Easiest Picks: KCR, NYY, SEA, WAS
Hardest Picks: DET, TEX

NL Central Thoughts: A note to all that I enter this operation with a PRO-Cubs bias. Seriously. I always overrate the North Siders. That said, the pitching is improved, but not on the level of three other Central Division clubs, and the offense is incomplete. They’re good, but they can’t beat a healthy Cards club. And you have to assume health here unless there are issues already presenting themselves.

Houston’s good, but not playoff good. Milwaukee doesn’t need a Cy Young year from Sheets, they need a HOF year from Sheets, and Jeff Suppan minus defense equals losses.

AL Central Thoughts: Oh, like you have a clue either.

NL West Thoughts: Winner gets to lose in four in the NLDS!

AL West Thoughts: SAMMY’S REVENGE! Seriously, the Angels are overrated and Oakland is good, but there’s something about Texas I like. I’ve never picked them to make the playoffs. That changes here.

NL, AL East Thoughts: Oh, go ask ESPN.

Seen on eastbound Illinois 13 in Carbondale one day before the Salukis/Jayhawks Sweet Sixteen contest:

At about 11:15 CDT on Thursday, a jibcam will swing around the left side of the studio at CBS Sports, showing a block of four flat panel televisions arranged in two columns and two rows. Each will have a locator shot from the corner of an arena with full-screen chyron announcing the two teams about to play.

Greg Gumbel will say something to the extent of “Let’s take you to your game…”

And my head will explode.

As much as baseball is my favorite sport, and as little attention as I pay to college basketball before this last week, there is nothing in sports that can match the drama of the NCAA Tournament, specifically the first two days. Especially when you’re in a pool.

And especially when you work around about thirty HDTVs and have access to every game in HD from your antenna and DirecTV HD DVR.

For the third year in a row I’m running my pool at work, and my spreadsheet each season has been revised to perfection. This year it’s gotten ridiculous: all I had to do was put in the bracket on one worksheet and I have a page for each participant where all I do is check who they pick to win each game. Then, after each game, I type in the final score and it tabulates the results for me. Epic.

Here’s the 2007 spreadsheet with the teams included. I’ll be updating it late Monday night (read: after “24″) with game times when released (and at that point this sentence will disappear; enjoy it while you can.) Read the instructions on the first worksheet (titled, appropriately enough, “Instructions”) and enjoy.

Running several websites that use Movable Type as content management software, I’m well-versed in the annoyance that is comment spam. Since Google lists pages based in part on how many other pages link to them, a trick to raising the profile of your cheap Viagra substitute is to create a bot that crawls all of the internets, finds open MT comment scripts, and register random, stupid comments that include links to your pathetic webpage.

They’re getting smarter. Witness this recent attempt on the website for the Our Lady of the Highways Shrine, which uses MT to run its guestbook:

I’m receiving often messeges [sic] like this:
“Hi!Nice site!
*four spam links deleted*
How do you fight with spam?

Rather than risk easy deletion by including no content of even remotely imaginable concern, the spammer has opened up the door to inclusion by making the webmaster think that just maybe this is a legitimate comment by a fellow flustered pagescripter.

No dice, son.

As of today, I own a Canon printer.

After several years of decent use, my Epson C86 gave out recently, ending about four years of Epson usage. Reviews on their newest ink system have been pretty poor in comparison to their usual stellar reliability over the last half-decade, which forced me to turn to my fourth and final printer band.

• My first real PC in 1996 came with a crappy 15″ CRT and a Lexmark printer, which sucked as much back then as they do now. Not only are Lexmarks slow ink eaters, but their dependability is more than suspect; when I worked at Best Buy we once had a customer swear theirs just randomly caught on fire, and we all believed him. Yet the fact that Lexmarks suffer from spontaneous combustion isn’t half as bad as their crappy photo printing, high ink tank costs and poor ink usage.

• HPs are tolerable. I paid $400 for one of their workhorses back around 1999, and it still works to this day - it’s just not up to par with the print quality of current printers. That and the 75/45 ink combo requires a fourth mortgage (although similarly priced Lexmark cartridges usually give me far less ink.)

The biggest issues include higher paper and ink cost (their cheaper ink cartridges have quite little ink,) as well as sub-quality prints. Often gear tracks can be found on photos, and borderless printing has always been a mythical joke.

• I went to work as an Epson rep for a few months in the summer of ‘04 because their printers were (and still are, save the ink cost) the best. Their photo quality was amazing, the text on their non-photo line was beyond crisp, and the ink cost was reasonable, even better than Canon. I got eight billion free cartridges as a rep and bought my mother an R200 photo printer for $99 that still works today (haven’t bought any ink in almost three years since it uses the six individual cartridges conservatively, and we had a cache of them from my time with the company) and got myself a C86 to replace my C82 since it also used the ink that I got for free. Now, as I finally run out of ink, the printer decides that the heads are clogged and printing is no.

• I’ve always liked Canon but never owned one. They seem to get a jump on Epson every year, briefly beating the leader in cost and quality only to see Epson come out with something that blows their competition out of the way. This time I think the Red Box has the advantage, though, as Epson’s current #76 ink line is almost Lexmark-like in its usage, prompting me to buy a Canon MP600 multifunction (since my scanner is on its last legs.)

It’s only a four-inker, but that’s the one area Canon excels in. While nothing - NOTHING - can produce the quality that a six-ink Epson photo printer can, Canon’s four-ink system has always been the closest (in fact, you can rarely tell the difference between their four and their six-ink lines.) Since I rarely print photos, it should be perfect.

Especially for $160.

So now I’ve owned printers from all four companies, prompting this reminder:

Unless it’s a laser, NEVER BUY A LEXMARK.