Pirates pick up option on Russell

The Pittsburgh Pirates picked up manager John Russell's contract option for 2010 despite going 67-95 in his first season.

General manager Neal Huntington called the decision easy, although the club has been in spring training only a week.

"J.R. met or exceeded expectations in his first year as the Pirates manager," Huntington said Saturday. "His club worked hard to play the game properly and battled from the first out until the last. His leadership, knowledge, attention to detail, ability to see the big picture and passion for things being done the right way made him the ideal choice as our manager a year ago."

Good thing the Pirates goal was to win in 2008

Could the Pirates be this year's Devil Rays?

I cannot believe anyone could honestly believe this but this is what the big free agent signing the Pirates did thinks of the Pirates after playing with the Devil Rays last here

"I see a lot of comparisons," Hinske, the Pirates' top-billed offseason acquisition, said yesterday on the second full-squad day and fifth overall. "A lot of talent. And not a lot of winning.

"Tampa had lost for what, 10 straight years? They had talent. They had to learn to win. Luckily, we got on a roll. It's contagious."

Okay, he's got the "not a lot of winning" down but the talent... Where?

Pluck forums

I have collected comics since I was 4 years old (1977 for those that don't know). As such I will check comic book sites. One of them is newsarama which for years was run on the the good messageboard software vbulletin. Well newsarama was bought by a company and last summer they switched to Pluck forums. The result is less traffic, less users, and those that remained are angry, complaining ect... I stopped going there until recently and saw that people were still angry about it. As looking at this forum will tell you

So I got to thinking, is it just comic book fans that are this mad? So I decided to check LiveScience.com and lo and behold, more Pluck hatred and still more.

They don't have forums on their other Pluck linked sites. Wonder why?

So how does Pluck survive? Confideniality agreements for one. Promising upgrades that are always pushed back is another.

In my opinion the best forum software is the free phpbb and another free one that looks good is smf. But if you really want to pay, it should be vbulletin. Pluck should be paying its customers to use it.

Sounds like Dekker's Sinner

With this fear by the Christian broadcasters, it feels like the contents of Ted Dekker's novel, Sinner is coming to pass

Banks balk

Certainly is nice to see that executives would balk at low interest money because their pay is going to be capped at $500,000 when most Americans make less then $50,000. It also is nice to see them not caring how this will effect the economy and how they won't use the money the way it was intended to get the economy going again.