BTN Review: The Diamond

I realized this April, while watching my first game of the year, that I’ve been going to games at this stadium for fifteen years. So perhaps it’s best to open up this new category with the stadium I know the best: The Diamond in Richmond, Virginia, home of the AAA International League’s Richmond Braves.

In late June 1988, as eight-year-old Josh watched the Braves of Lonnie Smith, David Justice, Jeff Blauser and Tom Glavine take on the Maine Phillies, The Diamond was the class of the minor leagues. Built on the site of old Parker Field and opened three years before I visited, it was a modern park with all the amenities one might expect — multiple concession stands on both decks, a back for every seat, and even a new invention called the “Superbox” (which we now know as the luxury box, an absolute minimum requirement for any stadium of 10,000 seats or more these days). The one curiosity was that the ballpark only had two pay phones on the premises (back when cell phones stayed in cars and cost a few thousand dollars each) — this was apparently a long-term Richmond ballpark tradition, although it seemed a rather silly one to me.

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Intemperate Thoughts: 24 August

With apologies to Neal Boortz for stealing an occasional section header of his for use as the title of this entry…

Surprise of the day: local daily the Richmond Times-Dispatch doing a front-page story on Virginia bloggers, featuring Will Vehrs of Shouting ‘Cross the Potomac, Ben Domenech and Meryl Yourish. Interesting part: Ellen Qualls of Gov. Mark Warner’s office mentioning that they keep track of bloggers for Virginia political insight. I doubt my VT/ACC 3 Stars column got much play, though… you’ve probably got to get above 5 regular readers for that.

Observation from the POÄNG chair: Lileks’s Star-Tribune column today (use cpunks/cpunks username/password if you don’t want to register) hits awfully close to home. It does appear that at least some of my Ikea furniture is made of real wood, though, instead of particle board.

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NY/PA Korg Travel Follies (A Rainy Night at Big Shea)

As some of my regular readers know, I was a fairly serious keyboardist during college, playing accompaniment for my campus ministry’s choir and carting around a cheap 5-octave Casio unit in the back of my truck to rehearsals of my a cappella group. Since I moved out of my parents’ house before New Year’s, I’ve been suffering from a severe lack of instrument. Thus I’ve had my eyes on Ebay for 88-weighted-key Korg synthesizers, preferably used models from the 3-4 year old Trinity line.

An 88-key Trinity Pro X being sold out of Montrose, NY (about 40 light-traffic minutes north of NYC) appeared about two weeks ago. There were two problems with it, though: (1) the seller was brand-new, so there was no evidence immediately available as to whether he was honest, and (2) it didn’t come with a case, which would leave it open to all the abuse UPS could muster in transit. Putting two and two together, assuming I could win the auction, there was only one way to ensure that I would get what I paid for:

ROADTRIP!!!

And thus my weekend was born.

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BTN Weekend Roundup

Just checking in with some quick takes on the weekend’s events.

First expansion: we got nothin’. Not even any really good rumors or wild ideas out there. The usual suspects said expansion was still on; other usual suspects said not so fast. All we know is that there wasn’t a successful ACC conference call on Monday. (By the way, BTN would like to thank Eric McErlain for the ACC coverage compliments on Friday — and to apologize for the 404s some of you probably got following his link. Hopefully we didn’t lose you permanently.)

(Newport News) Daily Press columnist David Teel suggested Saturday that the ACC and Big East form an alliance. Although he was actually responding to another compromise plan, I think TSL’s Capitol Hokie’s description of it as a “non-aggression pact” would be appropriate here, both in intent and in potential for long-term success.

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Quick Hits, 5 June

Yeah, I haven’t posted in a while. Work’s been getting busier, and I spent much of last weekend on a totally extracurricular coding project. The fruit of that project, though, is that once again you can AIM hawkeye5Cell to send me a (free) text message on my cell phone. AOL and SunCom don’t have their act together yet on the real AIM forwarding service to GSM phones, so I wrote a Java client using a couple of third-party libraries for the AOL and SMTP interfaces. Eventually I will release this app to the public, but I need to:

• debug re-connecting after a connection drops
• move configuration options from hard-coded Strings into an XML file
• figure out how to properly build a standalone JAR file using Ant — I’ve got web-apps down, but basic JARs not so much
• resolve licensing dilemmas, which may require me to rewrite the SMTP library so the whole app can be GPL’d, in line with Jaimlib

A few column thoughts have crossed my mind over the last week, but I don’t think any qualified for a full column on their own. Judge for yourself, though.

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