Kyle Boddy dot com

This is still my favorite Penny Arcade comic, dating back to November 3rd, 2003:

The third panel is quite accurate. Now you know where my title on Livejournal comes from.

USD v. CAD

USD v. EUR

USD vs. CNY

And finally....

GLD

Class dismissed.

• Baseball game and party next week with Eurotrash, Anacardo, Brighten, Chelsea, and others. Perhaps they will watch me pitch a good game! Who knows.
• Getting into better shape. I have been working out quite a bit and have the urge to hit the batting cages as much as possible, unfortunately I have few partners who are willing to do as much as me.
• Getting a tan. Slowly, but surely.
• Moving into a townhouse after I am married so I can then build a batting cage in the basement. Oh yeah.

I have a few job/consulting interviews this week and my father-in-law-to-be is going to spread the word as well. I'd like a little stability in my life while I do my other work in the evenings, because without high school baseball taking up my time, I basically don't do much all day. I also don't spend time in the local casinos anymore for reasons that I cannot elaborate on, but that's something for the work filter.

Anyway, just rambling. Time to sleep.

Paul Nyman has decreed that I know nothing about pitching mechanics. I knew this day would come, but so soon? I can hardly withhold my joy.

I started working out again and actually paying attention to what I eat. I'm keeping that blog over at Baseball Delusions if anyone cares. It basically involves me going to the local tennis courts and throwing baseballs into a net in an unorthodox motion every night. Yeah, I get my fair share of weird looks.

Tomorrow I'm getting a much-needed haircut.

RHS Freshmen baseball is coming to a close. I'm happy that I worked with them and plan to do it again next year with Coach Nelsen, since we like working with each other and we're close in age (I'll be 25 in a few months; Matt is 30). I'll be coaching at least one individual player over the summer and I'm trying to pick up others for side cash and to pad my resume.

Speaking of resumes, I've been applying for day jobs in the field of Business Analysis and going through recruiters. I have a few pingbacks, including one from Google, so we'll see what comes of that. The other work has been getting better as well, so people on that friends list can expect an update fairly soon.

Getting married in less than 3 months is pretty crazy, but we've gotten everything under control or on a schedule. Trida does great work; there's no way I would be able to deal with the stress from that operation.

Driveline Mechanics continues to grow at a fast pace, and though I've taken some time off from promoting the site on various message boards, I've been busy adding content to the site. The last post I made there is a video of Arizona Diamondbacks' pitching prospect Max Scherzer with a voiceover done by yours truly (clocks in around 15 minutes).

I just realized that I've been living alone for the past 6-7 months. It's weird, to be quite honest, because I haven't really put much thought into whether I liked it more when I had roommates. I think that I just miss the good times I had with Jason, Dave, Doug, and my college friends when we lived in that dump in Berea. Both Jason and I are getting married, so I guess it's time to grow up and start acting like an adult. What a shame.

Just wanted to check in with y'all.

As many of you know, the Church of Scientology has been 'under attack' for the past few months by members of a group called 'Anonymous.' Anonymous is just a bunch of people on a completely uncensored image board who occasionally get together and perform 'raids' on various businesses or organizations. Examples would include calling Gamestop repeatedly and asking for Battletoads, or logging into a popular UK avatar site and getting banned for racism.

Anonymous has no leader. It's a critical mass of the dregs of the Internet where people post the most inane and ridiculous things. They are responsible for lolcats/cat macros and almost every popular meme you've seen on the Internet. They get the name Anonymous because there is no registration on the site, and everyone is forced to post with that name. Somehow these unorganized and nameless masses actually get together to do things, and the latest raids on Scientology are evidence of it.

Members of 4chan's /b/ have been performing various disruptive actions against CoS, ranging from calling in death threats, staging peaceful protests, playing Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up' at full blast (yes, they invented the Rickroll meme as well) over the phones, and obtaining stolen documents from the CoS about their ridiculous doctrines on how to 'move up' in the organization.

Interestingly enough, the CoS has fought back by publishing various videos on YouTube and getting advertising to spread the 'good word' about Scientology and bring the 'truth' to light. Obviously anyone reading this blog knows that Scientology is a crock of shit, invented by a guy who wrote B-list scifi novels and possibly performed questionable scientific experiments (including abortions) on family members. However, the CoS holds a ton of power, made so by their large coffers built from using extortionist tactics on their members and donations from Hollywood celebrities. They never had much of an Internet presence, but it would seem that these attacks and attempts to bring their injustices to light has finally motivated them to put out their own propaganda on YouTube, Google Video, and various other sites.

A quick search of YouTube will yield some interesting videos. Here are but a few:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKs-u0q467U&feature=dir - What Scientologists Say About Scientology
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCbKv9yiLiQ - Message to Scientology (from a random Anonymous member - seen as the first strike by Anonymous)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrkchXCzY70 - Call to Action (explanation of Anonymous and CoS)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-063clxiB8I - Code of Conduct (another Anonymous video detailing the code of conduct in protests)

It's always fun to watch how /b/ shapes the Internet*, but this time, it might actually be serious business.

Today my high school baseball team got kicked off the field we were supposed to practice on due to previous rain making home plate a mess, so we did our stretches, ran a bit, threw long toss, and took infield/outfield practice. After that, I broke out a football and we played seven-on-seven tackle football with three-man lines. Despite my right ring finger getting jammed when I was playing left tackle, it was an absolute blast and the kids loved the break from practice.

We only have another 2 weeks left in the season, and while we've had our ups and downs, this group of freshmen is very athletic and talented. Two went up to JV while another is pitching at the Varsity level already, so our freshman-only team hasn't been as good as it could have been, but we're still one of the better freshmen-only teams in the area and are competitive with the JV squads we play as well.

Coaching HS baseball is a lot of fun. I hope to do it next year, and I might be coaching some of the kids individually over the summer as well.

At the risk of sounding like even more of a person entering «real» adulthood, I'm also considering taking a full-time Business Analyst position and enrolling in summer classes at the local junior college with the eventual goal of finishing up my undergraduate degree (probably in Business Administration). I could use some stability in my life right now, and it's not like I can't do my current job at nights and in my spare time. Plus, I could use the benefits (health insurance mainly) and regular paychecks.

• Royals: Welcome to reality.
• Beane is so fucking smart.
• The Indians need to sign Bonds.

That's all for now.

In this post, I talked about how difficult it was for me to pick up baseball again. I can still vividly remember those days; my coach would cringe at putting me into the game and I was embarrassing at the plate. I said this:

On the drive home, I just wanted to stop. Stop working out, stop playing baseball, just be an overweight guy working from home and enjoying video games. Playing baseball, working out, and losing weight - none of these things come easily to me. The last time I have felt like this was the first week of soccer conditioning, where I was easily the most out-of-shape kid there. I feel so inadequate, so inferior. And I knew this was coming, I really did. But suffering through the pains of acquiring a new ability, even something that I love like baseball, is so psychologically and mentally taxing.

But I won't.

Just over 2 years later, I'm writing this post. I maintain a blog about pitching mechanics that gets thousands of viewers per day, I coach high school kids how to pitch and hit effectively, and most of all, I am capable of hitting some serious fucking light-tower shots when I'm not busy on the hill locating four pitches for strikes.

And I'm just getting started.

One of my favorite books is Generation X Goes to College, by Peter Sacks. In it, the author details his years of teaching at a community college in the mid-1990's and complains about grade inflation, the influx of students who expect to do little work and still receive B's, and the degradation of academic standards on campuses nationwide. I largely credit this book with my conversion to classic liberalism, but having recently re-read it, I can't help but draw certain economic conclusions based on the material in the book and what I have personally witnessed as a student.

Sacks talks about the rapidly-changing environment in the classroom, often using the word 'consumerism' to describe the students' point of view. He accurately points out that the student has increasing leverage at the college level because they feel like they deserve it for what they pay in tuition. Sacks goes on to chastise this line of thought. However, are the students wrong? I don't think so. Long-time readers of my blog know that I am fond of saying that 'college is the only place where you pay money to get told what to do,' and I think more and more people are starting to realize the absurdity of that statement. Of course, you are paying money to eventually get a degree that will increase your employability and/or standing within the community, but the road to that degree involves your money going to a group of people who essentially determine whether or not you will get that degree. Sure, we can talk about 'learning,' but few people actually attend college to learn, and many of them are lifelong students or simply audit the classes. (The fact that I have learned a great deal in college does not invalidate the previous sentence; I did not attend college with learning as the primary objective. I would be willing to bet that a significant majority of students would answer in the same manner.)

As someone who wants to eventually teach, I realize that this is a pitfall in society. However, if you really think about it, such a viewpoint amongst students is inevitable. With the real cost of tuition outpacing almost all investment vehicles over the past fifty years and the media's insistence that you must attend college - lest you be a failure - young people everywhere are beginning to question the validity of forking over their hard-earned money and not having much say in the guidelines that academic institutions set.

Unlike Sacks, I do not see this as a 'dumbing down' of society. I see it as an inevitable economic truth. We would not expect consumers of produce to be blind to the selection and/or quality of tomatoes at the local grocer; why then should we expect the student to blindly accept the college's rules when the college requires the student's tuition to stay operational?