Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

I did a work errand to Fremont this morning, and after dealing with the business there headed over to Centerville to leave my van with my mechanic. I was running a bit late, and had to trot over to the Centerville train station if I was going to make the 9:29 train back to San Jose and not have to wait three hours for the next one. If the train hadn't been running a minute late, I would have missed it — it was that close.

While working from the apartment, I set up my personal laptop to display video, plugging the S-Video and audio cables into an adapter that converts the signal it to cable, and plugged it into the TV that comes with the aparatment. This is the same equipment (except for the television) that I used on one of my TV sets in Fremont. The signal and sound are fine, except that the picture is only in black and white.

(No, it's not a PAL set. No, there's no place in the settings to change the output signal between NTSC and PAL.)

I think it's something wrong with the television, but without another set on which to test it, there's no way to tell. Looks like I'll be watching the Australian Open in black and white.

Update: Examining the S-Video cable, I note that one pin is missing on one end. That must be the pin that carries the color information. I'll try to remember to buy a new cable at Fry's in Sacramento tomorrow on my way from there to Yuba City to visit my sister and mother. I'm taking the train and renting a car from there.

In the meantime, it turns out that WatchESPN is showing the Caribbean 20/20 Cricket tournament, so I put that on in the background while I worked on the Day Jobbe. The match ended up tied, so I also got to see a "super over" tiebreaker for the first time.

While working from home today, I set up my other computer to listen to day 4 of the England-New Zealand cricket test match on RadioSport. (Click on "listen live" to get the free radio feed.) The first three-plus days of the match have been rather listless, and it looked like it was going to be a draw, but things went a bit wild during the later part of the day, including one of the England bowlers taking a hat trick (three batsmen on three consecutive balls). It was an almost overlooked hat trick, because he did it across two overs.

(Cricket is played in "overs" of six balls, each over bowled from opposite ends by different bowlers. In this case the bowler took a wicket (got the batsman out) on the last ball of an over, so there were six intervening balls from the other end by the other bowler before he bowled again, whereupon he got wickets on the next two balls.)

So it looks like they'll go to the fifth and last day of the match tomorrow with a chance of either team winning it, rather than drifting along to a draw.

Like baseball, cricket is a game where something nothing happens for a long time, followed by a bunch of frantic action all at once. And like baseball, it's a pretty good sport for listening on the radio.

Australia were not able to pull off the miracle comeback, although the tail-enders made a surprisingly high score as they sort of let loose and swung away. In the end, Australia managed to score 340, which is more than I expected, before the last wicket fell and India won by 72 runs. Thus India ends Australia's winning streak at sixteen games for the second time -- it was India that stopped Australia's previous 16-game streak.

So now I'm back to only having one screen going, instead of having both the cricket and the tennis running. And speaking of tennis, I'm going back to an amazing match where Roger Federer is showing signs of being human instead of the amazing tennis machine.

I have an embarrassment of sport to watch this week, between the Australian Open tennis (starts 4 PM my time) and the India v. Australia cricket in Perth (starts 6:30 PM). This evening, I had the cricket running on streaming video and the tennis on the Tennis Channel, and I was switching the audio back and forth between them trying to keep track of everything going on. And it was all action in the cricket, too, with the last four wickets of India's first innings falling pretty quickly, followed by Australia unaccountably dropping three wickets in short order before the lunch break.

Ironically, I ended up with a break in both at the same time, as the Tennis Channel coverage ended at 8:30 my time just as the cricket went for lunch, and the ESPN2 continuing coverage of tennis is being delayed by a basketball game. Hm, maybe that will give me time to have dinner.

Addendum: And a new episode of MythBusters. Ack! And you can't take your eye off the cricket, as the Australians tried to melt down, dropping two more wickets quickly after lunch.

I'm working from home today, partially because we have a contractor in today to replace the toilet in one of the bathrooms and partially so I can watch the semi-final of the Cricket World Cup. (Cheryl having corrupted me by teaching me about those funny foreign sports like cricket and rugby.) Hooray for high-speed internet with enough bandwidth that I can access my modeling computer in San Mateo and we can also watch the live-streaming World Cup coverage.

Sorry, thirdworld, about South Africa's performance, but the Australian juggernaut looks unstoppable.