"Noooooooooo!"

Watching the Sox game on ESPN last night, I was reminded once again that watching Joe Morgan call a game drives me nuts. Last night's big thing for him was the Sox lineup: it featured four "non-regulars": Mirabelli instead of Varitek, Millar instead of Ortiz, Youkilis instead of Mueller, and Payton instead of Nixon.

And all throughout the game Joe wouldn't stop repeating over and over that when your team's not winning (like the Sox of late) you have to put your best players out there. And these four guys' results?

Mirabelli: 2-4, 1 R
Millar: 2-4, 1 R
Youkilis: 3-5 (one a HR), 2 R, 1 RBI
Payton: 2-5, 1 R, 1 RBI

Not bad at all. Yet Joe never once said that he was wrong, or even comment that the Sox were still able to easily beat the Cubs despite having some of their best players on the bench.

One good thing you can say about Joe Morgan, though: at least he's not Tim McCarver.

Enhance your photos by using the High Pass Filter (Veerle's blog)
This is a good tip for sharpening photos in Photoshop: rather than use the Unsharp Mask filter (my filter of choice), use High Pass on a duplicate layer of the photo, changing the Layer Mode of the duplicated layer to Overlay, Soft Light or Hard Light.

This is a great idea if you really need fine control over the amount of sharpening going on in different areas of a photo: you can simply erase parts of the High Pass layer to change the amount of sharpening.

Announced earlier this week, Apple is switching from IBM PowerPC chips to Intel chips. Todd Dominey points out:

The best part about the Intel deal is that the whole silly megahertz war will finally be over. For all intents and purposes, Apple and the whole PC hardware industry will share nearly identical components. Even if Apple sold their hardware for 5-10% higher than a Dell, and used nearly the same components, that extra amount would be a bargain when factoring in Apple's product design skills, the value of the bundled operating system, and the applications contained therein. The battle will no longer be about platforms, but software.

That last sentence is pretty key, in my opinion. If people are no longer getting hung up with Apple vs. Windows computers' chip speeds and it's now down to software, that's nothing but good news for the Mac.

Regarding the lack of posting here: last week we moved from Tewksbury to Bridgewater (so I apologize if I haven't replied to any email you may have sent). To summarize: moving's no fun, unpacking is better than packing, and Comcast sucks.

Fox saves Arrested Development

In a major surprise, Fox has renewed its critically-acclaimed but little-watched Arrested Development for a third season.

Nice!

After last night's Yankee loss to the Devil Rays, this photo of Steinbrenner and Cashman is pretty funny. "Off with his head!"

The product manager for Yahoo's Gift Finder writes about it:

I want to take this time to discuss the Gift Finder we created along side a great Y! partner, ChoiceStream out of Cambridge, Mass. The gift finder was built as a collaboration between Yahoo! Shopping, the Yahoo! Personalization team, and ChoiceStream. It was one of the better collaborations I've been involved with and I feel lucky to be the Product Manager for this feature...

[W]e set out to make a simple, comfortable gift-giving tool that can be used to provide recommendations for products, product categories, brands, and even stores. At the very least it's a valuable brainstorming tool that does the work of weeding out millions of products. At best, it hits the nail on the head for a quick and easy gift giving experience. It's unique to the web by its breadth and depth and its ease-of-use -- we're very proud of it.

Read the whole entry here...

I've had designer (and non-designer) friends of mine ask me how they should go about learning CSS. (If you don't know what that is, no need to keep reading...) Like I did with HTML, I fumbling my way through the early days, practicing with it until I learned what I now know. Unfortunately, that's no help to someone new who wants to learn CSS now.

Well, I found this blog entry -- Learning CSS -- that points to a bunch of good references to learn CSS. So if you're new to CSS and want a crash-course, check it out.

If, on the other hand, you want a big page chock full of categorized CSS resources, go here...

Baseball + Google Maps = Satellite Ballpark Images