Sharon's having a boy! Alan saw his "boy part" on the ultrasound.

The audience is listening

Cool Slashdot thread about burning AC-3 CD-R's.

What I'll miss watching in baseball

If players go on strike, here are a few things I'll miss watching:

Kevin Brown torquing his body to throw some of the filthiest pitches around, sinkers that drop down and sideways like lead buzzsaws.
Andruw Jones, the human web gem, chasing, or really gliding, down flyballs in center field
Roy Oswalt pitching. His stuff and his attitude are filthy. All sharp, hard, severe, from his pitching motion to his pitches. Contrast that to...
Greg Maddux pitching. Smooth, subtle, watercolor painting both sides of the plate with pitches that are fluid and always in motion. Contrast that to...
Curt Schilling pitching. Once he got control of his power pitches, he became that rarest of breeds, the power-control pitcher, like Roger Clemens. Or Pedro Martinez. All 3 have so many weapons that when they're on it's really unfair for hitters. A 96 mph fastball with location is mean enough, but if you follow that up with a splitter just above knees that drops into the dirt or a slider on the outside lower corner of the plate that looks like a fastball until it takes a hard turn down and left, that's cruel and unusual.
Barry Zito's overhand curve, especially when there's a pair of knees buckling on the other end.
Barry Bonds at bat. I've never seen anyone so locked in at the plate for such an extended period of time. If you throw a bad pitch anywhere near the strike zone Barry will hit a home run. He has, late in his career, adopted more of an upper cut type of swing to produce more fly balls, but it's not a long, loopy uppercut. It's a compact, uppercut swing with massive torque generated by keeping his weight back and opening up his hips hard and rotating his upper body off an axis from his head down his front leg. Kerry Wood versus Barry Bonds was the most exciting at bat of the year. Wood went after him with several 99mph fastballs, and then punched him out with an unhittable 12 to 6 overhand curve. Second most exciting at bat was Randy Johnson striking out Todd Helton to end a game. He blew him away with three straight fastballs of 100mph, 101mph, and 102mph.
Vladimir Guerrero firing a cannon out of deep right field to nail a runner at the plate. The most exciting player in baseball.

Maybe the owners and players don't enjoy those things as much as I do, because apparently billions of dollars aren't enough to keep all that going.
Oh well, thank goodness for football. I just participated in my first ever rotisserie football draft, so I'm all ready for Sunday pigskin action.

Z4

The new BMW Z4 roadster.
Roadsters scream mid-life crisis, or pampered wife. They're glorified go-carts.