// do something here

Well, I was just about to pull the trigger on the MLB.TV Premium subscription for 2012 at a not so small cost of $125, when I saw the blackout warning on the subscription page. Just out of curiousity, I clicked on the link thinking that the Indians and Reds would be blacked out in Columbus, Ohio. Imagine my surprise to find out after clicking the IP detection link (and using the zip code lookup just to see if the results were different) that even though it takes me about 3 to 3.5 hours depending on traffic to get to PNC park, I am in the Pittsburgh Pirates home area, and as a result, all their games (home and away) are unavailable for live viewing.

Nice job MLB, you just cost yourself $125.

BTW, thoughts and prayers to the family and friends of Ronnie Montrose, who just passed away this past weekend.

EDIT: Also, I forgot to mention that it is only 180 miles to Comerica Park from here. Awesome.

This VB code was brought to my attention.  It is meant to look at a string variable (prefixText) and decide if the string is numeric or not, and return a data set (ds) by using a different method based on the result of the numeric test. (As always, this code is in a heavily used production environment.)

If Left(prefixText, 1) = "0" Or Left(prefixText, 1) = "1" Or Left(prefixText, 1) = "2" Or Left(prefixText, 1) = "3" Or Left(prefixText, 1) = "4" Or Left(prefixText, 1) = "5" Or Left(prefixText, 1) = "6" Or Left(prefixText, 1) = "8" Or Left(prefixText, 1) = "9" Then
    ds = New Users(_ConnStr).getUsersListByNumber(prefixText)
Else
    ds = New Users(_ConnStr).getUsersListByLastName(prefixText)
End If

I have some great ideas on how to improve this code. The first thing I would have done was to use OrElse instead of Or, it would speed things up tremendously. And I would also have added in the test for the “7” character.

While the set up pictured below was not our equipment, I am still kind of glad that our servers are not hosted at this facility any longer.

Way back in 1984, I came to the enlightening realization that the bulk of my life is spent in the spaces between Spinal Tap moments…

Check out part of this advertisement for a 32″ Emerson LCD HDTV that I received in my e-mail inbox from Tiger Direct:

I have heard that Dobly audio is awesome. Too bad they weren’t selling a 32′ diagonal television for $299.99, I might have bought it.

I have just learned by accident that the venerable <blink> tag is now unsupported in Internet Explorer 8. Needless to say, I am guessing that my desire to usher the blink tag back into common use (circa 1994 or so) may not get off the ground now.