I done got tagged to do a book meme. This is a meme that I can get on board with.

The rules of the meme are:

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
2. Find page 123
3. Find the first 5 sentences
4. Post the next 3 sentences
5. Tag 5 people

As for the nearest book, my bookshelf at work is directly behind me, so all of the books were equidistant from me. Therefore, I chose a non-technical book, Management by Baseball: The Official Rules for Winning Management in Any Field. It’s an entertaining read, with some enjoyable baseball stories used to describe his management philosophy. On with the reading.

This excerpt is talking about Mickey Mantle’s 565-foot home run in April of 1953.

First, there was the stadium-dimension factor, compounded by estimating the distance from the fence to the adjacent street, compounded by (the Yankee publicist) [Red] Patterson’s use of pacing as a measuring technique, compounded be the 10-year-old’s memory of where the ball was (no where it landed, but where it stopped rolling). And while sometimes a lot of little inaccuracies can cancel one another out, remember it was a publicist doing the measuring — a person who had every incentive to maximize the number to inflate the importance of the story. Bad tools, weak quality control, biased agent: a fatal combo in baseball or in your organization.

On with the tagging.

• Karla
• Stephanie
• Jim
• Aj
• Bren

Just go check it out.

Coincidence or not, you decide.

September 12, 2004 - Judah born. October 27, 2004 - Red Sox beat St. Louis to win the 2004 World Series.

June 11, 2007 - Abel born. October 28, 2007 - Red Sox beat Colorado to win the 2007 World Series.

So last week Judah stuck not one, but two CDs in my computer…at the same time. I was able to get them out, but it was a bit of work to do that. Ever since then it just hasn’t work right. So, tonight I decided to try and figure it out.

Since it is a Mac Mini it is a little harder to work on, let alone get into it. After I got it open I had to figure out how to “service” the optical drive. After finding some guides online I was able to free the drive from the chassis, and open it up to find…Fred Bear stickers! Apparently Judah stuck them in at the same time as the CDs.

Fred Bear stickers + optical drive = no workie = unhappy dad

Stickers out, everything back together, and working again. He lives to wake another day.

Judah has three things related to TV that he asks for all the time. In no particular order they are:

• Dirty Jobs, and host Mike Rowe; this is often presented as one word, “DirtyJobsMikeRowe”
• Mythbusters, complete with a countdown (3..2..1..) and explosion noises
• Alton Brown

The last one is a bit of a recent phenomenon, but we enjoy Alton as well, so it’s all good.

Actually, they are Jim’s rules:

There will be no rules posted here, nor will I “tag” anyone, but here are a few random facts about me.

I was tagged for a meme, and so I will post 8 random facts/stories about myself. Here goes.

1. This is the first meme that I have ever responded to.
2. As a kid I wanted to prove that man could live on bread and water alone.
3. For all of the Microsoft bashing I do, I consider Excel to be one of the best software titles ever.
4. It actually hurt me to type #3.
5. I am responsible for Judah’s haircuts in the summer months. I guess I’ll cut Abel’s next summer, too.
6. I’ve had five concussions. But get this, for some reason I have a sense that I’m forgetting about one. They are (in chronological order [the ones I remember]):
   1. toddler in the church nursery
   2. elementary school age playing in a sprinkle, hello sidewalk
   3. middle school age playing football at recess
   4. high school wrestling match
   5. college Bruin Brawl
7. Growing up I tried to avoid yard work. Now it is something I strive to do well at.
8. The “formal” announcement is just coming out that I am shifting my responsibilities at work. I will continue to work in Admissions half-time. My other half-time will be in IT, doing software development and system administration.

Walk away! On Friday my office was involved in a division picnic at Cook Park in Tigard. When they arrived they found sections of the park roped off with caution/police tape. One of the activities of the day was people could go canoeing down the Tualatin River. The picnic ended up moving to another park, but that park was up-stream from Cook Park, so those canoeing ended up going by Cook Park. Anyways, the “person canoeing” in this story is someone I supervise. Weird.

Two translations for you from the Judah Language Institute:

• No-bah-wat-ton: “No I don’t want to” or “No I’m all done”
• A-bow Gee: Evil Genius

The “a-bow gee” stems from him being able to work the TV and DVD player, and his mother calling him an evil genius.

NPR has a segment called “This I Believe.” I gave Judah my rough impression of NPR as I got dressed on Friday:

“I’m wearing a red shirt today. Do you know why? [silence] Because we can believe in basketball again.”

If you don’t know what I was referring to, perhaps you should read this and this.