I know this isn’t the Blue Jays logo any more, but it was the last time I went to see them play. In fact, this was their logo the last time I watched any MLB at all.
Its not that I hate baseball. Its just that I don’t care. Baseball is no worse than any other professional sport — athletes are over-paid and over-worshipped for playing a game, while people in other parts of the world starve to death. Just seems kinda stupid to me. But I guess it doesn’t bother me enough to be passionate about it… I just don’t really get emotionally involved in sports at all.
It doesn’t help that the last baseball game I went to went into like 14 extra innings, and we were stuck in uncomfortable seats for 32 hours straight… or something like that.
Anyway, I’m going to a ball game tonite. And I’m actually kinda looking forward to it. Not the part about watching doped up, spoiled rich guys swinging a club and chasing a ball around a field. But the part about hanging out with my old friend Randy, doing something he enjoys, and celebrating the fact he’s grown-up to the point where he’s ready to commit to his girlfriend and to their son in marriage. And I guess it would be nice if the home team won (especially since they’re playing New York) but either way, tonight we’re celebrating a victory.
Here’s hoping there are no extra innings…

I don’t know Todd really well, but he (and his wife and their brood of children) are going to be missionaries in Turkey. In the short time I did know him, he taught me something very important, that I remembered tonight…
I have never seen Todd without a smile on his face. We worked together at our church in New York, where I was a part time production director for our weekend services, and Todd was our audio guy. The first time he came in on a Sunday, there was a mis-communication about times. He ended up there early, and I ended up there late.
When I arrived at the church, Todd was standing outside the front door. Since they were saving up for a missions trip, they only had one car for the whole family, so he’d been dropped off — an hour and a half before I got there. It was the dead of winter in New York, and the guy was standing there in the cold waiting for me.
With a smile on his face.
This guy was a professional audio engineer, well into his career, who’d given it up to get ready to go the missions field. And because of where God had called him to go, he had to make some money working for us. We were a bunch of 20-somethings pulling together an intensely fast-paced ministry by our shoestrings, some bubble gum (literally, on at least one occasion) and the seat of our pants. And we probably didn’t give him half the respect he deserved.
But I never once saw him without that smile on his face.
One time, stressed out about something or other that had probably gone wrong, or was about to go wrong, or might go wrong if the solution we’d patched together at midnight the night before fell apart, I asked him how he could always be happy. And he told me:
You get to choose your attitude.
And he was right. Right now, things aren’t terribly fantastic in our lives. For everything good we want to do, or give, or accomplish, something comes along and craps on it, or somehow screws us out of more time or money or resources than the little bit we could manage to share. And it looks to be continuing that way for at least another two months. But I was reminded tonight that I’m actually pretty spoiled. And that my idea of a rough week, or a rough month, or a rough summer… well, it would probably seem pretty good to a lot of other people in the world.
So I’m trying to choose a better attitude.

In what could be described as “the straw that broke the camel’s back” I decided yesterday to never, ever pay for cable TV again.
Unfortunately, Primus isn’t working out good enough as our telephone service, so, loathe to pay the phone company, we’re going with Rogers digital home phone service. Its marginally cheaper than a normal landline, and won’t mess with my dry-loop DSL. While on the phone with Rogers, I decided to inquire about getting PBS for Benjamin. He actually pays attention to the TV now, and our selection of kids movies may not be boring him, but Nic has all of Finding Nemo memorized, and if I have to watch Flushed Away one more time…
I was frustrated to find that you can’t select “basic cable” from the automated system, but was even more so when I got through to a person and found out that the cheapest cable you can buy (and remember we only want 1 channel) was $30 a month. Apparently basic cable has been abolished in Canada, and paying $9 for channels 1-20 isn’t something you can do.
So we bought an AppleTV.
It was a gamble, predicated on the knowledge that iTunes would let us buy U.S. content while in Canada, because our billing address and credit card are both U.S. This frees us from the crappily small Canadian catalogue of video, and means we don’t have to rely on any of the crippled-but-allowed-in-Canada digital distribution systems that over-charge for their tiny library of content.
Here’s a shot of the AppleTV at work, using only its manufacturer’s intended features:

Through the power of the Internets, and a bit of hacking by yours truly, it also does what the XBox 360 can do (and more elegantly) in allowing us to access our own library of content in various media types. All our digitally stored movies, TV series, music and 7 years worth of photos can be viewed on our TV. Our favortie TV Shows are downloaded over the Internet and available immediately on the AppleTV. And if there’s a show we want to check out, we just order it from our remote control.
We will be buying a couple shows as well. If we budget $10 a month for purchased TV, thats a third what we’d pay for cable, and it lets each of us (including Abi) subscribe to one full season of a show each year. Plus I can take my show with me on my iPhone, and watch it anywhere I want.
On top of that, there’s a wonderful array of free content on the store. National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, TEDTV, and many other educational shows are available in High Definition at the touch of a button. And if you want something a little more low-brow, there’s YouTube. You can spend hours “surfing” the TV, and not have to pay a cent to any monopolistic media conglomerate, or watch a single commercial — not even on fast forward.
It was not particularly easy to find an AppleTV in Canada, and for now, our set-up requires us to maintain a U.S. credit card, but that’s something we’d intended on doing anyway. Eventually the Canadian tech industry will be forced to grow up and catch up. Hopefully our little loop-hole remains open until then.