Ben’s Blog

We did get moved last weekend. We got completely moved in and unpacked in two days, thanks to the help of the moving guys and our parents. It’s fair to say that we’re more settled in here than we ever were at the old place. We got Luke’s furniture all put together. His room is pretty cute; I’ll have to post some pictures when I get a chance.

Speaking of Luke, he’s still not here. We went back to the doctor on Tuesday and nothing had changed. We go back again next Tuesday. He’s due on the 29th. We’re ready for him to be here, but having another human to care for is a pretty scary proposition. He can take his time as far as I’m concerned. :)

We finally got our Internet connected this afternoon. I didn’t actually miss it that much, but I think Cassie did. Of course I was at work while she was stuck at home all day. We had DSL at the old place, but BellSouth doesn’t offer it at the new place, so we’re having to go with Vista III Media cable internet. It’ll be interesting to see how the two compare.

I got my camera in last week and got to test it out at Brandon’s graduation. I’ll be posting some pictures as soon as I get my monitor calibrated. (More on that later.)

I’m currently listening to the Ole Miss baseball game. Electromagnetic radiation is funny stuff. When I plug the Ethernet cable into the cable modem across the room from the radio, the static on the radio drastically increases. Baseball update coming soon.

Yes, it’s time for your weekly Ole Miss baseball update. Ole Miss won on Friday night and Sunday afternoon to take the series. A three-game sweep would have been nice, but we didn’t play very well on Saturday. My parents came up for the Friday night game. As you can see, it was pretty chilly. I took some pictures as usual, though this time it was with my new Fujifilm F31fd. I’ll do a review of the camera when I get a chance. (More below.)

On Friday night, Ole Miss had a 6-0 lead in the 4th inning, but Georgia cut it to 6-2 in the 5th, 6-4 in the 6th, and took a 7-6 lead with a three-run home run in the 7th. That should have been the end of the story, but Georgia dropped an infield popup to allow Evan Button to score in the 9th, tying it up. In the 13th inning Georgia scored a run in their half of the inning. We managed to score two runs to win 9-8.

It was a sloppy day all around on Saturday. The score was tied 3-3 going into the ninth, but we managed to walk three batters and they got a run off a fielder’s choice. Georgia won 4-3. Lance Lynn pitched a good game, but the defense had three errors, and we were held to five hits.

On Sunday we blasted them 9-0. True freshman Nathan Baker pitched six scoreless innings in his first career SEC start. I suspect we’ll see him again next weekend. Both Bukvich and Rodriguez were given a shot at the Sunday starting spot earlier in the season, but neither one did a great job.

In other SEC baseball matchups, South Carolina took two from Florida, Vanderbilt took two from Alabama, Tennessee took two from Kentucky, Auburn took two from LSU, and Mississippi State took two from Arkansas. MSU taking two from Arkansas is pretty impressive. It was at Fayetteville no less. The SEC standings look very similar to last week. Ole Miss is still tied with MSU for second in the West, one game back from Arkansas. Ole Miss is ranked 16th, 15th, 13th, and 23rd in the four major college baseball polls.

We play Southern Miss Wednesday night in Hattiesburg, and LSU this weekend in Baton Rouge. The Southern Miss game will be tough. We beat them by one run a couple of weeks ago in Pearl, a neutral site. We should take at least two of three from LSU, but one never knows.

• Amusing: I left work a little early today to go get a haircut. I arrived at the barber shop to find a note taped to the door that said, “Gone fishing.” I could probably use an afternoon of fishing myself.
• Weird: FedEx was supposed to deliver a package to our apartment today. It never arrived, so Cassie tracked it. Of course they said it had been delivered. She called FedEx, and they said if it didn’t show up by Monday that we should file a claim. Not very helpful. Cassie suggested we drive around and look for it, as it was likely that FedEx actually delivered somewhere nearby. I thought the probability of us finding it was pretty low, but I was game. We drove through about a dozen apartment complexes on our road looking for packages left on the porch of apartment #3. No luck. We headed toward home, but we spotted a package sitting on the porch of a small apartment fifty yards or so off the highway. It looked like the sort of place one might get shot, especially if you’re taking a package off someone’s porch. I got out of the car and checked the name on the package. Sure enough, it was ours. No one was home, so I just took it. The apartment where FedEx left it was a third of a mile down the road from ours, and on the wrong side of the road. The house number wasn’t even close. Good job FedEx.

Yesterday, NASA launched the New Horizons spacecraft onboard an Atlas V rocket. (NASA, BBC, Wired, CNN) The purpose of the spacecraft is to observe Pluto and its moons and hopefully a Kuiper belt object or two. At the moment, Pluto is the only planet that’s never been visited by a spacecraft.

It will take it about a year for the spacecraft to get to Jupiter, at which point it will use a gravity assist to get its speed up to around 47,000 mph, a little more than thirteen times faster than a rifle bullet. After passing Jupiter it will take New Horizons about nine more years to make it to Pluto. Pluto is about 3 billion miles from Earth.

New Horizons is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. The RTG uses the heat from twenty-four pounds of radioactive Plutonium to produce electricity. Fitting don’t you think?

The BBC has an interesting article about the woman who came up with the name Pluto back in 1930 when she was 11 years-old.

Wow! Now that was a football game. I don’t usually watch football on TV, but I watched this one all the way through. In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, last night the University of Texas Longhorns beat the University of Southern California Trojans 41-38 to win the national championship.

I was pulling for Texas because (a) they were the underdog, (b) I was tired of hearing about how good USC is, (c) Texas is geographically closer to me, and (d) UT has one of the top Computer Science departments in the country and I’d love to get a PhD there if they’d have me. :)

Vince Young was absolutely awesome. When Texas got the ball back with about two minutes left, I had little doubt that Young would find some way to get in the end zone, though I did have my doubts when it was fourth and five. While Young was undoubtedly the best player on the field last night, you have to give a lot of credit to the UT defense. If they hadn’t stopped USC on fourth down with 2:09 left in the game, Young would have never had a chance to score that last touchdown.

I also found out that USC was every bit as good as everyone said they were. Bush even had an off night and they were still nearly unstoppable, especially in the second half.

We lucked out this year, the two best teams in the country did end up playing for the national championship. We could have this kind of national championship game every year if college football would go to some sort of playoff system. It really does make a lot of sense.

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