#1 The NL Wild Card race currently has a five-way tie for the lead, with three other teams in close contention.

Who will win it this year?

#2 Where will the Montreal Expos be playing next year:
  a - Montreal
  b - Portland, OR
  c - Washington, DC / Northern VA
  d - Puerto Rico
  e - Elsewhere
  f - CowboyNeal's Field of Dreams

I'm in the market for a portable MP3 player. I'd like one that's easy to use, has significant capacity, and minimal disruptions while transfering files between computer and player. Apple's iPod certainly fits these, however I dont think my computer has USB2.0 (is there a way to tell?). Rios are another option, but I think most of those are of small capacity. Suggestions? Alternatives?

You knew this one was coming: Is the blackout an event of cyber-terror or other criminal hacking activity? This morning while driving into work Richard Clarke (formerly a US Gov't terror expert) was speaking on ABC News. He said that while US officials are saying terrorists have not struck, he stresses it should not be ruled out. Of interest is how vulnerable the grid might be. He stated that tests by Sandia, Livermore, and other national labs resulted in a better than 90% rate of breaking into systems on the power grid. These Red Team tests started in the 1990s. Not said was what they were capable of doing once on the inside, if these attacks were performed from the general Internet or a closed network, but he did say that no standard for security has been established (let alone implemented), with various actors (Dept of Energy, power companies, etc) still bickering over details. No link provided as one could not be located.

The University of Florida Gators have committed a travesty of mix-ups. Their football media guide for this year has a crocodile, not an aligator, on the cover. Anyone got a picture of it?

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/college/news/2003/07/29/florida_croc_ap/index.html?cnn=yes

By now you've probably heard about the shooting at New York City Hall. I'm watching my local news, where Bloomburg has just made an announcement that the apparent target of the shooting, Councilman Davis, was shot and killed by someone who had registered to run against him in the next election. The shooter was shot by a plain clothes officer immediately after the first shots were fired and killed as well. Was this possibly an act of assassination?

It appears that regular pizza eating can do a person good to fend off cancer of the digestive tract. The study (by Italian researchers, no less) appears in this month's International Journal of Cancer, indicates that one pie per week can decrease risk by a significant margin. It is suspected that it's the tomato sauce that brings about the goodness here, as other studies have shown tomatoes to lower risk as well.

Update: After several hours, it's finally been rejected. Though I do expect this to end up on the front page before the end of the day.

Does anyone think we'll be seeing this article hitting newsstands soon?

(If you dont know what's going on: Patrick Dennehy is a Baylor University basketball player who has disappeared, suspected of being killed by a teammate, Jerry Stackhouse is an NBA player charged with misdeameanor assault of a woman in North Carolina, and Kobe Bryant has been charged with felony sexual assault in Colorado. Over the past several years, more than a few NBA players have gotten themselves into trouble with the law, prompting that article above.)

Has anyone been following or at least heard about the story where a high school student sued her school in order to be the sole valedictorian?

Here's the background: Blair Hornstine is a disabled student whose condition required home schooling. Because she was at home, she could take extra AP/honors courses that other students could not take otherwise (being home schooled allowed her to get around scheduling conflicts regular students had), and did not have to take classes like gym. As a result, she was able to get a higher GPA than was possible(*), and did so. So the school district, aware of this, wanted to award two valedictorians at graduation.

Hornstine, whose father is a state superior court judge and will be going to Harvard with plans of being a lawyer, sued the Moorestown School District in federal court, claiming it amounted to discrimination. She won, making her the sole valedictorian at her graduation.

Naturally, the students who actually attend class at Moorestown were pissed, as was the rest of the community. They started getting threatening phone calls, letters, vandalism to their home, etc. So Hornstine skipped the ceremony. And I think the school district executives couldn't have been happier, knowing all the jeering that would happen if she were there. They didn't even raise her name the entire night.

It turns out that Hornstine had written some articles in the Teen section of the Courier Post newspaper, and had plagiarized some parts of them. The plagiarism was found after the court ruling, but (IIRC) before the graduation.

The whole thing made national news, and students at Harvard shared opinions of those as people in Moorestown. Editorials of protest appeared in the Harvard Crimson student paper, along with petitions getting passed around both at Harvard and Moorestown wanting the university to drop her, make her share the valedictorian crown, etc.

The news: It appears now that Harvard has indeed dropped Hornstine from admission, though it is unconfirmed officially. The story appears in the Crimson, and locally as well (Courier Post, Philadelphia Inquirer).

My take on all this is that Hornstine should be proud. She is now the last high school student in the United States to reap the advantages and privileges she had being a home schooled student.

(*) - In many schools in NJ, a perfect GPA is not possible, as classes like gym are weighted less than honors or college prep courses. NJ requires four years of gym in high school, and Hornstine was exempted from that requirement, so she got a jump on other students.

Baseball's All Star game requires each team be represented by at least one player. This was a good idea, when there were 10 teams in each league. But now with 14 AL teams and 16 NL teams, you end up having some deserving players snubbed because some low-ranking team has to have someone at the game. To my knowledge, the NBA, NHL, and NFL have no such requirements for their All Star games.

Question #1: Should MLB eliminate this rule?

Additionally, MLB allows fans to vote for the starting lineups. Result is a popularity contest. IMO, Sammy Sosa does not deserve to be a starter this year, yet is #2 in outfielder voting. IMO, either Andrew Jones or Albert Pujols are much more deserving of a start. Similar has happened in previous seasons, such as 1990's Mike Schmidt getting voted a starter despite retirement in May, or the countless Ken Griffey Jr injuries.

This year MLB is allowing players to vote as well, and their vote will carry some weight.

Question #2: Will it help?

Wahoo!!

I'm a workin' boy again! I got a job!

I dont start until after the July 4 weekend, and I'm gonna be moving back home with my parents for a few months.

But - I got a job!

Special thankyous are to be granted to those who posted very good suggestions in my previous JE about the length of the resume.

So I'm working on my resume and have reached a point where nothing else will fit on one page.

I could go for two pages, except that I'm told by COM profs and Career Management Center advisors that two pagers quickly hit the trash can, regardless of their content.

I could jettison some stuff on there, but doing that makes myself look significantly less skilled and experienced than I really am. And I've already gotten rid of some things that I felt I could afford to.

The margins and line spacing is so tight right now that putting anything else in forces a second page anyway. And no, I'm not shrinking the font size. I already made it 11 from 12 last September, and I'm not going to strain a reader's eyes by making it 10.

Thoughts anyone?

Senior Project - DONE! Ok, so we finished it Monday and demo'd it Wednesday, but it's DONE!

The CS Dept this year also started giving a $250 prize to the best overall project. We came in second.

other news.... or rather a question:

On course evaluation forms, does anyone actually read the comments? I had a *really* bad professor this term, and wrote an extensive narrative on the comment form about him. I took time to prepare it as the form was an online form and made sure it was something readable and worth reading (including bait at the beginning to get the reader to read the end). I do know profs get these forms in a few weeks, but are they actually read?

If you hurry....

Visit CNet News.com. Note that there are TWO postings of Report: Home networking to branch out, same links, same times, same summaries. Guess CT & buddies are no longer the only ones......

Some of you may have seen past journal entries of mine ripping the press on how they scare the public, sensationalize, etc, all without fact checking. (And praising journalists like John Stossel for efforts to counter it) A few summers ago, for instance, was "Summer of the Shark" off the southeastern coast, even though the number of attacks and the sizes of the shark populations were consistent with the numbers of previous years. Despite this, the press's handling scared people in taking vacations elsewhere, leading to a lack of tourism in beach communities, and which sent their local econimies downhill fast.

My prediction: Tornadoes will be a hot topic this summer in the press, no matter how bad the numbers actually are.