Wezzul.com - It's the Dinglez

This is my last dinglez ditch effort to rank for the word dinglez. Google seems to hate mah dinglez!

---

This season for the Tigers is getting pretty amazing. They won again, last night, agains the Kansas City Royals. What made the game special was that after the sixth inning, the Tigers only had four hits. By the end of the game, they had seventeen. At the end of the sixth, the Tigers were down, 4-2. By the end of the game, it was 8-5, Tigers. This the sort of thing that NEVER happened for the Tigers last year, winning games in the late innings. Last year, if the opposing team went up four runs in the first or second inning, you knew the game was over, they'd never come back from this.

Since Saturday, this is the second time the Tigers have come back to win in the late innings. On Saturday night, versus the Cincinnati Reds, the Tigers had a 5-2 lead when Ken Griffey Jr. hit a grand slam off of Joel Zumaya to put the Reds ahead 6-5. The Tigers responded in the ninth inning, when Curtis Granderson hit a solo homerun with two outs to take it to the tenth inning. Then, on a pinch hit RBI single in the tenth by Placido Polanco, the Tigers took the lead, and Todd Jones closed out the game, which coincidentally set the Detroit Tigers record for career saves. This is a perfect example of what Jim Leyland has brought to the table this year. With a roster that, for all intents and purposes, is the same as last year (add Jones and Kenny Rogers from free agency, and rookies Justin Verlander and Zumaya), he has managed to turn an also-ran in the MLB to a early contender for the AL Central division lead. The Tigers now stand at 31-14, and have a one game lead over the Chicago White Sox. They are the best team in the MLB right now. This is fun.

As for the other Detroit team currently still playing at this time of year, the Pistons lost their first round game against the Miami Heat last night after a very poor showing. At times, the Pistons contended for the lead, or even had the lead, but it looked bad pretty much the entire night. The Pistons shot a poor 37.8% from the field, lead by Chauncey Billups and Richard Hamiltons combined 15/41 shooting effort. The one thing about this Pistons team that everyone likes is that every night during the regular season, someone would step up, be it Rasheed Wallace, Chancey, Rip, Tayshaun Prince, or Antonio McDyess (you can't really put Ben Wallace here, as he's not really a huge scoring threat). In the playoffs, they haven't had a lot of that, where one guy picks up the slack for the other guys that aren't playing as well in that game. For the Pistons to win this series, they're going to need to get some better performances from their starting five. They have been a team that relied on their starting five, and should continue to do so if they want to reach the NBA Finals. Game 2 of the series is Thursday night, and it is a must win for the Pistons. If they go back to Miami down 0-2, it's going to be a hard climb back to evening the series.


Briefs:

*The Detroit Red Wings have re-signed 44-year old Chris Chelios to a one year deal. I couldn't be happier about this. During the albeit short playoffs for the Wings, Chelios was a great stay at home defenseman, which the Wings need with the loss of Jiri Fischer. I remeber a particular penalty kill where Chelios cleared the puck from deep in the Detroit zone three times, essentially killing the penalty all by himself. I don't care how old the man is, he's still tough, he can still play defense. I'm happy he's going to be back. Now, on to Shanahan and Yzerman.

*Dmitri Young continues to suck. This is not news, but it's an indication that the Tigers are going to be looking for someone else to DH for them, perhaps Marcus Thames, who has made the most of his limited time at the plate. He's on the DL now as well. John Hannahan, 3B, was called up from Toledo

*Dmitri Young also has been charged with domestic abuse, after allegedly strangling his 21-year old ex-girlfriend at a Birmingham, MI hotel. Not only is this guy high paid, and not performing, but he's also a woman beater. Detroit has the best .169 avg DH in the league, that's for sure.

*Detroit Lions let Dan Wilkinson go. He had a good run with the team, helping Shawn Rogers become the two-time pro bowl player that he is today. Shawn Cody is expected to start at Nose Tackle in the coming season.

*Still no Steve Yzerman news. My feeling is the longer it takes, the more likely he is coming back.

Articles:

Wade's Hot Hand Helps Heat Steal Home-Court Advantage - NBA.com

Heat's Energy Rolls Pistons - ESPN.com

Oh So Cold! - freep.com

Wings re-sign Chelios - freep.com

Leyland's Message Hitting Home - detnews.com

Current Music: Alkaline Trio - Clavicle

---

The Detroit Tigers won their seventh straight last night, and now, not only do they have the lead in their division, but also the best record in the MLB. They swept a division rival, the Minnesota Twins, for the second time this season, and are rolling behind stellar pitching from both the starting rotation as well as the bullpen. Let's hope they can keep this up and be in this spot in September. As nice as it is to be in first right now, it's a marathon, not a sprint as they always say.

The Tigers have some important series coming up. This weekend is the Sparky Anderson classic, a series with Sparky's other team, the Cincinnati Reds. After that, there are two division series, one with the weak Kansas City Royals, one with the Cleveland Indians,. Then, they take on two of the more popular teams in the American League at home. First, a four game series with the New York Yankees, then a weekend series with the Boston Red Sox. If they can come out of those two with some good wins, it should put the Tigers on a more national stage.

Below are some articles about the Tigers recently:

Add victory to list of things going right for Tigers - detnews.com

Leland says he's happy for the fans - detnews.com

Tigers extend longest team winning streak since '93 - espn.com

---

I am now using mod_rewrite to do a bunch of stuff as far as making nice looking URLs point to pages that would normally have to have a query string. For instance, now, instead of going to something like http://wezzul.com/747/, you can go to http://wezzul.com/General/Festival!-Festival!-SMASH!. This is mostly for the search engines, though a URL without a query string looks a fuck of a lot better than one with one.

Dinglez to that, I'm happy that the site still interests me enough to work on it every so often.

Current Music: Utter Silence

---

Last night, I attended the Detroit Tigers game with the Minnesota Twins, and it became even more apparent why the Tigers have the best record in the major leagues right now -- pitching. I watched 21 year old Justin Verlander pitch eight scoreless innings against the Twins. He pitched amazingly well, and was calm, and confident even during the few jams he got himself in. A few times during the game, the batter worked the count full, and with men on base, Verlander would force the easy pop up or ground out. I don't think he struck anyone out the entire game, but it doesn't matter if you're still getting the outs. I think he probably could have stayed in the game, and finished it, getting the shutout, but there is no reason to chance it when you only have a slim (two run) lead.

It's hard to think that Kenny Rogers wasn't worth the price paid. Not only does he lead the Tigers in wins (6), but he is also tied for inning pitched with Jeremy Bonderman. Sure, he's 41, and sure the Tigers had to pay too much to get him here (as they usually do with quality free agents), but his impact, not only on the Tigers win/loss record, but on the young staff is immeasureable. You think a guy like Mike Maroth would be pitching as well as he is this season without the veteran pointers that a guy like Rogers can dole out? They have a similar style as far as what kind of pitches they throw, and it's clear Maroth is learning from Rogers by example. He's 5-2 with a 2.18 ERA. Compare that to years past, and tell me Rogers isn't worth every single penny the Tigers have got built into his contract.

I think the big thing this year for the Tigers is getting young players from their farm system to step up and win games for them. The aformentioned Verlander, along with Joel Zumaya (RP) and Curtis Granderson (CF) are really playing good baseball this year. You can see in Zumaya (who, along with Verlander, has had pitches clock at 101mph) a future closer for the Tigers that could easily be in the tops of the league. It's amazing that, at the start of the season, it was said he could be a starter. If he can keep up pitching the way he does for 6 innings, I'd love to see it. And it's a real testament to the Tigers staff when a guy with that much obvious talent can't make the rotation. Granderson isn't playing GREAT baseball, but he's a real asset to have at the lead off spot, since he combines speed and a reasonable amount of power. He does lead the team in strikeouts, but he also leads them in walks. As he gets older, and refines his eye at the plate, we will see him become a more important part of the Tigers squad. The one thing you can say about him is he is defensively sound. He has a 1.000 fielding average at this point in the season, and while he may have trouble running balls down at times, this is another thing that will come with experience.

The Pistons are looking very frustrating lately. Last night, they lost their third game in a row (first time this year that has happened), and first playoff game at home. Chauncey Billups fouled out with about five minutes left in the fourth quarter, which hurt them, and Rasheed Wallace was also in foul trouble (and probably still injured) for most of the fourth. After watching the end of the game, it's easy to see that the Pistons are not playing like they want to win. Now, they are left with the task of beating the Cleveland Cavaliers at home and then bringing it back to the Palace for game seven. While it is clear that the Pistons can pull this off, it has yet to be seen whether they have the will to. It will be an interesting couple of games. Lets hope they can step it up on Friday and bring the series back home.

I won't even mention the Lions or Red Wings here. No reason to sour up the post.

Current Music: Sigur Ros - Track 1 from ()

---

Since learning some perl, I've realized it has great applications for automatically ripping data from webpages. So I wrote something for flickr to take a users album, rip all the pages out of it and then pull all the full sized images from those pages.

In the archive, there are three files. The perl script, rippr.pl, a users.txt file, and a records.txt file. All that needs to be done is populating the users.txt file with user directories in the format http://www.flickr.com/photos/username. You will also need to create a directory, images, as a subdirectory of the directory where the perl script resides. Then, while running the script, it will create a new directory in images for each user, and pop the images in there, naming them incrementally with numbers so as not to have duplicate image names.

It has worked pretty well for me so far, and it's relatively fast as well. Get it here.

Edit: I upped a new copy that pulls down the original images instead of the sized ones flickr displays by default.

Current Music: The Raconteurs - Steady as She Goes

---

"Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know how many motherfucking snakes will be on your motherfucking plane"

Current Music: Gnarls Barkley - Necromancing

---

So it's been a while, right?

I've done some re-design on the site, as far as the navigation goes. The drop downs were one of my huge problems with the site, and I fixed it. At first, I was unclear as to how to make the sidebar work with css. That is because I am a moron. It was an easy fix, and works well now, in my opinion. I also made some changes to the .htaccess file, allowing for some better looking direct links into individual posts. That should allow for some better indexing of the content by the search engines, and also, keywords will now point to the actual post they reference instead of just going to the default main index. After attending the Webmaster World Conference in Boston, I realized that moving away from query strings would be easy, and allows for pages to be much more indexable. On that same note, the conference provided alot of hints as to optimizing content for search ranking. I'll be working on that in the near future.

Things are getting better in IE. Not great, but better. Comments still don't work in IE. However, the page looks alot better now. Different theme / css there. Since imagemagick on my new server does not seem to recognize the channel RGBA (which makes NO sense), the newest title image is fucked up over there. I'll find a fix for that relatively easy I think.

Anyone that knows me knows of my love for the local baseball team, the Detroit Tigers. Well, they have been on a tear as of late, winning six straight and now being tied for first in the AL Central. This is pretty exciting, especially because of the first round exit by the Red Wings. I'd love to see the Tigers turn in a good season, and perhaps compete for a wild card spot. We'll see how it turns out, but my hopes are high right now.

The weather has been outstanding lately which means disc golf has been going on with some frequency. I currently stand at 3-5 for the season series with Seabass. I am, much like the Tigers, on a winning streak, though, winning the last three games. We found a beautiful course in Northville, which is relatively close to my residence. There is one majestic hole, where the tee is on top of a 150 ft hill, and the distance to the pin is 740ft. Teeing off from up there is just so beautiful, it feels as if you are throwing off the top of the world. This weekend, we have plans to play Kensington as well as perhaps playing Firefighter's park today.

That's all I got for now. Once again, thanks to Jake for hosting this, as well as Mysticaljackass.com , IHateLlamas.com and Dan's blog . I may attempt to write more in the future, get some content up here. But saying that is the death knell for any activity on the site at all.

Edit: Turns out commenting in IE does work. Who'd of thought.

Current Music: Fesit - Mushaboom (Postal Service Mix)

---