Wow. The "submit news item" feature mangled my username even worse than it was already mangled...

It's like they don't understand why he was cut by the Padres...

One week in.... yup, Edmonds hate burns as fiercely as ever.

And somehow, this is all the Cards' fault.

One week in.... yup, Edmonds hate burns as fiercely as ever.

Yes, well, he sucks.

actually, he'd better start bunting a lot more

i watched every AB he had this week against the astros and he's just not able to drive the ball like he used to. 4 of his flyouts would have been out of the park in 05. and even his grounders are weakass.

he looks decent in the field because he know the Box so well, but, he looks cooked with the bat fer SHER

i kinda feel sorry for the guy because if i was him i wouldn't want to go out looking this bad... and here i am feeling sorry for a washed up guy who killt my team for years - kept us out of the series in 04, got on base before The Infamous Pujols Homer in 05, which ended up costing us the series...

retro
wtf is wrong with your handle? what is all them stupid boxes for?

My fave part of retro's handle is how it's vowels that're fikked up until you get to scheiß.

The unreadable symbols in retro's name appear on my browse as question marks, not boxes. At first, I thought it was a game of hangman.

Lou is the best. No BSing around. Produce or begone.

The unreadable symbols in retro's name appear on my browse as question marks, not boxes. At first, I thought it was a game of hangman.

That's how they showed up on mine, too, until I submitted this item. Now, I get an odd combination of boxes, slashes, question marks, and what appear to be Chinese or Korean characters.

In any event, I suppose looking at my fecked up handle is a lot more entertaining than watching Jim Edmonds.

To explain the handle bit--the other night on the Cubs game chat Carl Spongberg and I were talking about things German (he lives in Austria). I lamented that I didn't know how to form umlauts on the keyboard; once AR and Carl showed me, I decided to umlaut every vowel in my new and improved handle. It showed up fine in the "change username" field, but all the umlauted characters appeared as question marks on my posts.

I have no idea where the hell this hodgepodge of characters came from. I kind of like it, though. Just call me the poster formerly known as retro. It's my own personal symbol.

Having recently gone through a ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 conversion in my day job, I would speculate that the problem is

1) the website is expecting UTF-8 on forms because it seems to generically specify that as the output, and
2) the underlying databases are still configured as Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1).

Translating between the two can cause all kinds of havoc. Taking a look at the scharfes S in the last character in your username (I'm assuming you were going for the German word "scheiss", one of those naughty words my high school teacher Herr Bannehr wouldn't give us but my college professor would), the Latin-in-Unicode symbol is U+00DF, corresponding to the ISO-8859-1 encoding of DF. Taking a binary dump of this page and looking particularly at your name derives this snippet:

0000220 275 s n 357 277 275 s c h e i 357 277 275
bd 73 20 6e ef bf bd 20 73 63 68 65 69 ef bf bd

That is some seriously mangled stuff. The correct encoding of U+00DF should be C3 9F. What's escaping the tailpipe at BTF isn't even close, and isn't even well-formed UTF-8. In fact, if you look at this, all the high bit characters are coming out as triplets. Weird.

Here's a test of the scharfes S: ß. Seems to work okay when posting, just not when changing your userid.

Now, I get an odd combination of boxes, slashes, question marks, and what appear to be Chinese or Korean characters.

Having just come over from the comic cover thread, maybe Retro's handle is like the visage of Galactus, where each race sees him in their own image.

I must just be clueless, because everything comes up question marks. Of course, I live in a world where Jim Edmonds plays center for the Cubs, the Yankees are in last, and Barry Bonds can't possibly help the Mets. I'd hate to become even more enlightened.

I'm just hoping Jimmy doesn't get cut before Monday, because I really want one last chance to cheer for him in person.

Seriously.

hey retro any night games this up comming week that you arnt going to make? cause id love to catch a cubs game before i go over to turkey

Having just come over from the comic cover thread, maybe Retro's handle is like the visage of Galactus, where each race sees him in their own image.

I don't know what that is, but it sounds cool as hell.

Dumbest mover ever. EVER!!!

One week in.... yup, Edmonds hate burns as fiercely as ever.

Yes, well, he sucks.

It is this kind of end to a great career that makes it difficult for one to get into the HOF. Edmonds deserves a look at the HOF as he was one of the best CF ever.

"He's one of those guys who's going to be himself," former Angels teammate Darin Erstad said. "He's not worried about pleasing people. He's going to have fun, and I'll tell you what, when it's on the line that man knows what he's doing. He loves being there and I think it's a great pickup for Chicago."

I always thought Erstad was one of the Angels who didn't like Edmonds because he didn't have a punter's mentality.

Clearly Erstad thinks it's a great pickup for the Cubs because he now plays for Houston.

Meanwhile, down on the farm:

Pie (27 ABs): .111/.226/.222; .095 BABIP

Not that he should have been sent down in the first place, but this is a particularly bad time to have an unlucky slump.

I must just be clueless, because everything comes up question marks.

What your browser decides to do with improperly encoded characters is its business. Firefox under Linux uses diamonds overlaid with question marks.

What your browser decides to do with improperly encoded characters is its business.

Well, that's a typically libertarian viewpoint.

He needs to start hitting...or what? They'll play Reed Johnson? Cause they're sure as hell aren't going to give Felix Pie a shot.

The latest idea from the geniuses in charge is to slide Fukudome to CF and play Micah Hoffpauir in RF.

Not that he should have been sent down in the first place, but this is a particularly bad time to have an unlucky slump.

Is it unlucky? I'd guess he's sulking. I don't blame him, but that's what I think it is.

It is this kind of end to a great career that makes it difficult for one to get into the HOF

Yes, five and a half years from now those voters will never be able to shake the memory of the last 30 games of Jim Edmonds's career.

It is this kind of end to a great career that makes it difficult for one to get into the HOF

Yes, five and a half years from now those voters will never be able to shake the memory of the last 30 games of Jim Edmonds's career.

Not that Jim Edmonds is really Hall-worthy, but it doesn't seem like ending a career with bad performances is much of a barrier of getting into the Hall. I mean, look at Steve Carlton.

Out of curiousity, why does Soriano bat leadoff and Fukudome bat fifth? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

scareduck, code set conversion is a scary, scary world, especially if you bounce around between the Windows and the Unix/Linux world. Be careful of your database, too. We had all kinds of fun migrating and transforming data from Oracle using Python on Linux for some transformations (standardizing on attributes across 2 companies that were merging) and stuffing it back into Oracle (new version) and then accessing the data via both VB and Delphi based front ends and back ends respectively. Then for new data, we wrapped the transactions in XML, shooting down an MQ pipe through a Websephere hosted java program before stuffing the new data into the DB.
I was the DB and data migration guy, not the system architect. Was this system hard to maintain? Indeedy, it has. But we did sort out all the code set conversion prior to going live, at least until the French go hold of it and ran into problems using their government mandated French language Front End. (Our company requires all scientific analysis to be written in English! Nipplerent would have seethed over that gov't intervention).

Re #30, oh yeah, it caused me a lot of fun. We luckily had very little in the database (I don't think I'm giving away any state secrets by naming my daytime employer and the fact that we use MySQL) that was using foreign characters... except that

1) For some time prior to the conversion, I had been converting incoming merchant feeds to UTF-8 in the database despite the fact that they were being stored as Latin-1. Lotsa fun there, as some of that became temporarily unsearchable until those magic characters slowly percolated through the system and were converted later.
2) One of our non-merchant data providers were sending us data encoded in three or four different ways without us knowing about it until we started looking deeper at the feed for non-ASCII character usage. Ever hear of DOS-437? Neither had I until I finally figured out that's what they were sending us! We called them on it (it was supposed to be ISO-8859-1, or at least its proper superset, Windows-1252) and they eventually corrected it. Fortunately, the number of titles involved was pretty minimal.
3) Telling MySQL that you're going to change the default character set of a table along with the data inside can have the peculiar side effect of unwittingly changing the field length. In particular, it cuts it down by 75%, because the assumption apparently is that a varchar(1) is now as wide as four bytes. This can have some surprising effects, needless to say. It also doesn't appear to be consistent.
4) PHP is even dumber than Perl when it comes to handling UTF-8. I'm no fan of the Perl Unicode implementation, but at least it's consistent. (Though... why can't you tell XML::Parser that the filehandle it's been given is already set for UTF-8?) But come to think of it, PHP being dumber than Perl is par for the course.

Our migration got started on a Tuesday afternoon, IIRC, and we didn't finish (I should say, I didn't finish) until 6:00 the next day. One of those things where you have to go balls to the wall for sixteen hours or so. I'm glad it's over.

Has Fukudome ever played CF? I'd be for bringing back Pie, but I know it's more likely that Johnson will just get the full-time gig in center if they don't move Fukudome to center and Hoffpauir to right. I wouldn't mind that latter scenario if Fukudome is capable of manning center. Isn't Hoffpauir supposed to be good?

Hmmm...I get cool little diamonds suggesting there might be a man on 2nd ... I thought that was cool and intentional.

and the other line of note at Iowa is 336/438/418. That's lovely and all in its way, but an ISO of 82 at AAA is not promising. Still I suppose we could do worse than Fukudome in CF and a Hofpauir/Murton platoon in RF. Before anyone makes fun of that suggesting, remembering we are currently proving that we can indeed do worse than that.

The "upside" of the Edmonds signing is it kept us out of the Jacque Jones sweepstakes. :-)

If we're set on having a CF/RF combo where one doesn't hit, let's at least get a Patterson or Gathright or something that can actually catch a lot of balls. Of course we already have one of those (Pie). What's Gary Pettis up to these days? :-)

Retro, your handle comes out fine when you switch the encoding to ISO-8859-1.

Edmonds sucks.

As a fan of Jimmy, I really wish he would've hung it up 2 years ago and not have to taint my memory of him by a. being awful his last few seasons. b. being really awful in a Cub uniform. Even George Costanza learned to leave on a high note.

Even Hitler knew when to give it up. Edmonds is, therefore, worse than Hitler.

To explain the handle bit--the other night on the Cubs game chat Carl Spongberg and I were talking about things German (he lives in Austria). I lamented that I didn't know how to form umlauts on the keyboard; once AR and Carl showed me, I decided to umlaut every vowel in my new and improved handle.

You may have learned this from Carl, but the letter "e" does not get an umlaut. There is no such thing, as basically the umlaut is a form of the letter "e."

Put another way an umlauted "o" is essentially the same as "oe."

rëtrö-shïïtë. If it worked that would be the most metal name ever. Metal with a sprinkling of chrome and a frosting of awesome. Kind of exactly what Jim Edmonds isn’t. I am pretty sure that Pie can be recalled any time after Sunday, but it probably won’t happen quite that quickly.

Fred, the letter “e” might not get an umlaut in German, that doesn’t mean that you can’t put one there. I’m also pretty sure it can have an umlaut in French (e.g. Noël)

Ëdmönds sücks.

Ÿdmÿnds ÿs tÿÿst. Apparently that was real funny on IRC one day.

Good point, Carl. Thanks.

A Møøse once bit my sister ...

No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse
with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given
her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and
star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo
Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst
Nordfink".

Put another way an umlauted "o" is essentially the same as "oe."
My great-grandfather replaced the ö in our last name with an oe, presumably so that people would use the right pronunciation in an anglicized form. However we are now stuck with a name that people generally mispronounce and can never get the spelling right. When spelling out my last name, I have to do it a minimum of 2 times. My great-great-grandfather's grave is written in German with the umlaut, while his son's has the anglicized name. They are about 50 yards away from each other.

To put this discussion to its well deserved rest and to pick one last nit I have to open my yapper one last time: Technically you can have an umlaut over the e in German, but only for names. The former CEO of Volkwagen was called Ferdinand Piëch. I have a Cubs related analogy coming up. Pie is a cake. Pie in German would be pronounced “pee”. If you want a German to pronounce his name like the abbreviation of Pennsylvania you’d have to write “Pië”. I suggest Felix ¨.