Half Dome Hiking

Well, Half Dome week has finally arrived. This is the week where my brother, sister and I will charge up the Yosemite icon.

We've prepared for this hike with almost two months of progressively harder practice hikes. Yesterday, we charged up Mission Peak in Fremont twice (12 mi, ~5000 ft elevation gain). We've previously adventured to Mount Diablo and our favorite prep hike at Big Basin. It has been great to get out and see a lot more of the North Bay. We're very lucky to have all of the mountains around us, my brother had to train on the Bunker Hill Monument. Walking up and down that in a hot, humid Boston summer is not too fun!

The Prep Hikes:

Big Basin

Mount Diablo

Mission Peak

Please note that in between these hikes, all of the clothes were washed.

There are two events that could make things dicey for us. The first risk is thunderstorms. You don't want to be on top of a very tall mountain when there is lightning. The second risk is this fire that is burning through the park. If it isn't contained today, I would assume there is a good chance it won't be contained by next Monday. Right now the forecast for the next few days is "patchy smoke".

There will definately be some Half Dome pictures up next week!

Love that Crazy Crab

Crazy Crab Night is in the books. The Giants lost badly to the Brewers but the loss hurt a little less because we were able to visit with Crazy Crab. Here is our picture with the crusty crustacean at our exclusive pregame party.


I've met some famous people in my life, but none lived up to the hype more than Crazy Crab. He was an ornery shellfish, who criticized us for enjoying our delicious crab sandwiches while eating his brothers. I've never seen a mascot that talks back. Of course, most mascots don't wear Air Jordans either.

In person, he was a bit smaller than I would imagine. By far the most impressive feature was his eyes, which are black disks mounted on nails so the swing around when he moves. I also enjoyed the Giants hat stapled to his head.

There was disappointingly little Crazy Crab in the actual game. He almost made out with Lou Seal on "Kiss Cam" and he danced at the 7th inning stretch. At about the 5th inning, he made a defiant dash across the infield. Unfortunately, I only got the run from 3rd to the dugout.



If it looks like the guy who shot that video might have been drinking, you either could be on to something or it might have just been shot using a cheap point and shoot camera that is really hard to hold steady.

Over all, it was one of the funnest games I've seen at AT&T park. My enjoyment had to do more with the the good company, Crazy Crab, and catching the Silver Bullet train than the game. Long live Crazy Crab!

Ray Durham: a good Giant, a good trade

Today, Ray Durham was traded to Milwaukee for high minor league left-hander Steve Hammond and low minor league outfielder Darren Ford. This was a good deal for the Giants and for Durham and signals that the white flag has been raised on 2008 for the Giants. The team was slumping going into the All-Star break and is still slumping and it is time to pull the plug and dump some veteran players.

Ray is now in the middle of a pennant race on a good team. He should be in a position to be a role model for Ricky Weeks and get significant playing time off the bench or at second base. That should be a much better situation than a team that was trying to find a way to push him out of the lineup in favor of younger players.

Impressively, the Giants held on to Durham long enough for his value to jump up to a point where they could unload him without having to eat salary. It is estimated they saved $3M in this transaction/salary dump.

Neither of the prospects are can't miss guys, but you can't expect too much when the main reason for moving a player is to get salary relief and open up playing time for other guys. Ford is supposed to be an athlete who needs to learn how to play baseball. I'm always a bit skeptical about these sorts of projects, but we'll see in 2-3 years how he's ended up.

Durham was a very good Giant. He came over as a lead-off hitter and left as a number 3 or 5 guy in a weak lineup. I admire his professionalism and his ability to hit well this year after a tough 2007. He made a lot of great plays for the Giants and I thank him for the memories and wish him best of luck in Wisconsin.

Crickets in Campbell

I live in Campbell, CA. While being the greatest town in the South San Francisco Bay Area, is not exactly one with nature. I find it interesting that on summer nights when I sleep with the window open, I'm serenaded by crickets chirping. It makes it seem like I'm camping in spite of being in the middle of suburbia. Very bizarre.

In case you've never seen crickets chirping, I will prove that you can find absolutely everything on YouTube:

Crazy Crab Day is upon us!

Crazy Crab Day is now just 24 hours from being a reality. I've got a crew of 7 to travel on Caltrain to the game tomorrow. I'm very pumped about this. I'll do everything in my power to have a picture with Crazy Crab on this blog in the very near term.

Today, I'll leave you with some important Crazy Crab links to help you prepare:

My previous thoughts on Crazy Crab
Rehab the Crab!
Crazy Crab's MySpace page

Giants and the Brewers tomorrow! We get to see two of the game's top pitchers, Cain and Sabathia. As they say, there are still good seats available. It's been way too long since I've been to a baseball game.

Cut a watermellon in half with your umbrella

Budweiser goes on European Holiday

A great American has moved to Europe. Budweiser has been purchased by the Belgian brewer Stella Artois. This was the biggest business headline today that had nothing to do with the housing crisis.

I'll be honest, I'm a fan of Stella Artois. Its light and easy to drink. It's a nice expensive beer. I think the whole world would be better off if we all drank European beer.

The funny thing that has people up in arms is the fact that Budweiser's image is that of America. They spend a lot of money selling themselves as being as American as apple pie and Uncle Sam. They try to market themselves as a working man's beer as well. Apparently, a lot of folks believe this.

This Midwestern guy would like Stella Artois to "kiss his glass".


I liked this guy's line: "This Bud's for EU".

This really shows how much people buy into marketing. Is Anheuser-Busch really American because they sell their beer in ballparks, have dogs and horses in their ads, and an eagle flying through an "A" on their label? Is this any worse than any other American corporation being sold abroad?

One funny thing we found while we were in Prague was that there is a real Budweiser that is a oh-so-delicious Czech pils. If you ever find yourself in

A friend of mine said a case of Budweiser costs 5 dollars more than a case of Coors in the state of Missouri. Apparently, everyone still drinks Budweiser. I guess if you've done that your whole life, I give you permission to "have a drink with Mother Freedom and tell InBev to kiss your 'glass". For me, I'll take the Coors and save the 5 bucks to buy a Stella on tap.

Firefox 3: Much faster HTML rendering

According to the the user tracking software I use for this site, more than half of you users use some kind of Firefox. If you don't use it, you should check out the latest version of Firefox that has been released in the past month.

If you've never used anything other than Internet Explorer, its probably worth experimenting a bit. Installing a new web browser is as easy as going to a website, downloading some software and installing it. There are various comparisons between browsers as well as some picture based browser comparisons.

I've slowly migrated from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 on my various Windows machines at work and home and I'm happy with the changes.

The major new feature that I'm happy about is faster HTML rendering. Pages appear much faster than they did with version 2. Firefox 2 also used up tons of memory (and it likely was wasteful with this memory consumption). Pages appear at least a half of a second faster per page than they did with Firefox 2. There is also a nice new user interface with pretty buttons.

Happy browsing. If you haven't upgraded yet (and almost 80% of you Firefox users have not), click through and enjoy the painless upgrade. If you are still and IE user, give open source web browsers a try and download Firefox!

A Spring Awakening

I'm now going to alienate my core readers and blog about Broadway. Why blog about the Great White Way right now? Well, I went on a trip to New York in the spring and I've been too lazy to get around to blogging about it.

I've seen some musical theater in my day, and it was nothing like Broadway. Broadway is just a bit better in every way compared to regional theater.

I saw two shows, Young Frankenstein and Spring Awakening. Young Frankenstein the musical was a lot like Young Frankenstein the movie. If you liked the movie, you'll probably like the musical unless you don't like music.

Spring Awakening was an amazing show. The lighting was the best I've ever seen and the music was great. You can get a plot synopsis here. The book was adapted from a German play from the early 1900's. If you want to summarize the plot in one sentence, it is about a bunch of sexually repressed youths coming to sexual maturity. If you don't think that plot synopsis would interest you, you won't like the musical. This isn't Annie or anything The King's Academy would present.

This is the clip from the Tony Awards a year ago when they won the Tony for Best Musical. The lyrics have been altered dramatically so it can be put on public television.



I was fortunate enough to see the show when most of the original Broadway cast (OBC) was still doing 8 shows a week.

Watching Broadway is one of those only in New York experiences. If you get a chance to spend time on Manhattan, do yourself a favor and stand in the tkts line and go watch some Broadway!

The Giants win the NL West! (10% of the time)

The latest ESPN.com MLB standings have added three more columns. In addition to all of the regular stuff that has been printed in the newspapers for ages, they now have three new columns corresponding to the probability a given team will win the division, win the wildcard, or simply make the playoffs.

You can read more about how these probabilities were computed here. They are generated by coolstandings.com. They claim to be accurate based on running historical data through the proprietary determined by coolstandings.

The core to their standings depends on the concept of expected wins. Expected wins are computed based on a teams run differential. The more runs you score than you give up and the more games you should win. The ESPN.com standings have a +/- run differential for each team. You can tell that run differential doesn't correlated perfectly with teams that win. At the time of this writing, Tampa (+78) and Boston (+76) have more or less the same run differentials, but Tampa is up 5 games on Boston. Last year, Arizona made the playoffs in spite of being outscored. However, historically, if you score a lot more runs, you win a lot more.

All of the above is designed to take us back to our heroes, the San Francisco Giants. They are given a 9.9 percent chance of making the playoffs! That is about 9.9 percent higher than I thought it would be in April. They are 5 games back of two teams

The Giants have the advantage of playing in a very weak division. The Dbacks are slumping badly. The Rockies and Padres have been huge disappointments. The Dodgers have had a lot of injury issues. I still thing 9.9 percent is a bit high. The Giants probably aren't going to get much better than they are right now. Their whole team is more or less healthy and their pitchers are throwing well right now.

We'll see how this all shakes out in September, but forgive me if I'm skeptical about this sort of thing.

Ian Ayres likes to blog about all things prediction. I'm just as skeptical of everything he writes about but a lot of it is good food for thought. Should we be able to know putt probabilities or rebound rates? Its pretty clear to me that this guy doesn't play sports at a high level.