I just spotted this add banner on MLB.com:
I bring it to your attention because of the teams featured on it: The Boston Red Sox, the Chicago White Sox, and the Oakland Athletics.
Last night, the New York Yankees moved ½ game ahead of the Red Sox in the AL East, and the Red Sox are 1 game behind the Cleveland Indians in the AL Wild Card race.
The Chicago White Sox hold a 2½ game lead over the Cleveland Indians. They held something like a 10 game lead at the All-Star break, and have been playing .500 ball since then. They just lost two of three to the Indians, and are in danger of suffering the biggest collapse in baseball history.
The Oakland Athletics are 2½ games behind the Los Angeles Angels of Aneheim, and 5 games behind the Cleveland Indians in the Wild Card chase.
In a worst-case scenario for this trio of teams, the Angels, Indians, and Yankees win the divisions. That leaves the Wild Card, which one of these teams would earn. Of course, they could all still win their divisions.
The closeness of these four AL races (three divisions and the Wild Card) is exciting enough, but the fact that in the final weekend of the season the Red Sox host the Yankees, the Indians host the White Sox, and the Athletics host the Angles for a 4 game set in the second-to-last series of the season. What this means is that all of these races will probably be undecided until that last week. Outstanding.
The other day I went to Wikipedia.org and the site was down. The error page was very complete, however, and included a link to Alexa.com (which Amazon.com owns, by the way), a site that ranks websites by — among other things — daily page views. The link, which I’ve duplicated here, shows a graph of “Reach” of Wikipedia.org compared to Slashdot.org. I assume reach means unique viewers, as opposed to page views. Also, the graph I link to here spans the maximum available two years, rather than the one year Wikipedia’s error page linked to.
The graph is surprising. Why has Wikipedia experienced a mammoth increase in traffic since October 1, 2004? It’s currently the 40th most visited site on the Internet (scroll down the page I linked to). Slashdot is right around 800. In the span of one year Wikipedia has gone from 800-class to 40-class. How? Why?
I know that over the last six months or so I’ve grown more interested in Wikipedia. I posted about it. Has it made some sweeping improvement? Has word of mouth built it up? Or has its content reached critical mass? Maybe it’s gotten so large and so deep that it’s just too powerful to ignore. Maybe it’s gotten so useful that people use it once and they’re hooked. Is that what happened to Google? Probably.
Yes, I finally switched to Gmail.
You know what really bugs me about Yahoo Mail? I have to re-enter my password multiple times per day. Not only that, but there’s one screen that tells me I need to log back in, then another screen where I actually type in my password. Why don’t they just consolidate this to one screen? This alone was nearly enough to make we switch.
Google Desktop 2 was enough to put Gmail over the top.
Via email correspondence, Lewis commented that
1. The Gmail plugin should update more quickly, because he has deleted messages but they are still visible in the Deskbar hours later, and
2. Filters created by the user in the native Gmail interface should be applied to Gmail messages displayed in the Deskbar interface, rather than requiring the user to create seemingly duplicate filters.
I’m inclined to agree with him on both points.
I see a correlating deficiency on the Quick View plugin — With the clickable star system, it effectively becomes a Favorites/Bookmarks list. Available on the Google Personal (google.com/ig) site, users can create a bookmarks list. This again seems to be a case where users must duplicate effort to gain similar functionality across a single company’s product line.
Perhaps Google is getting too big for its britches.
So I have two draft posts about Google: “Google is Taking Over the World,” and “Google: Free ISP.” I never posted either of them because I thought they were both too out there.
Well la-dee-da, today I read on my Google Desktop 2 Deskbar a summary of this story from Cnet News.com: Google offers clues to its own Wi-Fi service. Very little is known about it, but it doesn’t sound like it will be free. But why not? Google bought out Keyhole, and now it’s the free Google Maps (which is sooooo much better on broadband, by the way). If Google were going to roll out any kind of ISP, wouldn’t it be Wi-Fi? There’s still a lot of tussle and bussle at the FCC about who gets to use what infrastructure when offering phone, tv, and Internet to consumers. Verizon now offers a wireless broadband service. Google would need to invest in some kind of infrastructure, but they wouldn’t need 100% coverage immediately. Verizon’s new service reaches 130 or 140 million people, depending on which sentence in the fine print you read. Google could put up some transmitters in San Francisco, DC, NYC, LA … whatever, and roll it out. Then add more as they go along. Or they could lease infrastructure from existing companies.
But hey — they could also buy AOL. How about RaodRunner, too? There are rumors that Microsoft wants to merge MSN with AOL, but Google doesn’t want to lose all its AOL business. So the new rumor is that Google might pre-emptively buy AOL to keep it out of Microsoft’s sandbox. Fun, huh?
This is really looking like the old Microsoft-vs-Netscape days, except that Google is entrenched in multiple markets, and Microsoft has no option comprable to throwing money at popular companies so they will produce IE-only websites. Google’s partner is the consumer — and the advertiser.
Because I moved to Atlanta, I changed my cell phone number, which I won’t post here. I also decided that now would be a good time to change me email address. I will still check the Yahoo address for the forseeable future, but from now on, please email me at logicbus at gmail dot com.
I’m watching tonight’s Arkanas-USC game on Fox Sports Net, and I am aware of two things:
USC has a good football team, and
Arkansas has no business playing USC.
But what I really want to talk about is Matt Leinart’s decision to play his Senior year at USC. Leinart won the Heisman Trophy last year, and had he declared for the NFL draft, he almost certainly would have been the number one pick of the San Francisco 49ers.
But he didn’t. I did a Google search for “matt leinart insurance,” and the first result was an article on Insurance NewsNet titled Premium Players; Insurance Policies Are Becoming Standard For Elite College Athletes.
I was going to summarize the article, but instead I’ll suggest that you read it. The one fact from the article that really surprised me was that insurance policies have becomes something of a norm for “elite draft-eligible college football players.” Something much less surprising but perhaps more intriguing is that such insurance policies have increased in number significantly since Willis McGahee’s horrendous knee injury in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl — unsurprising because it was the final game of an elite college player’s senior year — intriguing because McGahee has seen none of that money, after signing a healthy contract with the Buffalo Bills. (Go Bills.)
The article points out that because of advances in sports medicine over the past twenty or thirty years, these insurance policies may not be worth it, and McGahee is the perfect example. Carson Palmer’s father almost didn’t take out a policy on his son, but Carson asked him to do it.
The NCAA offers injury insurance to athletes likely to be drafted highly — it does so in order to give sports agents one less reason to whisper in the ear of college athletes. It’s called Exceptional Student-Athlete Disability Insurance — ESDI. While I was thinking over this post I planned on saying some sentence like, “What does all this money mean in relation to the question of whether or not college athletes should be paid?” The answer? I don’t know. Maybe the NCAA should guarantee $1 million to every single college student who plays one of the four major sports — if an athlete suffers a career-ending injury while playing in an NCAA-sanctioned event, the NCAA pays up. I don’t expect to see that any time soon, though.
I moved in to my new apartment on Monday. I was at my sister Maureen’s over the weekend. The drive from Allegany to Arlington is about six hours, and the drive from Arlington to Atlanta is about ten hours.
My apartment community has a website that allows residents to set up utilities before moving in, so gas and electricity were on when I got here. However, I didn’t get Internet until today, which is why I am writing this now.
I have no furniture, but I was at Ikea yesterday and Target the day before. I found some stuff I like, and hopefully by Monday I’ll either have everything or at least ordered it.
Have you heard of TinyURL.com? No? What about this — have you ever gotten an email from someone that includes a URL so long that it runs over several lines? Then you click on it and your email program only recognizes the portion of the URL that falls on the first line? So the link doesn’t work? That’s what TinyURL is for. I first came across a TinyURL on Gamespot.com. It’s great for stuff like MapQuest directions. I just used it for the first time.
You may have to hit reload, or even shift-reload. Please note that this is more or less the logo for the planned layout/design/theme overhaul I’ve been telling people about, but have yet to deliver.
