mothershipconnection

I only use firefox on Windows 7, and have had absolutely no trouble. Make the switch invader.

I'm not even that old and it feels weird for me to remember collecting many of these guys' "Rated Rookie" cards and remember debating with friends which card would someday be worth the most. We of course made many poor predictions. Ellis Burks burned me pretty badly, as did Matt Nokes and Cory Snyder.

For those on the fence, Best Buy has the Xbox 360 Arcade essentially going for $140, because you get a free game or accessory at up to $60 (which you're gonna buy anyway) for free with purchase. Link

About to polish off the current book. Next up: The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. I'm pretty pumped about this one, it's a collection of writings by some pretty great science author (Hawking, Einstein, Schrodinger, Sagan, Oppenheimer, Mayr, Gould, and seemingly a hundred others).

Tell me about it. I literally haven't turned my Wii on in over a year. Pretty much from the day the PS3 came out of the box. There are a few solid games (pretty much just the Nintendo ones), but the used price never gets cheap enough. I just got Gears of War 2 for $17 and Metal Gear Solid 4 for $22 new while on Amazon Super Paper Mario is still $30 used, Punch Out is $35, and Twilight Princess is $37.

There are enough good exclusives that it's worth it to own multiple consoles, though. 360 has Halo, Gears of War, GTA episodes, and used to have exclusive Fallout 3 expansions while PS3 has Uncharted, Killzone 2, Ratchet and Clank, Metal Gear, a blu-ray player and no-fee online gaming..

I'd maybe think about signing up for something like freecreditreport.com or something similar. Don't go there. Number 1, do not reinforce their ad campaign. Number 2, you have to pay a bunch of money for it, so it's not free. What is free is annualcreditreport.com. You can get your report free once per year there and make disputes. I disputed a bunch of crap on my report that was my ex-wife's and was assigned to her per our divorce agreement. It all comes off my record in 2011, and I can't wait.

Cabs in most of WI are so cheap that you look like an even bigger idiot for driving drunk. I went back to EC for a wedding in July and we got a ride from a couple miles outside the SW edge of town to the SE edge of town for $12. Especially if you're splitting fare with friends, without even mentioning other consequences (not harming someone, crashing your car, etc) you can ride home many many times for the economic cost of a DUI. A tip for you young drinkers: as much as it will kill you to not stay until close, you always want to leave 20-30 minutes before the bar closes so you can get a cab. Try getting one in a busy area around 2:30 on a Saturday, ain't happening. At 2:00, though, you waltz right up and cruise home.

Definitely call them so it's documented in their system. That would hopefully help you get things sorted out quicker if it all goes bonkers. Also, they may be able to tell you if that may indicate a real hacking of your account and be able to lock it up if need be before someone goes wild with your card number.

Are there actually people that don't know the drill by the time they turn 21 these days? Plenty have been drinking for a while, but it's rare that you meet one who isn't a near-abstainer that knows how to handle themself. Might partially be a product of them having to drink in hiding with other kids who also don't understand when to quit or how much will make you vomit. Drinking was always a pretty out-in-the-open kind of thing in my family, so I had lots of examples of how to party for extended periods without getting stupid.

If you plan on drinking, please take a little time to learn the drill before going hog wild. By that, I mean take some time to learn your limits and tolerance before going out and drinking too much and ending up like a puddle on the floor. Nobody likes the amateur who ruins the night by puking and getting kicked out of the bar by 11:00.

Quite similar to Guns Germs and Steel, but it's a more in-depth analysis of the causes for the collapse of societies. Generally, we again find fragile environments, lack of resources, profitability of trade (either the society is exploited or itself exploits unsustainable resources for short-term windfalls), war, and unsustainable production as the reason societies disappear. The analysis of why Norse Greenland failed while the Inuit survive there is really interesting.

Thats not to bad of a deal, I mean what are we paying Hoffman, Like almost 8 million? Unlike Hoffman, who has been decent but not great in 3 of the last 17 otherwise-great seasons, Rodney has been pretty mediocre for 3 straight years. The past couple of years suggest that there's a good chance that Seth McClung can probably do better than Rodney, and be had for way less. As a reliever, McClung has had ERA's of 3.67 and 3.95 over the last 2 seasons while Rodney has been 4.91 and 4.40, plus Seth is 4 years younger.

How is he throwing, and how good of an idea do you have regarding his physical and mental health? He's had one out of the last three years where he was worth anything. If you were paying him that rate since 2007, you'd have spent $16.5M on 22 very good starts and a lot of trying to fill the hole with whoever else you can find at whatever you had to pay. He's a good guy to gamble on, but you have a very real shot of seeing a very small return on your investment, and better have a decent #6 starter.

Mothership, your post fails to bring one thing to light. It's Melvin's job to build a team!! I think we're now talking about different things. I give Melvin no free pass on failing to acquire decent players. There's no "avoid my wrath free card" on the Suppan and Gagne signings. I do, however, give him a pass on not trading Hall, Hardy, and Hart at the end of what history showed to be a great season before a big drop-off. With a magic crystal ball, you could have a fantastic team, and we'd have taken Berkman and Utley instead of Peterson and Morrow the year after taking Halladay instead of Jenkins and then taking Sabathia instead of Gold the next year. You can only fault someone for making or not making a move based on the information available at the time. If a move made great sense at the time, we can't go back and rip someone for making it, even if it ended in disaster. the Wolf signing basically only replaces Looper Wolf's career ERA as a starter is .63 below Looper's. As unhappy as we all were with him last year, Looper's another move that hard to fault in a vacuum. While we needed another starter on top of Looper, getting a guy who looked like he'd be a 4.5-4.75-ish ERA pitcher over 180 IP or so for that price is not bad.

Why does it always have to be "fall apart next year" with you poeple? I say again it's not about a player's production going south at all, it's about filling an organizational need and giving value to get value. I have no problem with the idea of trading strengths for weaknesses: that's something people can reasonably and objectively determine. I do have a problem with everyone who thinks we should have traded players "at their peak" as if they knew at the time that said season would be their peak. It's the same as looking back at GM stock and wondering why everyone didn't sell when its price was high. People mis-predict players' peak values the same way they do with stocks, because we only have data on past performance and no magic powers to predict where the value will be in the future.

The problem with all this talk of "peak value" is that it's only descriptive (after the fact) and not predictive. How do we know when a player's value has peaked? Should we have traded Prince after he hit 50 homers, when should we trade Braun, and what about Gallardo? Any of these guys could fall off a cliff next year and never have the value they do now, so we should trade them, right? Problem is, we'd be trading them for guys who could also fall off a cliff, and their value may never be as high as it is now. On the other hand, our guys who appear to be peaking, can easily have another great season, and this replication makes them more valuable to teams who'd trade for them. Had Hardy posted an .830 OPS last year, we now have a commodity we can trade for a bit more than the previous year. Sure, it would have been fantastic in hindsight to trade Corey Hart after his .892 OPS in 2007, but who knew he'd fall apart? Look at the guy's minor league numbers, and at age 25 he looked like a rising star. Ryan Braun has similar numbers at age 24, and if you'd have predicted him to fall apart, you'd now look like an idiot. Sure, we can look at McGehee and say his production is unlikely to match 2009's, so we'll guess he's at peak value, but we're guys who post on a website in our free time, while baseball teams (as often as they make dumb moves) have guys that know way more baseball than we do, I don't think we know something they don't. Nobody is going to ignore his history and give us the same return as they would for a guy with .859 OPS production over multiple years. I'd like for those who rant and moan about missing out on trading players at peak value to post a list of players who will fall apart next season even though there's nothing in their numbers to suggest they'll fall apart. Tell me who the next stud 26 year-old SS to fall apart will be. Which young all star OF will turn to garbage? If someone here has this predictive ability, I'll take their criticisms of failing to trade at peak value seriously.

I'm not a Gamefly member, I just buy their used games. One thing to be wary of, though, is that they switched from USPS to Fedex when shipping used games. Sounds OK, but they require signature for delivery. Makes it a pain in the butt when you're at work all day. They told me to go pick the package up at the office 48 miles away. I politely told them that they'll just come back after 6:00 someday, and they did. I ain't driving 96 miles to save 10 bucks on video games. Off on a tangent, UPS is way better than Fedex.

I just bought a 360 on Monday and have thus completed the trifecta of current generation consoles. Time to buy games. Luckily, gamefly is running some sweet end of the year deals on used games right now.

I was thrilled when I went to Japan and could get Cuban tobacco, and at a very reasonable price. Cohiba cigarettes were like $4 a pack, and a pack of 5 H. Upmann corona-ish cigars was $15. Thus, I had a smoking relapse.

I just finished Jared Diamond's Collapse about 2 weeks ago (fantastic, but not quite as great as Guns Germs and Steel), and am now close to halfway into Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth. I rarely ever read fiction, it's generally behaviorism, skepticism/pseudoscience, evolution, and anthropology stuff for me.

Was that Swing Right in Banbury Place, Al? I remember going to one like that growing up, but can't remember which one.

I too am happy with windows 7. Other than not having easily-accessible direct paths to files (e.g., just being able to easily open c/documents/mymusic/filename), it's been superior to previous versions in my opinion.

The appropriate legal status or addiction potential are irrelevant. The issue is whether or not he can change his behavior to conform to an explicit rule. My employer explicitly prohibits me from having facial piercings. Nothing illegal or immoral about it, but no matter how much I want to get a facial piercing (I don"t), I have to conform to company rules if I want to keep my job. I'm also prohibited from using tobacco, to which I'm addicted, while I'm at work. I like my job, and know the consequences for ignoring the rule, so even though I don't like it, I go without tobacco for the day. Jeffress simply must realize that he's employed in a business with rules that he has to obey, and that the payoff for obedience is very, very big, so is the penalty for disobedience. You can argue that your company should change their rules, but if you want to keep your job, you need to behave according to the rules in place. Like everyone else here, I'm wishing Jeffress the best, as he has the potential to have a giant impact on our favorite team. However, if he fails another test, I won't be really sad to see him go. If an employee ignores rules, even when they know it will get them fired, I doubt they have the capacity and discipline needed to be great at their job. It shows that they either have a huge attitude problem and will continue to cause problems, or just don't care about their job at all, and will not put in the required effort.

Absolutely. Offer him jack squat with generous bonuses for starts and see if he bites.