Please say it ain’t friggin’ so!

The MLB trading deadline passed about 50 minutes ago as I write this, and a little over ten minutes ago I saw a breaking news alert from our local CBS affil saying Manny Ramirez is heading to the Dodgers. Except the MLB Trade Deadline page has Manny staying put in Beantown. I also checked the Blue Notes blog from the LA Times and the only thing they’re talking about is the Greg Maddux deal that fell through, so I’m waiting for verification on this breaking story.

I’ll say one thing, though. The Dodgers don’t need another outfielder or Manny’s friggin’ drama. If Ned Coletti did in fact trade for Manny I want to know what the Dodgers gave up for him. And I really hope this is the final nail in Neddy’s coffin and the s.o.b. is handed his pink slip before the season’s done. God knows the Dodger fans don’t want Manny (we already have Andru Jones, thank you very friggin’ much), and I can’t see Joe Torre wanting Manny either.

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As I finish writing this I’m seeing that Manny is in fact joining the Dodgers in a three-team deal. And this Dodger fan trapped behind enemy lines in the middle of Red Sox Nation is definitely not happy.

When did SecondLife open up their forums to non-paying members?

For as long as I (or Peng) can remember the SecondLife Forums have been off limits to us since we not only don’t pay monthly fees (due to a combination of available funds and fairly recent bugginess, plus the fact that I’m hardly on it anymore), but I was reading a post on the SL Blog from Catherine Linden about new forum discussion threads and clicked on a link to the forums, expecting the usual “I don’t recognize you. Please log in.” response. Instead I found I was looking at a page on their forums! Wow!

I did some poking around in their Linux Client Testers section to see what was going on there and I saw some nice comments about the Cool Second Life Viewer. I had seen something about it before but a quick glance didn’t show me any “have to use” features so I hadn’t gotten it yet, but after today I may have to take it for a spin the next time I pop in to check messages and to see what the September hair from Gurl 6 is. Although looking around Six Kennedy’s blog again I think I’m going to have to subscribe to her feed. She has some pretty nice specials that I’ll want to be able to catch.

Update 1:30pm Tuesday, 26 August: I’ve had to close comments for this post since it also has become a spam magnet latly. I’ll try to open comments again in a few weeks. I’d really hate to have to disable comments accross my entire blog due to the spammers.

Peng’s links for Thursday, 31 July

• Chris Blizzard: two cool things: ogg support in mozilla and canvas in IE. From the “it’s about damned time” file, Firefox 3.1 will finally support Ogg Vorbis/Theora (audio/video) files natively. Linux users have long loved the open source Ogg media formats, and now their favorite browser will know what to do with them out of the box, even on non-Linux platforms. I’m not sure what this means for codecs on OSX and Windows.
• Melissa Draper: You’re doing what now?! Ms. Draper interrupts her hiatus from blogging to post a very important Public Service Announcement on the problem with using scripts found online that use the apt “–force-yes” flag. That’s right, it’s a really bad idea. And Ultamatix (which I mentioned Saturday) uses it a lot, which makes using the successor to Automatix a really bad idea.
• Alan Pope: Ubuntu UK Podcast Episode 11 Out. The UK Ubuntu LoCo (Local Community) Team recorded some segments for their latest podcast at the recent LUGRadio Live UK 2008. Although some of us Yanks may need closed captions since we threw some tea into Boston Harbor so many years ago.

It seems I may have had more possible posts from Planet Mozilla, expect people got trapped at the Mozilla Summit thanks to a rock slide on the road they were expecting to take to Vancouver. There’s been good natured jokes about whether summit attendees were going to have to resort to lifeboat team building events, but there is an alternate route, even if it does take eight hours rather than two and a half hours.Luckily Neil Deakin, who didn’t have that many hours to spare, found an even better route to Vancouver, so he won’t have to be late for his own wedding.

Dan Glazman came up with an even funnier way to look at the problem, and in true open source fashion someone filed a bug on the problem. I can’t help but laugh at some of the comments added to it. I think I’m going to have to subscribe to it, if for no other reason than to get even more humor out of today than my favorite cheezburger joint. But hey, we found the remote!