Hello gang. I will be in D.C. this weekend visiting friends and a city I haven't seen since 8th grade (342 years ago). Should be a good time. I'm bringing the camera so expect some photos when I return. Just don't expect me to post them before October.

From the most recent NY Times/CBS Poll (dated 4/27/04):

It is still May and we have six more months until the election, but that makes me very nervous.

Well, I just changed web hosts. You'll only see this when the name servers change.

If you see anything that is amiss, please let me know.

Update: I seemed to have moved. Email is a little wonky right now, but I can still receive it. Just know that I might have trouble getting back to you today. Oh, and I know about that isse on the right side. Not sure what the problem is.

Hmm: Ok, it seems to be working now. Everything's a go on my end. Wheeeeeee.

Details: Matt requested to know who I'm hosting with, so here you go. I'm using Midphase Hosting, per the recommendation of Web Host Magazine. I'm getting 1.7GB of space (although cPanel claims my space is unlimited), 55 GB/month of bandwidth, two hosted domains and all the other goodies (PHP, MySQL, etc.) for $9.99/mo. So far so good as my account was set up in 20 minutes and everything is up and work less than 24 hours later.

The last few days there has been a lot of press about the death of former NFL player Pat Tillman. He died in combat while serving in Afghanistan. From all accounts, he seems to have been a great man who decided to serve his country instead of play football professionally. I think that's quite honorable.

The problem I have is that Tillman's death has gotten so much press. It's clear the reason for the focus on him over other GIs who have died in the line of duty is his time in the NFL, but I think that's wrong. In fact, while reading an obituary of sorts from Newsweek, I found out that he didn't even want any notoriety for his service.

So, it is frustrating to see his name plastered all over the news solely because he started on an NFL team. Newsweek said, "But Tillman's death is a startling billboard of grief, a reminder that these lost soldiers—all of them, famous or not—had so much left to give." I understand and appreciate this, but I think there are probably equally interesting stories of soldiers who had some desire to be eulogized by the media.

Yes, it's been quiet around here lately. Instead of apologizing or whatever, I'll let you know that most of my mental energy has been focused on the Chicago Cubs. I am completely and totally obsessed at the moment. I just called to see about ticket availability for the Cubs/Mets series in September. The difference in time is a little crazy, but then I felt a little dumb when the girlfriend reminded me that this is Shea Stadium, where a game hasn't sold out in something like 500 years. Okay, maybe I need to cool out a little but when your team has won six in a row and given up only five runs during that stretch, I think you're allowed a little excitement.

This weekend also brought us the NFL Draft. The Bears beefed up their defensive line, which is exactly what they needed. I'm excited for next season already. Let's hope Lovie Smith can bring these boys together.

Those are all of the "bear" stories I have for you. Before I go, you should know that 24 is the best show on television and tail lights are capable of spontaneously popping out of your car, causing you to have to get the fixed the following day.

As I've mentioned, my birthday has come and gone. I have yet to mention any of my gifts. The reason for this is that I have not received anything tangible yet. All of my gifts for both my birthday as well as Hannukah were in the form of a check or cash. See, I've been saving up to get myself one of these beasts and a 20-inch display to accompany it. As you may guess, they don't come cheap, so I've been trying to get money together and I'm about 85% of the way there. I can buy the beast, but not the monitor...yet.

On top of that, Apple has yet to actually release the second revision of the G5 PowerMacs, which I'm waiting for anyway. So that's a bit of a snag.

I know I'll be ecstatic when the computer arrives at my apartment, but in the meantime I'm lacking that immediate gratification I have grown used to on my birthday. The days of unwrapping a huge stack of presents is gone. Granted, it has been gone for about ten years now, but I'm still feeling the loss. It's not the contents of these packages I yearn for, but the act of sitting down with all your friends, ripping open gifts, and ooh-ing at all the new Legos and Micromachines you've acquired. It is a sensation that happens much less often in the adult world and that's unfortunate. Next time a gift-giving event rolls around, I'm going to ask for a whole bunch of small things.

And so I'll offer you the opportunity to come over when I do purchase my PowerMac and watch me unwrap the computer and we can ooh, ahh, eat cake, and cry about getting one less pixi stick than Bobby.

First, thanks for all of the wonderful birthday wishes. On top of all the comments left in the previous post, I also got a number of great birthday wishes and haikus over at the West Wash Blog.

In other news, my baseball kick and playing High Heat 2002 with my cousins inspired me to purchase MVP 2004 for my PS2. It's amazing how far baseball games have come in the last three years or so. The best thing is that I can do roster updates, because a number of lineups have changed significantly since the game locked in their rosters on January 15th, 2004. I'll be sure to give a full review in a couple weeks.

This weekend is looking to be action packed. Last night I signed up for a year-long membership with New York Sports Club and I have a free training session tomorrow at noon. Time to tame the mini-gut. Then I'll have frisbee in Prospect Park, a viewing of Born into Brothels at the MTR Television Documentary Festival, then two parties. Sunday I'll hopefully be seeing Kill Bill vol. 2, but will definitely be going to the Brooklyn Museum and to my birthday party at Lazer Park and Cold Stone Creamery. If you'd like to join me and my pals, let me know.

It should be a good time. Now I'm going to eat half of my five dollar burrito from Pacifico, which was an awesome/cheap restaurant (review forthcoming).

I will not post any multiparagraph stories that end in you finding out I'm a year older. Instead, I am just telling you. It's my birthday.

Wish me a happy birthday. Or else.

Okay, so maybe that was a bit much. Wish me a happy birthday, if you'd like.

First, I am back from Chicago. I was back on Wednesday but didn't really feel like posting. Lo siento to those who came looking for insight on anything.

More importantly, the baseball season has begun. I've been enjoying the first week of games as Time Warner Cable has been showing a free preview of the Extra Innings package, which lets you watch every single game being played. After watching about five games, I'm really tempted to buy the package, but with no roommates who would share the cost with me, $149 is a little steep. Instead, I'm probably going to drop $15 to buy the audio package from MLB.com, where I can listen to every game this season. No visuals, but a much more reasonable price.

I'm quite excited about the Cubs chances this year. Let's just hope there are no major injuries and our offense can start gelling, which will mean more than two runs a game.

It also seems this will be the first year where I'll put effort into following the entire league. On top of the usual sources (games on TV, Baseball Tonight, ESPN.com, etc.), I'll be reading a few baseball blogs. I will continue to read RBI, but will add the Cub Reporter and Baseball Musings. I'll most likely be talking about this more throughout the summer.

Now, I'm going to enjoy this beautiful afternoon before the Cubs game starts at 7.

I've been playing with Kinja for 24 hours now, and I've found it to be useful. At home I use NetNewsWire to check in on the blogs I like, but I don't have the time or desire to look through all of those sites while I'm at work. So, I can use Kinja to keep track of my 10-20 favorite blogs during the day, instead of going to each of the pages individually. As others have said, it's nice to see everything together on a page that actually looks like a weblog.

There are a few things I'd like to see that would be nice additions down the line.

• When I visit someone else's digest, I want to see a list of all the site's they've subscribed to.
• I want to be able to claim my blog and see who is subscribing to it.
• Once users have claimed their weblogs, I'd like to have a link to their digest included with each of their excerpts.
• I realize there are bandwidth issues, but it'd be nice to be able to customize how many excerpts appear on each page.
• Multiple Digests.

That's my list for now, but I expect it to grow over the next few days.

Tomorrow morning I'll be heading back to Chicago with the lady to celebrate Passover with my family. I'll be gone until Wednesday, April 7th.

So, if you know me (or not) and want to meet up, shoot me an email or leave a comment and we'll find a time to meet up. I know I'm definitely going to see Baby Wants Candy at Improv Olymic at 8pm on Saturday night if you're interested.

Oh, this doesn't mean I won't be posting, I just thought you should know so you can flood my answering machine with messages.

Two new web applications were announced today -- Kinja and GMail. The first is live and the second is being privately beta-tested.

Kinja is "a weblog portal, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web." In otherwords, it will parse your favorite sites, blogs or not (theoretically) and give you a digested version. I signed up for a Kinja account to give it a shot. I think it's an interesting concept, even if it's something I probably wouldn't use regularly.

Iniitially, I'm not that impressed. I inputted a handful of sites into my personal digest and checked things out. One of the first sites I added was kottke.org and, ironically, it omitted Jason's most recent post, which happened to be about Kinja. The post has now appeared, but when I added Wired it didn't show up at all. Maybe it takes a little while before it is parsed (Update: Nick Denton emailed to say they spider sites every 4 hours) or maybe I should enter the address of the RSS file. Either way, I found that disconcerting. If this technology is supposed to be for the people, I should be able to just enter the URL and have it work.

What I learned is that I like the concept, but I'm not sure if the technology is there to make this work well. Again, it's not for me as I have way too many blogs I'd want to read, but I can see the need for a service like this.

Update: I received an email from Nick Denton (and a comment from Jason) explaining that news sites aren't meant to work with Kinja. Good to know. I responded to Nick via email by saying:

So I'm happy that everyone has been so helpful, but I would still like more feedback from the system if things don't go as expected.

In regards to GMail, it is Google's new email service. Apparently, you will get 1 gigabyte of space to store your email. I read somewhere that the service will only cost $2 per gigabyte, which Google will recoup through text ads placed in the email. It's scheduled to launch publicly in either a few weeks or a couple months.

I'll definitely sign up and GMail will be the first webmail service I've used in a couple years. I've never loved Hotmail or Yahoo Mail and I have a feeling that GMail will be easy to use. Also, you can't beat a gigabyte of storage space. I do wonder how they'll deal with people that use it as a file server though. If I just keep emailing stuff to my GMail account, I could just keep it there until I need it again. I can't imagine there's an effective way to limit the number of accounts you have either. Despite a few questions, I'm really excited about this.

I do find it odd that both of these were announced on April Fool's Day. I'm still not 100% convinced that GMail is happening, especially since there's no working demo. No matter what, it's fun to talk about.