watching expired appliances align

general random thoughts

i am obsessed with my fantasy baseball team. it's pretty much the only thing i can think about these days. thursday night i'm meeting friends for happy hour (i'll be a bit late, by the way) and i am going to make a most concerted effort to avoid talking about baseball. it will be a challenge.

as of this morning i was 2.5 points out of first place in my twelve person league. on april 30th, with a lead of 4 points, i moved into first place for the first time. i've hovered in and around first place for the past month. i had no inkling my rotisserie team would do so well. on nights that don't involve going out for happy hour drinks i find myself at home obsessively flipping from one baseball game to another. the whole thing is well beyond ridiculous.

(image from 30 april 2004)

on another note, is online poker the new day trading?

filmmaker admits to reading L Magazine

filmmakers are now considered visual artists. i never knew that was in question. but this interview with a guy who was arrested last year for selling dvd's of his work at union square tells a different story. (link via MIT Technology Review)

the kids love their internet

the internet was made for things like FireArtHowe.com. link about the unable to make good decisions mets manager via joel sherman in today's new york post.

wakka wakka wakka

I’ve been meaning to write about blogs and the NY Bloggers Talk event for the past few weeks but haven’t felt like I have anything new to add to the conversation. I jotted down a few paragraphs and realized that I really do have nothing new to add to the conversation. But the paragraphs are written and because I like to make sure I make a post once a month about navel-gazing and how I was into comic books when I was 12, I’m posting the following for your skipping-over pleasure:

A few weeks ago I went to the Apple store in SoHo for the Weblog event set up by Jake of Gothamist (and now Chicagoist?). I got there a little late so I missed some of the conversation between Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton. I did see enough to know that I didn’t miss too much. The event was hyped as some sort of verbal smackdown between two of the leaders in the field of “blogs as business.” That hype was fun and I was curious to hear what these two guys, who have both been around the internet world for years, had to say about their respective companies (Weblogs, Inc. for Calacanis and Gawker Media for Denton). I wish I had been a little closer so that I didn’t miss every tenth word, but their conversation basically boiled down to Calacanis saying blogs, if done right while properly finding thousands of niche publishing areas to fill, can become very profitable in a few years. And Denton responding that he’s not really about that (and then not revealing too much about the financial structure of his company or where he plans to take it).

All of this has been followed up pretty nicely the past few days. Calacanis’ Nanopublishing Weblog pointed me to this story in Business 2.0 about Denton’s business plans. Today I learned about Denton’s own response.

Denton’s response to the Business 2.0 article (and pretty much every other article I read about the popularity of blogs) boils down to media being fascinated with blogs because they’re a type of media. The media loves to talk about and hype the media. That’s understandable. And I think it’s mostly true. Happily, I’m one of those relatively young big-city guys that could read about media all day. This kind of thing fascinates me. Nanopublishing / micropublishing / whatever you want to call it is of interest to me and has been since I was 13 or 14, when I created my first comic book oriented ‘zine. That’s what makes me think niche weblogs can work as a small business. People, especially those in the 14-30 demographic, love navel-gazing. Creating a blog, or commenting on blogs about subjects they are passionate about is a lot of fun!

One thing that wasn’t made especially clear in the conversation between Calacanis and Denton a few weeks ago (that Meg Hourihan briefly touched on during her part in the conversation that night) is that weblogs can alternately go in two separate directions – the niche publishing about select topics (Hollywood, DC politics, gadgets, magazine design) and the intensely personal (of interest to a select group of friends). What’s interesting about those two formats is they way the authors handle information. In the more business oriented blogs, the discussion is formed around links to articles published on the web by others. There is some original reporting, but it doesn’t happen as often. With more personal weblogs, the focus of the writing is often a reaction to the day’s events, or a specific response to universal themes about the human condition (okay, okay, I’m really reaching here). As a heavy reader of blogs, I like both. And there’s room for both on the internet.

Anyway, if you're curious about what others had to say about the event at the Apple Store, Gothamist's Thank You has a full slate of comments and trackbacks. And Jeff Jarvis also has a bunch of links.

people sure are nice

the feel good story of the night

danny graves, a pitcher for the cincinnati reds, lost his wallet while playing on the west coast not too long ago. someone found it and returned it to him. the heartwarming part? graves' $1400 in cash was converted to travelers' checks before the package was sent back to the address on his driver's license (minus shipping costs).

grilling is...

i guess i really am taking this week to catch up on a lot of the photos that i failed to post during the first quarter of 2004 (geez, i really am taking this "balgavy the brand" idea to heart - quarter? what the hell is going on? am i going to start reading the financial times next?)

in february i got a call from chris and mary. they were having friends over for an afternoon of grilling and wine drinking. it was saturday and i wore shorts. and i drank wine. and ate delicious grilled meats. and, if you dig around, you'll notice that i also posed as if i was on the football team. or maybe as if i wanted to be on the track team. either way, i wore shorts. everyone drank a bit of wine and had a blast. i think i recall a quick trip to the local wine merchant where i tried to do alcohol volume vs. price calculations in my head.

here are the photos:

balgavy.com/rotating152.html

partying is...

a long time ago (february), some friends and i went to a party at anne & sheila's place in brooklyn. as usual, i took a few pictures. and, as usual, i'm posting the photos long after the event. i had way too much orange soda and bourbon that night. and alex's photos from that party are a lot better than mine. but check out the ones i took.

here are the photos: balgavy.com/rotating151.html

bowling is...

a long time ago (february), some friends and i went bowling at melody lanes in brooklyn. as usual, i took a few pictures. and, as usual, i'm posting the photos long after the event. maybe i was just upset that i can no longer break 100 at the bowling alley.

here are the photos: balgavy.com/rotating150.html

but are the pretzels any good?

The excellent Doug's Business of Baseball Weblog points to this story about concession stands being staffed by volunteers. during college i volunteered with different groups once or twice at the concession stand during basketball games. it was fun during the first half, but then it got pretty boring. at the professional level, i want my concessions coming from employees making actual money, though.

probably good with an orange soda

jamie of whatever-whenever just put herself through taco hell and lives to tell about it. she and a friend had a taco eating contest. her report is filled with photos and a good summary of the positives and negatives of hard and soft tacos.

trivia update

kathy is quietly building a "bearded guy" conspiracy theory about why her team didn't win monday night's dr. fact's fifty questions.

kathy, the neuticles lost, too. don't go all oliver stone on us!

took the bus home

it started raining before jim and i stepped off the bus. what a way to end the night. oh, and i lost my pager. i just went out to look for it in the pouring rain.

we came in second in tonight's monthly round of DR. FACT'S NIGHT OF FIFTY QUESTIONS. sparklemotion held the lead at the midway point and never let go. i applaud them for emerging victorious. next month they get to come up with the majority of the questions.

this is what we look like when we lose:

you are as smart as we are

tonight is trivia at buttermilk. i'll be meeting the rest of the neuticles there in time to get a table. trivia starts between 9 and 9:30. i expect to see a few friends there with their own teams trying to take us down before we go on another winning streak.

the oc = good

i can finally have wednesday back. watched the oc tonight with the brooklyn crew (the tv club?) then went out for drinks. we were all happy with the episode. the final montage was excellent. a nice summation to the show - i was especially fond of the shot of ryan in theresa's (teresa's) car and the way it mirrored the shot of him leaving chino. very perfect for the wrap up nature of this episode. but what is up with seth on that boat????? someone please explain to me how he isn't going to die? more tomorrow.

i always wanted to visit

whenever i traveled from my hometown (fredericksburg, va) to my college town (harrisonburg, va) i'd pass mt. pony, just off route 3. it's a big hill that seems to rise out of nowhere, long before you get to the blue ridge mountains. for decades it was the secret back-up home for the federal reserve. it was there in case nuclear war broke out and the money men in d.c. needed to leave the capital yet stay in charge of the nation's currency. i guess the plan was for them to either helicoptor or drive out of washington and hide out in culpeper, virginia. it's good they had the bunker, even if nuclear war never broke out (i worried about it a lot in the 80's, though). there's not much going on in culpeper but at one time there was a tiny bowling alley about half a mile from mt. pony.

anyway, a report from wired news fills the public in on the new purpose for mt. pony. decommissioned years ago, the facility will now be home to a good portion of the nation's audio & film archives. it seems like a fair amount of the material to be stored there will be the archives donated from rick prelinger. back in the mid-90's i saw a few of the films from his archives at the virginia festival of american film. he's got some really interesting stuff, collecting bits and pieces of film that weren't played in movie theatres but made for other reasons (educational films, training films, etc.).

anyway, check out the article in wired news, especially for the four photographs. it looks like they were taken from an early 90's sales brochure when the goverment was trying to re-purpose the mt. pony property.

no more editorial

or maybe that's not quite what i mean.

i'll toss an opinion in here or there. but i can't seem to build up to whole paragraphs about things (see my previous entry about MEAN GIRLS - finding a link to the movie's official website does not a blog entry make). i'm currently listening to SONGS: OHIA. this is some damn fine music to be listening to when you've just finished watching a good episode of everwood (the teaser for next week made that episode look incredible) and you're at the computer trying to figure out how to make a productive night of things. listenting to this album (the magnolia electric co) puts you in a mind where listening to this record is doing something. i could just sit back right now and feel like the night was complete (especially since i finally updated my dvr blog).

more rambling... (and thus completely invalidating the introduction to what i have to say)

my roommate of over 6 1/2 years moved out and into a new place with his fiance last week. he'll think it's funny that i'm not mentioning his name here. but he won't be around the apartment to give me a hard time about it, so it's okay. anyway, a few weeks ago dan started posting photos on his fotolog of all the things he was going to miss upon leaving this part of town. check out the series. it starts here: http://www.fotolog.net/sweetplantain/?photo_id=7716009

number one in america

yesterday morning i joined dan and sujan at the multiplex theatre on court st. for the early show of MEAN GIRLS. it's funny. it ranks high among some of the other good teen films from the past ten years (bring it on, can't hardly wait).