Pitcher. Due to the low light the camera had to slow the shutter speed so there's some blur but I think it kinda works. 

Da Baseball

On friday a work colleague recommended to me the minor league baseball at the San Jose Municipal Stadium. This is the home of the San Jose Giants, not to be confused with the San Francisco Giants! So I drove on down from work at about 6:30.
This turned out to be a million times better then a major league game because: $8 entry instead of $30, small intimate stadium, close to the action, fantastic atmosphere, audience participation and a BBQ present cooking great food.
Game was scoreless until about the 5th innings until the visitors (never knew who they were) got about 5 home runs and from there on they won the game. I left towards the end of the 8th innings mainly because I was getting too cold in my t-shirt and everyone else was leaving too. The stadium was a little rustic, extremly cute inside and easy to find your way around in. There were only two types of seats: top half $8 and bottom half $10. The crowd was good size but there were enough seats free for me to sit in the expensive seats anyway (I only scammed $2 but that's the Aussie way).
They had competitions and raffles etc going all night. One batter was nominated pre-game as the "Beer Batter". Whenever he struck out without hitting the ball it was half price beer for ten minutes - the rush was on. As the announcer said "Don't run, Don't run". Beer was Bud-Light but actually it was pretty much identical to the shite you get at the cricket.
I went a little crazy with the camera: movies, action pics etc. My awesome camera has a great mode which will shoot continuously until you take your finger off and then just store the last three shots. Made it easy to get good action sequences. All in all I had a fantastic time.

My week

My week has involved the following disasters: wrestling with beauracracy involving, social security, health insurance, and banking, chasing $800 bucks that went missing, continuing to have our product fail at the customer site, being dragged into meeting with third level manager, stupid blackberry not working, my shipped stuff from home not arriving after I was led to believe it would, too many late nights etc etc etc.

Having said that, in three weeks of being here I had my first GOOD day on Friday. Passed my written Californian drivers license test, completed all my tasks, helped everyone that was waiting for help, and got out around 7pm. Then got to the baseball.

Beer

Good imported beer is about $5-$6 a six pack here. Need I say more.

There's also more alcohol available at the Safeway alone than most Australian bottle shops. Loads of Aussie wine as well.

Guaranteed to be boring

I know I don't do movie reviews but I went to see Kingdom of Heaven sunday night in Santa Clara. This happened to be the only movie showing in all of the bay area that I thought I could stand to watch. Anyway I am just finishing a book on the history of the Templar knights called The New Knighthood and I wondered if they would be featured in the movie and how much would be accurate.
Turns out the politics and contradictions between the westerners, the environment and the general events were all spot on which made it fascinating (except Saladin never took Jeruselem). It was REALLY interesting to see the Templars depicted as the bad guys when in fact it was opposite. Anyway if you've read this far on this post then you must be pretty bored with real life. Go and read a book or something.

Castro street north end looking south 

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