Dave’s Midlife Blog

In the spring of 2007, everybody in the USA seems to have a cell phone. (Mobile, handy, whatever you want to call it.) Here in the suburbs of DC, they are used ubiquitously, but not always benignly. Driving while phoning, for example, is nearly as dangerous as driving while intoxicated. The Virginia legislature just passed, and the governor just signed, a law prohibiting cell phone use by drivers under the age of 18.

Maybe I’m a prissy old man, but I am amazed every day at the huge number of rude and/or clueless people who use these things. Like Pavlov’s dog, these cell phone users drop everything when their phones ring. They interrupt whatever social interaction, task, or meeting they are involved in (or witnessing) to respond to the ring of the bell, in hopes of getting the telecommunications equivalent of a morsel to eat. (more…)

On March 21, 2005, the first edition of The Word Nerds went onto the Internet. With that my personal journey into the world of podcasting began. It’s been a great two years. Thousands of people know who I am, more or less, because of that podcast. It has succeeded far beyond my wildest expectations.

The first edition (my partners Howard Chang and Howard Shepherd and I decided to call our shows “editions” rather than “episodes,” since we weren’t telling stories) was just a simple five-minute speech-only monolog. I was recording directly into my iBook’s internal microphone, primarily to learn how to use the Audacity recording software. When it was over, I decided the edition was good enough to keep. It is still the first show in our podcast feed. (more…)

Two weeks ago, I walked around the neighborhood of the new Nationals Park with Bob Wright of the Baseball History Podcast. I posted a few pictures back then that I took without knowing much about what I was seeing.

Today Jacqueline Dupree, the pre-eminent documenter of the development of Near Southeast DC, led a walking tour of the stadium neighborhood for anybody who showed up.

Although it was very windy and temperatures were in the 30s, the front of 20 M Street SW, a building owned by Lerner Enterprises, showed a temperature of 58 degrees.

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I’m not an official Baseball Blogger (see the navigation column at the right for some good ones), so I have to get my information from those other guys and gals.

Today the Nats released a wonderful animated video tour of the new baseball stadium. NBC4 has it posted on their website. (Sorry about the possible commercial right before it; they’re a commercial TV station, after all.)

Thanks to the generosity of the contractor who did some work on our house, I got to see the Nats play the Baltimore Orioles from the club level of Oriole Park at Camden Yards last June. The club level in this video (with the nice bar, opening out to the picnic-table seating) is very similar to the one in Baltimore. Nice!

Adam Curry is a former radio and MTV deejay, an early Internet entrepreneur, and one of the creators of podcasting. He appears to have been so busy doing all those things that he skipped his high-school earth science and biology classes.

In his Daily Source Code edition #560, for March 9,  Curry gushed about a “fantastic” program he saw on channel 4 in the UK, “The Global Warming Swindle.” (Listen to the DSC at about 24:37 from the beginning to hear this segment.)

As Curry presented it, this TV program is about the “other side” of the global warming “debate,” in which the notion of man-made global warming is challenged. (more…)

The most reliable reason to go to a Washington Nationals game the past two years has been the chance to see Ryan Zimmerman play. He’s truly the star of the team, the face of the franchise. Because he has less than three years of major league service, the Nationals own him the way every team used to own every player before free agency.

The Nats had until March 11 (tomorrow) to sign him. He was the only player on the team still unsigned. Zim and his agent have been in negotiations with the Nats for weeks, with the possibility of a multi-year contract looming. The Nationals could have offered big bucks, or could have simply renewed last year’s contract with no change–or anywhere in between. (more…)

A couple of years ago, Christmas 2004, to be exact, my wonderful wife bought me a 20 Gb audio-only 4th-generation iPod. It was a wonderful treat. I spent January of 2005 loading most of my favorite CDs onto it, and then began to wonder what the fuss was all about.

A Google search or two for “iPod” kept kicking up links to something called “podcasting.” I explored further, and my life was changed. I became a member of the second wave of podcasting, and I podcast to this day.

Last night, my iPod slipped off a table and hit the floor. This had happened a couple times before, but last night did it in. (more…)

Mark Liberman published an amusing post on Language Log a couple days ago on linguistic incorrections. These occur when one person corrects another person’s grammar or spelling but the correction turns out to be incorrect.

I’m trying to recall the last time I was guilty of an incorrection, but I’m sure I have been. Incorrection seems to me to be akin to hypercorrection, the alteration of an expression to make it sound “more correct,” but actually resulting in an ungrammatical structure. An example is the misuse of a phrase such as “my brother and I” when “my brother and me” is correct:

The bank sent my brother and I (should be “my brother and me”) a foreclosure notice on our office building. Maybe him and me (or is it “he and I”?) should have paid the rent on time. (more…)

Prompted, I am quite sure, by the stunning photos posted on Dave’s Midlife Blog two days ago, NBC4, the local NBC owned-and-operated TV station, took a crew into the stadium site to photograph its progress.

I have to admit they got better pics than I did. But then, they were allowed to crawl all over the upper deck, while I had to peer in from outside.

I just got back from meeting my podcast buddy Bob Wright, producer of the Baseball History Podcast. He’s in DC for a conference, and we met (for the first time face-to-face) and went down to the new stadium neighborhood, where I took some pictures. Here’s “your game announcer Bob Wright” (more…)