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It’s opening day for the 2008 season and I am beyond pumped. As with the end of nearly every Padres season it seems, I have a furious knee-jerk reaction to the Padres shooting themselves in the foot by either failing to make the playoffs by a few games or rolling over in the first round. After a brief moment of swearing off my allegiance to them once and for all, I come back down from orbit, hungry for the next season to begin. The upcoming 2008 season is no different. After an overwhelmingly flaccid finish last season, the Padres retooled and overall things look good.

I was pissed for a while we missed out on the Fukudome sweepstakes, but I’m over it now. The Padres shed some baggage over the off-season and picked up some new guys. Jim Edmonds, who I thought would defy his age and his critics, unfortunately looks to be confirming everyone’s predictions by starting the season on the DL. Although I’m sad to see Geoff Blum go, I’m happy with Tadahito Iguchi at 2nd. Most importantly, the Pads have young guys who look to do some offensive damage for once (similar to what Colorado did last season). Callix Crabbie, Paul McAnulty, and Chase Headley, who was just sent down to AAA to work on his defensive skills (which is a total load of horseshit), all look promising. Scott Hairston and Kevin Kouzmanoff are looking to have a big season. The biggest question mark ironically is the Padres rotation. I hope Jake Peavy can continue his Cy Young form. I hope Chris Young is fully healed. I hope Greg Maddux can pull out another year of wizardry. I hope Justin Germano can stay consistent. I hope Padres icon Trevor Hoffman hasn’t jumped the shark. I hope budget pitchers looking for a 2nd life like Mark Prior and Randy Wolf can just last through the entire season.

Baseball analysts don’t give the Padres much respect or hope this season. All the Yahoo! Sports analysts put them finishing 4th in the NL West. I can’t wait for the Padres to prove them wrong. I never though I’d say it, but I’m more confident and excited in the Padres offense than their pitching. In any case, the Padres take on the Houston Astros tonight at Petco. Peavy v Oswalt. It’s going to epic, and I can’t fucking wait.

UPDATE: Pads win 4-0. Peavy pitches 3 hits over 7 innings. Bell looked good. The Claw looked good. Pads amass 14 hits on the night. I am fucking beyond stoked.

WARNING: Total nerdy post ahead based on my limited knowledge of a complex issue

For you San Diego Time Warner Cable (TWC) customers, you may have recently noticed the new program guide on your cable boxes/DVRs. Dubbed Navigator, it is basically Time Warner’s in-house cable box software, which allows them to replace existing licensed software from either Scientific Atlantic (SARA) or Aptiv Digital (Passport). More importantly, it signifies TWC’s move to their switched digital video (SDV) platform.

SDV basically reclaims massive amounts of cable bandwidth by only sending out requested channels. Traditionally, all channels are transmitted over cable lines, regardless of what channel you watch or subscribe to. So, even though you are watching 1 channel, the cable company is still broadcasting numerous unwatched channels, wasting precious bandwidth. This distribution method is the primary technical reason why Time Warner Cable’s HD offerings have been limited and their HD signal quality suspect. The lack of available bandwidth restricts TWC from adding new HD channels. Ever notice your picture turning into a giant mosaic of little blocks momentarily, especially in fast moving scenes? Known as macroblocking, this is a result of cable companies compressing bandwidth-hungry HD streams over their already saturated cable network. With SDV, Time Warner can reclaim large amounts of bandwidth by not broadcasting unwatched channels, thus allowing them to add more HD content and increase bandwidth for existing HD content. Navigator is the software piece that makes this happen.

The largest and most damaging drawback/side effect from the move to SDV is the effect on people who do not use Time Warner supplied hardware. People using CableCARDs in their TVs and 3rd party devices such as a Tivo S3 and TivoHD are SOL for the channels that are distributed using SDV. The hardware, namely CableCARD, and obviously the software will not support SDV. From what I understand, only digital tier channels are slated to be distributed over SDV, namely existing/new HD and seldom watched digital channels. When those channels switch over to SDV distribution, affected customers will not be able to receive those channels, in addition to already not having access to services such as Video-On-Demand (VOD) and Pay-Per-View (PPV). Digital broadcast channels such as CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox should be unaffected since those channels are required by the FCC to be universally available. Plans to release a special SDV dongle to allow the necessary 2-way communication back to the distribution hub is in the works for Tivo owners and is planned to be released in the 2nd half of this year.

The root of the complicated problem is a mix of issues. Some of these include:

• Cable companies’ move to SDV in order to free up existing bandwidth without having to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrading existing and adding new distribution infrastructure
• Poor, slow adoption and implementation of CableCARDs by cable companies and CableLabs
• Idiotic bickering and bureaucracy between CableLabs, cable companies, and the FCC in developing and enforcing open and standard protocols for 2-way cable communication and distribution

So far, Navigator has been pretty good. It is a tad bit slower than the previous running software (Passport) on my SA8300HD. The biggest improvement is that the sidebars on SD content is now black, instead of grey. I can also see how much remaining space is left on the hard drive for my recordings. Once the SDV transition is complete, we’ll see if TWC starts to rapidly add the dozens of HD channels already available to satellite customers.

Justin took this pic. Yup, this pretty much about sums it up.

…also concludes sky is blue. What an utter waste of money. College has always been stressful. Is this news to anyone?

After breakfast, I took a small hike/walk through the Kit Carson Park Nature Trail with Hanie. The trail runs between a creek bed and some nice homes with big backyards. After the recent rains, the trail is very overgrown and green, while the creek is more that its usual trickle. We saw a few dogs along the way. The trail itself alternates in stretches of shade and sun. It’s a very flat trail and is more of a leisurely walk than any sort of hike. There’s also a half buried Ford Rustang along the trail. It’s been there for as long as I can remember.