TBWAIN - AKA Jeff Svare's Blog

I know you're looking forward to my discussion of the three reasons why the Twins didn't make the postseason this year, but my attention has been drawn to the AL Cy Young award for this year. It seems like everyone is heralding John Buehrle as the man who will win. He shouldn't be. Johan Santana should. Through 29 September both Buehrle and Santana have the same number of appearances (32) which I think makes this a pretty fair comparison. Buehrle has been playing for the wire-to-wire champions (who've barely been able to maintain a winning record since the end of July), the ChiSox. The Twins however have been sliding all season, and may just barely be able to wrap it up over and finish over 500. If you ignore the press and the oft-heralded "smart ball" management syle of Ozzie Guillen, and look at the numbers it's clear that between Bueherle and Santana, Santana has been the better pitcher this year. Here's the numbers (sorry about the crappy formattin...

Actually, this piece should be titled "On Reaching .500 for the 4th Time." The First time was after the second game of the season, when the Twins beat the Mariners. That win was followed up with another over Seattle, and then loosing to the White Sox to hit .500 for the second time. The third time was the 6th game of the season, and their first series loss to the ChiSox. The Twins made it up to .727 on 16 April, but it's been a continual downhill slide all season long. After tonight's lost to the embarrasingly bad KC Royals, the Twins are at .500. Congratulations, you've achieved mediocrity. So, why after winning the AL Central title three years running did this happen? There are a few reasons that can be clearly identified. 1. No run support. 2. Allowing the other team to score first. 3. The Chicago White Sox (and no, it's Ozzie's "small ball" that did it!). I'll examine each of these in future posts, so stick around if you are interes...

Ren Cahoon, CIO of the National Archives and Records Administration gave a presentation that showed how the government's new electronic archive will work. I've been following this for a few years, and I was really excited to hear about this. On Thursday, September 8th, a contract was awarded to Lockheed-Martin to build this system. The cost? 308 Million. Yeah, that explains why no one has tried to do this before.

During his lunch presentation, David Rencher, Director of the Records and Information Division, made the statement that the Church has the capability of digitizing all 2.5 million rolls of microfilm within 6 years. As he said, "The planes are lined up, waiting." If you are into genealogy, this is exciting stuff.

The most newsworthy event of the day came during Jay Verkler's keynote presentation. He demonstrated the new collaboration tool that will be available through FamilySearch.org. This will allow users to search the database to find matching individuals among the other pedigrees that have been submitted. They can they attach that individual to their pedigree. This is a much different approach than existed with AncestralFile where a computer algorithim merged two individuals together. What I found when using AncestralFile is that the algorithm sometimes mismatched two people, and frequently could not identify that two persons were the same when a trained researcher can clearly see they are the same. The announcement and demonstration was so subtle that I wonder is everyone understood what they were seeing. Jay didn't announce a date when this would be available, but I would think that it should be sometime soon. After the presentation there was a small crowd that gathered around th...

I was out of the country on business for a couple weeks and found Internet access to be problematic so the frequency of my blogging has suffered considerably. My burning desire to keep up on baseball has suffered as well. Being forced to watch soccer games (sorry, "football") surrounded by hordes of alcohol-fueled fans just didn't cut it. Praise soccer all you want to, it's still nothing more than kick-the-ball-and-run repeated ad nauseum. This synapse-destroying activity is interrupted only by an occasional score accompanied by some announcer shouting out a lengthened "Gooooooaaaaaallllllll!" until he passes out from oxygen starvation. I guess baseball is just too cerebral for most people. Back to the lack of Internet access. I would think that when you consider that I was in two of the wealthiest countries in Europe, that wireless access would have been easy. Wrong. It was expensive and frequently very, very slow, on the order of 14.4 dialup slow. In refer...