Peon's Place

It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

The MLB (Major League Baseball)’s Players Association has made changes to the All-Star game. The All-Star Game will now have a designated hitter regardless of which league is hosting the contest. The updated designated hitter rule came among a list of other procedural changes the league has officially adopted for its jewel event at the recommendation of the Special Committee for On-field Matters.

Other changes include a restriction on pitchers who have pitched the Sunday before the game, a one-man increase in the number of position players elected and a unique re-entry rule. In an effort to protect pitchers who have started a regular season game on the Sunday immediately before the game, these players will not be eligible to pitch in the game and will be replaced. As with any player who is ineligible or unable to play, they will still be recognized as an All-Star.

Personally, I think this is somewhat unfair, as it will always benefit the American League who plays their season with Designated Hitter’ positions, whereas the National League plays with forcing the pitchers to bat. Therefore, there are specialized hitters in the AL that have little-to-no defensive skill and their pitchers have substantially no hitting skill.

Happy Meals may no longer come with a toy in California’s Santa Clara County, after lawmakers passed a ban on including toys with kids’ meals over 485 calories.

County supervisor Ken Yeager said Tuesday that the ordinance “prevents restaurants from preying on children’s love of toys to peddle high-calorie, high-fat, high-sodium kids’ meals,” and would help fight childhood obesity. “This ordinance breaks the link between unhealthy food and prizes,” Yeager said. “Under this ordinance, restaurants are still permitted to give out toys. This ordinance merely imposes very specific, common-sense nutrition standards for children’s meals that are linked to these incentives.”

While McDonald’s and its rivals have introduced healthier meal options for children, some critics say they have not done enough to fight childhood obesity — a battle that California’s lawmakers are more than willing to take on.

California was first to institute a state-wide ban on soda in public schools and state lawmakers now are weighing a proposal to tax full-calorie sodas and other sweetened beverages.

PCmag states Nokia has launched the N8, the first device to feature the company’s next-generation Symbian^3 OS. The N8 comes with a capacitive touchscreen that supports multitouch gestures. It also supports 3D graphics acceleration in hardware, improved memory management for multitasking, and Qt, a software development environment that will attempt to help developers build applications for Symbian and other platforms simultaneously.

The N8 also features a 12-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, a Xenon flash, and a larger sensor that the company claims will rival those found in standalone compact digital cameras. The N8 records high definition video, and features an HDMI out for connecting to a home theater system. In addition, the N8 will work with various global streamed TV services, as well as Ovi Maps for free voice-enabled GPS navigation, and it will come with social networking tie-ins. It includes 16GB of internal storage, plus a microSD card slot that accepts 32-GB cards.

This seems like quite a serious phone to me, which will release to “select markets” near the end of this year; however, being that it’s a Nokia, and seems to be released for T-mobile only, means it will likely be a failure.

YouTube now offers movies at its store, priced between 99 cents and $3.99 each, for the rental. The Google-owned video service dabbled with the idea earlier in the year by offering Sundance films for rental, but now decided on a different turn.

Rented movies can be viewed for 48 hours. All of the transactions are handled by Google Checkout.

The rental store features newer movies to  TV shows to selections for young children.

The Madden Curse. We’re familiar. We’re aware.

Congratulations Saints, but I hope you have a backup quarterback ready to go.

If I was Drew, perhaps I would have said “Uhm, yeah, thanks guys.. I appreciate it. But I’ll pass. Go hit up Jared Allen, we don’t want to play the Vikings anyhow.”

Take a look at the past Madden NFL cover athletes, and their fate that year.

Troy Polamalu injured his posterior cruciate ligament

Brett Favre admitted to suffering a torn biceps injury

Vince Young sustained a knee injury which put him out of the game; he didn’t start again for the rest of the year

Shaun Alexander sustained a foot injury that caused him to miss six starts

Donovan Mcnabb tore the ACL and meniscus in his right knee

Ray Lewis had his season cut short in week 15 with a wrist injury

Michael Vick broke his leg in pre-season and missed the first 12 games

Marshall Faulk underwent reconstructive knee surgery and retired

I’m sure you’ve noticed the past few days, fellow Facebookers. I pointed it out several days ago when “become a fan of” turned into “Like”, and now many other things are shifting as well. It’s not just social networking anymore; it’s social domination.

Soon, everything you do on the Web may integrate with the “social graph” Facebook has created. Facebook is integrating user experiences on external sites with Facebook’s news feed, effectively transforming what used to be a solitary browsing experience into a sprawling network of connectivity. It’s big, it’s ambitious, and it may very well change the way we use the Internet.

Facebook is evolving, something that was made clear at this week’s f8 conference. Here are three developments that were highlighted there:

• Social plug-ins: essentially the Facebook’s “like” button splashed all over the Internet.
• Open Graph: the evolution of yesteryear’s Facebook Connect, a feature that simplified sharing the joys of the Internet on your news feed.
• Open Graph API (application programming interface): designed to allow Facebook and participating sites to blend their respective user “social graphs” to customize their site experience for each individual visitor.

Congrats Drew, I knew you could do it. Ever since I had you as my Quarterback two fantasy football seasons ago, and then picked half of your offensive players last season to take me to an 11-2 season.

Congrats on the Superbowl ring too, champ!

Brees won out over Minnesota Vikings defensive end Jared Allen and Indianapolis Colts wide receiver Reggie Wayne in EA Sports’ first fan voting campaign to choose the cover athlete.

The game is due Aug. 10 for PlayStation 3, XBox 360, Nintendo Wii, PS2 and PSP, as well as the iPhone and other mobile phones.

For those interested..

MAIN  STAGE:
SUBLIME with ROME |  DEFTONES | HOLE | SILVERSUN PICKUPS | CAGE THE ELEPHANT

FESTIVAL  STAGE:
SPOON | GASLIGHT ANTHEM | AGAINST ME! |  FLYLEAF | TEMPER TRAP | DIRTY HEADS | THE SOFT PACK | VIOLENT SOHO | MIDDLE  CLASS RUT

SUBSONIC TENT:
MATT & KIM | BT | DAN BLACK | TOXIC  AVENGER | LIMOUSINES | GOLDEN FILTER | AMPLIVE | DYLOOT | MILES THE DJ | DJ  OMAR

LOCAL  STAGE:
SCENE OF ACTION | GEOGRAPHER | NORTHERN SON | I  AM EMPIRE | THE HOLD UP | I, THE MIGHTY | VEIL VEIL VANISH | LEOPOLD & HIS  FICTION | LOCAL BAND WINNER

http://www.ticketmaster.com/event/1C00449484882E5C
password: sunny

Nike Japan creates a video to promote the Nike Free running shoe.

See the video below, visit Nike+ at nikerunning.nike.com

The shoes used in the video are the real sound controllers. Tomoaki Yanagisawa of 4nchor5 la6 was responsible for the hardware part. He added flexible and accelerometer sensors to the shoes. Daito Manabe of rhizomatiks did the sound programming with Max.