Note: All of the embedded tweets have foreign navigation. I suspect this is due to my web server being in Europe. Will fix that if I figure out how.

First of all, none of the other Braves players have acknowledged him being on Twitter – yet they mobbed Brandon Beachy the day he first posted.

Second – anyone that knows the Braves knows that Chipper is a very private person. I just don’t see him publicly posting where he’s going during the day and generally being so jovial.

So my plan for tomorrow is to go to the gym, the grocery store, best buy, then home depot. #WOW

— Chipper Jones (@ChipperJones_10) december 12, 2011

All of that’s odd enough, but in the past few days “Chipper” has been posting pictures and offering up a signed jersey in an attempt to get more followers. Evidently his feelings are hurt because Beachy nabbed over 3K followers in a day.

Ok! We r half way there 500 more to go!! If my boy @Brandon_Beachy can get 2000 in 2 days I can get 500 in two weeks #followers

— Chipper Jones (@ChipperJones_10) december 21, 2011

In order to gain followers, “Chipper” is offering an autographed alternate jersey.

If I get to 1000 followers by the end of december I will give away a signed jersey! This signed jersey. twitter.com/ChipperJones_1…

— Chipper Jones (@ChipperJones_10) december 20, 2011

“Chipper” must have been fresh out of jerseys because that jersey is the same one that was for sale at RadTKE Sports website

In another effort to seem real, “Chipper” posted an image of his truck after washing it.

Just cleaned the truck! twitter.com/ChipperJones_1…

— Chipper Jones (@ChipperJones_10) december 20, 2011

I won’t get into the weird way that my wife determined that this was truly not Chipper’s truck (or house), but I didn’t know that Chipper was also named Javier and posts as VegasJunkie2004 in the F150 Forum.

I think those two examples are more than enough proof.

If impersonating a 7x All-Star, 2x Silver Slugger and most loyal player currently in baseball makes you happy, then more power to you. There’s not anything I can do to stop you. However, I will call you out on it.

The Atlanta Braves announced yesterday they non-tendered Brooks Conrad. While the moved surprised me, I’ll admit that it makes sense. Doesn’t mean I have to like it and it doesn’t mean I won’t miss seeing Brooks in the on-deck circle in the bottom of the ninth, getting ready to bat by rubbing the dirt from the field on his hands. There’s a story to my family’s affection for Brooks and it all goes back to May 20, 2010.

If you’re a Braves fan, you likely know the story of what happened on that day, so bear with me. The last game in that series against the Cincinnati Reds was an afternoon game. Outside of Sunday, 1 p.m. games are few and far between. However, living almost 4 hours away from Turner Field, they’re perfect for a quick trip down and back to see our favorite team play ball.

So, on that Thursday morning, my wife and I surprised our oldest son (then 6-years old) by telling him he wouldn’t be going to school that day. Instead we were going to watch the Braves play ball. Who wouldn’t want to skip school and go to a ball game?

This was our second game at Turner Field and it was a rough one. Tommy Hanson was having a bad day and late in the game the Reds were leading 9-3. We discussed leaving early, but decided since we drove 4 hours we wouldn’t leave early (a decision that would haunt us in 2011 – but, that’s another story).

In the bottom of the ninth, things started to fall apart for the Reds. Troy Glaus, Eric Hinske, Yunel Escobar, Nate McLouth all got hits. After David Ross was walked, Martin Prado loaded the bases when the Reds third baseman couldn’t get the ball cleanly out of his glove.

You could feel the electricity in the air when Jason Heyward stepped to the plate. After his opening day homer, Braves fans were expecting a lot from this rookie left-fielder. While he did deliver a few walk-off wins in 2010, he struck out and left the bases loaded for Brooks Conrad.

I can’t say we were familiar with Brooks Conrad that day before he hit the game winning, walk-off grand slam. I can say that after that he became someone we enjoyed watching every time he stepped to the plate or took the field. From the time the ball got lost in his shirt to his 3 errors in the NLDS, we rooted for Brooks.

Every time we saw the a few seconds of his walk-off grand slam in commercials in 2011, we would always look at each other and smile. My wife, son and I have all told that story to countless people and I’ll always tell it to anyone willing to listen.

My favorite time telling that story had to be September 3, 2011 when we participated in the Atlanta Braves Family Field Day. It just so happened that Brooks was one the six players participating that day. At the autograph session afterwards I made it a point to thank him personally for creating a memory my family and I will share and remember forever.

So long Brooks Conrad and thanks for the memories. You may not be an Atlanta Brave anymore, but you’ll always be one of our favorite Braves.

View the Gallery at Picasa if you don’t see images below…

Anthony Varvaro

Bobby Dews

Brandon Beachy

Brooks Conrad

Chipper Jones

Cristhian Martinez #50 and Cory Gearrin #53

Cristhian Marti­nez

Dan Uggla

David Ross

Eric Hinske

Eric O'Flaherty

Johnny Venters

Jose Constanza

Kris Medlen

Martin Prado

Mike Minor

Peter Moylan

Stephen Marek

Wilkin Ramirez #30

Anthony Varvarro
Bobby Dewes
Brandon Beachy
Brian Snitker
Brooks Conrad
Chipper Jones
Cory Gearrin
Cristhian Martinez
Dan Uggla
David Ross
Eric Hinske
Eric O’flaherty
Frank Wren
Jason Heyward
Jonny Venters
Jose Constanza
Kris Medlen
Martin Prado
Mike Minor
Peter Moylan
Scott Proctor
Stephen Marek
Wilken Rameriz

Here’s a recent MLB Fancave video featuring Atlanta Braves rookies Freddie Freeman and Craig Kimbrel. Fan Caver Mike O’Hara tells them about the postseason and they quickly scramble to clear their calendar in case the Braves make it to the postseason (they will).

It’s a great video if you’re a Braves fan – if you can get past the fact that both Kimbrel and Freeman were with the Braves in the 2010 postseason – a fact pointed out by my wife @ATLBravesBelle.

My first mistake was using the Sprint chat.

13:56:17 : Thank you for contacting Sprint. My name is #### #.

13:56:22 : #### #: I am happy to help you. Please hold a moment while I access your account.

13:56:27 : #### #: While I access your account information, can you please provide more details about why you’re chatting with us today?

13:57:44 : Phillip Duncan: My wife’s phone (***-*I**-****) won’t dial out, experiences slowness, locks up… She’s less than 2 weeks away for replacement – can that be adjusted to get her a new phone now?

13:58:32 : #### #: Ok

13:58:42 : #### #: Please allow me a few moment to look into it.

14:00:52 : #### #: Thanks for waiting.

14:01:32 : #### #: I have checked that you will be eligible for an upgrade on September 01, 2011.

Sigh…

When the Atlanta Braves sent out an email blast with $18 tickets and I found seats on the right-field warning track, it was too good to pass up. School was still out and a 7pm EST start time meant we’d probably get home about Midnight – plenty of time for me to get some shuteye and make it to work the next day. Little did we know that what we were really going to see was the LONGEST GAME in ATLANTA BRAVES Franchise history.

Yep. The game lasted 19 innings for 6 hours and 39 minutes. Yes, we made it home and yes I made it to work — only about 2 hours late. It was all worth it because the Braves won – even if it was a controversial call.

Plus, we made it on TV – twice. You can see the clips above. Carter, Riley and I are walking the plaza at about 20-seconds on the pre-game show. At about 40 seconds, look below the SportSouth logo and you can see us all for a second and Carter for a few more as he walks down to the right-field wall.

There’s no doubt that we like the Atlanta Braves. Everyone has their own favorite player. Carter likes Schafer or Heyward, Jill likes Chipper (and so do I). But, just like the Braves themselves, we all like Martin. It was a little disappointing to see him move to the outfield this year and we’ve missed him with his recent stint on the DL. If there was any doubt how important his is to the Braves franchise, their promotional materials for this year should let you know.

The Atlanta Braves filmed several commercials for this season during Spring Training. They debuted one featuring Jason Heyward first and it was especially funny since it dealt with a partially true Spring Training story. Chipper’s commercial was next and the content and attitude embodies Chipper (it’s also one of Jill’s favorites). The third commercial released featured Huddy and Lowe showing off their new pitches – which look like they were developed by Bugs Bunny. The fourth commercial featured Brian McCann in a deadpan performance in his catcher’s gear. I had heard the final commercial featured Prado and was the best of the bunch. After we saw it the first time, there was no denying that it was the best.

Although Chipper is having an outstanding year and I hope he returns for the 2012 season, I would love to see Prado take over 3rd base when Chipper retires. Various outlets have stated that Prado is the heart of the team, so I can’t wait to see how they perform when he returns (hopefully after the All-Star break).

While planning to move a site to a new server, I thought I’d try to restore from one of these backups. Surely downloading and uploading 4 TAR files would be easier than downloading/uploading thousands of files and images. It was, but there was a bit of trial and error.

In an effort to speed up the process, should I ever need to restore a crashed site, I’m going to document the process here.

1. First of all, I had to download all the necessary files from my Amazon S3 account. This was basically the httpdocs folder, plus the MySQL.

2. Next, upload the files to the root web directory.

3. SSH into the site and navigate to the root of the site.

4. Combine the files, which have been split into 300MB chunks, using the ‘cat’ command. The filenames should resemble httpdocs_date.tar.gz.p00, httpdocs_date.tar.gz.p01, etc. The syntax looks like this:

cat httpdocs* > filename.tar.gz

That will combine all parts into one file named filename.tar.gz

5. Decompress the GZipped file using:

gzip -d filename.tar.gz

and then decompress the TAR file using:

tar -xvf filename.tar

6. That should restore all the files to the httpdocs directory. There’s one last thing you may need to do. You might have to change the owner of the httpdocs directory using the chown command, like this:

chown -R USERNAME httpdocs

That will let the public see the files once the database is restored (that’s a topic for another post).

This past Saturday (February 5, 2011) the Atlanta Braves Caravan made a stop in Nashville at the Academy Sports and Outdoors in Madison. We were expecting a lot more fans to be there this year since Nashville resident Dan Uggla and All-Star Martin Prado were scheduled to appear. We arrived two hours early and were #210 in line. We felt pretty sure we’d get to say hi and get a few things autographed for Carter’s collection.

It took almost an hour to reach them, but it was well worth the wait. After talking to Uggla and watching him interact with Carter for only few seconds, I’ll have to say I’m a big fan of the Braves newest 2nd baseman. Upon seeing Carter in the line, Uggla immediately perked up and greeted Carter with a “Hey there big guy, how are you doing today?”

Carter decided this year he wanted the Braves to sign the Brian McCann bat he got at a game last year. It’s not a full size bat, but probably little league sized. I will admit, it looks pretty cool with all their signatures on it.

I told Uggla that I was excited to see him with the Braves, since we both grew up in the same small town – Columbia, TN. Based on his demeanor and attitude, you can tell he’s a small town guy. Martin and the rest were equally cool and I didn’t know until the day before that Braves pitcher Mike Minor grew up about 30-minutes from me in Chapel Hill, TN.

There were at least 500 people there this year. That’s a big difference from the 100-200 that were there last year for Jason Heyward and Mike Minor—that was a month or two before most people knew who Heyward was.

With Jill and I tagging along, Carter was able to add 5 more baseballs to his collection and a few autographed cards. Hopefully we can add a few more baseballs over the season at a few games.

Overall, I’m ready for baseball to get started. After watching a few specials/countdowns on the MLB Network and the Braves Caravan, I’m ready for Spring training and the season to get underway. We’ve already looked at the schedule and have an idea of which games we’ll try to hit this year.

With Uggla added to the lineup and Chipper hopefully making a return at 3rd, 2011 looks to be a great year for the Atlanta Braves.

Check out my February 2011 photos for a few more images from the day.