Loading Up At Sports Authority

I am not a jock.  I never was a jock.  Though I’m 6’1” and in reasonable shape now, throughout my childhood I was undersized (I grew late), which, when combined with physically slow and a bit uncoordinated, makes me very well suited for, well, being a computer geek, not an athlete.

But my two oldest children are now 6 and 4.5, and I’m starting to hear rumblings from other parents about little league, coaching, etc.  Moreover, I fear that if I leave their athletic training solely to my wife, it will be nothing but ballet and gymnastics – fine for Katie, but for Danny, well…

Anyways, my kids have been watching a bit of the Cardinals fine season with me this year, so last week I broke out the whiffle ball and bat for my future shortstops.  Following on that great success (not a single injury!), we went to Sports Authority today for a buying binge.  We’ll practice on the warm days this fall, and they’ll storm the T-Ball league next spring – yeah!  (and the German skinflint side of me was thinking that late September would be a great time to pick up baseball equipment on closeout)

At first I felt a bit sheepish when I told the sales woman at the cash register that I needed help figuring out which baseball equipment to get for my kids – did I miss that day at Fatherhood training school?  My manhood was further jeopardized when they summoned from another department an athletic looking woman who could probably beat me at not only baseball, but pretty much any Olympic sport, all the way down to curling.  But she knew her stuff, and promptly picked out the right size gloves and bats for my kids, and filled me in on the local little-league scene.  Finally, I had her size me up for a glove for myself.  The last glove I had was a gift from my dad at around age 10, and hasn’t fit me since about age 13.  Now, though, I have a proper glove – but I need to make sure I scuff it up before I show up for any other dads-type little league event – you can’t show up with a shiny new glove that’s never been used.

Baseball Spree at Sports Authority:  $197*

Two Hours Later, Your Daughter Says Baseball Is “Boring”: Priceless

OK, while she did say that, it was after our first baseball practice of the day ended in an 0 for 9 slump by my daughter.  A bit later, both kids wanted to play again, and this time, they got better pitching by Dad.  Where did she swing last time – ok if I can just pitch it to exactly that point…  Still, it was a lot of fun, and I had to turn down my son’s request for a 4^th baseball session late in the day. 

As bad as I was/am at baseball, two of my uncles played minor league ball back in their time.  Maybe the baseball talent skipped a generation sideways and down, and my kids will surpass their dad at this one.  In the meantime, at least my kids will appreciate the Cardinals games a bit more…

* 2 bats, 3 gloves, 3 balls, a batting tee, and glove ‘moisturizer’ – yeah, like I’m really gonna follow through and use that regularly, plus a Nerf football and a Scooby Doo basketball.  And no, the baseball stuff wasn’t on closeout – don’t they know baseball season is over in 3 weeks?  Ahh well…

Best Sports Writing I Saw This Week

“If you believe what the White Sox manager told Copley News Service columnist Mike Nadel the other day, he might just up and retire if the Sox win the World Series this year. The way things are going for the South Siders, the qualifier seems a tad out there. It's like starting a sentence, “If Paris Hilton becomes a nun…””

(Rick Morrissey via The Sports Economist)

In my second semester, freshman year of college, I probably spent three hours playing cards for every hour I spent in class (or at least, for every hour I was supposed to be in class). At the time, we mainly played Bridge, Hearts, and a bit of Spades.

In the last year, on a couple of occasions I've had a chance to relive the card playing with a couple of my college buddies. The game of choice has been Barbu - a 4 player game that takes about 2 hours to play (you play a structured set of 28 hands). It's got elements of Bridge, Hearts, and Spades, plus a few twists. Very fun. Here's a Barbu rules page, and here's the custom Barbu scoresheet my friend (Steve Rareshide) created, which also contains an abbreviated version of the rules. (Note that the different sources have the Barbu scoring slightly different. It's a lot of fun - if you're a card player, check it out some night.

On Friday I had two rather shocking customer service experiences.  Shocking in that they went well (for me).

In the morning, I had to visit the DMV* office to register my car.  I waited 20 minutes in line, reached the front, and discovered, as usual, that I had one form wrong and was missing another.  To my surprise, the DMV agent went out of her way to help me fix one form, and called the state tax office to verify that I’d paid my property taxes (eliminating the need for the other form – a tax receipt).  It took about 20 minutes to get all this stuff cleared up (there were other windows helping the other customers, BTW), but this undoubtedly underpaid agent went out of her way to help me even though I was missing forms.  Helpful agents going above and beyond.  At the DMV…

Later, I called Belkin to try to get tech support for a KVM switch they’d sent me (as a replacement for an earlier one which also didn’t work).  When it became clear that the new one wouldn’t work either, I thought I was hosed, as I’d bought the original one from a third party vendor back in March - $200 down the drain.  Amazingly, I was transferred to a customer service rep. who promptly offered a refund.  I faxed her my invoice, she scheduled a UPS pickup, at my door, of the non-working units, and I should be whole again in about a week.  I don’t think I’ve ever had a manufacturer issue a refund check for something I didn’t buy directly from them.

Offsetting these experiences a bit, I discovered that a 15 minute phone call I’d made to the Philippines, for which I’d expect to pay maybe 50 cents a minute, had been billed at $3.50 a minute.  Adding the international calling plan onto my phone service (at $3.99 a month), drops this rate to $.16 a minute.  So they charge the casual international caller 20 times more than they charge the price astute caller who’s bothered to find out what plans are available and signed up for the right one.  Ouch.  Reminds me of visiting Disneyworld this January, where I noticed, in very very fine print on page 4 of the 7 page hotel sign-in, that using my room phone for domestic long distance billed at $6.00 a minute (i.e. roughly 100 times more than most people pay per minute on their cell phone).  Sometimes you don’t bother checking prices because you don’t think it’ll make much difference – a 10 minute phone call – hey what’s it gonna cost – five dollars, maybe?  Maybe not…

* Alright, fellow Missourians will note that we don’t go to the DMV for these kinds of services – it was actually a franchised license office.  But they call it a DMV office in most states, so it was a clarity simplification…

My mother and father-in-law were with us this past week to help with the new baby. Yesterday we all went to my older daughter's ballet recital. It was a big deal - maybe 1000 parents and grandparents watching maybe 200 kids do various dances - we had to sit in an upper balcony of the theatre.

My daughter performed in the first half, and my wife and I left with the kids at intermission (short attention spans and newborn baby = 1 hour maximum event time). Somewhat to my surprise, and despite a bit of cajoling from us, my in-laws remained for the second half (they had driven on their own).

After we left, during a pause in the recital someone stood up in the audience and shouted "Is there a doctor in the house." - like a scene from a movie. A 50-year old woman had gone into cardiac arrest. My father-in-law is a retired cardiologist, and hustled down from the balcony to the main level, where he applied CPR (working in tandem with an off-duty paramedic who was also in the audience). It took 15 minutes for an ambulence to arrive (awful, I know). Had my father-in-law left early, the woman would likely have not lasted until the ambulance arrived. For that matter, it's unclear whether she survived after the ambulance took her - my father-in-law was pessimistic, but ultimately will never know.

The mental picture and accompanying thoughts had me going for much of the evening. Coming on the heels of the whole birth process earlier in the week, it made me thankful for the medical profession as a whole, and maybe a bit jealous that what I do doesn't have that kind of impact on people's lives. I'm used to thinking of my own father as a hero, but this reminded me of a lifetime of good things that my father-in-law has done for others, despite very humble origins.

It's also a reminder that even the small choices we make in life - to stay for the second half of a somewhat boring [to me] ballet recital can have greatly unexpected consequences. And I'm thankful that I wasn't able to nudge my father-in-law to leave early with us.

It’s been an eventful week:

Babies

Tuesday morning, 9 minutes after midnight, Grace Marie Steinmeyer was born, at 7 pounds even.  This is the third child for us, and we are very happy and thankful for her safe and healthy arrival.  Even after having been through this twice before, bringing a new baby into the world is an absolutely amazing event – really without comparison to anything else that’s ever happened in my life (except the previous babies, of course). 

And to bring in a geek note, if you’ve got a baby in your future, or just like odd web pages, check out this site, which shows you the popularity of various baby names through time.  Type in “GRA” to see the decline in popularity of “Grace”  in the 1930’s through the 1980’s, and it’s rise to popularity again in the last 10 years.  (No, we didn’t pick that name based on the popularity-meter, but it’s still a fun tool to play with).

Cars

The addition of a 3^rd child to our family brings one sad note – the end of my footloose and fancy free days driving a convertible (trivial in comparison to having a new baby, but still…).  My Mitsubishi already had one strike against it – it was a stick, which my wife can’t drive, thus complicating things when we needed to juggle cars (our other car is, of course, a minivan).  The new baby added a second strike, in that the convertible only seats 4 – we’ve got an overflow error here, and to fix the bug, I’m selling the convertible (details here).  To replace it, I bought a Hyundai Tucson (automatic, seats 5).  I really like the Hyundai, but the buying experience was classic car-buying goofiness (details here). 

Game Development

The baby arrival was well-timed on another front.  I’ve been working with a freelance artist for the last couple weeks, and while waiting to get our overall visual look nailed down, I’m basically stalled, programming-wise.  Gives me more time with the baby, but still a bit frustrating.  While I may be premature in saying this, it appears that for a reasonably experienced game programmer, the programming side of doing a casual game is almost trivial – maybe 2 months programming tops (assuming you’re starting with a solid framework).  Which means a lot more time on design and bouncing art stuff back and forth.  In the future, I might run two projects concurrently to reduce the waiting.

Apple/Intel

In the broader tech world, Apple announced a switch to Intel microprocessors, with the switch starting in mid ’06 and not being completed until the end of ’07.  While this may have been necessary for Apple to get good, low-power chips for their notebooks and other portables, I see it as a bad sign overall.  Consumers will hold off on buying new Macs until the Intel-powered machines come out.  Developers will face higher porting costs, with the need to develop and test for two processor platforms.  Higher costs to develop and smaller target market equals fewer developers making Mac products.  I’d like to support the Mac, and probably will, but overall, I see Mac’s market share falling even further from it’s already low 2.5-3.0% level.

This Saturday, I volunteered a day at Habitat for Humanity. Overall, it was a good experience for me, and I’ll likely do it again. A quick summary of the day... (especially for those who might be interested in doing it themselves)

My parents came by to visit (and babysit) yesterday and had a couple of forwarded postcards for me from the Missouri Secretary of State.

Title: "Please Help Us Return Your Treasures To You!"

Sweet! How much money was lurking in this now dormant account?

It's surprising that the postcards made it to me. They were mailed to my parents' old address (which they moved away from ~10 years ago). I hadn't lived at that address since 1992. Amazingly, the postman looked up my parents' new address and got the postcards to them. Hey, everyone was just trying to help me realize my unclaimed treasures.

So I went to the web site this morning. The unclaimed treasure?

75 cents.

I did submit the claim though. I'll net about a quarter after the cost of the stamp and envelope, but at least the state will stop sending postcards and people won't waste energy trying to get me my vast unclaimed fortune.

This weekend, I made my first ever trip to M.I.T. (and first trip in 25 years to Boston).  Some notes/thoughts:

My 5-year old daughter has been fascinated for the last week with a book of fairy tales that she got as a hand-me-down from her cousin. Unfortunately, these fairy tales hew much closer to the original Grimm’s versions than the syrup-y Disney style fairy tales pumped out by both Disney and Disney-wannabes lately.

As a media consumer, the typical Disney ending wears thin (evil-doers punished, misbehaving ‘good’ characters learn their lesson, all ends well). But as a parent, I was somewhat alarmed by the alternative.

In Jack and the Beanstalk, the boy climbs the vine, robs the giant 3 times (a bag of money, the golden-egg goose, a golden harp), lying to the giant’s wife along the way (while the giant is evil, his wife is nothing but generous to the boy, offering him food and protection). Finally, when the boy steals the harp and the giant gives chase, the boy kills (murders?) the giant. And the boy is held out as the hero of the story. Other stories are similar (‘heros’ lie, cheat and steal to achieve their goals). I suspect this book will be ‘lost’ soon…