Monthly Archives: October 2007

The Leopard Ate My FileVault

Fortunately, I backed stuff up before the install, and won’t be much hurt except for the aggravation. Nonetheless, it’s annoying. At this point I’d say it’s unlikely that I’ll turn FV back on when I get the laptop running again. Let’s just say I like the idea better than I like the implementation.

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Minor League Franchise Continuity

I was a season ticket holder in Battle Creek. That’s given me no emotional stake in the successor franchise, Great Lakes–and I rooted against the Springfield and Madison predecessor franchises when they actually existed. I’ve now transferred my loyalties mostly to the Lugnuts, and I root against the Loons.

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Posted in Baseball CrankSpace, History Scrapbook, Rant | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Of Iron Men, and Dubuque Finances

Matching iron man attempts, Bill Bauernfeind of Michigan City and Joe Schaffernoth of Paris opposed each other in both games of a Midwest League double-header, August 21.

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Dear Old Macalester

Every campus has a narrative, and that narrative shapes the college culture. These stories may emphasize unimportant details; they ignore entire decades. Macalester’s, like most, begins with a founder, has a key figure who shaped the college, skips lightly through the decades, mentions some key teachers and graduates, describes a major crisis, and looks brightly to the future. To the best of my ability, here’s the Macalester story.

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Posted in Dear Old Macalester, History Scrapbook | Tagged | 1 Comment

Railroad Fever

The entire nation had the Railroad Fever in 1869. Michigan was nursing two outbreaks: Promoters were raising money to build a more direct line (an “air line”) between Detroit and Chicago which would roughly follow the route of the Chicago Road, and actual construction was occurring for a line connecting Jackson and Grand Rapids. Both remain interesting, for different reasons.

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Posted in Along the Rail Line, Dear Old Macalester, History Scrapbook, Mitten State | Tagged , | 1 Comment

WP Themes: Lessons from Gangway

Within the past week I’ve called LightCMS “well-crafted” (Sreejith is a code artist), Cutline “workmanlike” (Chris Peterson’s a problem solver), and ModernPaper “delightful” (Brian Gardner’s unusually disciplined). Although they’re very different in detail, all use the same basic CSS vocabulary for describing the document. Since I don’t follow the CSS discussions, I don’t know what standards someone’s trying to enforce, but I’ve read enough code in my life to have preferences. CSS is a rather spare coding language, but you don’t need to look at many stylesheets to learn that there are a variety of coding practices (normally I’d call these “styles,” but that would be confusing), and that some of those practices are more readable than others. Gangway’s style sheet fails the readability test.

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WP Themes: Lessons from ModernPaper

Behind the scenes, there’s a slight surprise; Gardner’s used the Home.php page the way most theme designers use Index.php, and Gardner’s Index.php is used like most designers use Single.php. (That realization sent me to the Template Hierarchy, where I convinced myself that the design decision makes sense, though it’s unconventional.) Opening the files to examine the code is delightful: Gardner writes clean, compact, and obvious code, uses XHTML tags as they’re intended, and organizes things well. Needless to say, his CSS files are similarly impressive.

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Rick Patterson

So, where are we? We still need to fill in the gap between his playing career and his managerial career (that one will be hard unless I find the information in a South Bend program), and there are a couple one-year gaps where he was likely on some team’s coaching staff (I can usually solve those). The pitching coach stint looks like I miscopied something, which has happened before. Loose ends: Was he working in baseball this summer? Did Patterson really play in the minors for three years; if so, where and when? And I need a couple biographical details: What do those initials stand for? When and where was he born? (I’m betting on Mobile, probably in 1955 or thereabouts.) Finally, we still need won/lost records for the partial season at Greensboro, his collegiate teams, and the winter league stints; that will be some other year’s project, methinks.

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WP Themes: Lessons from Cutline

Cutline is beautiful, but it’s not the answer I’m looking for. Your mileage may well vary, because this is a very attractive theme; unfortunately, it runs up against some of my strong preferences.

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Autumn, Mulliken Road

Took this on yesterday’s lunch break. Colors are finally changing….

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