malvasia bianca

The A’s are continuing to do pleasantly well: they haven’t gone on a huge win streak or anything, but they’re winning almost every series these days. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by Bobby Crosby’s return; call me a pessimist, but even though he was rookie of the year last year, he only batted .239 last year, and sophomore slumps are far from rare, so I wasn’t expecting much from him this year. But his line this season is .313/.370/.507, which is great.

I’m still not thrilled about the Tim Hudson trade, but the Mark Mulder trade is turning out nicely so far: Mulder has an ERA of 4.27 (in the NL), while Danny Haren has settled down after an iffy start with an ERA of 3.98. Keeping Barry Zito still doesn’t look too good, but the younger arms seem to be living up to their billing. I have a hard time imagining we’ll make the playoffs this year, but as rebuilding years go, not too bad.

And Julio Franco, not content to rest on his laurels, followed up his two-steal game with a two-homer game. Doubtless inspired by his example, the Indians are doing great; I doubt they’ll catch the White Sox, but a wildcard berth isn’t completely out of the question.

The computer’s memory problems seem to have settled down: I’m not convinced that everything is right, but it’s stopped crashing now that I’m only using one DIMM. (And 256 MB seems to be right on the borderline of where swapping starts happening, so I’ve ordered a 512 MB DIMM.) But now I’m having networking problems, which I’m not sure are my fault. Sometimes my internet connection temporarily disappears, which might be the fault of the computer, the ethernet cable, the cable modem, or something else, and I have no clue as to which of those it is. “Something else” isn’t completely crazy: I got assigned IP addresses a couple of times last week that makes me think that one of my neighbors is running a misconfigured DHCP server. If the problems continue, maybe I’ll bring in a laptop and ethernet cable from work to try to eliminate some of the variables.

Incidentally, one more thing about Nausicaa: in the comic books, the big bugs are called “Ohmu”, while in the movie their name is pronounced “Om”. Is “ohmu” how Om (as in Om mani padme hum) gets transliterated into Japanese? I would believe that. Also, is there any significant difference between the new edition of the comic books and the older, four-volume edition? Nothing leaps out to me (other than the color of the ink), but I haven’t compared them carefully.