Ladies and gentlemen, step right up to the looooong-threatened, new and improved Futility Infielder 2.0. The same great ingredients, now with less scrolling and 22.2 percent extra width (not that I didn’t have plenty of Extra Width before — I’ve bought that album three times over).

More pixels for everybody! Or something like that.

I build and maintain this site to entertain myself along with everybody else, so you’ll have to forgive the compulsion to rearrange the furniture now and again (I am a designer, after all), not to mention the silliness of that new banner with the bobblehead mini-me. The story behind that is that several months ago, Andra found someplace that made customized bobbleheads based on photographs, and decided to have one made of me — wearing a Dodger uniform — as a Hanukkah gift. This soon turned into a fiasco, as the makers forgot to put a cap on “me,” insisted that the team’s road greys were its home uniform, and forgot the one element which lifts the Dodger uni above all others — the red numbers on the front. Also, the rendition didn’t bear much resemblance even with the glasses (which I still wear 98 percent of the time, contrary to many recent photos). For better or worse, the company attempted to redress some of her grievances, only they again forgot the cap, and the head on the second version appears to be that of Keith Olbermann:

Eh, no worse than most other bobbleheads, resemblance-wise. Both versions now sit atop my CD carousel, among what I like to refer to as the Futility Infielder Executive Board (it’s basically a bunch of yes-men, geddit?). Wanting to get some mileage out of the little statue, I had initially planned to put a photo of one on the homepage, then decided to have some Photoshop fun. Somehow, the result wandered up into the banner during a moment of whimsy and chutzpah, and until I’ve got a better idea or acquire a sense of shame, there it will stay.

Anyway, the actual upgrade process for the site seems to have gone through relatively hitch-free. Under the hood, not much has really changed except for my penchant for posting photos to the blog. There are now permanent links to the blog archives and the 2004 DIPS results in the navigation bar. The links page has been retired in favor of what’s on the blogroll to the left, the contact form has been mothballed in favor of a simple email link because I don’t know enough Unix to configure the Form Mail script. Most of this means bubkes to you except that more text fits on the screen to accommodate the fact that 3/4 of you have wide enough monitors to see it all, and if you don’t, you probably need a new computer (in an unrelated story, I just plunked down for a new one myself).

One post-wedding project down. Back to baseball soon enough…