The Yankees are in the playoffs. The analysts counted them out and they've said they will lose in the first series. Looks very close to me between the four American league teams. Yankees would play the Indians if the season ended today. They were 6-0 against them during the season. The analysts are changing they're tune a little because the Yankees have been the hottest team in baseball since the All-Star break. Seems it does not matter what you did in the regular season when it comes playoff time. You only have to look back to last year when the Tigers and Cardinals limped into the post season and ended up in the World Series. Time to take a short breather and then GET READY FOR OCTOBER BASEBALL!

Very cool programming from Sirius as they bring back E Street Radio. With Bruce Springsteen and the boys coming out with a new cd on Oct 2nd and a tour, it's time to hype up the Boss. I wish they would not hijack one of the good rock stations, The Bridge. Why can't they take over one of the junky stations with Justin Timberlake? Oh well, with so much to choose on Sirius, it's making me like a kid in a candy store.
Wish I could be at the show in Hartford when they open the tour. Oh well, I already have Mule tickets for Oct 5th. No worries.

Is there any better drama than baseball in the fall?

Last night, I had the remote working hard between the Yankees and Red Sox game. Both games had the same score late in the games, 2-1. Yankees were up one and the Red Sox were down one. The Blue Jays had the bases loaded with one out in the eighth inning against the Red Sox. Looked like the Blue Jays would pick up some runs until Papelbon came in and struck out his first batter. At the same time, Mariano Rivera was trying to close out the close 2-1 game but he was struggling and loaded the bases. On any pitch, either game could swing against New York. If the Red Sox could lose and the Yankees win, Yanks cut the division lead to 1.5 games. Tigers had already lost a close one in Cleveland. In a matter of minutes, Blue Jays hit a grand slam and Rivera struck out the last batter to end the game! Awesome!

With the Red Sox losing two nights in a row and the Yankees winning, it's now gone from a high of a 14 game lead to 2.5 games. Awesome! If you look at the remaining 10 games, Tampa Bay may decide the winner of the division. Red Sox and Yankees both play them 3 times. The team that fairs the best against them could be the winner. Anyway, no matter what happens, it's fun to watch the Red Sox nation sweat. :) They've been talking about the Yankees all year even though the Yanks were far behind. If the Yankees were that far ahead, I wouldn't be worried about the Red Sox at all. As a matter of fact, I don't care if we get in by wild card or not. The regular season has been a formality the past 11 years. It only counts how you play in the playoffs.
The real question is, "Do we have the pitching to win short playoff series against the best teams?".

I fell asleep last night with the Yankees trailing the Red Sox 5-1. Why stay awake for a drubbing? My son came in my bedroom in the morning and asked(knowing the answer), "Do you know who won last night?". I couldn't believe it when he told me it was the Yankees 8-7. Yankees did it with an 6 run 8th inning. Watching the encore presentation this morning. :)

Go Yanks! Let's sweep the series in Boston! Again!

Had a great time with the Luther League at Hammonasset Beach State Park on 9/9/07. I've not been camping in a long time and it's been 20 years since I've been to this beach. Glad I remembered the way down and we didn't get lost. The youth were great and I enjoyed chillin' and getting to know them. We were first worried we wouldn't enjoy the band playing for the weekend entertainment. They were a hip-hop Christian band. My daughter said it best, "I think I'm going to be nauseous". (With a very serious face) I couldn't offer any hope because I was feeling the same way. Then, they did a serious song that sounded good the first night. The female singer was great; America Idol material. Then, I started getting into the beat and band. Still can't say I dig the rap stuff but we ended up having fun. The kids even wanted to hang with the band and get autographs/pictures/cd's.
I enjoyed the young minister who gave the sermon's. He repeated himself a few times but still inspiring all the same. It was fun to attend a contemporary Sunday service. The woman singer did the music mostly. At the end, we did have more hip-hop but it was fun. There was the usual program I'm familiar with as a Lutheran. Weather was great and we didn't get any rain. It was hot and we did get a few hours on the beach. Not like NJ in any way. The CT beach is rocky, no waves and the water is murky.
We had a great time!

I do. Picked up four tickets for Gov't Mule playing Oct 5th at Chevrolet Theatre in Wallingford, CT. I've not been to this venue in a very long time. It used to be in-the-round. My tickets are "ok". Plan on bringing my sixteen year old son and a friend of his. He needs an education in "good" rock. My Notes Admin is going too. All developers should take care of their admins. Little Feat is warming up. Really looking forward to it!

This week, I've been working on a shopping cart application in Domino. In searching the Notes.net forum, I came across a demo application from DominoDeveloper.net. Check it out here. I've got more to do but so far it's working out. I did come across a couple challenges. The biggest was an issue that drove me crazy for a while. The cart was not accumulating items. If I added one item and then went back to get another item, I'd lose the first item. They're sample database worked fine but my integration with my application didn't work. Long and short of it was that the application was creating two cookies. One cookie had the database name in caps and the other was in lowercase. The cookie code, if you will, didn't see the first cookie created from one form and the second form created a second cookie. I haven't yet checked in out fully but I suspect that one form is not converting the name to lower case and the other is. To resolve quickly and to check my theory, I simply changed the name of my database to all lower case and the cart started working properly. What do you want for free? There are some javascript errors too. One is looking for a cartid field that's not on the form and the form is not set up to pass the field. I just added the field and checked the proper form property and that one went away. Not sure why the JavaScript needs that field, yet.
The next interesting part of this will be the sending of credit card info to VeriSign. How do you test that? I guess I'll have to order stuff from my site with my credit card. Fun is.

I attended this webinar from LotusUserGroup.org yesterday. I was about 20 minutes late but I did enjoy what I was able to see. They already have it available to view.
Check it out here.

I know I'll be reviewing it over again.

Scott Good has posted a new and improved address picker using AJAX. I watch Scott's blog every since I attended a couple of his sessions at Lotusphere. His web techniques with CSS have been greatly appreciated. You can use this technique for single or multiple names. I easily replaced my old address picker. This AJAX version has a nice type-ahead for searching names and I like how it picks up my current address books. In the past, I had to code the address picker myself to handle single or multiple names and it was a bit ugly. The old address picker had an undocumented lookup to the address book and you had to call it out by name. This AJAX version is a nice advancement. Thanks Scott!
Hope Scott can offer more great code at this next Lotusphere.

Just cruising around Flickr today and came across this picture from Lotusphere 2006 taken by Julian Robichaux. I find it funny that everyone else is watching Bruce Elgort and I'm not. Hey, I march to the beat of a different drummer.

Ok, so you sweep the best team in baseball early in the week and you have the worst team on Friday. Your facing a pitcher with a 3-9 record and you've got an explosive line-up. Who'd guess the Yankess would go out and lose 9-1. It hurts even more since both the Red Sox and Mariners lost last night.
Arggghhh!

tags: Yankees