I took great pleasure in calling out Scott Boras and his loathsome behavior during game 4 of the World Series in my last post. It turns out the COO of Major League Baseball agrees with me! Check the AP article.
"There was no reason to make an announcement last night other than to try to put his selfish interests and that of one individual player above the overall good of the game," DuPuy said.
I could not be happier that the powers that be in major league baseball essentially slapped Scott Boras in the mouth. He needs to learn that the world of major league baseball does not revolve around him, but rather, allows him to make millions of dollars for being a dick. Don't push it Boras, no one likes you to begin with.
It's official... The Boston Red Sox are the 2007 World Series Champions! I don't really have an angle for this post, but I could not let this awesome occasion go without some comment.
My favorite moment from the series clinching game 4? It was the eighth inning and I looked up to see an unfamiliar batter in the box. Before I could figure out who it was, the man swung at the first pitch and crushed it out of the park. Seconds later, I figured it out. BOBBY KIELTY! Absolute 100% awesomeness.
I'll probably more touch on this later... stay tuned!
P.S. Scott Boras, and Alex Rodriguez by extension, are an affront to everything good about baseball. I've never particularly cared for either of these two individuals, but to interrupt tonight's World Series game with some bullshit announcement about A-Rod was totally unprofessional. Boras just wanted to steal the thunder of baseball's biggest event to serve himself. This move was the equivalent of Scott Boras running on stage during a best-selling Broadway musical during the climax and shouting at the top of his lungs "Hey look at me and how important I am!" Douchebaggery at it's finest. F#&% Boras!
BOSTON, Mass., October 24, 2007 - Earlier this evening during a sporting event at Fenway Park, the Colorado Rockies were the victim of an "external malicious attack", according to a Rockies spokesperson Jay Alves. Although authorities had not yet been contacted, the Rockies spokesperson claimed they had not only one, but two suspects.
"The two main suspects in tonight's attack are Josh Beckett's absolutely fantastic pitching and the entire Red Sox lineup's ability to mash baseballs at will. Even that midget rookie Padroia make us look foolish. We were confident that we were prepared, but nothing can prepare you for the 8.5 million hits we received from the Red Sox' bats in just under three and one-half hours," said Alves.
This is not the first time the Rockies have experienced such an attack. However, they remain optimistic.
Alves continued, "The Rockies hope to resume being good at baseball tomorrow at 8 p.m. ET."
Several Rockies fan's we spoke to were not as optimistic about the situation.
"We've seen how the Rockies operate when they try to 'resume' anything the day after an 'external malicious attack'. I fully expect more headaches and dissatisfaction from the entire Rockies organization. If history proves anything, it proves that they are clueless," said die-hard Rockies fan Pat Marmenter.
Pat spoke to us while looking at Rockies World Series tickets on Ebay.com. Although obviously opinionated, it was hard to understand him clearly through all the cursing.
First off, I would like to congratulate the Colorado Rockies. Not the team, but rather the team's management and administration. I wish you congrats on being not only the laughing stock of the baseball world, but the technology world as well. Oh and also a big congratulations on managing to piss of every would-be World Series ticket purchaser in sight. Well done. I'll continue as soon as the steady stream of sarcasm flowing off the preceding statements slows to a slow drip.... ok there we go.
In case you missed this whole ordeal, let's do a quick summary of the events before I delve into some or the more asinine aspects of the situation. On Wednesday 10/17 the Rockies announced that they had cancelled a lottery drawing to be held in Denver at multiple locations in favor of selling tickets on-line only. On Monday 10/22, tickets went on sale at 10 a.m. Mountain Time. By 10:05 the web servers handling the sales had completely crashed. About 2 hours later, the Rockies announced that ticket sales had been cancelled. They then strung fans along for the rest of the day, essentially calling press conferences to announce that they will make an announcement sometime later in the day.
These press conferences for future press conferences were met with great derision from local media. Finally, at around 9 p.m, the Rockies announced that they had been the victim of an "external malicious attack", and that ticket sales would resume the next day at 12 p.m.
Noon on the 23rd came and went, and most fans experienced the same headaches that they had encountered the day before: molasses-like load times, repeated server time outs, and a general sense that they had been fucked... again, this time with even more bullshit press conferences. Now for some more specific highlights: Everything in italics is a quote from the Colorado Rockies.
The Lead-In
"It's our attempt to get as many tickets to as many Rockies fans as possible."
"We have certain safeguards, no doubt about it. We have firewalls in place, we're certainly confident, comfortable they're going to do the job."
I feel like I could write an SNL "REALLY?!" segment with this material. So in order to get as many tickets to Rockies fans as possible, you open up ticket sales EXCLUSIVELY to a WORLD-WIDE audience AFTER everyone in the Northeast knows the Red Sox will be playing against the Rockies? Really? Good thinking Rockies President Keli McGregor. And thank goodness you guys are protected against external malicious attacks from hackers... bless those awesome firewalls and safeguards!
Ticket Sales Day One
"Right now we're shutting the system down .... We expect to be online at some point."
Really? Your website will in fact be online at some point?! That's great news... I was worried that the Internet had been broken beyond repair and we would never have the privilege of visiting the Rockies site again! Tragedy averted!
"We're as frustrated and disappointed as they (the fans) are."
Fuck you talking head Jay Alves. You and your whole family have tickets and awesome parking for EVERY SINGLE GAME. You aren't as frustrated and disappointed as the average fan, and every time you spew this lie, you only make people more angry.
Ticket Sales Day Two
"The online system, after a slow start, certainly worked very, very well for us. Tickets are selling smoothly at a rate of more than 1,500 per minute"
Worked very well huh? That must be why your website landing page specifically instructed me NOT TO REFRESH or I would lose my place in line. The only problem being that after the landing page reached its specified refresh time, the connection timed out OVER AND OVER again. I experienced this over 100 times on my own computer. Sounds like it worked very well.
Are you sure on that figure of 1500 tickets per minute Mr. Rockies spokesman? Really?! You don't want to double check that on a calculator or anything? OK, suit yourself.
It's math time sucka!
The Rockies say tickets were selling smoothly at a rate of more than 1,500 per minute on Tuesday. Games 3 and 4 (Saturday and Sunday) were sold out by 2:15 p.m. and Game 5 was sold out in the next half hour.
That makes the overall sales time at 2 hours and 30-ish minutes. That would equal a total of 150 total minutes of ticket sales time. So using the Rockies estimates, the should have sold 225,000 tickets (1500 tickets x 150 minutes). Okay... this would be just fine except for one small detail: There were roughly 54,000 tickets available. But I am willing to give to Rockies the benefit of the doubt. Lets assume the Rockies' claim of a "slow start" was legit. Let's cut that 150 minutes down to 60... (1500 tickets x 60 minutes)... that equals 90,000 tickets. Just shy of DOUBLE the amount of tickets that were available. So not only can the Rockies not handle ticket sales for a major event, then can't even do simple math. Either that, or they are misrepresenting the facts. I guess this explains the past decade of Rockies baseball.
The Aftermath
From NBC Denver:
"The FBI and Denver Police say Rockies have not contacted them about attack"
Because that's exactly what you do when millions of dollars of revenue are threatened by an "external malicious attack". In case you are taking notes, not only do you not contact the FBI, you definitely don't contact the local police department if your multi-million dollar business is a victim of cyber attack. What's that you say? Whatever you do, DO NOT contact the authorities. Resume sarcasm drip. Ed. note: It was reported on 10/25 that the Rockies had filed a federal complaint with the FBI. But this post is too sweet to remove anything!
Stay tuned for some more updates regarding the foolish actions of the Colorado Rockies front office.
Over the last few years, I had the pleasure of living in Boulder's University Hill area. Although renowned for it's party first ask questions later attitude, I was fortunate to score a place on the western edge of "The Hill", six or seven blocks away from raging frat parties, Halloween riots, and general mayhem. Generally it was a great place to live. A nice mix of party proximity and quiet neighbors. One of the cool things was being able to experience the wildlife that descended from the steep terrain into our yards. Elk, deer, and fox were a regular sight in the Hapgood St. 'hood. I even saw a couple of black bears (one cub and one small young adult bear). For such a densely populated area, I always felt it was kind of a cool thing to have nature so close.
Which brings us to tonight. After leaving a party at Meaghan's house (which is right next to my old house at 500 Hapgood), I walked outside with my friend Alex.
"What kind of animal is that?," he asked, pointing north up Jay St.
I turned to look down the street and saw an animal crossing the road. Despite being close to 100 yards away, I immediately sized up the creature.
"Deer," was my initial reaction, based solely on the animals size. An instant recalculation later and it was obvious.
"A MOUNTAIN LION!," Alex yelled.
He was correct. The shoulder-swaying stalk-walk gave it away. It was a cougar. And it was frighteningly enormous.
For some reason, I've always been of the opinion that if I were ever to be attacked by a mountain lion, I would stand a pretty good chance of fighting it off with my own two hands. After my experience this evening, I can assuredly tell you, with a full grown cougar, the odds are NOT in your favor. It's hard to describe how you feel the first time you encounter a wild animal in an uncontrolled situation that can easily kill you. Even from 300 feet away in the dark the fight or flight reaction goes into full effect, and I don't even think the cougar saw us.
The second I got home I checked out the Wiki entry for cougars, and I can't help but feel that the animal we encountered was pretty close to the upper estimate for general cougar size. From Wikipedia.com:
After watching Julio Lugo ground out into another inning-ending double play, I decided that I officially despise him. So much so in fact, that I decided to look up his post season stats for the Red Sox this season. And guess what? He is atrocious! He would pretty much have to hit grand slams at every at-bat for the rest of the season for me to change my mind. Check out the numbers, and if you are a Sox fan, try not to write Lugo hate mail.
Thanks to everyone who contacted me about the site being down. It's nice to know that people check it out. The payment info I had on file with my hosting company had not been updated, resulting in my domain and hosting plan expiring. All is well now, but I do have to mention that if you are looking for a hosting company, I do not recommend IPOWERWEB. Although my three year tenure with them has been uneventful up until this point, I had to make several calls to get the site back up AFTER my initial call to pay them. Turns out one of their servers melted down, and the notes from my initial call had been incorrectly flagged, resulting in my site not being restored, bla, bla, bla. In addition, the calls I made to them had an average hold time of about twenty minutes. And I called at different times of the day in each incident. So here's looking forward to another uneventful year with IPOWERWEB. OK back to the point of this whole thing...
I was sitting around the other day thinking about how I wanted to buy something nostalgic, basically anything that reminded me of being a kid. Around the same time, I realized that I wanted a reliable container to take my lunches to work. And then it hit me: Ghostbusters lunchbox from the 80's! I excited fired up the trusty laptop and directed my request to Ebay. SEARCH: ghostbusters lunchbox. RESULTS: 3. So I click on the first one that looks nice. I immediately went for the larger view of the pictures. Out of three pics, the first two were standard shots, but the third picture caught my eye mostly because I couldn't figure out what it was. Clearly it was the inside of the lunch box; perhaps a closeup of a crack or broken piece. So I click on it and what do I see?
Yes, it is for real... the random link to the random lunch box that I randomly searched for has my first AND middle name inscribed on the inside of it. I was awe struck. I HAD to win it. It was destiny. So I did. For $11. I love Ebay. See below for more pictures!
