Spring training is nearly over and the roster is nearly set. Opening day is next Tuesday, and a dozen or so familiar faces will be joined in the Braves dugout by quite a few newcomers. But how will that affect the Braves' run for another division title? Let's have a look.

Starting Pitching. The Braves lost Russ Ortiz, Jaret Wright, and Paul Byrd, all of whom were fairly successful under Leo Mazzone, but none of whom should be all that successful in the future. Wright has the best potential among the three, but he was a bit too volatile to hold. Tim Hudson outshines all three of them, and a healthy Horacio Ramirez and John Smoltz returning to the rotation will more than make up for the pitchers we lost. Even if Smoltz is only 75% as good as he used to be as a starter, that's still much better over the course of a season than we would get out of Paul Byrd! Verdict: The starting rotation has improved.

Relief Pitching. Alfonseca and Cruz were quite reliable -- I was even hoping Cruz was take over Smoltz's spot as the Braves' closer at one point -- and Capellan has enormous potential. I disagree with the Braves' decision to trade Capellan; I think he would have made a better closer than Dan Kolb. But I'm still hoping for good things from him. And rookies Adam Bernero and Buddy Hernandez could be pleasant surprises. Verdict: The relief pitching is slightly degraded.

Starting Lineup. The Braves replace JD Drew and the Marrero/Thomas platoon with Raul Mondesi and a Jordan/Langerhans platoon. But Andruw Jones has come back much stronger and healthier than last year, and Chipper Jones should return to much better form after an off year. LaRoche should be much improved in his sophomore season, and we should be able to expect close to the same performances from Furcal, Giles, and Estrada. Verdict: The starting lineup is slightly improved.

Bench. Eddie Perez, Julio Franco, and Wilson Betemit return. Nick Green and the second half of last year's left-field platoon are presumably replaced by Pete Orr and the second half of this year's left-field platoon. The talent may be there, but the performances of these players is sporadic at best. But let's look at the bright side: at least they're on the bench! Verdict: Improvement or degradation is negligible and as yet indistinguishable.

OVERALL. Change is constant, and in a 162-game schedule, surprises are guaranteed. Players will be injured and traded, minor leaguers will be called up, and newcomers will have an unpredictable impact. However, given what we do know about the players who have established themselves and what we can expect based on changes to last year's team, the Atlanta Braves still look like division champions to me. And no one can take that away from them until someone else clinches the NL East title. Verdict: I predict another successful season, good enough at least for a playoff berth and probably the Braves' 14th consecutive division title.

I haven't posted much lately. I haven't been keeping up with news, baseball, technology, or anything outside my little bubble of a personal life. I haven't been thinking too much outside the box either, and there isn't anything bubbling beneath the surface pressing to get out. But if something comes along, you'll know about it.

Also, I'm considering removing files from the images folder en masse, so if there's something in there you want, browse through it now before I weed out the old stuff!

I don't agree with most of Bud Selig's decisions when they make the news, but I agree with this one: keep the government out of baseball's steroids "scandal". (Of course, if it were up to me, I'd say the scandal is the fact that people are calling it a scandal.)

This is bullshit. A handful of the Hall of Fame voters are refusing or will refuse to vote for Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and others because they supposedly "enhanced their performance", whatever that means. Guys have been hitting gyms, drinking protein shakes, taking cortizone shots, and playing dirty to enhance their performance since MLB was founded. The Baseball Hall of Fame is full of racists, philanderers, drug addicts, gamblers, and others of disreputable character -- and do you know why? Because it's a baseball hall of fame! Not a moral fiber hall of fame. Not a Christian-conservative-values hall of fame. A baseball hall of fame.

Babe Ruth did much worse things during his playing career than Mickey Mantle (alcoholic), Pete Rose (gambler), and Jose Canseco (substance abuser) combined. Granted, two of those men aren't in the hall of fame and may never be, but they all three should be based on their on-the-field performances.

A player's ability to play baseball has much less to do with one's entry into the baseball hall of fame than ever before. One's fame has nothing to do with it, despite the title: "Hall of Fame". What a sham! What kind of idiots don't allow the all-time hits leader or the two all-time single-season home run leaders in for stupid crap like gambling and use of performance enhancers?

Regardless of how players achieved their statistics, what matters is what they did on the field. As a fan of the game since I was old enough to comprehend it, this pains me, but the baseball hall of fame means almost nothing to me now.

VideoGameDC's Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom 4 is finally available! If you haven't seen parts 1-3 yet, do not watch part four first! I recommend watching them all from the beginning again anyway to refresh your memory of the storyline.

Download:       part 1       part 2       part 3       part 4

While eating lunch with Mom and her work crew, we saw a headline on TV about Toys 'r' Us, and we asked why. Are they bankrupt? Are they sold? Is it a scandal? After about two minutes the ticker finally updated to reveal the $6.6 billion sale of the New Jersey-based toy group to, um, well it didn't say. Immediately they were suggesting Sears/Kmart and Walmart, and I suggested Target or Best Buy (why not?). Well, um, how about an investment group including three firms to assume equal partnership over the company?

Via the news (I leave out unimportant/uninteresting facts):

I had typed up a huge post three days ago about all seven of the computers I had "owned" in my lifetime. I put owned in quotation marks because I didn't truly own any of them until this one; my laptop is the first computer I bought with my own money and have hoarded completely to myself as a personal plaything. It's the greatest toy ever! :)

Anyway, what you're getting now is a preview post. I haven't decided how I'm going to go about writing about all my old computers, but I think I'll just cover them one or two at a time, initially describing them how and why they were purchased, then discussing any upgrades, problems, or other interesting facts about them. You'll see, I guess.

The list (** laptops):

In case you're wondering, it's really easy to trace computers back to the dates I originally acquired them when I've been blogging for 5½ years. And we still have the invoices lying around for all the surviving computers, and I'm sure Dad's got archived receipts of the previous significant purchases.

Within our lifetimes, some form of socialism will have to win by default. (Okay, really, it already has. But I don't like admiting that yet.)

As populations grow and technologies are developed, there will be many more people requiring provisions, much better technology to do the work, and much less manual labor and man hours necessary to get the work done. That is, we'll have a larger labor supply working fewer aggregate hours, which can only mean one thing for the average working person -- that is, if we're going to keep prices consistent (or consistently rising) with the arbitrary monetary value we assign to everyday things: reduced hours, increased wages, and increased money supply.

Of course, that's more of an ideal scenario. What's more likely to happen in capitalist America, for better or for worse, is an attempt to conserve the status quo without making such socialistic adjustments, allowing the disparity between rich and poor to grow significantly. If we maintain our current 40-hour-workweek standard, unemployment will skyrocket because there will be far too few jobs for an exponentially growing population.

You want to talk endangered resources of finite supply? Think about how much better some of us are going to feel in 40 years when everything works out just fine for us, but how much worse off someone else will be because of that.

I hate the idea of the Welfare state, I really do. But sometimes I wonder how this world is supposed to survive in the long run without it. I mean, it gets harder and harder to educate the population and train the labor force in mass quantity, and as we get more and more specialized (that is, less and less talented) it's going to be much harder to avoid the need for some kind of socio-economic safety net.

(Also posted to my Livejournal. Leave comments here.)

The power supply on our old old desktop (Pentium II 300 MHz) died sometime in the last year, and Brett was nice enough to give me an older power supply. It had one less connector than mine, so I removed the IDE connector from the 8GB slave drive, but the good news is that Windows still loads on the 5GB master drive! (It's been a while since I ran a system with only one hard drive -- I had to power down and adjust the jumpers for a standalone drive!)

I thought about moving the 8 GB hard drive to my newest desktop (AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz) to get at its data, but when I realized I'd have to disconnect the 60GB drive (which is where the data would go), I decided against it. I also learned that I can't put anything in the two empty drive bays in the newest desktop because of some weird-ass metal plates the guys at First Computer Systems put in the way! I won't be shopping FCS again!

But whatever. The old computer was actually up and running, and aside from the fact that I can't get data off the old hard drive, it was in great shape! I wondered if I had left the 8GB drive in bootable condition, swapped its connectors with the other hard drive, but nope! So I went ahead checking our old Zip disks for useful data, took what I needed from them and the 5GB hard drive, and then I got the best idea I had had yet: swap the connectors from the Zip drive to the 8GB hard drive! I'm glad I didn't get that idea first, because then I never would have backed up the data from the Zip disks!

So after I got everything useful off our old 100MB Iomega Zip disks, I disconnected that drive, reworked all the jumpers, and reconnected the old 8GB hard drive using the Zip drive's power connector. And it all works! So now this is where I stand, with tasks already completed struck through:

get old desktop working
backup useful stuff from 5GB hard drive
backup useful stuff from 8GB hard drive
reformat and reinstall Windows!

I think I'll go with Windows ME instead of 98, especially since I just gave my Win98 disc to Brett thinking I'd never want it again. And I don't want it anyway, since I have two copies of Windows ME and a copy of XP Home, none of which are currently in use. (I think I'm having too much fun with this.)

But I think I'll get to those things tomorrow, or at least late tonight. It's just about time to eat dinner, get cleaned up, and spend the rest my Saturday night with Jen.

(I mentioned "oldest" and a "newest" desktop computers. Superlative adjectives indicate a group of three or more, instead of the comparative adjectives "older" and "newer" which would indicate only two for comparison. So, for those who caught that and are curious, the computers are:

1. Intel 386 SX 20MHz, 4MB RAM, ~20MB storage (1990-ish)
2. Intel Pentium 166MHz, 32MB RAM, ~2GB storage (August 1996)
3. Intel Pentium II 300MHz, 128MB RAM, ~5GB storage (September 1998)
4. AMD Athlon 800MHz, 256MB RAM, ~13GB storage (September 2000)
5. AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz, 512MB RAM, ~40GB storage (October 2001)

Although only desktops 3-5 are involved in the comparisons in this post, I thought I would include the other two for completion. The first was the first computer I knew about in the house, and the second was our first Windows computer; both died years ago and no longer exist except in our memory. I also feel compelled top mention that the RAM and storage values are their original purchase values; all of my computers, except the first one, have been upgraded somewhat. And there are also two laptops I'm not mentioning here.

Now that I look at this list, I feel like posting a much more involved history of computers in the McCord household(s), which will also include the laptop I perma-borrowed from Tony when he got a new one in college. So I'll do that. Later.

(If you feel like commenting on this, visit my livejournal!

A California judge said in a preliminary ruling that bloggers should not have the same protection afforded to journalists.

Specifically, the ruling is a first amendment restriction, undermining freedom of the press for the independent media, specifically any individuals who perform as journalists but are not recognized as "professional" journalists (like bloggers and other noncredentialed journalists). Not being afforded those protections would severely discourage their sources from disclosing any sensitive (useful) information in the future, and would in turn guarantee that the public is left more in the dark than ever.

This is a slap in the face of any one who likes the idea of being informed about real, useful news, as opposed to the sensationalized crap that clogs the mainstream press. If this decision is allowed to stand, we'll be one step closer to becoming something like the super-socialist state in Orwell's 1984, where the news is engineered by the privileged few rather than reported by the many in order to reflect the world accurately.

We are each getting further from reality, and it's our own fault, because so few of us is willing to do anything about it.

(I'm not saying sources of sensitive information shouldn't be prosecuted if caught, but this is the information age, and people who come across that information and demonstrate a willingness to function as a member of the public press should not be legally bound to divulge where they came across it. It's irrelevant if the information is true.)