Just a Gwai Lo awkward flow, to some it's even unorthodox [?]

Second full day in Toronto, and I've been to Coffee Zone on Carlton St. twice now (hence my two checkins on 43 Places), since there isn't a Wireless Toronto hotspot nearby. I have a hotspot account with Telus, but the two Starbucks I went to didn't have power outlets in convenient spots. For lunch I grabbed a free slice of pizza at Pizza Pizza (since at the Blue Jays game the home team pitching squad got more than 7 strike-outs total), then went to the Apple store and got quoted more than double for replacing the casing on my chipped powerbook than an online retailer. I picked up Cory Doctorow's latest book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, which I may not get started reading until the plane trip back. Still sunburnt, arms redder than they've ever been. The cream I bought for it should have come with a pamphlet entitled "So You Decided to Not Wear Sunscreen", since it stings like crazy.

This is my first full day in Toronto, here for about a week. I've already seen a Blue Jays' game (my first ever in Toronto!) but they lost 10-5. Evidently there will be—or possibly already is—video of me singing terribly out of tune the "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" song during seventh inning strech, but you won't get me pointing to it! No foul balls came my, the closest one hitting a lady in the head. (The paramedics came down and everything.) I have a healthy sunburn on my arms and possibly my face, but that didn't spoil my good time, as the Jays belted out 4 home runs, two of them back-to-back jacks.

Regular readers know I'm a fan of both PubSub and baseball (alright, I don't talk about the latter a lot, since none of my TV channels show any games). PubSub lets you subscribe to feeds of searches that match 'on-the-fly', that is, once someone writes about something you're interested in, it matches against a search, and pings you either by RSS or—okay, RSS is the way that the overwhelming majority of people using PubSub get their notifications. PubSub is theoretically faster than Technorati because the former matches posts to your search where the latter matches searches to a database. (I say theoretically because PubSub doesn't have the instant gratification and pretty website that Technorati has. PubSub over IM would kill, by the way, but Adium—for example—doesn't yet support Publish-Subscribe.) Today PubSub announced PubSub Baseball, which pre-defined feeds for all the Major League Baseball teams including all of their players. See the Toronto Blue Jays page as an example.

I'd be interested to know if they account for trades during the season for what if Eric Hinske gets traded to the Cleveland Indians? Do both the Cleveland Indians and Toronto Blue Jays pages get updated? If so, the OPML feeds would work great as 'reading lists' for individual teams, as any player that gets traded gets removed automatically from the list of players I follow and new players get added automatically. It can happen automatically and immediately after the trade because I would find out about the trade via the team's main feed.

It's a great demonstration of a way to create, for example, a group of feeds that follows everything about an organization, that organization being anything from a small startup to a medium-size non-profit to a heartless, multinational corporation. Spam is a major problem—for all services, not just PubSub—and especially so with things that cost money. (I found this with books and music albums I was tracking, as stores would feed in RSS to all the services knowing that people like me would syndicate them on their sites and increase their search engine ranking.) Reading lists seem like a really great idea, if not so much to decrease the amount of information that comes in (hypothesis: most attempts to reduce the amount of information coming not only fail but make the problem worse) but to let subject-area experts handle the creation and maintenance of feeds of writing and video and audio that help the reader better understand that field. There is no doubt the political problem of what goes in and what stays out, but since it's should, in the near future, be fairly easy to create your own reading list, if you don't like what one person is doing, other than time and energy there's no reason you couldn't start your own.

For Christmas, one of the gifts I received was a year-long subscription to Sports Illustrated. Since it comes every week, I haven't had a chance to read a lot of them, but last month Tom Verducci wrote an article about what it was like to play in Spring Training with the Toronto Blue Jays, my favourite team ever since I heard there was a thing called Major League Baseball. (My favourite Blue Jay of all time, if you must know, was Jesse Barfield.) The article is available to subscribers, but SI published an interview Verducci conducted with himself about the 5-day experience.

Batter's Box, now one of my favourite weblogs, even though they call themselves a magazine, which covers the Toronto Blue Jays (and to a lesser extent, baseball in general), recently featured an article on Verducci's article, saying that “marketing these days, especially among younger fans, is viral, and it’s through online promotional pieces like Verducci’s and posts like the one I’m creating here that buzz gets generated. Word gets around, especially when any American news outlet shows interest in a local product. I’ll bet Sportsnet ends up carrying a short feature on Verducci’s escapade, if it hasn’t already.”

Batters Box has more coverage of the Verducci article:

• an introduction to Verducci and what he set out to write
• a commentary on his self-interview, mockingly calling into question whether or not he did steroids
• a final article on what Verducci reads and how he feels about his writing and sabermetrics.

Though they don't publicize it, I read Batters Box through its RSS feed—or rather get notifications of new articles, because they don't publish the full article in the feed. No matter: through the magazine, and through Management by Baseball, I've rediscovered a love of watching baseball, despite not yet having any TV channels on which to watch it.

Adam Sternbergh: “[T]he hat's story might have ended here, were it not for the intercession of a group of people who have, throughout the 20th century, tirelessly and selflessly led the way in determining all that is cool. I am speaking, of course, of black people.”

I remember wearing a baseball cap all through junior high school. First it was a Duke Blue Devils hat, then a black Toronto Blue Jays cap. I can't remember the reason, but half-way through grade 9 (which for me was part of the senior secondary school, the junior school being overcrowded). I just decided one day to stop wearing one. Since then, I haven't worn a cap, and never really had any desire. Maybe Sternbergh was right: after the mid-90s, it was no longer really that cool to wear a cap.