My name is Chris, and it's been 9 days since I accessed the internet using a high speed connection. When I last had DSL, the Red Sox were a half game up on the Yankees in the AL East and Outkast's song "Roses" was all over the airwaves. Now, the Red Sox are still only a half game up on the Yankees and "Roses" is still unfortunately played nonstop.

So that was a bad example that doesn't quite underscore the agony of nine days without listening to the Red Sox on internet radio, reading everyone's weblog comments, and watching the antics of that crazy Strong Bad. If I waste away and am never heard from again, avenge my death. Damn you SBC...

So my posting will be a bit sporadic for the next week as my parents and grandparents come into town for graduation and I pack up all of my worldly possessions to move to KC. My internet there is supposed to be hooked up on Wednesday. We'll see.

In the meantime, ponder how Nomar Garciaparra and Trot Nixon are both on the baseball All-Star ballot despite the fact that they have been out all year with injuries and haven't played in a single game, while the players who took their place aren't on it. This, coupled with the fact that All-Star voting begins in about the second week of the season, takes away credibility from something that already has serious image issues. "This time it counts" my ass.

David posted recently about record companies shamelessly stealing royalties from their own clients, which as he said, doesn't come as much of a surprise. Starting with the payloa scandals, it seems like the music industry has been corrupt and will always be corrupt.

And while everyone is panicking over their frequent lawsuits over filesharers (although no one has actually stopped downloading mp3s, it seems), it's worth pointing out an ironic positive result of this overreaction.

When I started trading concert tapes (yup, cassette tapes) back in 1995 or so, there were few mp3s online because nobody had broadband connections at home yet. Some stores sold "official" bootleg CDs from fake overseas labels like Kiss the Stone and Moonraker, but these discs weren't on the shelves. You had to ask the disinterested twentysomething behind the counter for their "import" CDs, and after a few moments they'd reach into a cabinet and pull out a cardboard box full of contraband.

In the mid-90's, these bootleg CDs were the big threat to major record labels. "The artists don't get royalties," they'd claim, but in reality they were afraid that they'd lose money to the fly-by-night labels who were skillfully positioned in some faraway land with no copyright laws. In 1996 during the Atlanta Olympics, record labels (led by the Dave Matthews Band, who make a living selling CDs of the same songs over and over again) raided many metro-Atlanta stores and busted them (at least the ones who weren't tipped off in advance) for peddling their unlicensed wares. Legally there wasn't much that the labels could do about us small-time traders, since we weren't selling anything, but there was the occasional rumor of a taper getting shaken down.

With the pervasive spread of broadband internet connections, it became easier for people to share music digitally, and as we all know it wasn't too long before entire albums were available for free before they were even released to the public. Ironically, record companies all of a sudden didn't care about concert tapers anymore. There are websites you can visit nowadays, such as Sharing the Groove and eTree, and download entire concerts in lossless FLAC or SHN format. Yet record companies don't care anymore now that they devote all their time to the crusade against peer-to-peer file sharing.

And as soon as some new technology comes along, they'll forget all about the mp3s that are "destroying their business" and go after that. It's hard to take them seriously anymore.

In an effort to ridicule us for one last time, WashU is making Master's students wear frilly velvet gowns that look like "Star Trek Uniforms" according to James, and caps that look like this:

If we want to keep these delightful fashion statements, we just have to not drop them off on Friday afternoon and our credit cards will be billed for about $500. Sounds like a plan to me.

I'm about to take my CS507 final, thereby freeing me of my scholastic debts to Washington University. As with most people, my motivation for doing well on this exam is pretty much nonexistent, but I've got my sheet of notes and I'll do these proofs the same way I've done proofs all semester: with as little mathematical formality as possible. Proofs are nice, but nothings satisfies quite like a strongly worded statement that insults the reader if they don't see the obviousness of the solution.

Now that my parents are reading my weblog, I thought it appropriate to have the unnecessarily-scandalous subject line. But this post is not about protected sex, it's about advertising, and more specifically itty-bitty squares on the bases of Major League Baseball games.

If you've spent all week "studying" or "preparing for graduation" rather than browsing the web like I have, then you might have missed the news that for one weekend in June, advertisements for the movie Spider-Man 2 would be put on the tops of the bases. You especially might have missed the news since one day later the marketing folks did a 180 and decided against it. They attributed their sudden reversal to internet polls that showed fans were against it.

First of all, if decision-makers listened to internet polls, Al Gore would be our current president and the characters on Fox's The O.C. would undergo wild personality changes from episode to episode based on popular opinion. And that would just be ludicrous.

But more importantly, why in the world did they ever consider this idea in the first place? Sportswriters lit into the movie company and Bud Selig for "ruining the sanctity of the playing field", but did anyone bother to think about who the hell would see a tiny ad on the top of a base? The following major demographics are exposed to the top of a base on a regular basis: major league first basemen. Granted, Jason Giambi has some extra cash now that he's not using it to buy steroids, but I don't think he will singlehandedly see Spider-Man 2 enough times to warrant Sony Pictures' spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the ad campaign.

Think about every shot you've seen of a base on Sportscenter or during a baseball broadcast. They're all wide-angle shots, and they're definitely all taken from a 45 degree or lower angle to the playing surface. None of them are helicopter-shot closeups of the base, and these ads are so small that only such a shot would allow you to discern that the red splotch on second base is a plug for Spider-Man rather than the result of Derek Jeter cutting is hand on a headfirst dive.

If you're going to ruin baseball with shameless on-field advertising, at least do it in a way that makes sense. It shouldn't take an internet poll to realize this.

Last weekend David, Eileen, Berney, Shannon, and I visited the hippest most indie place on the loop: Pin-Up Bowl. It was a bowling alley with style and flair (except in the actual bowling equipment, which was recycled from old bowling alleys), complete with retro t-shirts, fancy furniture, people sipping martinis, and an mp3-powered digital jukebox playing the Strokes. Since I am probably the least indie person on Earth, the hipness was lost on me, but if you listen to Jet or the White Stripes, you will love Pin-Up Bowl.

But all kidding aside, it's nice that they are reclaiming Delmar east of Church's Chicken. Across the street from the Pageant they recently put in some sort of art gallery-type place, and the stores there have swanky new storefronts that are nicer than the rest of the inappropriately-named "Loop". Now if only they could do something about that traffic...

Every once in awhile, a seemingly random website, concept, or idea spreads through the internet like the Sasser worm through Windows machines. One minute you're blissfully unaware that legions of badgers can peacefully coexist with mushrooms but not snakes, then almost overnight you can't walk 10 feet without hearing someone humming that driving rhythm or go to an anime convention without seeing someone dressed as a badger.

The latest fad, as shown on sites like this one, this one, and especially this sonic masterpiece, is to create a website with a tiled-picture background and layered 3-d text, then loop a short sound clip in the background over and over. It's like a virus, popping up everywhere, and it often incorporates past internet fads as well, like this one, an unholy alliance of All Your Base Are Belong to Us and a sound clip of Kirk screaming "Khaaaaaaan" from Star Trek II. The people who make these pages have somehow latched on to the latter clip, as it is by far the most frequently used.

Where do these people come from? As michael queried last night, how does one come up with the next internet phenomenon? Randomness seems to be a common theme (such as the badgers), as well nerd-bonding type things like video games (all your base), star trek/wars (khaaaaaaaaaan or the famous Star Wars Kid), and of course Monty Python. And repetitiveness is a must, providing easy sound bites or quotes for people to add to their webpages or .sig files.

I think we in the -273 community need to get proactive here and create our own internet phenomenon. If anyone has any random, nerdy, and repetitive ideas, post them here so we can all take credit for sucking up bandwidth and promoting the decline of society.

This weekend I went to the AC, as I often do, to play basketball. And once again, in what is becoming a regular occurrence, we were unable to play because non-WashU-affiliated groups were using all of the facilities.

Our Athletic Complex has three gyms for basketball: the main gym where our varsity teams play, Francis gym (which is the oldest gym) where our varsity teams used to play, and the recreational gym for student use. The main gym is usually off-limits to students, as it is the site of basketball games, volleyball games, and lectures, and this weekend it was the site of some fancy event with tablecloths and such. This isn't really a problem though, since there are two other gyms specifically set aside for student use.

The problem is that every weekend, the athletic department rents out the recreational gym to other people. This weekend it was some midwestern fencing tournament, last weekend it was a high school volleyball tournament, and the week before it was the Native American Powwow. During the summer, you can find youth soccer camps in there almost every day of the week. Normally we could just go play in Francis, but this weekend it was filled with high schoolers who were here for the high school track meet that was going on at our track outside. Apparently WashU students need ID cards to get into the AC, but anyone else can walk in and out as they please.

Frankly, it's unacceptable that facilities meant for students are unusable every weekend. Our athletic facilities are already sorely in need of renovation, from the outdated and broken equipment in the weight room to the slippery surface of Francis and the recreational gym, and they only get worse when they're constantly in use by non-students. If they're going to get money from the fencing people and the high school volleyball teams, they should at least use the money to fix up what we have (or preferably build someplace else for the non-student events).

Most of our basketball group ended up going to the Richmond Heights Fitness Center and paying $7 each to play basketball on Saturday (although I did not), which would have been totally unnecessary if the student facilities were open for students to use. I don't mind it when I have to wait for a game because the gym is crowded with students during reading week, but it's unacceptable that I should have to dodge epees, career fairs, and giggling high school girls or pay to play elsewhere.

Victory is ours! We defeated our arch-nemeses 11-6 on Thursday night to claim the IM Softball Title (and t-shirts). This win is dedicated to Lucas and all those who played last year and didn't get to taste sweet victory.

I also won the CS Department Tennis Tournament, so I can finally graduate in peace.