Category Archives: Thinking

I Need a New WordPress Theme!

Clean­r’s been great to me. Taught me the val­ue of a clean inter­face, with dead sim­ple nav­i­ga­tion. The prob­lem? It’s not sim­ple enough. Not a year goes by that I don’t real­ize how impor­tant it is to present infor­ma­tion com­plete­ly free from noise when­ev­er pos­si­ble. What does that mean? An end to two-col­umn theme, at least for me.

Thus, I throw myself at the mer­cy of the Inter­net to help me find the fol­low­ing: an ele­gant one-col­umn theme with dead sim­ple nav­i­ga­tion and a beau­ti­ful­ly inte­grat­ed “fol­low” suite where I can plug in links to my Twit­ter, Flickr, and oth­er accounts. To be per­fect­ly hon­est, if Flavors.me offered some­thing akin to Tum­blr, I’d jump in a heartbeat.

Why not Tum­blr, you ask? Too insid­ery for my tastes. Sure, I don’t try to gen­er­ate bat­ty pageviews here at Kens­ing­ton Blues, but I’m not try­ing to impress an arma­da of fol­low­ers either. Influ­ence ped­dling is not some­thing I want to get too wrapped up in out­side of work, if you catch my drift. More impor­tant­ly, I have yet to find a Tum­blr theme that does­n’t make actu­al words seem like unwel­come guests on the page. I think Tum­blr’s great for meme gen­er­a­tion and is home to a lot of fun stuff on the web, but I just don’t think I can com­mit to Tum­blr as my sole out­let online. (Don’t even get me start­ed about main­tain­ing sep­a­rate chan­nels in my per­son­al life.)

Hav­ing said all that, I do appre­ci­ate Tum­blr’s ele­gance. Be gone, use­less blogroll! No one clicks on you any­way! Good­bye, archives! The peo­ple will use search instead! You get the picture.

Ide­al­ly, I’d love to strip the extra­ne­ous ele­ments out of this theme and adapt it for my pur­pos­es. If you’re the sort of per­son who reads this and thinks that is pos­si­ble, let me know!

The Future of Television

I work for a tele­vi­sion com­pa­ny. When I start­ed at Com­cast three years ago, I was real­ly in the dark about just how com­pet­i­tive tele­vi­sion and film would become. Sure, lots of peo­ple were beat­ing their chests, root­ing for Hulu like the G.E.-owned prod­uct was some kind of under­dog, but then Com­cast bought that. Aside from Net­flix’s efforts with stream­ing video — some­thing I love watch­ing on my HDTV via my Xbox 360 — there weren’t real­ly any oth­er com­pa­nies real­ly try­ing to make hay online.

How times have changed. Just as Com­cast jumped in the pool with Fan­cast Xfin­i­ty TV, so has every­one else. The basic con­cept was always sim­ple, but how do you get your tele­vi­sion to play nice with the Inter­net? There are pesky rights issues! That seems to be chang­ing, too. Now that com­pa­nies like Google and Apple are involved, you can bet that it’s going to be all out war and con­sumers may come out winners.

But is it too much noise? Let’s talk about music for just a sec­ond. Think back about, oh, two years. Remem­ber when every Tom, Dick, and Har­ry jumped into stream­ing music online. It was a ver­i­ta­ble bonan­za. The ser­vices may have been wonky and were like­ly incom­plete, but users could cob­ble togeth­er a pret­ty exten­sive online music library that as total­ly legit. Flash back to the present: effec­tive this week­end, the num­ber of full length free stream­ing on-demand music ser­vices will be zero.

Maybe it’ll be dif­fer­ent this time and we’ll all be liv­ing in a la carte utopia in just a year or two. It’s great that some of the big tech­nol­o­gy play­ers like Google and Apple are in the mix. You know them for their most prod­ucts, but it’s some­times easy to for­get that both of them have armies of lawyers who are try­ing to gain any toe­hold they can against the big cable providers. Ulti­mate­ly, it push­es every­one in the right direc­tion and we will all reap the benefits.

Opening Day 2010

Is there any­thing more excit­ing than Open­ing Day? Depends, I guess. Last time I went, the Phils were shelled by a Car­di­nals assault led by Albert Pujols. Pujols bounced a ball off the score­board in left on a drea­ry, cold after­noon at Cit­i­zen’s Bank Park. Pret­ty sure he broke a light or two.

Things quick­ly got out of hand. We sat in the 200 lev­el in right, where a group of drunk­en stu­dents start­ed fights and were puk­ing all over each oth­er. It got so bad they shut down the con­ces­sions. It sucked. We suf­fered through a few more innings and head­ed home. 

We caught their last home game that year, a dis­ap­point­ing loss in a make­up game to the Astros. How things have changed since.

I’m thrilled to be joined on this Open­ing Day by my fam­i­ly to see the Pres­i­dent throw out the first pitch and watch Roy Hal­la­day’s Phillies debut. Here’s to a great 2010 season!

Get Ready for the 2010 Phillies

As my two favorite Phillies blogs, Beer­lea­guer and the Fight­ins,  vie for the title of best Phillies blog over at the Phield, I look for­ward to Mon­day’s Open­ing Day game against the Nation­als, with tick­ets cour­tesy of for­mer Nation­als right field­er Eli­jah Dukes. (Thanks, dude! I hope you find a team soon!)

This is our third year as sea­son tick­et hold­ers and the first that I’m gen­uine­ly ner­vous about how the sea­son will end. Maybe it’s the feel­ing any­one has when their team gets that close to win­ning back-to-back cham­pi­onships and los­es. Fear creeps in. Doubt, too. Some­how, despite the fact the Phillies trad­ed for a pitch­er who’s arguably the best in base­ball last Decem­ber, I can’t help but won­der how Roy Hal­la­day will be able to fix the Phillies when he can only take the field every fifth day.

With our thin pitch­ing staff already being test­ed by injuries, I can’t help but won­der if this is the year our fan­tas­tic Phils final­ly fall apart. Part of that is a life­time of Phillies pes­simism talk­ing, but it’s also the real­iza­tion that it’s very dif­fi­cult to field a team as con­sis­tent­ly great as the Phillies have these past two years with­out set­backs like this. On the oth­er hand, it’s April, and the Phillies tend to start slow­ly and gain momen­tum as the sea­son pro­gress­es. After all, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. There’s plen­ty of time to beat up on the NL East to secure a play­off berth.

I also feel like this is the first year that the end is in sight. Werth a Yan­kee? Per­ish the thought, but it might hap­pen. Trade Howard? After years of threat­en­ing, this could become a real­i­ty if the Phils aren’t will­ing to pick up his con­tract. The end of Jim­my Rollins’ reign as Phillies short­stop looms. Will the lega­cy of the ’08 Phillies be like that of the ’80 Phils, with Chase Utley as the new Mike Schmidt, the last man stand­ing from the team’s glo­ry days, a Hall of Famer sur­round­ed by also-rans and unproven rookies?

It’s famil­iar to me as some­one who was only 3 when the Phils won in ’80. I spent the bulk of my child­hood hat­ing the loath­some Phillies, even going so far as to resent their rag­tag run in ’93. The Phillies were so bad I chose to fol­low a team that was even worse: the Cleve­land Indi­ans! By ’95, I’d giv­en up on the Tribe and found myself root­ing for a Phillies team led by guys like Kevins Sef­cik and Stock­er. I vivid­ly remem­ber pars­ing the Schilling trade, hop­ing that some­how a guy like Omar Daal might be the answer to the Phils pitch­ing woes. (He was­n’t.) Must my infant son endure the hard­ship of being a Phillies fan just as I had before him? Seems likely.

My wish for the 2010 Phillies is that they win the World Series and enter the pan­theon of great teams. They’re prob­a­bly already there, but to win a third con­sec­u­tive Nation­al League pen­nant would be a thing of beau­ty. To be men­tioned in the same breath as the Big Red Machine is already dizzy­ing, but to sur­pass them would be magical.

So while I’m over­come with nos­tal­gia for the past two won­der­ful sea­sons, my hope is that the Phils enjoy con­tin­ued suc­cess and stay com­pet­i­tive. We won’t always be there in Octo­ber. It could be worse, much worse. We could be Mets fans!

Let’s go Phillies!

My Macbook Needs Help

I recent­ly had a stroke of bad luck with my oth­er­wise mar­velous Mac­book. It was act­ing fun­ny, so I tried to restart. It stalled out and I tried doing a hard reboot.

Oops.

I found myself star­ing at a grey screen, the fan whirring out of con­trol. Fun!

Now I’m try­ing to fig­ure out whether I should take it to an Apple store, or just vis­it a repair ser­vice now that my Apple­care term has ended. 

Feel free to offer your two cents in the comments!