Friday Notes: June 22, 2007

Another week, another set of notes:

• I’ll be heading off to Atlanta after work today, where my wife and I will be visiting the Georgia Aquarium and attending tomorrow’s Braves game.  The pitching matchup is Justin Verlander against Kyle Davies, which should be fun for all the visiting fans unless Good Davies makes his triumphant return.  I’m sure we’ll have fun regardless, but I’m not excited about the Braves’ chances to win.  If we get the chance, we’ll probably try to see some of the other sites around Centennial Park and maybe visit the CNN Center or the new World of Coca-Cola.
• North Carolina and Oregon State will play for the College World Series trophy this weekend, but neither of them can match the fictional Harding team I play with in MVP 07 NCAA Baseball.  I basically created a team of me and my friends from college, gave us all perfect ratings, and unleashed our team on the SEC (replacing LSU so as to be Arkansas’ rival).  I’m 23-0 in the 2007 season, having won every game by the mercy rule.  I have allowed a single earned run as the staff’s ace, and I’m hitting .590 with 22 homers out of the leadoff spot.  Whenever I need a gaming confidence boost, I know where to turn…
• Melissa and I have been watching past seasons of The West Wing for the past month or two, and we’re midway through the second season right now.  Neither of us had watched the show during its 7-year run, so it’s all brand new to us.  So far, it has a creative story arc and deep characters, and the dialogue in the show is fantastic.  I have great expectations for the rest of the series, and if anyone has $175 set aside to spend on me, I have a suggestion.
• If you’re using Google Reader to manage your feeds, I strongly suggest that you check out the “Trends” page and use it to track your feeds.  I have used it to analyze which feeds I’m not really reading, which ones are the must-reads, and which ones post the most content.  It’s incredibly helpful as a time-management tool.  In order to use it effectively, though, I switched to the “list” view, which makes me click on items I want to read (thus marking them as read), while I just pass over the others.  If you’re curious, Engadget produces the most daily items (31.2 per day), with about ten others producing 10 or more items per day.  I read about 120 items per day, and I would guess that I click through to the original site for about 10 of those.

I’ll check in with a full report of the weekend’s activities and a Braves update next week.