Shea Stadium (NY Mets) - September 13

Shea Stadium (NY Mets) - September 13
Originally uploaded by phi1317

I intended to write this post sooner, but I've been extraordinarily busy this week playing softball, organizing professional society meetings, completing house work and running errands. Nonetheless, here I am with a few minutes to spare and an interest in sharing my experiences at Shea Stadium with you.

To begin, its important to note that my attendance at the NY Mets game on September 13 almost didn't happen. As the day of the game approached, I found myself more and more under the gun at work, at home and at play -- the stress of outside life quite nearly forced me to pull the plug on my trip and stay at home to deal with life.

Afterall, I'd been to a New York baseball stadium, and I hadn't been impressed. (Yankee Stadium is a dump, and the fans left a lot to be desired, in my opinion).

Staying at home for this game, however, would have been an enormous mistake.

Not only did my visit to Shea Stadium completely upend my prejudiced impressions of New York baseball clubs, but also the fans and stadium staff.

Shea stadium, as a whole, is just as run-down and shabby as some of the other baseball stadiums I've visited. But the condition of the facility doesn't even come close to resembling the slum in the Bronx.

Now, people who know me well, can say that I'm a bit of a baseball snob and I'm a bit hard to please when it comes to stadiums. I just won't compromise on the setting. And, along those lines, this place (Shea) just felt *right*.

To me, its the smells of hot dogs and beer that make a ball stadium; its also the sounds in the roar of the crowd, the call of the vendors and child laughter at the "wave."

The feeling also comes from stadium seating, especially in the upper deck, and also from chips in years of paint over paint along every railing.

Its also in the way the stadium lights slowly fill the field with amber then argent glow in the early twilight hours of a game.

---

To me, there's more to baseball than the players on the field and outcome of the game; watching the event on TV just doesn't hold the same sway with me as *attending*. There's some particular about *being there* when all the pieces fall in place. It brings a smile to my face, unlike anything else can.

Shea stadium has all the pieces. I found that out on September 13.

Front Page Extensions

I received this in an email over a professional society listserv, and had to share it here. The basis for this message is almost universal hatred for particular afflictions common among .EDU web developers, and administrators. Those familiar with the working environment will immediately recognize the culprits, easily, but the underlying frustrations will also ring quite true as well. Enjoy!

Bill -

Did I mention that my department has about 12 FrontPage forms that broke the other day when IT turned off something called "FrontPage Extensions?" Not sure what that is, but they were grumbling about obsolescence and "heinous security risks." Would you mind fixing them up to write to our Access database again? The database is on my laptop. The administrative login is "english" and the password is "department."

We get 2, maybe 3 of these a month and the forms are just a lifesaver. Help me, Bill. You're my only hope!

Dr. Connie
English Department Chair

Office 2007, MIME Types & IIS6

Server administrators running IIS6 have likely noticed that with the new version of Offices 2007 comes a new array of document extensions; these delightful new extensions must be added to IIS6 as, by default, IIS6 is configured to throw a 404 error for any MIME-types not found in its list of supported formats. That's a solid, "makes sense" security feature, and I'm not complaining about it one bit.

That said, adding seventeen individual new file types to each of my Windows 2003 / IIS6 installations is a bit much. A hotfix from Microsoft to automatically add these types into IIS6 would have been great.

Nonetheless, there is another way. Here's how to do it in a much easier method.

Stop the IIS6 Windows service and open the metabase XML file (C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\MetaBase.xml) in a text editor. Search for "iismimemap" and append the following to the appropriate node. Save the changes to the Metabase and restart IIS. Problem solved.

.docm,application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12
.docx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
.dotm,application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12
.dotx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template
.potm,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.template.macroEnabled.12
.potx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template
.ppam,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.addin.macroEnabled.12
.ppsm,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12
.ppsx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow
.pptm,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12
.pptx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation
.xlam,application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12
.xlsb,application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12
.xlsm,application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12
.xlsx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
.xltm,application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroEnabled.12
.xltx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template

Sunday Games - Rain Out?

There were no softball games this weekend on account of the "bad weather" that rolled through on Saturday.

To that end, Tropical Storm Hanna really turned out to be much ado about nothing; it rained practically non-stop from Friday night/morning into Saturday afternoon, filling rivers, streams and the like, but the storm cleared out quickly; but not before the Richmond-area weather hysteria kicked into high gear.

So, yes, our softball games were canceled, and local grocery stores were moving all of their frozen goods out of freezers in the aisles to the backup freezers in their back inventory areas. Its like they were preparing for a major catastrophe.

But Hanna wound up being an extended rain storm with some low- to moderately-high wind gusts. I mean, I didn't even hear lightening.

But with all that said, the rain was gone by mid-afternoon and a few disgruntled softball players from our Sunday team wound up stopping by the fields after the rains parted.

Their report? Clear, dry fields.

Indeed, the fields were in great condition for the little league and youth softball games at the same complex on Sunday.

The adult fields had fresh line chalk too.

How do I know all this? I stopped by to practice with one of the other teams in our league; I was invited by a player from our Tuesday team, and the adult softball fields were just fine for us to play on for more than 2 hours.

So, if the fields were fine and the youth league games were in full swing to boot, why were the adults sitting out for the weekend?

Well, the scuttlebutt on the field wasn't good. Suffice it to say that several of the teams who did show up on Sunday for team practices weren't pleased by the "rain out," and shared several, independent, yet eerily similar theories about why games were canceled.

Now, I don't know whether or not I should fully attribute their negative comments about the decision to frustrated conjecture or absolute truth. My guess is that the theorists are probably not accurate in this case and that reality is somewhere in between what was noted on the field and what actually happened. With that in mind though, the sources for the on-the-field gossip are, at least, typically good to their word, but their theories don't bear repeating here.

Either way, there wasn't anything we could do yesterday, except to enjoy the nice day and relaxed softball practice; that much was great.

Hopefully, we can get some playing time in on Tuesday, but the weather report doesn't look promising.