I'm starting out by visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.  From there, I'm going to Toronto, Chicago (Whitesox, stopping in Detroit on the way), St. Louis, Iowa City (no MLB there, but I'm visiting friends), then to the old homestead.

After picking up Wifey at the Des Moines airport (she's sane enough to only do half of this trip), I'll hang with my old classmates for a day or two, then chug back to greater NYC via Chicago (Maggie's never been there beyond O'Hare airport), Cleveland (Drew Carey says it rocks), and some random place in Pennsylvania with a motel.

I've never been to Skydome, New-Comiskey Park ("US Cellular Field"), or New-Busch Stadium (although I've been near the Chicago and St. Louis stadiums, just not in 'em).

I'll be driving the 1987 car back to the 1987 reunion... I've gotten it spiffed up quite a bit over the last month or two.  Hopefully it'll keep running well!  I have the gods of radar detection, satellite radio and GPS riding shotgun.

--ryan

Ever wonder how they make designs in the mowed grass at ballparks?

I recently stumbled across this link that explains how it's done.  Doing a little more web-searching, I found an MLBlog of an actual groundskeeping and turf expert.

My dad (who's a certified master gardener) would probably "dig" this... now that I think of it, though, maybe not...he let me mow the yard most of the time when I was a kid...

--ryan

That's barry bonds in the batters box

Originally uploaded by ryancnelson.

Sean C. and I are at PacBell park for Giants/Mets tonight...

About four seconds after I took this, Barry jacked #745 into the bleachers.

neat.

(ridiculously beautiful park, by the way.)

I'm at javaone/communityone in San Francisco

Originally uploaded by ryancnelson.

If you're in SF for javaone, please look me up!

Email my personal email address , and i'll get it on my phone.

the energy of the community here is really impressive... I'm looking forward to learning a LOT over the next few days. I'm currently in the Tim O'reilly keynote at CommunityOne.

1) i'm very impressed by the bravery of my buddy Justin for running the MLB Mosaic blog... we've put a lot of work into that product, but it's still cutting edge, and has some fairly high computer and internet-connection requirements (sissy computers or my mom's rural Iowa "broadband" need not apply)... and the customer service "comments" he gets there aren't always constructive. 

Kudos to his asbestos constitution, and I hope we can help him make the MLB Mosaic (and mlb.tv) work well for everyone soon.  With permission, I hope to talk some about the tech involved, and some other alternative audio/video client possibilities to make users of various platforms happier as well. (*forshadow*)

2) I bought a Yankees ticket package this year (with my own money!) ... as a league employee, we sometimes have ticket opportunities come our way, but I wanted some guaranteed seats to some games I knew would be sold out anyway, so I and some friends got an 11-game package.  I got two Boston games and the 4th of July games in there, so the ticket package ended up being a pretty good bargain, as seats behind home plate go...  I'm pretty happy with the camera phone trick I figured out last year, so I'll give it an encore here to spice up the blog post:  I take several cameraphone pictures with my smartphone, then stitch them together using Autostitch (on pc) or Calico (on mac) to make a big panorama.  Fairly good results for a low-res phone-cam:

(click for the full size image)

talk to you soon!

--ryan

Hopefully we'll have more than a once-a-month post on this blog this season.  We just moved our team's desks into a snazzier corner of the MLB.com offices, and everyone spent part of last week getting our workstations configured "just so"... keeping in that spirit, I'm going to try to post occasionally about how to get more use from the site on your weird unixy-style workstation, and/or mash-up our content in interesting ways (yeah, I got a few new books for Christmas...)

--ryan

Stuff I found out at the conference that that very few people know about MLB.com:

* http://wap.mlb.com (from your phone)
* http://www.mlb.com/narrowband (from your slow computer, like mine is in this airport)

--ryan

Today, we're doing DraftDay, so I'm chained to my desk, eating pizza and watching logfile scroll by and picks come in from the commish's office, into the DB, and deployed to the webservers as xml files... every year it's crazy (big amount of work for something we won't use again for another 363 days), but it's all going pretty well... knock wood!

--ryan

Not really, of course, but most of it's not that interesting to the blogosphere, and what may be interesting isn't cool to talk about until the plans are firm. I can say, however, that we are *not* just sitting around an actual hot stove trading Topps cards and arguing about the weighting coefficient of the on-base+slugging stat.

We're building stuff, which is what we do here in Operations at MLB. In-season, we run stuff. And also build it. And log into it in the afternoons and watch baseball on it. Which is a nice little perk.

This offseason, I also found time to get married, go on a honeymoon, and buy a house, so that's another good excuse for my having blogged a lot more elsewhere ("the houseblog", if you will).

So why get back on the blog horse today? Well, mostly 'cause I just signed up to go to the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference, and put my name and contact info in their wiki. I can only afford to schedule one workday there, though, so I'll be there Sunday night, Monday, and flying back to NYC tuesday morning. If you're going, and want to talk baseball, unix, Sun servers, or whatever, find me early!

I really hope to run into Joeseph Adler and let him know that his book and the example programs in it are going to be obsolete in a few weeks... I wish he'd done us the courtesy of telling us what he was doing, so we could've said "hey, neat... but could you have people hit our Akamai caching network instead of the servers directly? ...and hey, that file stucture you're using's gonna change, so save yourself some effort there".

...but stuff like this: (from page 144)

"This script will pull down approximately 250 MB of data from the MLB.com website if you run it as is. ... I could have done something less hack-like, ... but the title of this book isn't Elegant Software Engineering for Baseball"

...I guess it's not Courteous Network Client Software for Baseball either. Neither shall it be Functional software for baseball for very long.

Don't mistake my tone for anger or annoyance, though. I love this stuff, and might have blogged about it before if I considered the data terribly usable for anyone but our web-based GameDay client. I would *love* to publish (and champion) an official, well-spec'd baseball API and WebService, put out for the community by MLB.com...kind of like Amazon, Google, and Flickr did, before their Hacks books came out. That would really be neat.

I'm just sayin'... you might want to wait for the 2nd edition.

Hope to see some of you in San Diego!

--ryan

We're looking. Know anybody good? I've got a honeymoon to Aruba planned soon, and I need a spotter. (well, actually, my spotters need a spotter.)

blog post tags:
MLB-Unix-job-baseball-geek-Solaris

--ryan

Technorati Tags: #

  DSC02653
 
  Originally uploaded by ryancnelson.

We had our company picnic and softball game in Shea Stadium last Friday... my team won! (which resulted in a nice, crunchy, sunburned nose...)

In other news, and an explanation of why there's been a scarcity of "root for the home team" blog entries recently; WE'RE INSANELY BUSY!

...I'll post a little more about this soon, but in the meantime, I'll just say that we need some help over here, and may be hiring soon... I suspect that some of the people reading this might fit the job description.  keywords: Unix, Solaris, Sun, Perl, shell, geek.

I don't generally post my email address on the blog, but comments are open, ya know?

--ryan