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 The Yankees spend the most money every year and this year they outspent the Twins 3 to 1. It’s not shocking that they are better than the Twins. In fact, the surprising thing is that they don’t win more often. Spending big bucks is no guarantee of post-season success or even success during the regular season (ask the Cubs, Mets and Tigers), but it certainly increases your chances. Of the teams in the top 10 payrolls, 5 made the playoffs. Of the teams in the bottom 10 only one team, the Twins, made the playoffs. Basically, the only way a team in the lower half of payrolls makes the playoffs and does well is a kind of Perfect Storm where everything comes together. The Devil Rays last year were an example of this. A lot of young, low salaried players all coming together with a couple of veterans and everything “clicking”. But as this year’s Rays team shows, it’s a flash in the pan, one shot only situation. The high payroll teams can shrug off a bad signing that would cripple other teams. For example, the Yankees signed Carl Pavano to a 4 year $40 million contract. Mr. Pavano was beset by a host of injuries during his time with the Yankees and only started 26 games total in those 4 years (a starting pitcher who stays healthy will start around 35 games per year). For the Yankees, $10 million per year is only slightly above their average player salary of around $7 million per year. For teams in the bottom half of payrolls $10 million is a sizable investment. The Twins, for example, have an average salary this year of about $2.5 million and only have 3 players that make over $10 million per year.
So what happens is that the best players in the league from all 30 teams eventually become free agents and migrate to the high payroll teams where they will make more money and have a better chance to go to the playoffs every year. For the most part, the best free agents will wind up in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia and Houston also spend over $100 million per year and spend large sums on free agents most years. The top 10 payroll teams spent a combined $1.2 billion on payroll this year. The other 20 teams spent $1.4 billion. It’s not hard to see that the “haves” spend almost twice as much as the “have-nots”, $120 million average per team vs. $70 million per team.
I love baseball, but the disparity between the haves and the have-nots is pretty bad and getting worse.
Dash the company basically died about a year ago. They stopped making new devices and fired all the support staff. Apparently they’re focusing on trying to sell the always connected technology to other gps vendors. My Dash Express unit died a couple months ago. It won’t boot anymore, no matter what I’ve tried. It starts to boot and gets stuck, then reboots. My data subscription is over and obviously I won’t be renewing it.
I’ve been trying various gps apps on the iPhone to replace the Dash and the one I like so far is waze.
It’s a free crowdsourced navigation app. It’s easy to use and, hopefully, anyway, gets better the more you and other people us it. As you can see from the screenshot, it looks like most any gps navigation application but there are some differences. The blue car on the pink line is you. The pink line is your route. There are three other wazers on the map, a green one, a pink one and a gray one. There are also two incident reports, a police one and one that looks like a general warning. If you click on one of the incidents, it will give you details about it.
It’s also got a built in game mode where you get points for driving on roads no other waze user has driven on. On the waze map, any roads or section of road which no waze user has driven on have dots on them. When you drive on these roads your car on the waze map turns into a pacman-car hybrid and gobbles up dots. You get points for the dots and a global ranking system lets you know how you’re doing in relation to others. Last time I used it I was in something like 2400th place.
You can also see other waze users on your map and it lets you set a mood which changes your icon on the map. You can report slow traffic, police speed traps, construction, etc. to let other wazers know about it. Hopefully at some point they will add live traffic from source other than waze users.
waze is fun, but routing needs to get quicker and more accurate. If their algorithms are good, the more you drive, the better routing should get. If you’ve got an iPhone, Android phone or Windows Mobile phone, you should give it a try.
This morning I had a friend over for some espresso. He’s the first person to try espresso from my new machine who has also had espresso from my old machine.
His comments:
“Is this the same espresso blend you used before? Wow, this tastes so much better.”
“If all espresso tasted this good, I wouldn’t need to have steamed milk or flavor shots.”
Yay!
I bought an Alex Duetto by Izzo from Chris’ Coffee Service as a winter solstice present to myself.
 Shiny! It’s very shiny and pretty and makes kick butt espresso. The very first shot I made was at least as good as anything I’d gotten from my PIDed Rancilio Silvia. I’ve owned the Silvia for 9 years and had periodically considered upgrading to a real E61 group head machine. The Silvia was (and still is) a great machine, but it wasn’t really a professional quality machine. It has a relatively small boiler and can not brew espresso and steam at the same time. The Duetto has seperate brew and steam boilers and can brew and steam all day without skipping a beat.
The Duetto is also incredibly stable as far as both temperature during the shot and consistency of temperature between seperate shots. Temperature stability during a shot is important to keep the shot consistent from beginning to end. Temperature consistency of temperature between seperate shots gives you repeatability. A guy named JimG did a temperature study on homebarista.com and the stability is quite remarkable. That’s all well and good, but how does it taste? Great! I’m completely happy with it.
I’ve had the Dash Express for 3 weeks now and I figure it’s time to give a little review of it.
First, the positives.
- Send2Car. Search on the web and find the address of somewhere you want to go, highlight it and Send2Car. Bam, it shows up on your GPS. No writing addresses down on a piece of paper and having to type it into the GPS. There is also a Firefox plugin, but it doesn’t yet work with Firefox 3 beta 5 that I run.
- Search for gas prices. With the price of gas seemingly going up every day, it’s great to be able to find the lowest price in the area.
- Traffic rerouting. It’s only happened once so far, but the Dash Express saw bad traffic in front of me and offered to reroute. Cool!
- Customizability. You can add RSS feeds to it for just about anything. I’ve got the weather and Austin’s best restaurants currently. You can create your own or Dash has some. I’m sure more even cooler ones will be available in the future.
- Upgradability. Map updates are included in the service. Dash is actively adding features and fixing bugs. Those are free too. Those are extra cost on most GPS systems.
Now the negatives.
- It’s had issues 3 or 4 times with turning on when it gets power. Normally it comes right on when I start my car, but a few times I had to manually power cycle it.
- The map in 3D mode lags a little bit. Dash says they’re working on improving speed.
- I haven’t experienced it yet, but apparently there are issues with long distance routing. Again, they’re working on it.
Overall, I’m quite happy with it. There seem to be a fairly large number of people on the Dash forums that are unhappy and thinking about returning their unit. But most of them are saying things like “I’ll check it out again in 6 months to see if it’s more polished and suits my needs better.” Almost nobody is completely unhappy or disappointed. I’m not sure what they expected from a company that’s not just new to making GPS units, but is an entirely new company. They’re not just making the Dash Express, they’re also building up their infrastructure and support and figuring out how they handle things and grow. I’m satisfied with it now and I believe that it will continue to get even better. Everything I’ve seen from them indicates they are in it for the long haul.
Would I recommend you buy one? Depends. If you’re patient and willing to ride it out while it matures, then yes. If you insist on it working right 100% of the time, you should either wait for Dash to become more polished or buy a Garmin or something.
I just realized it’s April Fool’s Day. That explains the wacky stories I’ve been seeing online. 
I picked up one of thes suckers this weekend.
Well, not really picked up. Ordered from Amazon. It should be here tomorrow.
Continue reading Mrs. Dash Express
I upgraded to the latest and greatest Wordpress and was having issues with the old database, so I decided to delete it rather than spend a lot of time and energy trying to fix an ugly, neglected and broken blog.
It’s a fresh, clean start for good old Ragged Thoughts. Over time I’ll work on making it purty and/or interesting. But I’ve said that before.
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