Don't Back Down

I love this story about Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The story offers perhaps my favorite quote ever. When the inmates complained about the lack of coffee, having to wear pink, having to work on chain gangs and perhaps, above all, not being able to smoke, he told them: "This isn't the Ritz/Carlton. If you don't like it, don't come back."

A close second for favorite quote was when the sheriff was asked about his cable TV choices. Apparently there is a federal court order that requires cable TV for jails. He piped in the Disney Channel and the Weather Channel. Someone asked Sheriff Joe why he chose the Weather Channel, to which he answered: "So they will know how hot it's gonna be while they are working on my chain gangs."

Sweet.

Just over two months after I caught my first one, one of the MX records that I donated to Project Honeypot has snared another spam harvester! You can also check out my overall statistics. If you have control over a domain's DNS records, donate one (or five) to Project Honeypot and let's see how many we can catch!

An article this morning talks about a coach who was suspended for running up the score on the other team. The final score was 55-0. In softball. I'm not sure how to take this. If you're talking a game like soccer (as is referenced in the article) or basketball, you can simply run around the field (court) and try to make sure the opponent doesn't have the opportunity to score. You practice your skills and the other team still feels reasonably okay with it, as you didn't score and score and score on them. I see no problem with this.

In a game like football, the clock will run out eventually, but the team must keep moving so that the other team does not have a chance to score. This means that even if the superior team keeps putting in worse and worse players, if the other team cannot stop them, the score will grow. What are you supposed to do? Play poorly enough, say by fumbling the ball or throwing interceptions, so that the other team gets more chances? That's not right.

In a game like baseball or softball, where there is effectively no clock, even this tactic won't work. You can tell your batters to get up and not swing - but what does that do? With poor enough pitching, the opposing team could simply walk the bases full and you would still score.

You could have them attempt to strike out - but what does that do? It actually may affect your team's ability to hit the ball if they go out and try to miss on purpose. As Ichiro Suzuki found out, even subtle changes can dramatically affect your batting average. Surely intentionally swinging the wrong way could have the opposing effect.

Moreover, usually softball (and baseball) teams don't have depth - you might have two players at every position, but in many cases even that isn't a sure thing. While football teams may have three or even four players for a single position, and can put in those players as the score grows more lopsided, that's not often an option in softball (or baseball).

Though I don't know the circumstances, I suspect strongly that I'd end up on the side of the winning coach here. If your team is bad enough that they cannot stop the bleeding, even after a 30-run first inning, perhaps you ought to consider that the game should be forfeit, rather than expeting the other team to play poorly so your team doesn't feel so badly.

And if the league doesn't like it, add mercy rules to earlier innings. For our sons, they can score only 5 runs per inning, and if the other team is ever up by a score of 10-0, the game is called. Why wait until the fifth inning to check for such a situation?

I've seen this before, but wanted to record it while I came across it again. There are tips available on how to speed up the Adobe Acrobat Reader. This once-useful piece of software has recently become a bit bloated with all the plugins that it loads and advertising that it includes. No more, and no more fiddling with files or changing settings.

AcroPDF, the folks who brought us the software of the same name for converting documents to PDF format without requiring Adobe Acrobat, offer a utility called, appropriately enough, PDF SpeedUp (version 1.42 at this writing). This little utility (just over 300K) gives you quick access to most any setting you might need, and also handles the backing up of plugins for you automatically. Quick, easy, and priced right (free).

For creating PDFs, I personally like PDFRedirect from EXP Systems. The standard version is free and installs a virtual printer that you can use for creating PDF files from just about anywhere - if you can print, you can create your own PDF files.

The Pro version, just $19.99, allows you a slew of additional features, like integrated sending via email, batch printing, 128 bit encryption, previews, merging, and free lifetime upgrades. Available as a 90-day trial version without cost. While prior versions created somewhat bloated, but still perfectly useful, PDFs, the current release (v2) does a fine job at creating small PDFs quickly and easily from most anywhere.