Going on a brief posting break, so that the post about the Ellise’s is at the top of this blog for a while. For you RSS’ers, this one comes after it. But I’m back-dating this so that it appears on the blog below it.

I’ll still be writing — but I’ll be post-dating the entries for about a week.

As we saw in April, sometimes banned commercials are the best. Just ran across another commercial that qualifies on both counts. Oddly, most commercials for game units (this one’s for the X-box) leave me scratching my head and feeling like a totally out-of-it 40-year-old.

Not that I’m anything but.

HT to the evangelical outpost.

Kim Fabricius gives us Ten reasons why baseball is God’s game.

I do have one issue to quibble with though. In reason #5, he states definitively that “Shoeless” Joe Jackson took a bribe, but that Steroid Boy allegedly took the juice. This is a bad joke or Fabricius is a Giants fan. I’ve asked him which.

Other than that, it’s a fantastic article.

HT to BHT.

I was admittedly underwhelmed by Peretti and Dekker’s House, as a novel. I theorized that perhaps part of the problem is that this book was bound for the movie screen from Day One, and that the authors tried to write a book as a screenplay. I hoped that the movie version would be clearer than the novel, and capture what it seemed they were going for.

Just saw a trailer for the movie (due out in October). I think they go it.

UPDATE: This movie has been pushed off to the spring of 2008.  Heaven knows that we wouldn’t want a horror movie to come out in October.

UPDATE 2: The movie was pushed out again.  Halloween 2008 is on a Friday — seems like a good date to open a horror movie, right?  So naturally House opens on November 7.

I read an interesting article today about US colleges trying to renew interest in computer science as a major. It was even more interesting to me, as it focused on two schools, one of which was Georgia Tech, my alma mater.

The article cites some interesting statistics:

The number of new computer science majors has steadily declined since 2000, falling from close to 16,000 students to only 7798 in fall 2006 . . .

1% of incoming freshmen have indicated computer science as a probable major . . .

And comes to the conclusion:

The aftermath of the dot-com bust may have triggered the exodus, but computer scientists admit they’ve also been slow to adapt to the changes by reprogramming their teaching methods.

And I can certainly see an argument toward the need to update curricula. My actual degree was in Information and Computer Science, the name coming from the fact that it used to be simply Information Science. One of the classes that I had to take (which was obviously a left-over from the IS days) “taught” me how to use a technical library to do research. The most advanced technology that we used was when we looked at one of the catalogs on microfiche. The obvious assumption from the 130-year-olds that designed the class was that the only career for an ICS major would be endless research.

It’s a very interesting (and occasionally amusing) article. I commend it to your reading.

If only it was true.

A corollary to Occam’s Razor tells us to never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. So I will attribute the gaping holes in logic that this article presents to naivete on the part of the writer. Early on, the article notes the decline of interest in computer science in US colleges and says:

At risk, professors say, is nothing less than U.S. technology supremacy. As interest in computer science drops in the U.S., India and China are emerging as engineering hubs with cheap labor and a skilled work force.

The writer has the actual issue screaming right at him — he wrote it, for goodness’ sake — and he misses it. 90% of those 7798 that entered computer science in fall 2006 will have their jobs “outsourced” to India before the ink on their sheepskin is even dry.

Of course those countries are on the rise in IT. You can’t find cheaper technical labor than in India. And if you even thought of outsourcing from a company in China, the government would shoot you in the face.

Meanwhile, executives in the US keep harping on the fact that their companies are “international” as an excuse to ship more and more jobs abroad, thereby boosting the bottom line, increasing stock value, and being able to buy that 150-foot gold-plated yacht with cash.

Oh, and sending thousands of US workers to the unemployment office.

In the 1980s, Steve Taylor wrote the song, “What Is The Measure Of Your Success?” about materialism in the me-first decade. In the 1990s, he commented on the song:

The optimist in me wants to bronze this song as a museum piece for the materialism-run-amok decade in which it was written; when the measure of a man was his stuff.

But since greed is one of the grand, recurring themes of American life, it logically follows in the 1990’s that the love of money is the root of all downsizing.

I would submit that in this decade, the love of money is the root of all outsourcing.

Sidebar: Remember when “outsourcing” meant “we’re gonna let the company across the street run our IT shop, so that we can concentrate on selling these widgets”? Heck, for the first 7 years of my career, my company was the “company across the street”. Now outsourcing and off-shoring are synonymous. If a job gets outsourced, you can bet your Aunt Fanny that it’s moving to another country.

The sad thing is that this is eventually going to bite companies like a rabid chihuahua.

(Actually the sadder thing is that the CEOs responsible will be long gone, sunning their pasty fat butts on the 250-foot yacht they bought with their retirement package. But I digress . . .)

As most of us have experienced, off-shoring is often frustrating for the customer. When I call customer support for my DVD player and get some guy who makes The Simpsons’ Apu Nahasapeemapetilon sound like John Wayne — and then has the audacity to tell me that his name is Bob — my first inclination is to give up TV altogether. But, to some extent, off-shoring is logical for first-level jobs where somebody is reading off a script (”Is your computer turned on?”).

But American CEO’s keep pushing higher and higher levels of work to other countries (primarily India). And while I know for a fact that there are some very sharp technical people in India, my experience tells me that they are far and away the exception to the rule. (Or are at least the exception for the rate at which the American CEO is willing to pay them.)

The nature of my job has changed a lot in the last 5 years, and I’ve been interacting with folks outside my department a lot more of late. Three years ago, this was a guy in another US city. Now, his job is gone, and he’s been replaced by someone in India. And, more often than not, the Indian employee is not keeping up. And I don’t blame him — but there’s a reason you can get IT workers in India for $3/hour.

I don’t have any children, but if I did, I would strongly discourage them from entering the IT world. If they chose to defy that, I’d probably disown them faster than a Hassidic rabbi whose child has converted to radical Islam.

Prediction: Fact: By 2050, there will be more elephant farmers than IT workers in the United States.

No humor, just schadenfreude.

Burning some discs for my dad. I’m taking some stuff recorded off the TV and turning them into DVDs that are watchable on a stand-alone player. Each disc takes about 2.5 hours to process.

I’m sitting here, working on another computer, keeping an eye on the processing. At 2:27, the processing computer crashed.

Hall of Fame broadcaster Ralph Kiner:

Two thirds of the Earth are covered by water. The other one third by Garry Maddox.

For the uninitated out there, Garry Maddox was a center fielder (mostly with the Phillies) in the 70s and 80s. From a defensive standpoint, he was the Andruw Jones of his era. (”You will believe a man can fly.”)

Attending my very first MLB game in the mid-70s, I saw Maddox run what seemed like 50 miles, climb the wall at Veterans’ Stadium, and rob the batter of a home run. It was a great play, but in the eyes of an 8-year-old, it was super-human.

Ever since that moment, I really dig seeing baseball live. And I have been blessed to see some remarkable things, many done by more familiar names.

Before anyone knew about corked bats, I saw Sammy Sosa hit one out at Wrigley Field.

I’ve seen Cal Ripken Jr turn a double play at Camden Yards.

I’ve seen Greg Maddux throw a complete game shut-out at Turner Field.

I’ve been to a game at Fenway Park. ‘Nuff said there.

I was at game 3 of the Braves’ 4-game sweep of the Reds in the 1995 NLCS.

I saw John Smoltz spank Roger “overpaid hired gun” Clemens in game 2 of the 1995 NLDS.

And speaking of Smoltz, I was there Thursday night, when he punched his ticket to Cooperstown, winning his 200th game (to go with 150+ saves). Smoltz pitched masterfully. And our seats were in direct line with the edge of the dugout, so we saw him well when he came out for a cap tip at the end of the game.

I got the tickets from a neighbor of a friend. My friend told me about them, and I was interested (Braves vs Mets), but had to see if end-of-year crunch would keep my teacher wife from being able to go. Then he told me that it was Smoltz vs Glavine, and I was nearly ready to go even if she couldn’t. (Thankfully, she could.) On the way down to the stadium, listening to the pre-game show on the radio, was the first time that I heard that John was going for #200.

After the game, they showed a celebratory video on the big screen that was an obvious rip-off of the movie, 300. Rip-off or not, I think even Frank Miller would have found it cool.

HT to Michael (the afore-mentioned friend) for setting me up with the tickets.

My pastor was out of town most of this week, so Mitch (one of our elders) taught on Wednesday night, and noted this:

Was Jesus a great miracle-worker? Certainly.

Was Jesus a great teacher and preacher? Certainly. As Mitch said, I’ve heard preachers say much less in 2.5 hours than Jesus said in about 18 minutes in the Sermon on the Mount.

Yet, we do not see anywhere in the gospels that the disciples asked to be taught how to work miracles or to teach or to preach. What they did request:

Lord, teach us to pray

As clueless as these guys sometimes were, the disciples understood how incredibly important prayer was in the life of Jesus. And, by extension, how important it should be in their lives.

And, by extension, how important it should be in my life.

I couldn’t be more embarrassed if the title of this post was true.

Half my team got laid off earlier this month, effective at the end of the month (6 days from now).

Right now, I’m sitting in a department meeting — that those people have to attend — and our manager is explaining the newest salary system.