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Well I started work at Sun this week and I would say that I’m in a huge adjustment period right now, but one that will be very positive when it settles down. After a few days on the job, there are a number of things worth mentioning:

• I’ve only been there a few days and I am already confident that Sun will be a great environment to work in. Sun has no cubicles (I have my own office with a large work area, a door, and a private quiet space if I need it), casual dress (jeans to work every day), flexible hours (I’ll prob. end up taking 1.5-2 hrs for lunch every day so that I can workout/play frisbee), and most importantly very nice and very smart people (from what I gather and whom I’ve met so far).
• Commuting 40 minutes to an hour each way every day is tiring. I’ve worked plenty of 40 hour weeks before at O/K, but that was a 7 minute commute. Driving in traffic for that amount of time every day is definitely more taxing on your body.
• It’s tougher to come up with the energy to blog after working all day. Interestingly, Sun encourages their employees to blog, and provides their own blogging service for anyone working at Sun to use. I haven’t really gotten deep enough into any projects yet to be enthusiastic enough to write about them, but hopefully I will soon and start occasionally writing while at work. (I’ve also set up a super secret Sun blog that is internally accessible to Sun employees only. Any bloggable material that contains potentially overly revealing information will go there!)
• And perhaps the most overwhelming emotion that I’ve been experiencing while starting my first full time job: I really miss Katy. She’s meant so much to me and to my personal growth as a person over these last 3+ years. Talking on the phone is nice, but I really wish that she was here as I enter into the next chapter of my life.

Back to work tomorrow.

Given all of the talk about the AL MVP, I was hoping that I could make my own quantitative, objective comparison of the raw value that both David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez have contributed to their respective teams this season. Unfortunately, I have failed (Gah!). Actually, my original intent was to calculate the total offensive WPA (Win Probability Added) for both Ortiz and ARod throughout the course of the entire season. I mentioned this statistic in an earlier post about closers and I would also suggest this site as a good starting point if you’re interested in exploring the stat yourself. In short, WPA is a metric designed to quantitatively measure a player’s “value” or significance of his overall contribution to the team’s performance.

Think of it this way: at any one particular point during a game, you can describe the game situation in terms of inning, outs, runners on base, and the score. For each one of these game situations, we can assign a probability of victory for either team. There are many strategies for coming up with these probabilities, but perhaps the easiest and most straight-forward method is to use historical data and directly use the percentage of times a team has won the game given it has been in a particular game situation. This site is an example that uses such historical data from games played between 1979 and 1990. In any case, when a hitter comes to the plate, the game is in a certain game state as described, and his team has a certain probability of winning. After his plate appearance, the game is in a new game state and the probability of winning is a new probability. The change in probability from before his plate appearance to after can be directly attributed to the result of his at-bat. Thus WPA accumulates these changes over all at-bats throughout the course of the season.

To make it even simpler, WPA gives more weight to what many would refer to as “clutch” hits. For example, hitting a walk off RBI single would be a significantly greater boost to a hitter’s WPA than a grand slam in the top of the 9th of a blowout. Conversely, popping out with the bases loaded in a tie game would be more of a negative impact to WPA than grounding into a double play with a man on first when you’re down by 10 runs. Thus WPA does not necessarily accurately rank players according to their talent or their raw quality of performance during a season. It rather measures the overall timeliness of a player’s hits as they are important to the outcomes of each particular game. (Whether or not this “clutch” ability is due to anything other than pure randomness is an entirely different debate however)

At any rate, given Ortiz’s flare for the dramatic and unusually high quantity of late inning heroics, I suspect that his WPA would be significantly higher than A-Rod’s. Even though, looking at their raw numbers, A-Rod had a slightly better pure offensive season (not to mention he also has some value as an above average third basemen), I still think that Big Papi’s “big hits” meant more to the Red Sox and makes him the Most Valuable Player in the truest sense of the word. Alas, though, I was unable to efficiently calculate the WPA’s for both players. In order to accomplish this, I would have had to track the WPA over every single at-bat and the only play-by-play data that I could find for every game of the season were in the game recaps provided on ESPN.com. I started to try and do it by hand, but it just took too long and I could not find a usable data set that could be automatically parsed using a reasonable amount of programming effort. Regardless, though, I still think that my suspicion holds true (about Ortiz), and I would like to see WPA become more a part of the mainstream SABR community.

I don’t think that I’m going to make use of this service, but I thought that Katy would appreciate it. Tadalist.com offers an online to-do list management system! It’s actually a stripped-down. free version of a much larger web-based project management and collaboration system so it’s limited in functionality and features. In fact, the only advantage that the free version has over plain old pencil and paper is that it offers RSS feeds and list sharing capabilities. In any case, when I stumbled across it, it made me think of Katy’s reams of to-do lists that go along with any big (or small?) project that she does so I thought I’d mention it here.

A recent article from CNet.com outlines potential efforts from Congress to legislate file swapping services, suggesting that the services may need to be completely banned (?!):

A California senator [Sen. Dianne Feinstein] has suggested that because file-sharing networks continue to house illegal files, they should be shut down. … Pointing to what she called a “rise in peer to peers” since the Grokster decision, Feinstein said current law is not effective enough to deter illegal file swapping and the government must enact stronger enforcement measures. “If we don’t stop it,” she said, “it’s going to destroy these intellectual property industries.”

It seems outrageous to me that legislators, lawyers, and RIAA suits can continue to quibble about an issue that most of them completely do not understand. There is undeniable truth to the assessment that the music industry has a legitimate gripe about consumers illegally acquiring music through file swapping services. However, what they don’t seem to realize is that throwing laws and lawsuits at the problem does nothing to help their cause. Consider the following points:

• Imagine that a retail store has caught a 13 year old child attempting to steal hundreds of dollars worth of goods. A typical response might be to call the police, re-acquire the stolen property, and enforce proper disciplinary action on the offending child. Nobody would suggest that the store sue the child for monetary damages thousands of times greater than the actual value of the stolen goods. Yet this is essentially what the RIAA is doing. It doesn’t seem to me like very good publicity or an effective way to establish a mutually beneficial relationship with its customers.
• Contrary to what the RIAA bigwigs and many of the legislators and lawyers seem to be saying, file swapping services have very legitimate and wholly legal uses. The fact that they are used for illegal activity is unfortunate, but certainly not a valid reason to shut them down. I’m pretty certain that many other legitimate internet services have been used for illegal activities. I’m purely speculating here, but perhaps instant message services or email services have been used for terrorist communications? or maybe child pornography has been spread through online photo publishing services? or how about viruses being spread through the very infrastructure that defines the internet? I haven’t heard any cries to shut these services down yet.
• Perhaps even more ignorant of the RIAA is that the legitimate legal uses of these file swapping services can and do directly benefit the music industry. Many, many, many independent and lesser-known artists embrace file sharing services as a means to spread their music and freely distribute and advertise their content. Does the RIAA even realize this? or do they just not care about these artists because they are not a significant contribution to their bottom line?

The music industry has a potentially very profitable music distribution paradigm sitting right in front of them. They have already made a step in the right direction unveiling services such as Napster 2.0 and Apple’s iTunes. However, I am sure that they can exploit this model further to make file-swapping services a true benefit to their business. Rather than wasting money on lawsuits, lawyers, and legislation that ultimately stifles innovation, they should be investing this money directly into research efforts to encourage innovation in this area. You can’t eradicate the pirates and the copyright infringers; they will always find a way to live on. Instead, give people a reason to want to buy music through legitimate means.

I got back from our hiking trip yesterday and it was a good one. On Saturday, like I said, we went up to the top of Mt. Washington and I couldn’t believe the weather that we had. Not only was it entirely clear and probably in the upper 50’s or close to 60 degrees, but there was also absolutely no wind up there. I’ve never been above the tree line where it was completely calm like that. In any case we hiked down to the shelter and there were surprisingly a couple of other groups of hikers setting up camp there as well. We made some dinner, hung around the fire for a bit and turned in early.

Unfortunately, though, the less than optimal sleeping conditions made for a terrible night’s sleep. We didn’t feel like carrying sleeping pads and were just sleeping on the bare wooden floors of the shelter. At around 2AM I woke up and heard something rummaging around in the trees just outside the shelter. I looked out and saw Brian roaming around collecting branches and wood to build a fire. Apparently he was so miserable trying to sleep that he decided to just get up and occupy his time by building a fire and keeping warm. After trying to sleep a little longer, I finally gave up and sat around the fire with him.

It was actually pretty nice to hang around the fire in the middle of the night like that, but it definitely caught up to us on Sunday. We stayed up until dawn and left basically as soon as the sun came up. We were both soon so overtired that we pretty much just wanted to get back to the car. Regardless, though, it was a good trip and a good way to spend the weekend.

I have a job! After about a month long process of sending out resumes, cover letters, phone calls, interviews, and follow-ups, I somehow managed to get 3 offers all within a few days of eachother! I finally settled on an offer from Sun Microsystems at their Burlington, MA location. My initial job function will be as a Q/A Engineer but with a potential career track that could lead me into the development side of things in the not too distant future. I start work October 3rd at which time I will no longer be a jobless bum!

Now this is certainly big news. I mentioned the other day that Opera was giving away free registration codes for their 10-year anniversary. Well it appears that they’ve gone one step further now and have released the other other browser as freeware. Certainly superior to Internet Explorer, and comparable in features and functionality to Firefox, Opera is a welcome addition to the free browser community.

So just browsing around today I stumbled upon this review of VectorLinux 5.1. I’ve read about Vector before and have been meaning to try it out but have not yet gotten around to it. VectorLinux is an up and coming distribution based on the popular Slackware. The key feature and appeal of it is that it is optimized for raw speed and is designed to give you a lean, barebones OS but at the same time not cut out functionality or style. From the reviews that I’ve read, it seems like you can take any old computer from the attic, dust it off, install Vector, and you’ve got yourself a legitimately useful and responsive machine.

In any case, I still have not taken the plunge and installed Vector, but there was one interesting discussion in the above mentioned review that caused me to take a parallel investigative leap. Up until now, I have relied on both KDE and GNOME to serve my Linux desktop environment needs. For the past couple of years, I used KDE on Mandrake up until just recently when I switched to GNOME on Ubuntu. In both of these cases, I was using my old PIII 900Mhz, 512MB Thinkpad T22. The problem that I’ve run into lately is that GNOME is beginning to have a clunky feel to it on this system. It is well known that GNOME is fairly memory intensive; combine this with an annoying Firefox memory leak, and you have yourself a system that can really bog down. I tend to carry out several parallel tasks using open applications on multiple virtual desktops. The result is a lot of hard drive thrashing because the system keeps running out of physical memory.

Coming back to the original Vector review that I mentioned above, an alternative desktop environment called Enlightenment is discussed. I have seen Enlightenment before, but apparently there is a complete rewrite going on and the newest version, E17, has reached a usable form. Intrigued, I decided to install it on my Ubuntu system and see what it’s like.

The first thing that I will say about E17 is that in its current form, it is very raw. Still in a pre-alpha stage of development, a lot of the functionality isn’t quite there yet and at this point, it is certainly not for the weak. However, it is in a stable form and most of the drawbacks of using it lie in the fact that many of the configuration tools are not very polished and a lot of command line tweaks need to be done and support files need to be created and modified. Once you get it set up, though, it’s a desktop experience like none other. As it is mentioned in the Vector review, once E17 is finished, it will bring Linux on the desktop to a whole other level. It of course has lots of eye candy, it’s light years ahead of most other GUI’s in terms of efficiency and functionality, and most importantly, it does all this with a small memory footprint and no need for any hardware graphics acceleration.

Have a look at a screenshot of my desktop that I started working on configuring today. I’m still trying to muck around with all of the currently available configuration options and modules, but even in its present state it works very well.

I just stumbled across this and thought it might come in handy at some point. If you’re ever in need of calling some company’s customer support system and you want to talk to a real person rather than a machine, check out this Find-A-Human database. It maintains information on how to quickly get to a human operator through several companies’ support lines.

My brother Brian and I just planned out a hiking trip up in the White Mountains for next weekend (Sept. 24, 25). It’s going to be a one night overnight trip. On Saturday we’ll go up to the top of Mt. Washington via Tuckerman’s or Lion’s Head and then we’ll peak hop over to Mt. Monroe. We’re planning on staying at Dry River Shelter #3 which is about 2.5 miles down Dry River Trail from the top of Monroe. The next day we’ll hike to the top of Mt. Isolation before heading back to the Pinkham Notch trail head, passing over Boott Spur along the way. Total mileage for the trip works out to be about 8.5 miles or so on Saturday and then roughly 10.5 miles on Sunday.

Click on the map below for a much larger view of our planned route. Also, if you want to join us let me know! (seriously)