Jared W. Smith

After a few false starts, I’m going to be finally taking a breather and heading up to Atlanta tomorrow with some friends. We’re going to catch the bloodied and bruised Braves (who just can’t catch a break) as they host the Milwaukee Brewers. The Braves found Chuck James to make the start against Jeff Suppan. (No, I will not live-tweet the game. ) It’ll be my first trip to The Ted, so I’m really excited about that. Our seats are reasonably decent and I’m anticipating several fly balls in my direction. I think I’m going to buy a new Atlanta cap while I’m there; likely one of the super-comfortable 39-30 models used in spring training and batting practice. We’re also slated to head to Six Flags. It’s been, what, 10 years since I went to an amusement park? Crazy. Should be fun, though I have issues with rollercoasters that I’m not going to get into right now. I’m hoping to run into some friends who will also be in Atlanta along the way.

The trip’s going to be a good way to ring in August after a really wild July. I’m probably crazy to say this, but I’m ready to get summer over with so I can attack this last semester with as much as I can give.

I’m on the fence about Serious Business on Sunday. I’ll probably be back early in the day (provided we don’t lollygag in Atlanta, which is always possible and easy to do), but who knows after six hours of driving whether I’ll be in any shape to do Serious Business. That will probably be a game-time decision, so stay tuned.

Lots of tangents on tonight’s Serious Business; just the way I like it. We talked more Apple Store, bashed Windows a little bit, and got into a decent baseball discussion with lots of little tangents to connect it all together, including my odd Saturday night!

In case you missed it, here’s the show:

Serious Business is tentatively on for next Sunday at 8:30. I’m headed to Atlanta for the weekend, but I should be back by Sunday evening. I’m still working up the agenda for next week’s show and expect to have it up sometime this week. Thanks to everyone who fought through the technical troubles and stopped in!

Tonight’s Serious Business was a resounding success. Thanks to everybody who stopped in and really made it something great. Here’s hoping next week is just as good.

Here’s the recorded show, in case you missed it — and it was a good one. We went in-depth on PR practices with bloggers, new vs. old media, and you’ll even find out what my baseball bandwagon is this year…

Remember that, for now at least, we’re doing this every Sunday at 8:30 over on Ustream.tv. Check out the show’s website for links to the show as well as a link to the Facebook page. Fan the show if you deem it worthy. I’ll have more at the show website soon; it needs a WordPress install, I just need time.

This was a gorgeous weekend, save for the severe thunderstorms that roared through Charleston at about midnight Saturday. We’re now in that window where it will be absolutely gorgeous for about three weeks before things take a turn for the humid and miserable, so folks, go outside while you can. To take advantage of it, Duke, Ale, Chris, and I went out to a random park near Colonial Lake Saturday to play some wiffleball. The winds were prohibitive to this, though, and we needed more outfielders. Then, we lost the ball…and that was that.

Luckily, there was a tennis ball hanging around. Ignoring where that tennis ball may have been, we continued to play. We quickly realized that my dazzling assortment of changeups, fastballs, sliders, and sinkers was virtually unhittable, so we decided to change things up a bit…and we eventually came up with Relay. read more »

I’m dusting off the cobwebs here in my WordPress administration panel…been a few days. These are busy times — and they’ve been largely chronicled on Twitter.

Last night was our regularly scheduled blogger/tweeter meetup at Gene’s Haufbrau just west of the Ashley. Great times as always. Eugene and I kicked some butt in pool, and he did all the work at shuffleboard last night. Was great seeing the lot of the gang out once again. I’m hoping to make that next floating meetup. I think it’s pretty rockin’ that we have TWO monthly meetups now.

The weekend is, as usual, packed — I’m going to a baseball game Sunday for my sportswriting class. Going to watch baseball for class is pretty friggin’ cool. It’ll get me into the swing of things this spring; I’ve caught maybe an inning and a half of baseball so far this year, and need to improve upon that.

Again this year, I will be a Bad Young South Carolinian and will miss Carolina Cup. A friend photoshopped me into last year’s Cup festivities (and set it to Tarzan Boy by Baltimora) but locating that photograph and associated song will be left as an exercise to the reader. I was somewhat hoping to bring a decent video camera of some type and do some sort of video production, but not this time — I’m not sure when I’d get to it, and quite frankly, I could see myself being brutally assaulted by armies of pastel and plaid for some of the inevitable comedic twists that I would capture on tape.

On a closing, musical note — Angels & Devils, Fuel’s fourth album and first without Brett Scallions, has really started to grow on me. I’ve listened to it non-stop all week. Clearly, I’ve lost it.

I always joke on days such as today, with highs in the mid-70s and light-to-medium cirrus at 33,000, that it’s a great day to stay inside and work on code and stuff. Well…today, I finally tossed that mentality aside and left the house. It was friggin’ worth it. I made the trek to Marion Square and kicked a soccer ball around with a buddy of mine, threw close to 100 pitches, and just generally soaked up a very nice day with a pretty nice view of…um…the city.

I hope you got a chance to get out and about today. This is one of those days that makes it truly great to live in Charleston.

A big black eye for baseball today. Senator George Mitchell’s report on steroid use in baseball was released today. A great deal of the players, honestly, were extremely obscure guys who were trying to get an advantage. Others were obviously going to be in the report (Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa). I always thought John Rocker had a bit of ‘roid rage about him, too. I think the big hitters here, though, are Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte. It’s flatly disappointing to see Pettitte involved here — he’s one of the good guys in baseball, one of the types you can root for, and so the HGH allegations circling him are more troubling than most. It’s disappointing to see Clemens — Lord of the Workout — also get wrapped up in this. But, injections of Winstrol would explain his superhuman performances at ever-advancing ages. It’s like a pitching Bonds, with one important difference — people liked Clemens. We humans have this thing about believing what we want to believe, and nobody wanted to believe Roger Clemens was a steroids user.

The report itself, though, is more troubling than anything else. The investigation was toothless. There were no punishments for not speaking to Mitchell. The investigation had no subpoena power. I think the report has just scratched the surface of steroid usage in baseball. With most of the players not cooperating — and believe me, Mitchell uses some form of the phrase “the player declined my invitation” approximately 84,000 times — I don’t see how one could consider this report fully complete. Without the players’ side of the story involved, how does one conclusively say that these incidents happened? What if the people who spoke on record had axes to grind? I have major issues with that.

We’ll let the chips fall where they may…it will be a very interesting offseason.