Pete Dudchenko

Went to the home opener for the Padres last night. They won in extra innings when the Pittsburg pitcher walked a guy home in the 12th.

The seats were great however my only complaint is the lack of beer vendors in the stadium. I’m talking about the ones that walk around and sell beer to people in their seats. Petco Park has received a number of complaints about concessions already and how long the lines are and I think this would be a reasonable solution to reduce the number of people in lines that aren’t buying food. Plus it reduces the need to get up and bother everyone in the same aisle as you and you miss less of the game. It works great at Wrigley so I don’t believe its logistically a bad idea but perhaps there are state or city laws prohibiting it.

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Not sure if its actually true or not but I’ve been hearing rumors that telemarketers will soon be getting lists of cell phone numbers that they will be able to start calling. Personally this is a double hit because now, not only are they interrupting me regardless of where I am, I am actually paying to hear their sales pitch by the minutes that they are taking up on my cell phone.

So I finally signed up for the national “Do Not Call” list, which is supposed to reduce the number of sales calls you get to only those companies you do business with. Up until this point I hadn’t signed up because in my opinion, I’d rather be on no lists then any, regardless of the intentions of the list. All it takes is one law change to allow those lists to be called again and suddenly the telemarketing companies have a ton of new numbers just waiting for them to be used.

I figure though that if this rumor is true I could be in trouble. I usually put down my cell phone number for when I sign up for things specifically because I didn’t want to get calls so it may be best for me to sign up.

BTW, you can sign up as well at:
https://www.donotcall.gov or call (888) 382-1222

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A growing trend with blogs, if you haven’t already noticed, is content feeds in RSS or Atom formats (2 of the biggest). What does this mean? Well, one example that most people probably can relate to is with the “My Yahoo” personalized page that Yahoo offers. Previously, users were locked into specific content that Yahoo offered when selecting what to display on their personalized pages.

With the development of content feeds and standard formatting, it is now possible to add any site’s content to your “My Yahoo” page as long as it is in one of these formats. In Yahoo’s case it must be in an RSS format, not Atom.

A brief intro to RSS can be found here.
A brief intro to Atom can be found here.

Anyway, I’ve started offering these blogs in both formats in case anyone uses a news reader or wants to add this to their Yahoo page. Plus its fun for me to learn about.

RSS Feed Link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DudchenkoBlog
Atom Feed Link: http://blog.dudchenko.com/atom.xml

BTW, in case you do want to add these blogs to your “My Yahoo” website. Click here.

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A funny thing happened to me on my walk to lunch today. I found myself surrounded by hundreds of butterflies in what appeared to be a mass exodus east. Have you ever been walking outside and had a bug fly right towards you and just move out of the way at the last second? Multiple that by a couple hundred and you’ll know what I mean when I say it was very odd and a bit concerning.

Anyway I looked it up and apparently this migration only happens once or twice every decade so I guess the world isn’t ending and since they are butterflies and not locusts, I think I can sleep tonight. It is a weird site though. At first glance it appears to be a bunch of leaves blowing across the street and fields.

If the butterfly effect is true, there should be a cyclone off the coast of Australia in about 30 days.

Here’s a link to an aticle on the butterfly migration.

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Went to Palm Springs this Friday and Saturday. Lots of fun, I had never been before and basically spent Saturday laying by the pool and relaxing. Really rough times…

Below are some pics I took while driving back (probably not the smartest thing).

Sunday after church for Easter I went surfing, which I hadn’t done in a while but it still went really well.

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I actually won if you only look at gambling money. That’s a first for me so I was pretty excited about that but the net total was a loss if you factor in food, drinks, and everything else. Still a good time though. I included a pic from my camera phone of the strip. New York-New York is part of the skyline. Below that is Toby. At the point the picture was taken, he had just won a couple hundred at Roulette.

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I’ll be in Vegas over St. Patty’s Day weekend and I’m hoping that the 1/10 Irish in me helps out at the Blackjack tables. I’m also hoping to try the Craps tables a little bit as it always seems fun but the last couple of times I’ve done it, I haven’t been familiar enough with the game. Perhaps this weekend I’ll brush up on some strategies online.

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