Has anyone noticed a small change in Gmail? It looks like they have decided to get rid of the standard cursor that everyone knows and loves, “|” and replace it with some kind of telephone pole, tree, broken cross thing. I realize it’s only two extra pixels…but it’s kind of odd. If they had switched to an “I” character that would have made a little more sense since some text editors use this as either the cursor itself, or the mouse cursor to indicate your mouse is hovering over a text area. I know I’ll get used to the two extra pixels and who really cares anyway….but do you think someone spent their 20% free time at google figuring out what the best cursor would be? I’m just not a fan.

Edit: I just noticed the weird cursor in the search box on wikipedia, and it doesn’t appear in gmail if I use Interweb Explorer- it must be a Firefox thing….just ignore this post up to this point.

Also I just got a call that my car failed inspection…and could costs upwards of $1,300 to fix it if what is wrong is actually wrong. (power steering fluid leak originating from the rack and pinion). I don’t think I should pay 1/3 of the car’s value to get something fixed on a friggin 97 Camry- maybe time to investigate some new car possibilities. For now I leave you with some eye candy via Tucker’s new macbook pro built in camera.

Stinking hotmail is down – it’s not like I would use a crappy free hotmail account for anything important, say – filing my taxes online. Stupid interwebs. Since I’m lazy and didn’t post this for a day – it’s back up now. But I already made the graphic with the bee so I’m posting it anyway.

Canadian born Neil Young has finished a new album titled “Living with War”. I have yet to hear any tracks from the album but have read that it is mostly a 3-piece (drums, bass, guitar) electric album, all of which was recorded in a 3 day period. The title track “Living with War” reportedly includes samples of George W. Bush’s voice over of a choir chanting “flip/flop” and even a rap. I’m, not sure how the rap is integrated into the music… I never thought I would be commenting on a “rap” or a “sample” in reference to Neil Young…unless it was “P Diddy sampled a Neil Young song for his new rap single ‘Keep on Rocking in the Diddy World’”. I really hope Young isn’t the one rapping – not sure how that would sound, but I’m guessing not good. Hopefully the album will be a hit and everyone will want to impeach that war profiteer in the white house after listening to “Let’s Impeach the President”.

The Orioles are 9 and 7 to start the season after winning 18 to 9 last night against the Indians. All 9 Orioles starters scored at least once and each had at least two hits. The teams combined for 35 hits and 6 home runs. wowsers. Only 146 games left to catch the Red Sox who are in first with the best record in the majors at the moment (11 and 4).

I am an Orioles fan and enjoy watching the Orioles play on TV whenever I can. Last year I had COX cable and could watch every televised game. Well now I live in Arlington, VA and have Comcast cable.

I don’t get games aired on WB54/WNUV (40 games), WJZ13(25 games), or obviously the unaired games(8) which combine for a total of 73 unaired games. I guess I live too far away from Baltimore to get these stations (Even though other cable networks in the area i.e. COX do have these channels). Apparently Comcast SportsNet (Owned obviously by Comcast Cable) has filed a lawsuit against the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network(MASN) because they thought they had a right to Orioles games. The case got thrown out and now Comcast is bitter and is not airing any MASN games that they can get out of (I believe this also includes Nationals games).

The only other options for seeing these games as an Arlington comcast resident is to get the MLB Extra Innings package or online at MLB.TV which I would have seriously considered. The only problem is all Orioles games are blacked out in my area because I live too close to Baltimore and am supposed to watch them on the local channels! So I live both too far and too close to Baltimore to watch 65 of the Orioles games (possibly 150 or more next season!). Pretty lame. The last and most desperate option would be to get an antenna and try to pick up the Baltimore stations over the air….I bet that will work out awesome.

From what I understand, after the 2006 season Comcast SportsNet will have no rights to any Orioles games. Since 85 O’s games appear on CSN this year that won’t air next year, there may only be a handful of games aired to DC area comcast residents which will be on major networks like FOX or ESPN. Something has got to change between this season and next, cause that will pretty much suck ass. Who suffers in all of this TV rights nonsense? The fans. Watching little dots run around the bases on orioles.com just isn’t the same as watching actual people on tv play live.

Also Comcast likes to have our interweb connection go out randomly. It’s happened probably half a dozen nights now over the past 2 months, each time it goes in and out and finally shuts off for 45 minute to an hours. I always seem to be in the middle of a poker tournament when it happens. When I contacted customer support about it, they of course could ping my cable modem with no problem They didn’t understand the fact that it was an intermittent problem that happened the day before. I told them it was out the night before but was back on now. They told me there was no way they could know that, so there was nothing they could do (I specifically asked that we be credited some cold hard cash on our next bill for shotty service). Then they sent me “directions” to restart my cable modem (i.e. unplug it for 60 seconds and plug it back in). Comcast, why must you suck?