Cactus Leaguers

I don't have quite enough time right now to write a thorough enough post about our great trip to Phoenix with Frank for baseball spring training, but I thought I'd share some highlights and post a couple pictures. There are more of my photos up on my Picassa page.

Some of the highlights included:

Kate's patience being rewarded with this gift from a Scottsdale grounds crewman. This just after Tom had a batting-practice home run ball bounce out of his hands and just before Kate got hit in the shoulder/face/knee by a Rich Aurilia line drive during the game. We must have been ball-magnets!

Great access to the players, especially from our bullpen seats near our favorite team, the A's. Here's Justin Duchscherer returning Kate's ball after signing it (check out the pink marker - cute, huh?). (See the additional photos for what happened to Duchscherer's shoes after the game...) Kate even got to have some "personal time" with Jack Cust, who also signed her ball, along with a good number of other A's, Mariners, Royals, and Brewers.

Fun in the Desert Botanical Garden, which was full of all sorts of neat cacti and blooming spring wildflowers. Neat place, where we learned about the Saguaro cactus and why they have pleats. (Apparently Google also knows this stuff, so that might save you the trouble of going to Phoenix to find out)

Soaking in the afternoon sun watching a ballgame, 4 days in a row! One of the best parts was that everyone at these games was a serious baseball fan, so it was basically just as normal to turn to the guy or gal next to you and say "what do you think about Mike Morse's chances of making the team?" or "I sure hope Gio can cut the walks down and be ready to help out by July" as it would be to say "nice day, huh?" Here's Joey Gathright, of the jumping over a car fame, in mid-bunt vs. the Cubbies at HoHoKam Stadium.

Great meals, thanks to Frank's collection of restaurant recommendations. Here is the man himself, about to dive into one of the many protein-intensive meals of our trip to cowboy country.

All in all we had a wonderful time, and look forward to doing it again sometime!

KatenTom get Artsy

As I have established in earlier posts, I'm not much of an artist. So when I find some sort of crafty project that I CAN do, I get really really excited. Anyway, I saw an article about these reuseable grocery bags online (Thanks, Martha!) and decided that they might be within my range of ability. So, naturally, I mass-produced about 30 of them in a two-day rush in December and gave them all away as Christmas presents. Incidentally, I suspect that my sewing might have been slightly suspect on that first batch - if anyone has any "manufacturer's defects" on their bags, let me know and I will issue an exchage...
Last week Tom and I decided that we needed some of our own bags too, so we hit the local goodwill and bought 10 more cool kids' tee-shirts. We finally got around to finishing them tonight, and I thought I would share our handiwork with the world. Cool, eh? And environmentally friendly, too! If you want to make your own, directions are as follows:
Sew the bottom of a t-shirt shut.
Lop off the sleeves.
Lop off the neck.

Now THAT's a recipe that is just my size.

Math Counts!

A couple of weeks ago I helped out with a nationwide math competition for middle schoolers, called "Math Counts". I actually had competed in Math Counts myself when I was in 8th grade, so I thought it would be interesting to see how the competition had evolved and also just lend a hand. During the day, I proctored an exam, schlepped boxes of papers around, directed lost students and parents, and even helped emcee the final "countdown" round of competition.
Wow are these kids good. To be fair, the Silicon Valley is one of the most competitive districts in the country, this small geographic area typically produces 4 or 5 of the top 40 teams in the nation. Still, I was impressed. The written test was tough even for me, but the oral countdown round was really crazy. It was jeopardy-style, with six kids sitting up front trying to buzz in when they know an answer to a question. Half the time they would buzz in before the question was finished being read!
Thought some of the readers might enjoy testing their mettle against the best middle schoolers in the nation. Here are a few questions for you!
1) An octopus has 8 tentacles and 1 head. A jellyfish has 20 tentacles and no head. A cow has 4 legs and 1 head. Farmer Brown, who raises only octopi, jellyfish and cows on her farm, has animals with a total of 17 heads, 196 tentacles and 20 legs. How many animals does she have?
2) How many non-congruent squares can be drawn, such that their verticies are points on a 5 by 5 grid of points?
3) A square garden has a gate at the center of the east wall. A pole (P) is located 50 feet outside the garden to the north, on a line that perpendicularly bisects north wall. Jeff (J) walks out through the center of the east gate, perpendicularly to the east wall, and he is first able to see the pole when he is exactly 98 feet from the east edge of the garden. What is the length of the north wall?
4) During football season, 25 teams are ranked by three reporters (Alice, Bob and Cecil). Each reporter assigned all 25 integers (1 through 25) when ranking the twenty-five teams. A team earns 25 points for each first-place ranking, 24 points for each second-place ranking, and so on, getting one point for a 25th place ranking. The Hedgehogs earned 27 total points from the three reporters. How many different ways could the three reporters have assigned their rankings for the Hedgehogs?
How'd you do?

Poll: What's he thinking?

a) Woe is me. It hath been 12 minutes since I was last fed.
b) I love my pappy.
c) How about a walk, humans?
d) Excuuuse you.
e) Mmmmm, toe jam!
f) (your entry here)

Not so bored games

I've always loved board games - growing up I spent a lot of time begging various friends and family members to play The Amazing Labyrinth, Bandu, and anything else that was lurking in the family game cabinet. My parents and siblings were usually good sports - we had a lot of fun playing games and doing puzzles during vacations and over Christmas. I remember a couple Christmases when Santa gave the "family" 6 games and after they were all played during the holiday we took turns picking which ones we would get to keep.

Anyway, this year I've decided that I am going to make board gaming more of a hobby. So I joined a board game group that meets every Tuesday for several hours in a local community center. People each bring several of their favorite games, and we just hang out and play them. I won't lie to you, we're an extremely dorky group, but I have a lot of fun. Everyone is very smart (lots of CS people and engineers) and I got schooled regularly when I first started playing with them, but I've started to hold my own a little more often.

Most of the games we play fall into the broad "Eurogame" theme, which are generally very heavily strategy based without too much luck involved. There are some really interesting game mechanics in some of them, including "cooperative games" where everyone plays together to try to defeat the game, "auction games" which involve bidding on various objects and trying to get a bargain, and "trading games" where there is a free-form market between the players. They've come a long way since Monopoly!

I'm not going to go into much detail on the games, but thought I would suggest a couple of my favorites in case anyone is in the market. All the links are on boardgamegeek.com, which is a great game website which has tons of reviews, variants, and helpful rules modification for just about any game you can think of.

Settlers of Catan - A classic "trading game" that we just got for Christmas (thanks Wendy and Jon!). This is a great introduction into Eurogames for newbies - super fun, relatively easy to learn, and highly addictive!
Pandemic - A cool cooperative game where all the players are working to stop the spread of four diseases around the world. Each person is randomly assigned a "character" with special abilities to help fight the diseases and you all work together to capitalize on these skills.
Puerto Rico - An economic game where you have to build buildings, produce goods, and ship them off for profits. Lots of different ways to win, which is always cool. This is probably the highest-rated game among the gaming community, and is very fun.
For Sale - A real-estate trading game - perfect for those of us who can't possibly afford to buy anything in real life. It has an auction mechanic - you bid on various "houses" (ranging from a leaky cardboard box to a space station) and then try to sell them at a profit. Only takes 20 minutes and has been very popular among our friends.

Let me know if there are any more that you love and I should check out!

Jumbotron watch returns!

Ok, I guess this is becoming a theme, but there's some exciting happenings on the new Washington Nationals stadium jumbotron. First off, it looks like the stadium is nearing completion, hats off to the crews there for getting the place done in time. I wonder if the giant puddle of tar over by the 3rd base entrance is gone now, too. Check out their progress at this webcam. Or if they've fixed (or even noticed) the backwards "W" yet.

But anyways, they might want to make sure they have their pictures matched up with the right players before opening day. I'm pretty sure this Dmitri Young (from a framegrab on 3/13 4:40pm):


Is not the same as this Dmitri Young:

I think this guy wouldn't be so happy if here were about to face Johan Santana throwing 100-mph fastballs, too. And isn't the guy on the screen wearing a Braves hat/jersey? Maybe it's just some construction worker that posed for the picture so they could test out the system.

Staying on the baseball theme, Kate and I are going to be heading down to Spring Training in Phoenix with our buddy Frank to catch some Cactus League action, so stay tuned for some more baseball-flavored posts soon! Fortunately for us, Frank has identified some places to eat in Phoenix, so you don't have to worry about us going hungry.

Exploits of the "Typo Eradication Advancement League"

I know many, if not all seven, of our readers may already be aware of the cross-country journey to document and correct typos and grammar mistakes that a couple of fellow Dartmouth '02s are currently taking, but thought it would make a good post anyways. Equally adept at roaming both the real and cyber-worlds, our anonymous poster friend originally pointed out the NPR story on these guys and their unique quest. I think there maybe a few other readers here, perhaps some with whom I share a fair amount of genetic material and who are currently roaming the country themselves, that might get a kick out of reading about all the typos these guys find (and correct!). They are currently in my home state of NC (go Heels!) and just found some hundred-year-old typos made by the Wright brothers themselves (maybe we should give them back to Ohio). Anyways, go over to the TEAL Blog and take a look, and good luck the rest of the way, Jeff and Ben!

Improv Musical

In case you haven't seen it already, from the same people that brought you "Frozen Grand Central" and "Mobile Desktop" (among many others), here is Improv Everywhere's newest project, "Improv Musical."



Thanks to Marc for the heads up.