Author Archives: proprietor

Caledonia Advances in Dizzy Dean World Series

Behind strong pitching from Zack Gorum and some timely hitting, Caledonia prevailed in an unbelievably hot opening game in the Dizzy Dean World Series for 10 year olds. It was so hot that an umpire swap was conducted during the third inning as the original home plate umpire looked like he would collapse at any moment. To his credit he battled through what he could but it became apparent that he was endangering his health and perhaps not doing the kids any favors either. Finally cooler heads prevailed and the game was temporarily stopped while a change was made. Kids from both teams cleared the field and parents sweated under the mid-day sun and heat. I’m certain that parental stress had nothing to do with any stress.

After a new umpire became available (from the looks of him after finishing a prior game) the game resumed.  Caledonia’s opponent, from Bolivar, TN held a slim 2-1 lead after crushing a two run home run.  However, the Caledonia offense woke up and began a train around the bases, running the lead to 7-3.

In the bottom of the 5th inning, after crossing home plate a Bolivar player collapsed and was attended to with cold water and a misting fan.  Play was suspended once again and again the kids cleared the field.  Nervous parents from both team worried about the heat and the safety of the kids who had by this time been playing in temperatures approaching triple digits for over two hours.

Play would eventually resume and Caledonia poured it on in the top of the 6th inning, batting around and eventually taking a 15-4 lead.  In the bottom of the 6th (and final inning; they only play 6 or run-rules) Caledonia’s Sammy Chapman made several slick fielding plays that resulted in two quick outs, and Carson Hollis ended the game by catching a Bolivar batter looking at strike three.

All told the game lasted nearly 3 hours after all of the delays, a time that is similar to many nine inning professional games.  Caledonia will resume play Sunday the 26th at 11 AM.

It what was a thrill for many of the parents, the game was broadcast on a local radio station in Bolivar.  The game was also streamed on the internet, so may families who were unable to attend the game were able to follow the game live.

The Caledonia team is planning to attend a Memphis Redbirds game, the AAA affiliate of the St Louis Cardinals.  The team will be taking photographs on the field.

 

Missing Mint 17.1 menu and how I got it back

I’ve been using a laptop with linux mint16 for about a year and a half. While it has worked great, I wanted to update to the latest fully supported version of linux mint. I followed these instructions and every thing seemed to go well. I was happy as a clam for several days, but suddenly, my system had no menus. I can’t think of a reason that the menu went away; I don’t remember anything unusual happening nor do I remember adding software after the upgrade to 17.1.

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I was able to right-click on the screen and get to a terminal window. I was able to open all of the files that I could think of the name of and all seemed to work normally. However, nothing seemed to bring the menu back. I did attempt the following command:
sudo mintmenu --reset
but didn’t have any success. I was able to use
sudo synaptic
to open the package manager, and I uinstalled and reinstalled the mintmenu package, but I didn’t notice any difference. My wife suggested that the problem was the panel after she looked at another computer on which we have mint installed.
When I right-clicked on where the panel normally is (in my case, the bottom of the screen) produced no panel references in the corresponding menu. I still had the package manager open, though, and I uninstalled and reinstalled the panel manager for MATE, named ‘mate-panel’ and ‘mate-panel-common’, rebooted the computer and voilà, I had the panel back. Next I right clicked on the panel and added ‘Main Menu’ back. I now had a menu, but it wasn’t the one with the favorites that I really liked. A little experimentation revealed that I needed to add the one titled ‘mintMenu’. After adding this I was back close to the way that I wanted my system. I now had the default menu do the the reset that I had attempted as one of the first steps to solving this, but the menu is easy to customize.

One additional note-right clicking on the panel area at the bottom of the screen will allow you to move the items after selecting ‘move’.  You can’t seem to simply click and drag to move them around.

If you have this problem I hope this helps you figure it out.