The Chris Gonyea Project

2006 has been rather boring in regards to new albums and music. I don’t think I have bought a single recently released CD since last year. You would think the record companies would get a hint.

Well finally there are some good CD’s coming out this Tuesday:

• Pearl Jam “Pearl Jam”
• Tool “10,000 Days”
• Thursday “City By The Light Divided”

Been a long time since even three good bands released new albums on the same day.

I will definitely be purchasing Pearl Jam’s and Tool’s new albums. Not sure about Thursday yet.

I had my first softball practice today and overall I thought it went pretty well. Since I really haven’t played organized baseball in 10 years and haven’t played softball ever, I thought I did very well.

The coach decided to stick me at shortstop, since I said I had good speed and no one else wanted to play it. I never played shortstop on any team before, so this was new to me and it showed. I really booted a few ground balls I should have had early on, mostly due to me not being used to the position. One thing I need to work on is hard hit ground balls and the bounces they sometimes take.

However as practice moved on, I started to make some really nice plays, such as on one ball ranging far to my right, grabbing the ball with my glove, setting my feet and throwing a strike to 1st base. I think I have good enough range to play shortstop, I really just need practice on ground balls hit at me.

Hitting was another thing as well, especially when I used a bat that was clearly too long for me. It took a good 5 or so swings before I started making contact. However, by the end of my batting practice, I was hitting very solid line drives into the OF and getting good contact. Nothing spectacular, but I should do fine, especially if they get some more bats that are my size. I should be able to get a decent amount of hits.

Overall I like our team. We won’t go 16-0, but we should do a solid job. First game is Tuesday, so I will write up how I do and try to keep some basic stats throughout the season.

Stopdesign has a bunch tips for Google Calendar users.

I have installed Bad Behavior 2.0 Alpha 3 on my site. Akismet has been very effective (maybe 1 or 2 spam are missed per 300-400 comment spam with no false positives), but I had to go through the 400+ comment spam it catches every 2-3 days and I would love if the obvious stuff is just blocked before it reaches Akismet. The less work I have to do with comment spam, the better.

So Bad Behavior will be combined with Akismet to effectively shut any chance of a comment spammer getting a comment posted on this site. If Bad Behavior misses it, Akismet should catch it. Already this morning, 47 spam attempts were blocked by Bad Behavior. Fantastic!

Tomorrow will be my first practice on the company softball team. Seeing how I haven’t played a real game of softball during my life and I haven’t played baseball since high school, this should be interesting. What are the odds I will make a fool out of myself? At least I have my co-workers making fools out of themselves too!

On a more serious note, I almost felt like a little kid last weekend when I went to a sporting goods store and bought my first new glove in probably 10 years. Spent the past week breaking it in and it feels pretty good. Needs some real game action to truly feel right, but that is coming real soon. Game #1 of my softball career is this Tuesday, May 2nd.

Back in high school, I always thought I was a decent hitter…although my fielding could have used some work. Injuries are what derailed my hopes of playing varsity baseball, but oh well.

The league I will be playing in is a coed league and is semi-serious (ie: everyone has fun, but you still try hard).

So I can’t be any worse then anyone else on the field…