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Remember the band “Big head Todd and the monsters”? Well, now we’ve got Big head Barry, the home run champion of the freak world. Just goes to show, give a man enough juice, and he can do anything; provided, of course, that he gets it done before his head explodes.

Just look at the guy. Put a fork in him, and I bet he pops. AFAIK, no amount of working out gives you a bigger head, only three things will. 1) getting fat. While Barry’s bigger, I bet there isn’t much scientifically engineered fat on him. 2) Elephantitis. Worked for Joseph Merrick, but I’m willing to bet that Barry isn’t afflicted. 3) Vast amounts of highly illegal Human Growth Hormone. So Barry cheats his way into the record books. Big Freakin’ Deal! Hopefully he’ll drop dead soon so someone can cut him in half and count the rings, or however they’d do an autopsy on a freak like this. Then when it can conclusively be proven that he’s a cheater, he can be stricken from the record books.

Heck, we really don’t have to wait that long. Bud can strike him from the record books right now if he wants to. Kennsaw Mountain Landis (Charles Commisky’s good buddy) struck all of Shoeless Joe Jackson’s records from the books, despite him being cleared of all charges in a court of law. So Bud doesn’t even have to wait for a conviction, he simply has to have the conviction of a real baseball man. Of course, that’s where Bud comes up short. No matter how many pitchers he’s employing on the Brewers, he still doesn’t have any balls. Bud should simply say “enough of this freakshow, he’s out of the game. Not a thing Barry, the Giants or anyones lawyers can do (because, as approved by Congress, Baseball is ABOVE the law).

Okay, now that that unpleasantness is out of the way, on to things that actually matter in Baseball. Yankees 5 games back of the dead sox, with 6 head-t0-head games to play, and almost 2 months on the schedule. Seems a few months ago I predicted boston’s annual summer stagnation and fall tumble, but everyone else was laughing then. I don’t hear Curt Schilling laughing now. Fact is, about a month ago I tried to bet two dead sox fans that Chien Ming Wang would end the season with a better record than anyone on the sox’ staff. Neither would bite, despite Beckett having 12 wins at the time. Wang wins tonight, and there’s nobody on the sox staff with a better record. Who’d got more upside, Phil Hughes or Die Sucky Matsuzaka? Who’ve the sox got that’s anywhere near as good as Joba Chamberlain? You remember Joba, don’t you? I mentioned him in an earlier post.

Since then, this is all he’s done: Progressed from A-ball to the Majors in the course of one season. Along the way he’s amassed a 9-2 record, a 2.45 ERA, and put up 135 K’s in only 88 1/3 innings. For those counting at home, that’s an average of 14 strikeouts per 9 innings pitched. MOFO! He pitched 2 innings the other night, gave up one hit, no runs, and had 2K’s in his major league debut. Nasty breaking stuff that even major leaguers can’t hit. And, of course, being 21, he’s only going to get better. Call me in October…

Gee, been a while since I’ve been babbling here. Busy, busy, busy. With the football season fast approaching, I figured I’d take a peek and see what’s happening. First, a potential major problem. Michael Strahan hasn’t reported to training camp. Now there’s word from his agent that he might want to retire. Is this real, or just a ploy to attempt to get more money from the Giants? If it’s real, he couldn’t pick a worse time, and he’s really letting the team down. If he really wanted to retire, he should have let them know at the end of last season, so they could address the problem. A week before preseason starts is no time to let the team know that one of their starting defensive ends won’t be around any more, especially an impact player like Strahan. Following Tiki Barber’s retirement, it leaves the team dangerously short handed.

As if that weren’t enough, the Giants are planning on screwing their fans (heck, they aren’t planning on it, they ARE doing it). You can no longer park at the stadium for football games. Unless, of course, you pay for an entire season of parking up front (including preseason games). I understand that with construction parking spaces are short, but lets face it, how many season ticket holders attend all games? I can almost guarantee you that any given week, at least 50% of the stadium crowd are NOT season ticket holders, but folks who purchased their tickets FROM season ticket holders (or brokers who purchased them from season ticket holders). As you get one parking permit for each group of season tickets, it’s not like the season ticket holders can pass along parking privileges to those who’ve purchased (or been given) the tickets. And, if you want to bring your winnebago or tailgate bus, it’s not only $150 for the season (as opposed to the previous $15/game), but an additional $60/week (winnebago) or $100/week (bus). Looks like the Giants’ fans will be paying for the new stadium.

To add insult to injury, if you DON’T have season tickets, the only place you can park is in a lot NOT located at the facility. Of course, there’s no list of where these lots are, or maps on how to get there, and preseason is only a week away. Plus, in addition to the added inconvenience of not parking at the stadium, you get charged MORE to park elsewhere ($20 instead of $15 that it used to be at the stadium), and tailgating is NOT allowed.

So, all you 15 million NYC area residents who don’t have season tickets (and the Giants are still filling requests from 1977), you not only have to pay more, be inconvenienced, but you can’t have any fun before or after the game. What’s the point of going? Let’s face it, most of the fun of attending a football game is interacting with the other fans. A good bit of this is the pre-game tailgate. Take that away, and you might as well sit in a cozy sports bar eating a free buffet, with no rain, wind or cold to deal with, and a better view of the action. Add to that the possibility that without Tiki and Strahan, the Giants just might suck, and it sounds like a lot more empty seats. Not that the Giants care, as they’ve already been paid for them. Give me a call in 2010, when the new stadium is slated to open.

…before the next one, of course. Owning a computer for most tech-savvy folks is a continual upgrade process. There’s always something better coming along, and prices on things that are already out there are always coming down. However, I think this will be the last one for this computer, per se.
Every now and then, though, the technology throws you a curve. My current computer, which evolved from a Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz machine with 512 GB storage and 1 GB DDR ram and a last generation GeForce TI4200 graphics card pulled from the computer before it, went through several upgrades until its at the point where any further upgrading would be pointless. The graphics went first, replaced by a GeForce 6800, purchased a few years back for $199 in a Black Friday sale. A pretty good upgrade, as its still robust enough to play most games out today, but not at higher resolutions or with high levels of anti-aliasing. Then, using the ol’ “Double-Switch”, I upgraded the processor and motherboard when I switched to an AMD Athlon 64 3200+. As my HD’s were already SATA, they kept chugging along nicely, and the memory still worked, but it was next on the list. When we upgraded the machines at work, I took the opportunity to upgrade at home as well. 2 512 MB sticks of Corsair EMS Dual Channel DDR were replaced with 2 1 GB ones, giving me 2 GB overall.

This probably would have been the end of the line for most of the current lineup, faster processors required newer motherboards with different sockets, which all used PCI Express graphics cards and DDR2 memory. About the only things which would survive would be the hard drives and my DVD burners. However, once most of the processors had moved over to the newer socket design, several places started blowing out the older socket 939 chips. A dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3800+ for a ridiculously low $79 extended the system’s usefulness a bit more. I also threw in another500 GB SATA drive ($99) for good measure, bringing the total storage up to 1 Terabyte.

That seemed like it would be the end of the road, as fast AGP cards are hard to find, and usually never cheap when you do find them. However, my good friends at newegg.com had a sale, and I was able to pick up an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro with 512 MB DDR3, which compares nicely to the GeForce 7900 GS, for $149. Considering this blows away just about every other mid-range graphics card on the market, I figured it was worth it to give the system one last hurrah before obsolescence struck.

Now, I’ve never been a fan of ATI, who’ve been known for good hardware but lousy drivers, but at that price point, I couldn’t pass it up. I’m beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea. Black areas on my desktop show sparkly white corruption, which is quite annoying. The only time I’ve seen anything like this is when overclocking a graphics card too much. However, when you play a game, it goes away and everything looks just fine. Games such as Oblivion play MUCH smoother too, due to both the faster GPU and 4x as much texture memory. I’m going to try using other drivers, and see if I can get this problem to go away. If not, maybe I’ll exchange the card for another one and see if that helps. I did strip out all the old NVidia drivers before installing these, so that shouldn’t be the problem.

Finally

Okay, apparantly it’s just peachy to kill cripples, drag their bodies out into the street, and then lie about it to your bosses to make it look like you’re a hero. A USMC court-martial just decided that convicted muderer Trent Thomas doesn’t need to spend any time in jail, despite the fact that he forced crippled 52 year old Hashim Ibrahim from his house, shot and killed him, and then dragged his body to the side of the road and propped it up with a shovel and an AK-47, to make it look like he’d been trying to hide a bomb. Five of this scumbag’s buddies have already been convicted and sentenced to between 12 months and 8 years, but they’ve let the ringleader and actual murderer walk, despite the prosecution asking for at least a 15 year sentence. He was willing to take a 12 year sentence on a plea deal, but turned it down at the last minute.

You know, I remember when WE were the good guys, we didn’t go around killing and torturing people. The world looked up to us. Unfortunately, it seems those days are long gone.

Up next, a bunch of corporate execs get off the hook (oooh, they had to pay FINES!) for lying to the FDA and public about the effects of Oxycontin. What, a convicted killer doesn’t go to jail, and you though these guys would?

Finally, an NBA referee is about to be indicted for betting on games that he worked. Of course, that means point shaving, by the very people who’re supposed to be enforcing the rules. Not real surprising when a bunch of them were caught selling their first class tickets that the league gave them, buying coach, pocketing the difference, and not reporting the income. Guess that big slap on the wrist they received then taught them a lesson, eh?

Like the Vick case, this one promises to be a slam-dunk for the feds. The ref is already trying to turn in his resignation, a sure sign he’s guilty as hell. He apparently owed a bunch of money due to gambling to mobsters, and, well, they found a way for him to pay them back. Of course, every questionable foul or non-call that a ref makes (or doesn’t) from now on will be suspect. The NBA, soon to go the way of the WWE. Heck, Artest is already whacking people on the sidelines with chairs…

Michael Vick, rhymes with “Dick”. Usually people with this many aliases are in jail, and Vick looks like he’s heading that way as well. Maybe his brother can hook him up.

First, let’s remember, this is America. He’s innocent until proven guilty in a court of law or public opinion. Folks regularly get away with murder here (see O.J., Robert Blake, et al). Because of this, there really isn’t anything that the NFL can do, except to give him a “temporary release” to deal with this, while his team deals with the season. No amount of screaming from those dimwits at PETA can change this. Wouldn’t hurt to make that release mandatory. Make it conditional; with pay, if he isn’t convicted, without, if he is. Of course, the Falcon’s owner had better be getting ready to find a starting QB, as I’ll bet money against an NBA ref that Vick won’t be at the helm this season.

While I like the concept that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and every dog has its day, let’s face it. This isn’t some overzealous hick from North Carolina trying to make a case against some rich fraternity kids to garner black votes. This is a FEDERAL indictment, and they aren’t handed down without a ton of evidence unless the target is some arab social club that bought one too many prepaid cell phones. Nobody in the justice department, except that clown running it, likes to be caught with their pants down. They wouldn’t be pursuing this thing unless it was pretty much a slam-dunk, with no point shaving (Gee, is there another story on my mind this evening as well?).

Chances are (and I like those chances) that even if the jury box is stacked with Vick’s relatives, there’s enough evidence to have him convicted. Despite Vick’s assurances that he’s never been to this house he owns, there are a WHOLE lot of folks who’ve seen him around there. A LOT. So, we’ve got one sick bastard who likes killing and torturing dogs, and watching them rip each other to pieces for fun. Personally, I don’t think the federal pen is punishment enough for him, but there’s that annoying little thing in the constitution against “cruel and unusual punishment”. Unless, of course, you’re at Gitmo. Okay, what are the chances of getting Vick declared an “enemy combatant”? Miq Al’Vik? Somebody check to see if he’s got a Qur’an in his closet…