2005 January 03 archive at Daniel Spisak on Technology

Angels change name to include Los Angeles
Anaheim, CA (Sports Network) - Los Angeles officially now has two major league baseball teams. On Monday, the Anaheim Angels announced they have changed their name to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. This change is effective immediately.

This marks the third time in the last decade the team has changed its name. From 1965 until 1996 the club was known as the California Angels. Walt Disney Co. then agreed to buy the team and the club converted its name to the Anaheim Angels in 1997.

The Los Angeles region is the second largest media market in the nation and includes the counties of Orange, Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside. According to the team, the ‘A’ brand that is synonymous with Angels baseball will remain at the focal point in marketing.

In December 1960 the expansion Los Angeles Angels were awarded to a group that included Gene Autry. The Angels played at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles in 1961 and then moved to Chavez Ravine, now Dodger Stadium, in 1962 and remained there through the 1965 season. In 1966 the team moved to its current location in Anaheim.

The building was first known as Anaheim Stadium and the name, along with cosmetic changes to the structure, was changed to Edison Field in 1998.

When the Angels signed a lease for Edison Field there was a provision that the team include the city of Anaheim within its name. However, that didn’t prevent new owner Arte Moreno from deciding to rename his club the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Moreno was introduced as the owner of the franchise in May 2003.

The Anaheim City Council had voted to sue if Moreno changed the name of the team.

With the name change that means there are three cities with two teams each in the majors. The White Sox and Cubs are in Chicago, while the Yankees and Mets are in New York.

This New Years Eve I went to Jim’s party in Huntington Beach. So lets analyze it!

The Good:
Discovered new Dark Ale from Canada in Chimay style corked Pint bottles called “Terrible”. It rocks!
Got to see friends old and new.
Didn’t get stupid drunk (I don’t care what you say on this one Tim ;P )

The Ambivalent:
Party seemed smaller this year then last year?

The Bad:
I was keenly aware of total lack of attention from the opposite sex. Sucky.
My friend Cynthia whom had said last week she’d come to the party bailed out on coming and text messaged me this bit of information at 7PM. One hour AFTER the party had already started. Claims she is up for a date after I get back from Las Vegas, we will see.

The Almighty SuX0r:
After dropping Alexis off at her place on the way back home my car lost power steering and overheated, the engine temp going into the red. After inital observation of the engine compartment it looked like the radiator hose had developed a small leak. However it was too dark to see if anything else was amiss. I had to sit like a bump on a log at 4AM in the morning New Years Day waiting for the engine to cool down enough that I could haul ass down the offramp and coast my way mostly back to the house before the enginer temp nudged back into red. After looking at the car today one of the serpintine belts for what looks like either the alternator or the water pump came off. I have no idea if the engine is toast from the temperature it had or not. Car was then towed to the local BMW mechanic on a flatbed, which showed up just in time for us to load the car and unload the car all while it was pouring like a sonuvabitch outside. Car was going to have its 100k mile maintenance done after I got back from Las Vegas.

The Family:
My grandfather from Ohio has been here for two weeks now almost. Its been good to have him around. Amazingly enough he hasn’t said a single word about why I’m not seeing anyone. Perhaps he forgot? I dunno, the guy is 85 years old so who knows. However upon arrival from the airport when he saw me within two seconds he said “You need to workout kid”. Sheesh. When I get back from CES I’m going to see what getting a membership at the new 24 Hour Fitness is going to cost me. I do need to start doing something about this. I’m tired of wearing 38/40 inch waist pants.

My Dads Computer:
For those of you who don’t know, every Christmas and/or time my dad goes to Fry’s or Pomona Computer Fair I invariably hear the words “Hey why don’t you help me put XYZ into my computer” or somesuch kind of technical assistance. My fathers PC is a beast of a computer assembled out of an old steel server PC case on whells that we hand modified from an AT standard case to an ATX standard case so its by no means standard or normal. Anyways it has like 6 SCSI hard drives in it plus two optical drives, and two Zip drives and two SATA drives in a RAID 1 mirror. Basically, I’ve been moving all of his older SCSI drive partitions over to the mirrored SATA RAID because the SCSI drives are small and old and starting to show signs of failure (drives occasionally dont register on the SCSI device chain, etc). Anyways Saturday night from 7pm to 7am this morning I was migrating the hardest part of his partitions over to the RAID drive, his Windows XP OS partition. Hell, I want to kill that POS P4 system. I swear to Christ it is cursed. I can run an XP system without having it do wierd things or fail in bizzare ways for almost 2 years now whereas my fathers system always has SOMETHING that isnt quite ever working right. The man has like 800 different things installed on it and its near impossible to tell just what the hell should be running in the background at any time. Anyways after getting that project finally fixed and done it was on to installing the new Dish Network reciever he got after we towed my car today. Turns out the reciever *required* that two LNB feeds were fed into it for *proper* operation.

So we pulled the damnable RG-6 cable through the attic at what time you ask?

12:30 in the MORNING.

And then we had to snake the cable down the wall through the firewall, etc, etc.

Meanwhile, Dan has to finish doing laundry and packing for his weeklong work trip to Las Vegas for covering the CES show for Byte Magazine and TechRevu and he has a MASSIVE migraine and heartburn or something.

Damn I need some oral right now.

And tomorrow I get to take the metro rail from Long Beach up to Del Mar station. Yay.