|
We have 8 guests online
Actual Books
Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics,
Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™
“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”
-- Boston Globe
"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."
-- New York Observer
“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING.”
-- John Hodgman,
author, The Areas of My Expertise and correspondent for The Daily Show
"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"
-- The Wall Street Journal
"A surprisingly touching memoir"
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."
-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
|
Home
|
Travel
|
I'm back at work, but I took a couple of hours yesterday to visit Antigua's brand-new ultra-modern cricket stadium complete with giant electronic scoreboard. The place just opened on Tuesday, and frankly, they'd have been far better off renovating the existing place, which was downtown, full of history, and walkable; this shiny dump is soulless, in the middle of nowhere, and a major hassle to reach; I suspect sports fans in most US cities can identify with the problem.
The brand-new scoreboard's green-on-black color scheme makes it pointlessly difficult to read, and while I was squinting to make out the lineup as New Zealand began to bat, Microsoft made a surprise appearance.
I think any computer user can imagine the panic in the control room when the error messages started piling up twenty feet high -- bloink! bloink! bloink!:
A closer look:
Ah. A division-by-zero error.
This makes sense, actually. New Zealand had lost a wicket before scoring a run, which meant their "run rate" (a cricket stat you don't need to worry about) would have required dividing by zero, something the scoreboard designer apparently never realized could happen. (OK, so maybe this wasn't Microsoft's fault.) Instead of a line of code fudging a zero or inserting a blank for the stat, there was a sudden unexpected fireworks display visible (but barely legible) to the sheep wandering across a distant parking lot.
You know that I tend to enjoy almost any place I go. Unfortunately, this sums up the experience of cricket in Antigua. The night I arrived, I took a stroll through the lovely old grounds in St. John's, now empty and echoing and lonely and beautiful, and really wished I could have seen a game there instead. The new stadium is a logistical disaster for the fans, and therefore for everyone involved.
This small island seems to have made a highly-anticipated, multi-million-dollar mistake. Painful to see.
|
|
|
