Kevin’s Blog
BlackBerry Dev Meetings: A Peek Under the Hood
As a BlackBerry user, I tend to have a lot of BlackBerry information on my Twitter feed. Sometime last month, Alex Kinsella happened to tweet about a meeting of the Toronto BlackBerry developer Group in Toronto. Not being a developer, I was hesitant to sign up. Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me, and I attended. I’ve been to two meetings so far, and wow, am I impressed.
On Fandom and Analysis, or how baseball helps me to understand RIM
Many of us have varied interests as mobile phone enthusiasts, and one of my hobbies/passions/obsessions is baseball. I’ve been a fan of this game ever since I could pick up a ball and a bat. My fandom truly became serious when my hometown team, The Toronto Blue Jays, first became a contending team in the mid-1980′s. I then started reading boxscores and following beat writers, devouring every scrap of information that I could find. When they won the series in 1992 and 1993, it wasn’t seen as weird that I knew stats and lineups for most of the teams in the American League by rote, but I was a guy whom classmates in high school would bounce ideas off of. I remember one classmate who was disappointed that the Jays lost their star lefthander, Jimmy Key, to free agency in 1992, after the Jays first World Series win. I then cheered him up by saying that they had signed Dave Stewart, a big game ace to replace him, which led to their second consecutive championship in 1993.
As time has gone by, the game had started to change and evolve, and being a fan of the game changed along with it. Instead of judging players simply by batting average, home runs and RBIs, we now have statistics like WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player) wOBA (Weighted On Base Average) and OPS ( On Base Plus Slugging Percentage). With the passage of time and technology, there has been an advent of many advanced tools and statistics, better known as sabermetrics, to deepen our understanding of the game.
