I’m not going to be able to listen to baseball games over the ‘net for free this season. I doubt I’ll cough up $10 a month in order to listen to day games while I’m at work.

I’m having real trouble getting a handle on what Microsoft is up to these days. Between .NET, Hailstorm, Windows XP, Office XP, and everything else, you have to devote real time to this stuff to sort it all out. I’ve read a lot of the articles in the trade rags about this stuff, but they’re no help. I guess I’m going to have to turn to the primary sources.

Does it really surprise anyone that Donald Rumsfeld is totally screwing up foreign policy? Dubya managed to unearth himself a legitimate Cold War dinosaur and name him Secretary of Defense, and we’re going to pay the price. I had hope for Dubya when he named Powell as Secretary of State, but it seems like Rumsfeld is the one that’s winning the arguments. His retrograde foreign policy positions are liable to get us into a heap of trouble down the line.

In other operating systems news, early reports on Mac OS X seem to be mixed. A lot of people are incredibly excited about Mac OS X, and with good reason, I believe. It sounds like the new OS is a bit rough around the edges, but has a lot to offer (especially to Java developers). I’m still looking for a really comprehensive review, but haven’t found one worth linking to yet. I haven’t owned a Mac for a few years, but between the Titanium PowerBook and Mac OS X, a new Mac is definitely on my wish list.

Paul Thurrott has a very detailed review of Windows XP Beta 2 on his Web site.

Wonder what the scoop is on Extreme Programming? John Brewer has written up a short XP FAQ that hits the highlights. XP is one of those things that I’d like to try out just for the novelty at some point, but I don’t run a programming shop myself, so I just have to ponder it from the sidelines.

Remember how Ralph Nader said during the Presidential campaign that there was no difference between voting for Bush and Gore? In case you hadn’t noticed already, reading the Washington Post’s review of Bush appointees drives the point home that the Republicans and Democrats could hardly be more different.

If you administer a computer running a name server, be aware that there’s a new, nasty worm out there that uses BIND as its vector. It’s called the Lion Worm.

Is it just me, or is it amazingly hypocritical to hold video games accountable for school violence when you’ve accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions from the gun lobby? That’s John Ashcroft for you. To oversimplify the situation, what do you think would be more likely to curtail school shootings: preventing kids from playing video games or preventing kids from getting ahold of guns? I’m no Second Amendment basher, but seeing conservatives who are big proponents of gun ownership (and big clients of the gun lobby) seek to curtail other freedoms in order to reduce violence even as they oppose any restricitions on Second Amendment freedoms makes me see red.

Publishing scientific data about federal land that’s slated to be despoiled is apparently a firing offense under the Dubya regime.