:

• Eureka Black and Tan
• MacTarnahan’s Blackwatch Cream Porter

Both are quite good, although I’m particularly fond of the MacTarnahan’s.

Geekage

As the owner now of four domains (yeah, I know, I need to get a life) I sometimes get questions about running a web site. When I’m not thinking about baseball–hey, even I need a break sometimes–I frequently read about trends in web publishing, design, etc. I do this because it’s part of my job in the real world to know about these things but also because I find them genuinely interesting.

With that said, here are a few links that those of you who run a blog or are thinking of starting one might find useful and/or fun:

• An excellent primer on blogging (I highly recommend this site)
• Blogger Code (here’s mine: B5 d++ t++ k+ s- u– f i o+ x- e l c)

I know there are a lot of good tools available out there for blogging. I haven’t tried any of them myself; I still pretty much code everything by hand using Notepad and/or KEdit. Yeah, it’s very 20th century, but it’s how I do things.

Now, lest you think I’m rambling aimlessly, there is a point to all this. I will be offline most of the next two weeks, which is fine because there isn’t much going on in MLB right now for fans of about 75% of the teams. After that I’ll be back for a bit, probably through the end of the World Series. Then I’m planning to take a month or two off first to involve myself more in non-computer-related projects that have been waiting for my attention for too long and second to do some development to this site.

I’m on my ISP’s server right now, and it’s a bit limiting. I’ve got some ideas of where to host but I’m open to suggestions. I’m looking for something that allows me to use PHP, CGI scripting, and e-mail. Access to a mySQL database would be a plus, and I’m partial to *nix boxes preferably running Apache. I’m not asking y’all to do my research for me, but if anyone has experiences, positive or negative, with this sort of thing, I’d love to hear about ‘em.

One final piece of administrivia, then you can get back to more important things. I’ve posted a picture of me over in the About section. I leave it to you to decide whether or not this is a good thing. No need to let me know either way.