My last post, I started to discuss my increasingly rediculous collection of gadgets, specifically the strange and antiquated server stack under my stairs…

Later on (and this post is my way of forcing myself to address it later on…) I’ll cover a greater number of my “stuff” collection, including the Newtons, the SparcBooks, the NextStation, and Audrey.

(Incidentally, I’m also an on-again, off-again follower of the cult of 43 Folders and GTD… the previous paragraph, making it impossible, or at the very least rude, to not finish that thought and therefore requiring myself to complete another entry tomorrow, is a little trick “the cult” has taught me… Transition from absent-minded-professor to semi-effective-manager has depended on mind tricks like this. I’ll blog more about those, too… there, see how I did it again?)

Anyway, between now and next post, here’s the real reason I logged in at quarter-to-midnight on a Monday, to test the results of my cameraphone and the new MLBlogs setup. This comes from my daily trainride home, past Yankees Stadium (hopefully soon I’ll get a new Metro North stop next to the soon-to-be-built New House that Ruth Didn’t Build)…

This comes from my favorite gadget of the moment, my Treo 650 camera/PalmPilot/internet-browser phone. Every doctor, lawyer, and captain of industry on the train in the morning has a BlackBerry or a Treo, and most of them have a tallboy in a bag on the way home. Tonight, I just had the treo, but did manage to be on the train before sunset, and was just able to get this shot between the concrete barriers of the Bronx:

–ryan

So… next blog post… hmmmm…

If you happen to be a friend of mine, and are at all familiar with my “other blog”, you know that it’s really only updated in short bursts, separated by long pauses. As with videogames and book-shopping, I’m far more interested in the idea and implementation of the thing, and less so with the actual end product… I spend far more hours tinkering with the “shiny objects” in the blog sidebars, or the wi-fi connection on my PlayStation, or with implementing (and re-implementing) some pseudo-intelligent system to defeat spam, using spare computing cycles from various computers around my house. The tinkering is what drives me.

I guess that makes my job pretty satisfying… if I still worked in broadcasting, I’d probably still be coming home at night, watching baseball on the TV in my home office, with the boxscore growing in a corner window of one of my workstations’ monitors, and noodling around with the server stack under the stairs. Now, I also get to spend 10am-6pm (or… maybe 11pm) noodling around with a MUCH niftier server stack, watching the day games in a window on the laptop, and watching the online All-Star ballots process themselves.

…AND THEN go home and watch SportsCenter while tinkering with the server stack under the stairs.

Don’t worry about me, though, I work with a great (GREAT) group of people who’re all like me… meaning we do this stuff because it’s our hobby, and we feel lucky to get paid for it. The silver lining for me, as their manager, is that this type of geek does it better than anyone. We also argue baseball (we have an iron-willed Mets fan, and a misguided RedSox fan onboard) and we go to games (hopefully to more Minor League games this year, too), and generally put off good nights’ sleeps until November.

I’ll try to make this blog about some of the neat stuff we (as a team) get to do because we get the double-play of doing what we really like doing, and for baseball. I guess it’s not unlike when players talk about getting to play a game for a living… well, I can’t hit a curveball, but Jeter probably can’t compile ngrep. But hopefully, he can run a blog here with the rest of us 🙂

–ryan