The competition is done but they don’t name the winners until AFTER the home run derby.
Right now we are watching work out day – and it’s funny you have a bunch of all stars shagging balls for all stars.
Everyone booed prince fielder for not picking Justin Upton for the home run derby team. Those balls are $30 each (derby balls).
The fans are rabid for them.
[this will be a live blog format. I'll just keep taking pics and entires on the end.]
12:30 it’s started. They are starting with the girls. At every level until the finals you have to hit a target – any part of it. But now they have to put it through a hole into a net and that is a lot harder
12:39 Lita hit 2 of 6. I was worried until the other girls in her age did the same. Girls are almost done.
12:46. Girls are done. Very last girl hit 6 of 6. Very impressive. She was like a machine just putting them in there. Nicely done.
7-8 boys are done. Now the 9-10s.
12:58. Ryan hit 6 out of 6! Way to go kid. The other two guys were 4/6 and 4/6.
They are now setting up for hitting.
1:15 the girls are done hitting. Best hit was about 198 on the tape. Wow that’s a long way to hit a softball. I’m a little nervous because they have to hit off a mat. That puts the ball in a weird spot.
You actually don’t want to hit a ball in the middle of the plate.
1:24 some 12 year old representing the nationals just set the 12 year old record hitting it 305 feet off the tee. Tyler – the player in front of Ryan had three real nice hits over 280 but they were a little far off the line. Ryan had one hit right on the line near? 300 it looked to me but it could have been more than 10 feet short. The record for 13/14 is 356 feet. That record is in no danger today.
Ryan was frustrated but I think he still has a chance. It’s the first competition where he hasn’t out driven everyone by 20 or more feet.
Now it’s time to run.
1:36 Boys are running now.
Ryan will be in the last group.
Ryan and Tyler tied for the fastest time with a time of 6.97. Luke trailed with 7.1
So now we wait. They don’t announce the winners until much later but I think Ryan has a shot to win it!
Got here and got parked. $20 for parking. It’s usually $10 so I guess it’s not that bad. Waited outside for the kids. Glendale parks and rec crew are here to run the event. Nice guys.
The bus showed up a few minutes late. Then they unloaded.
I hit the shop while they marched the kids through the stadium. They are already running out of stuff! Unbelievable. But I found some neat stuff. This is really cool.
The kids are warmed up now
Now they are sitting in the dugout waiting for it to start.
I wish I’d eaten breakfast.
All Tivos set. Sure enough one of them had “gone gray” meaning the tuner card just stopped sending pictures. Nice. But ingot it fixed and I added time to every recording before and after. they should be good to go. I packed up a backpack. Time to head to the stadium. I’m not competing but why am I so nervous? Lots of texts from friends and well-wishers. This is so cool.
10:00AM Rebecca is at grandmas. Matt is now off with his friends. Ryan is at the brunch by now. I need to meet them at the stadium by 11 am. I’m showered and mostly dressed. I got nothing done this morning. Expected to get some programming done but everything took longer than expected. Video camera is ready and charged. (I wonder if we will ever look at the pictures – I hope so). TiVo is programmed to record the Home Run Derby. I just pray Cox doesn’t crap out again. They don’t like TiVo and very often our cable card just stops working. Only shows gray. I better make sure all of them are set to record.
They can’t all go bad at once can they?
For the past three years both my boys have participated in the Pitch Hit and Run Competition hosted by our local little league. It’s one of those fun things that add a little more excitement to our picture day.
Ryan (Spider) three years ago made it to Chase Field for the team championships, but took third place. This year Ryan went out for the 13/14 Category. He posted some pretty gaudy numbers in the local competition which advanced him to the sectional competition.
At the Sectional Competition, he posted a score high enough to make it to the Team Championships. Many people think that winning the section automatically qualifies you for the Team Championships but it doesn’t. In some markets there may be as many as 20 sectionals! Only the three highest scoring winners advance.
The National Level Competition is similar. Out of the 30 Team Champions in each age group, only the 3 highest scores will advance to the National Level Competition. It is extremely unusual for kids with odd number ages to advance as the advantage usually goes to a year more experience and growth.
However, this year Ryan has been playing a lot of club baseball. And not just any baseball, but Chandler Ranger Baseball. The Rangers are a nationally ranked club baseball team (top 5 in the country) that has won 15 tournaments in both 13U Majors and 14U age brackets. They will be traveling to Florida at the end of July to participate in the USSSA Elite 32 World Series. All of that practice and competition had a measurable impact on Ryan’s development as a player.
And that came to fruition a few week ago when Ryan lofted a baseball off a tee far into the outfield at The Diamondbacks spring training facility. His hit not only caught the attention of the National PH&R director, coupled with his pitching and base running speed, his hit gave him enough points to earn a spot in the national competition.
Starting tomorrow, Ryan and his fellow competitors will journey to a brunch hosted by Major League Baseball then they will travel to Chase Field to continue their All Star Journey. You know how some competitions have 100 first prize winners? The way they are handling this event makes it feel like there are 24 first prize winners. So regardless of what happens they’ve made everyone feel very special.
For my part, I will try to capture as much as I can to preserve and share.
And other bad 1980′s puns. 
The real title should be
Came across what appeared to be a very nifty IDE. If you are making simple relatively stand alone websites Coda is absolutely genius. It’s available through the App Store, but I bought it via download.
What makes it so slick is that it’s a bit of Komodo, Safari, CSS Edit, FileZilla, SVN and Terminal in one package. It’s super easy to flip between Editing, Previewing, Uploading and working with version control all mixed into one. It has those nice little Mac touches (brace matching doesn’t just change the color of the brace, it hits with with a radar blip animation to really draw your attention).
What’s more it updates as you work, so working with CSS, this feels like a really really solid replacement for CSS Edit.
However, for heavy duty app work – I still find myself going back to Komodo, CornerStone, and Firefox.
Why?
If I need to debug something, Komodo’s integrated debugger is genius and that saves me more time than anything.
Komodo supports folding code in the editor so I can quickly compress classes and functions and get a quick overview of my code.
Coda does a great job of offering completion suggestions for standard calls, but Komodo actually scans your code and most of the time does a great job of making suggestions from the local variables, or class definitions. that makes it a lot easier to use verbose or self documenting variables names.
I might be missing something but I couldn’t find a way to submit all my changes as once. Further, I couldn’t find a way to revert to the latest version of a file and I don’t see a way to do a quick file compare. Of course Komodo doesn’t support that last one either, but Cornerstone really makes these things easy to do.
There are times you just really need a javascript debugger and the one from Apple and Firebug are both fantastic.
For historical reasons we work with large files. Coda often gets lost parsing those files and we lose syntax highlighting. That’s disappointing.
All in all if I had a simple (view php file) website that was basically HTML and CSS then Coda is fantastic. I’ll keep working with it, but it’s interesting the things you can learn working with a new tool. What I really do love about it, is that it keeps all of my Site information in one package – Terminal login (so I can check out changes on the server). FTP so I can move files back and forth.
What would really be great of all these features is if Coda would implement code folding and fix the syntax highlighting. I’ll keep running it for a while, but at $99 it’s one of my more expensive tools.
This week the family and I went to rocky point.
We were a little nervous because as a family we’d never been in Mexico for more than a few hours. We usually went on a cruise.
When I went years ago in college, I was always with someone else and let’s just say we didnt partake in “Family Friendly” activities.
Despite that, and some recent bad press about safety. We came anyway and boy are we glad we did.
Simple Things
Los Palomas. The resorts down here are nice! The picture is off our deck. The sea is beautiful, the people friendly and as Stacy pointed out it’s almost Disneyesque how there are always peoe sweeping and cleaning.
The one downside? It’s a bit pricey. We geared the Sonoran Spa is of similar quality for a better value. Having said that the people who told is this own a house in Las Conchas and have been coming here for almost 20 years. So you really can’t go wrong. Use VRBO.com to find a great deal. We saved a small fortune.
Breakfast. We really like Rosy’s (or Rossy’s or Rosies – guess it doesn’t matter how you spell it because she has all these signs posted in and around her restaurant.
They specialize in breakfast. The Chilaquillas are excellent as are the hotcakes. Rosie even showed Stacy how to make the sauce she uses on the Chilaquillas. Not that Stacy understood but It was a nice gesture.
Around the corner from there you can get home made flour tortillas for cheap. I paid $2 and didn’t haggle. I probably could have gotten cheaper but who cares. They were yummy.
Btw flour in Spanish is Harina.
Finally, we had dinner at the light house. That was expensive but beautiful. Dinner at sunset? Try the Mexican shrimp cocktail. It was fantastic. And shrimp wrapped in bacon? What’s not to like.
We also rented a rhino. Rocky point has to be one of the few places in the world where you can ride quads in the desert right behind world class resorts. Crazy. Maybe there are others. But I bet none are within 4 hrs to Phoenix.
So far everything has been great.
We even shopped at the Super Ley grocery store. They make fresh corn tortillas (maiz). And the salsa and guacamole from the deli counter are excellent.
The kids love the lift apple soda (Manzana) and I’m partial to the fresca. They use real sugar down here don’t you know?
It’s been a fantastic week. We are going to cone back I know.
I have the good fortune of being able to use the Adobe Creative Suite and CS5 is a really, really impressive suite of software. However, there are a couple of things about Adobe that make it really impractical for light work. First, it’s really tied down. I have 3 computers I use (one at the office, one at home, and a laptop for the road). Adobe’s license restrictions mean I can’t use that software on those machines. Frustrating, and I’m not really all that thrilled about shelling out even $600 for the learning or student additions. There are other things I’d rather spend $1800 on.
Secondly, Photoshop is slow to open, and Illustrator while powerful, is really, really cryptic. How do I convert a point to a bezier or a corner? Why isn’t it obvious?
Enter Two nifty little programs available through the App Store on the Mac that for my use, really do a nice job.
Acorn.app by FlyingMeat.com for Image processing and
VectorDesigner.app for… you guessed it. Vector Drawing, by TweskerSoft.com
Acorn as they describe it, is a great Max image editor, built for humans. It is simple, easy to use and the introductory price of $30 felt like a bargain. For all the image editing I do (and it’s not a lot), I found this to be very useful and powerful. It’s like a lightweight version of Adobe Fireworks which suits me just fine. Except its easier to use and more powerful that Fireworks because it supports filters.
The second replacement is a neat little package called VectorDesigner. I got this a while back 
through a MacHeist bundle, and I am very grateful that they continued to provide free upgrades. It is available in the App Store for around $30 and I have to tell you, it feels like a pretty nice deal. The application ran flawlessly for me and I find it much simpler and easier to use than Illustrator.
So for about 1/10th the price you can get some really nice apps that will let you create and manipulate images till your hearts content.
