Julio Garcia

Look Back: 2006 MLB Playoff Predictions // October 28th, 2006

The 2006 Major League Baseball season has come to a close after the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series over the Detroit Tigers Friday night. Let’s take a look back at my post season predictions to see how I did.

In the National League Division Series;
The Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the New York Mets in 4 games. Wrong. The Mets swept the Dodgers.
The St. Louis Cardinals defeat the San Diego Padres in 4 games. Right. The Cardinals did win in 4 games

Then in the National League Championship Series;
The St. Louis Cardinals defeat the Los Angeles Dodgers in 7 games. Right. Sort of, the Cards beat the Mets in 7 games.

In the American League Division Series;
The Detroit Tigers defeat the New York Yankees in 5 games. Right. Sort of, the Tigers beat the Yanks in 4 games.
The Oakland A’s defeat the Minnesota Twins in 4 games. Right. Sort of, the A’s swept the Twins.

In the American League Championship Series;
The Detroit Tigers defeat the Oakland A’s in 6 games. Right. Sort of, the Tigers swept the A’s.

In the World Series
The Detroit Tigers defeat the St. Louis Cardinals in 7 games. Wrong. Cards won it all in 5 games.

5 right and 2 wrong. Better than what others would have done.

I think the World Series was a surprise to everyone except Cardinal fans. Regardless, congratulations to them. On to the 2007 season. I have a feeling this offseason will go by fast for A’s fans.

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From DreamHost to MediaTemple // October 26th, 2006

I finally moved away from DreamHost problems and over to MediaTemple. And like Mark Wiens, I too am on The Grid.

Moving was simple with WordPress Database Backup, I just downloaded a backup of my blog/site and then uploaded it into PHPMyAdmin and everything was set (with the exception of updating my .htaccess file).

Even though DreamHost offers a lot more than MediaTemple in terms of storage and bandwidth, I am certain I am never going to come close to reaching the max so those extras become irrelevant. What is relevant to me is reliability and trustworthiness and DreamHost lacks both.

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Picasso’s on CBS 5 // October 26th, 2006

One of my parent’s restaurants, Picasso’s Tapas on Santa Clara Ave (the other being Picasso’s Steakhouse Grill on San Pedro) was featured for a minute(literally) on CBS 5’s Eye On The Bay show tonight. The subject of the segment was “A Night out in San Jose!” which is from an article in Sunset Magazine (November issue) and covered the some other great places to go in downtown San Jose. Hopefully, the video of the show will be on CBS5.com soon so you can check it out.

Later: here is the video

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CBS Cancels ‘Smith’ // October 11th, 2006

I knew it would happen if the ratings were not there; CBS has pulled ‘Smith‘ from the fall lineup, essentially cancelling the show. The last show was watched by 8.4 million people, either not enough people for CBS or not enough of the right demographic. This is why people don’t watch network television unless the show is a hit, not because it is popular, but because it is not going to be cancelled after they invest themselves into it. So how does a network show grow in viewship if it isn’t a hit right off the bat? I don’t know, apparently it is not allowed to.

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Project Update: Wireless Internet on Ubuntu Linux // October 4th, 2006

Well, I failed to complete one of my projects; “Build a local web server running Ubuntu Linux with LAMP and Ruby on Rails while using a wireless USB adapter(ugh) to connect to my home network.” The most important part of this project was getting a network connection through a USB adapter. Then after I established a connection I could easily configure the system as I wanted.

To do this, I had purchased a Linksys WUSB54GSC because having a wired connection is out of the question to use on my Dell Dimension box. The problem is getting USB Wireless to work on Linux takes a lot of work even with NdisWrapper which provides support for some Windows hardware, not all. Turns out, that as of recently, this USB adapter is not supported through NdisWrapper. Now while I am not a Unix or Linux guru, I am by no means a complete novice, I thought I could figure this out. Maybe I could, but it is going to take too much time for me to solve. So I had to move on.

Instead of trying to get the USB adapter working, I did what I should have from the start, use some sort of network bridge to connect my machine to the wireless network. So, for about $58, I purchased and had shipped a Linksys WGA54AG Game Adapter which can connect any game console or ethernet enabled computer to a wireless network (an idea I got from the SlingBox forums). After a simple set-up and configuration of the adapter, that is exactly what it did, with zero problems. This device needs no drivers, you simply configure it through the included software or web interface and connect your ethernet cable to the adapter and your machine and you’re set. Now I can easily move on to setting up and running a local development web server to complete my other projects. The problem of wireless on Linux is now solved. Anyone want to buy a USB WiFi adapter??

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