Gus and I went to a chilly late April game at Phone Company Park in San Francisco to see the Dodgers and Giants. Since Gus is from St Louis, he didn't have an prima facie preference, and wasn't willing to admit to cheering for the Giants merely to spite me (though that's obviously the case, since on days when the Cardinals win and Dodgers lose he reports "a perfect baseball day"), so he declared his sympathies to lie with "the umpires", "the defense[s]", "Joe Torre", and "Matt Kemp". I meanwhile was continuing to try out my Mark IV scorecard¹.

I keep score at baseball games because, despite my profound and multi-faceted love of the game, I get bored otherwise. Games average around three hours, and while the interval between events averages, oh let's say 36 seconds (300 pitches in 180 minutes), my attention span is apparently well under 36 seconds. So the extra effort of recording every pitch and every play keeps me focused, and the discipline of having to accurately record who made outs helps train me to better notice and recall the action on the field. I used to tally up a lot of statistics during games, like pitch counts, but in the nearly two decades since I started going to games and keeping score, the sabermetric revolution and the ability to download every conceivable detail from the internet has pushed that bit of OCD from silly to pathetic.

This game was a stinker. It's said of baseball that every game will offer you something new, and this is the probably first time I ever saw a run score via "hit by pitch, single, wild pitch, error". That was the first of three Giants runs; the others were obtained via "single, error, single" and "walk, walk, fielder's choice, walk". The Dodgers' ace, Chad Billingsly, logged the worst good performance I have ever seen; bounced some pitches in the dirt, hit two batters and got many of the others to dance, and threw over the umpire's head for variety. The Giants' catcher, Molina, also got a full workout, and the teams combined for four wild pitches. In the midst of all this fuss, Billingsly struck out eight and walked three, allowing 3 runs (two earned). And with only two 1-2-3 innings (and a 2-1-3 inning (leadoff hit, caught stealing)) he still made it into the eighth with 109 pitches.

Continuing the exciting trend of well-motivated deviation from from, Torre brought in Broxton in the eighth in a high-leverage spot, the third such happening in his last four outings. On the downside, Broxton, having several times previously made things "interesting" while still getting the save, this time walked in the tying run.

Things were equally interesting in the outfield: Matt Kemp was very nearly the meat in a Dodger sandwich, aka a Lucky Pierre², while snagging a shallow fly to center. In the same inning he he threw out Winn at home on a double to center, and in the top of the next inning Ethier lined into Lewis's glove in left only to be safe on first after Lewis tried to catch with the outside of the glove. The Dodgers picked up the winning run when Ethier's line to right bounced off the wall, and while Randy Winn would have had to make an exceptional play to catch it, the first step would have been anticipate that ball would pass over his head, which realization occurred during rather than before the fact.

Manny was up five times, all with the bases empty. After getting bored with walking (in the 1st and 3rd), he started doubling to right. After getting bored doubling to right (in the 5th and 7th), he started doubling to left instead (the 9th). The only reason to regret this one not going into extra innings is to see if he could beat the record for consecutive doubles in a game (apparently four). He did this while falling behind in the count four of five times, including 0-1, 1-2, 0-2, and 0-2.

My pitch count analog load detector lines worked fairly well; you can see on the scorecard that Billingsly's pitch count stayed quite reasonable (e.g., close to the top of the two diagonal lines) and he pitched into the eighth.

All in all the game was a chilly three and a half hours of mostly sloppy defense and pitching, redeemed ultimately by the outcome. Also, Caltrain runs 15 and 25 minutes after the last out, so that worked really well for us. Nobody got knifed or dunked for wearing blue, probably because it was too cold to bother and because, as the Giants fan behind us said (before the Giants tied it), this was too much a "turd" of a game to really care. But winning is a sweet and warm salve to smear over one's self in the cold dark.

1: (c.f. The saga of the baseball scorecard mk 3).

2: Email me if you get both jokes packed in there.

I finally cracked and got a cell phone in 2004. I was shuffling between San Diego and Los Angeles and working as a consultant and it was impractical not to have one. But it turned out that where I was living in Los Angeles was a coverage black hole for the carrier that I had randomly selected, so I canceled that, got screwed US$35 for having made one successful phone call, got another phone, settled in San Diego, canceled the second phone, got screwed for, I forget, maybe US$100, and spent a few months arguing with the carrier (couldn't check anything without logging in to my account; couldn't log in to my account since I had canceled it), and moved on.

In 2006, with ongoing business travel, I caved again. I had learned never to give a cell phone company my credit card number, so I got a prepaid phone. It was extremely simply, and pretty cheap. I used a land line for any serious calling, and the system worked well. I tried using Skype to replace the land line, but found it simply too unreliable for business use.

That worked reasonably well for a year or two, and then I moved to Singapore. If I wanted to socialize at all with my classmates, I needed a phone, so I got a very simple prepaid phone (only a US$20 ripoff; don't shop at Yeou Tat Trading Enterprises in Lucky Plaza. In fact, don't ever go to Lucky Plaza). That worked fine, and I started using the texting quite a bit.

I should clarify that by cheap, I mean that none of these phones was as much as US$50, most were much less, and that my total monthly cost for all the calling and texting I cared to do, including amortizing the phone, was never even as much as US$10.

Back in the US, I grabbed another disposable prepaid. With all of these prepaids, I'm probably already on either a terrorist or drug dealer watchlist. This one was $16, with a virtual network run by a South American telco (i.e., they do the billing and such and lease your minutes from US carriers). I was getting along fine with that, when a brand new HTC G1, aka Android, aka Google phone, dropped in my lap. You're supposed to have a contract with T-mobile to use these, but I was able to borrow a SIM card out of a t-mobile demo phone at the store for a few minutes, just enough to unlock it, at which point it was a palm-sized wi-fi computer with no phone abilities. After only two tries, I was able to get a competent T-mobile salesperson to sell me a $10 prepaid card (the secret is that the SIM card is $10, and comes with maybe $3 of credit, and then you need a separate card get a decent number of minutes; in my case, that's still less than $10 per month) that works fine. I even kept the phone number from the most recent prepaid phone.

So I have been using the G1 for perhaps six months now, and I'm ready to tell you about it. Keep in mind that I use an unorthodox prepaid card instead of a plan, so I don't quite have the typical gphone experience. Specifically, I only have internet access if I am in a wi-fi area; no 2G or 3G or EDGE or anything like that. Aside from that, and aside from the fact that I hate telephones, I think I have a pretty standard gphone experience.

And that experience is fairly poor. I do not like the gphone. It does a few things adequately, and a number of things poorly or not at all. Let's review its promise and performance, function by function:

• ultra-portable computer. Not bad. The screen is big enough to do light web browsing; the keyboard is adequate to type short web notes. There are a few games that you can use to fill a few minutes here and there.
• PDA, aka, personal digital assistant. Not nearly as good as my ca 1999 Palm V, not by a long shot. The Palm did five things absurdly well: calendar, to-do list, address book, memos, syncing with desktop versions of same. The G1 does all of this, but none of it well, and none of it with a desktop application. You can sync to your gmail account, so that gets you address book, calendar, and to-do list, but the address book and to-do list are lousy. And, damningly, the system lets you type in information that it then discards without storing or syncing. Which is to say, it forgets what you need it to remember. This is unforgivable: Death to you, G1 PDA functionality.
• wi-fi networking. Iffy at best. It can handle logging in to encrypted networks, including WPA, but it constantly loses connection, changes to different networks, fails to pick up the network you just told it to use that it said it could use, and generally makes your life miserable. Range is awful; speed is awful; wi-fi is awful.
• Email client for gmail. Barely adequate. The syncing is slow and weak. Combined with (or perhaps caused by) the lousy wi-fi, it's just one big lagfest.
• ultra-portable computer which stays on for more than an hour: FAIL. Battery life is terrible. Use it like a computer for an hour in the morning, and you probably won't have a working phone in the afternoon.
• Open-source computer: FAIL. The huge differentiating factor for Android (the operating system of the G1, the thing that Google sponsors) is that it's open, in marked contrast to the iPhone, which is part of Apple's icy white fortress of style and pain. This should mean that developers can share their work without kowtowing to an Authority, and that users can do what they want with the phones, such as use them with different carriers. The reality is, the gphone is locked to one carrier, unlocking hacks are not freely available, app developers are getting booted from the marketplace, and getting complete control of the hardware and operating system is an unapproved, laborious, and risky process. Perhaps it's open in letter of license, but certainly it is not in practice or spirit.
• GPS. awful. I have, on a few occasions, gotten my coordinates with the gphone. Much more common is for it to flair around, suck battery, and give up. I leave the GPS off now; the only practical difference between on and off is that the battery lasts a few moments longer.
• camera. FAIL. Press the camera icon, wait a few seconds, point the camera, fumble for the button which is small and very awkwardly placed, push the button, wait between one and ten seconds, sometimes more, and get a usually blurry picture of the wrong thing. Unless it's dark or indoors, in which case you get a picture of black. Awful, awful camera.
• phone: lousy. Oh yeah, the gphone can be a phone. Not a good one. I routinely get "no signal" messages in the middle of cities. It has a proprietary connector so you can only use the proprietary gphone headset. There is a lag of several seconds between pushing a button, like "hang up", and having it do anything. If you use it for automated services, it somehow detects this and turns the screen blank any time you need to push 1, so by the time you've unlocked the screen and pressed the wrong button, you've already been hung up on by the nice computer voice.
• mobile phone: FAIL. The battery life is terrible, so you have to disable all services and remember to plug it in every night and also turn it off when you are not using it. To turn it off, you have to hold down a button for a few seconds, then click "power off", then click "ok". To turn it on, you have to hold down a button, I think only for a second, but nothing happens for 4.5 seconds (I just timed it), so it's hard to tell, especially if the battery is low. Then you wait for 52 seconds for the normal screen to appear, and another 9 seconds before you have service. so that's just over a minute before you can use it. If you forget any part of this triumvirate (turn off everything useful like wi-fi and gps; charge it constantly; turn it off obsessively), then you will find it out of battery within the day. That is to say, it's a huge pain in the ass just to use it like a cell phone. It's also bulkier and heavier than all of the other phones and smartphones I've seen people using.

Executive Summary: I have one extra ticket to see Leonard Cohen next Tuesday in Oakland. Email me if you want it.

As a non-drinker who doesn't like loud noise, I don't attend that many music shows. The whole part where you have to show up more or less on time if you want to stake out floor space close enough to see the performers, then wait for the opening act to start (late), wait for them to finish, wait some more for the headliner; after the main act, the fake encore ritual; all standing on your feet and getting bumped by drunk people. I didn't care for it in my 20s, and I really don't care for it in my 30s. We recently saw Dan Bern at a small club in Santa Cruz, which entailed driving an hour at night in the rain, all of the aforementioned waiting, and easily the loosest Dan Bern set I've ever seen. It was more or less worth it, especially since he sobered up somewhat during the set and started remembering more lyrics and putting a little more heat into the songs. And it was only $10, and I would have paid more just to not have the opening act. But the math came out pretty close.

All that said, I didn't hesitate very long when it came to Leonard Cohen tickets. He's on a small list of living legends that I hope to see perform live in my (their) lifetimes. It's going to be in a proper venue and we've been warned that the performance will start on time and that there won't be an opening act. I was a little surprised to realize he's on tour given his age and previous retirement, but apparently his business manager just robbed him blind. Similar circumstances led Billy Joel to do the River of Dreams album and tour, which tour's Los Angeles stop I was very happy to attend. I know that musicians stereotypically don't like to deal with the money stuff; perhaps there is a niche for a special kind of manager whose only role is to prevent the primary manager from running away with the money. Of course then you'd need a third kind of manager to keep tabs on the second kind ....

Meanwhile the Cohen tickets ran afoul of the institutionalized scalping scam. Trent Renzor has an informative post on this, although his diagnoses and suggestions aren't quite coherent. The basic issue is that demand for many musical performances exceeds supply. Normally this leads to an increase in prices, but musicians are reluctant to raise prices too high for fear of alienating their fans. So the popular performers routinely leave huge arbitrage opportunities—demand can peak at double, triple, or even more of face value. Scalpers used to buy some of the tickets for any given show on a speculative basis, reselling some for profit and eating others. But apparently, entire shows are now priced so far below market that institutional scalpers, such as StubHub, owned by eBay, are happy to buy all of the tickets the instant they are on sale. And now many tickets from Ticketmaster-brokered events (TicketMaster has nearly 70% of the concert ticket market in the US) end up for resale at TicketsNow. For example, "Ticketmaster received complaints after an AC/DC show in Vancouver sold out in minutes, only for tickets to be quickly available for higher prices on TicketsNow. The resale site also charged up to $1,199 for a $44 face-value ticket to a recent Killers concert in Toronto." Ticketmaster bought TicketsNow in early 2008.

In addition to scalpers, Ticketmaster has close ties to advertisers ("Outdoor advertising in US is a duopoly between CBS and Clear Channel Outdoor."), the radio stations (Clear Channel is "the largest owner of full-power AM, FM, and shortwave radio stations ... and is also the largest pure-play radio station owner and operator"), and the artists' managers (Ticketmaster "last year acquired Front Line, a top artist-management firm."), the venues (As of September 30, 2005, Live Nation owned or operated 117 venues, consisting of 75 US and 42 international venues." and bought House of Blues in 2006), and the promoters (Live Nation "persuaded some of the world's best-known music artists, such as Madonna, U2, Jay-Z and Shakira, to sign up to its '360 deals'".) To complete the web: Live Nation is a 2005 spin-off of Clear Channel. And, as of early 2009, Live Nation is in the process of merging with Ticketmaster.

So there's basically one company with a dominant share in each of the distinct markets of owning venues, managing artists, promoting shows, advertising shows and artists on outdoor media and radio stations, owning radio statios, selling tickets, and scalping tickets. But all of that is an aside to today's point, which is that what seems to be happening with concert tickets is that the artists refuse to charge market rates, so Ticketmaster pre-scalps the tickets and takes all of the money that the artists leave on the table. Presumably the artists make something back in merchandise (unless they've signed a 360 deal with Live Nation and lost control of that process, in which case they probably get completely fictitious royalty checks) and such, and get to defend their brand reputation or something, but is there really such a big difference between not going to shows because I'm disgusted with the ticket prices scalpers are charging, and not going to shows because I'm disgusted with the ticket prices the artists are charging? Is the nominally better PR of the latter worth the subsidy it provides to the slime industry?

Of course, for a bit more perspective:

1. this is nothing new. The entertainment industry has never been especially clean or treated artists especially well. At least now, more of this information is openly available.
2. There are plenty of smaller-scale options, from people like Ani DiFranco who owns and operates her own completely independent record label to local venues that have nothing to do with TicketClearLiveMasterNation.

Anyway, after scalpers devoured tickets for a show in Oakland, even though the tickets averaged around $100, Cohen's people added some more shows and went to some effort to avoid this, using a special code posted in fan club forums to allow pre-sales, with a maximum of two tickets per buyer that must be picked up in person with photo ID. That price point suggests Cohen's in a weird spot of touring for the money, but not charging at marginal demand. I guess that's admirable. Anyway, we've ended up with four tickets for three people, so if you'd like to go see Leonard Cohen next Tuesday, April 14, let me know.

See Part One here.

I finished second to last in the NCAA pool, behind even Gus. My scientifically established brackets posited a historically typical 29% Madness level, but this year was only 15% Mad. Meanwhile he announced that next year's pool will include both mens' and womens' brackets, prompting some protest from some of the participants who actually watch college basketball (a set which overlaps closely the set of pool winners):

Gus,
have you ever watched a women's basketball game?
People don't ignore it because they're sexist.

Which is probably true as far as it goes, but if mens' college basketball was funded, recruited, and used as a conduit to (a remote chance of) extreme wealth to the extent that womens' sports are, it probably wouldn't be as much fun to watch either. Of course there's a chicken and egg problem with popularity and quality, but it's worth noting that the independent and player-friendly ABL women's basketball league was arguably forced out of business by the WNBA, which is owned by the NBA and operated for its own nefarious purposes.

Until next year, then, I offer this picture of Gus contemplating a picture of himself contemplating a picture of himself contemplating his moral vacuity.

At long last, surrounded and enveloped by the piercing rays of enlightenment--or at least the blinding rays of the California beach sunset--Gus looks away from a picture of Gus contemplating a picture of Gus contemplating a picture of Gus contemplating his own moral vacuity. Kona, fellow traveler on the eightfold path, quietly wishes him escape from Samsara and waits for him to drop some food.

My office is next to a bathroom. I'm in a building where they do lots of stuff with hardware. And the windows look out on a parking lot. So while it's not a bad office, it's not always the quietest. Last week, somebody in the adjacent parking lot, which belongs to a venture capital firm and has a "no dogs" sign (going to far as to cite irrelevant municipal codes) which one might suspect leads to a certain focusing of excretory activities (don't look at us; I always use poop bags)) sat in his Ferrari for ten or twenty minutes with the engine idling; it was slightly louder than the Odwalla truck that comes on Mondays. And a new alarm system was installed last month that has predictably led to regular false alarms.

So I was slow to react to this morning's weird noise, something like distorted, amplified speech, cutting very quickly into staccato syllables that just might be construction equipment while dying to a whisper, only to repeat again. Eventually I realized it was not coming from outside, it was not coming from the rest of the building, it was coming from the bathroom. Turns out a robot locked itself in the bathroom and was calling for help while running out of power.

Or, well, at least that's the cover story. As April Fools pranks go ... well, it wasn't any worse than the majority of them, I suppose. Perhaps another sign of my ongoing curmudeonation is that I rarely laugh on April 1. Not even for robots that have locked themselves in the bathroom.