Hugh's Worthless Blog

Now that the Series is over and the baseball season has come to a close I can get back to more geeky topics. First off, the Mozilla gang has released Release Candidate 1.0 of Mozilla Firefox. The are supposed to release the official version on November 9 with a big full page ad in the New York Times. It should be interesting. A new distro I have been looking at is called Ubuntu and it seems to be a nice Debian distro using GNOME instead of KDE. There is a LiveCD version (a la Knoppix) which I have tested ut which seems a bit more polished than the 0.8 or 0.8.1 versions of gnoppix. They will even send out free CD's to people who register on their site, no shipping charge or anything. Pretty neat. Mandrake has released the official 10.1 release to members only, so it should be hitting mirrors and torrents soon. I now have GMail invites everywhere. If anyone wants an invite, just e-mail me and you can have one. Does anyone actually read this site?

Well, it is all over now. The great Cards team that won 105 games this season and stomped out the Dodgers and Astros didn't show up against Boston in the Series. It was not a pretty site, but the Sox pitchers were definitely in control, and the Cards pitchers and hitters were not. The Red Sox deserved this one for sure!

I must have been cheering too hard for the Sox to beat the Yankees, since now they are beating up on the beloved Cardinals! In Game 1 the Cards were continually catching back up, but last night Schilling put them in a big hole and they couldn't produce many runs even given the errors and runners on base. Well, luckily we will have three games here at home where hopefully the Cards can at least last through to Game 6. However, back in Fenway I feel the Cards' luck may run out. At least the Rams don't have to play the Patriots for a couple weeks! Yesterday the Rams lost in a lackluster game to the previously winless Dolphins. At least they now get a week off to try to regroup before battling the Patriots here at home. Do you think the Rams can beat the Patriots winning streak? Somehow I don't think so...

Oh well, the NLCS is now tied at two games a piece. At least we know it will end here in St. Louis. I still think the Cardinals will finish it off, but it won't be easy. And what about those Red Sox? I went to bed at 10:40pm thinking they were finished, being down a run in the ninth, but when I wake up what a surprise! They ended up with a big win in the 12th off an Ortiz homer. Hey, that's what baseball is all about. I sure don't want to see the Yankees in the World Series, and you never know, the Red Sox just might pull it off. And Boston still has the Patriots. Do they know how to win, or what? The problem with them now is expectations. At this point everyone expects them to make it to the Super Bowl. They probably will, but nothing is ever certain in football either!

Well, the Cards definitely needed to win the first two before going to Houston and facing Clemens and Oswalt. If they can win one of those two I think they will win the series. But it won't be easy. I think the Cards can outhit their bullpen late in the game once they pull their starters, but only if the Astros don't get big leads in the first few innings. At least Matt Morris isn't pitching in Houston, that would really be scary! I really wanted the Red Sox to make it to the World Series too. How can anyone actually want the Yankees to win?

After Saturday's loss, it was good to see the Cardinals return to true form to beat the Dodgers convincingly yesterday. The Dodgers are a class team, though and played hard. I look forward to the NL Championship and then that Cards vs. Red Sox World Series!! The Rams even had a good 4th quarter yesterday. After falling behind by 17 I had already counted them out, but somehow they managed to come back to life and win. Even the defense looked like a real defense in the 4th quarter yesterday. Sometimes they can surprise you. In other news, the campus has settled back down to normal after last week's debate. I think WashU did a good job hosting it, and both candidates did a better job in their delivery on Friday. I will leave out my political commentary, but I thought it was interesting how Bush had an "invitation only" after debate celebration in Queeny Park, but Kerry has an open to the public celebration at the America Center. Bush gave a quick 5 minute talk so ...

Well, my buddy in Southern California still thinks the Dodgers are going to win it in 5 games, but I don't know. The Cardinal bats sure came to life against Perez yesterday. Let's hope they can continue again tomorrow. Bush vs. Kerry II is just a couple of days away here in St. Louis, and I'm ready to hide up at home while the campus becomes a zoo. I've decided to stay home both tomorrow and Friday since they are closing off some important roads and lots on campus. It isn't worth coming into work if it takes an hour to get here and an hour to get out, although I know many people are used to that kind of a commute all of the time. Luckily, with the advent of DSL and voice mail I can get most of my work done from the comforts of home while the Secret Service and CNN can invade campus. On the Linux front Warren and company released version 2004.03 of MEPIS, something new and fun to play with. I have also been updating the Firefox installations around the departme...

Well, as soon as I say the Cardinals are on a roll, they fall into a 4 game losing slump. The starting pitching is really starting to worry me for the playoffs, particularly Matt Morris who has become very inconsistent of late. Luckily, a lot can change in one week, so I hope by next week the Cardinals will all be ready to actually play some ball. It was fun watching the Presidential Debate last night (my daughter had to for school and it was her first full debate!). I don't think the debate will really change too many people's minds, since neither candidate wavered or said anything really stupid. But neither side really hit a big "home run" either. What is really more concerning to me personally, is that it all moves here to St. Louis and, more specifically, here to Washington University next week!! This place will be a zoo, and I won't even bother coming into campus on Friday. It will be better to watch it from home anyway since I am not sure who they are going ...