Dang.

There goes the perfect season.

Jon Stewart’s usually right about a lot of things. Gosh. Too bad he missed on this one.

I’m glad the Yankees won their home opener. It makes Keith happy. And it’s a nice start to the final year for the stadium.

Still no mlb.tv, plus the cantaloupe is trying to kill me

Thanks for the supportive messages from Hawaii, Jay, and Karl regarding my mlb.tv woes. J and K: I’m not sure it’s an analogy; I think it’s a metaphor, but I always get those two mixed up.

Still no progress on the baseball front here, although MLB has the cheerful headline MLB.TV is back, bigger and better up on the Web site. (This is right up there with George W. Bush’s Mission Accomplished declaration, if you ask me.) Meanwhile the God, Please Help Us thread in the Microsoft Silverlight forum has been viewed around 22,000 times so far; it was at 1000 views on Sunday. I guess it could just 15 or so of us baseball-deprived maniacs who keep going back there looking for help, but I have a feeling that there are at least a few hundred and maybe over a thousand users who are having problems.

Intellectually, it’s an interesting situation. Problems are occuring across multiple operating systems (Windows, XP, and Vista; I haven’t seen any complaints posted by Mac users) and with all three types of video streams (400K, 800K, 1.2M). Some users are able to get video, some aren’t. Some can get the 400K stream, but not the 1.2M. So it’s not likely that one fix will solve the problems for all users.

Emotionally, I just want to watch Mets games. As Jay wrote, the people at mlb.tv had all winter to develop the new system and test it before the season started. What’s especially frustrating is that mlb.tv worked perfectly for me all during spring training and then went bad on Saturday.

But perhaps a more serious issue is that we might have a killer cantaloupe in the house.

Picked it up a few days ago at the supermarket, then saw this in the Times: Honduras: Cantaloupe Ban Criticized:

Officials are denouncing a Food and Drug Administration decision asking American grocers to stop selling cantaloupe imported from a Honduran company because of links to a salmonella outbreak that has left at least 50 people sick in 16 states.

Then I read this today: Dole, Chiquita Join Cantaloupe Recall.

Yikes.

Our cantaloupe is ripe now but I’m not sure if we should eat it. I haven’t seen any local news stories about people getting sick from eating cantaloupe. I never got Salmonella poisoning after playing with our pet turtles when I was a kid. Maybe I’m immune to Salmonella? Still, I guess it’s not worth the risk. I hate wasting food, but the cantaloupe was only $1.65 and the thingies living in the compost pile will probably enjoy it.

Perhaps sacrifing a cantaloupe to the Baseball Gods will make mlb.tv work again.

PS: Hawaii, the Padres don’t seem to be getting much love from the baseball pundits; I’ve seen them picked to finish 4th in the N.L. West in at least two predictions lists. Karl, your Cubs are getting more respect; they’ve been picked to win the N.L. Central by quite a few people. The Mets have been picked to go first place, second place, and third place in the N.L. East, depending on who you want to believe. That kind of stuff is amusing, like doing up a March Madness bracket. But it all comes down to what happens on the field. And luck.