smallchou.com/blog

draft day’s here. just a few quick notes on what i’m hoping from the niners at the top of the draft:

1st Rd, 6th Overall: i want us to pick up the best available here at one of our need spots, which (lucky for us!) is any position but qb really… i’d be happy with vernon davis, the freakish tight end from maryland. i mean, honestly, what kind of a person is a ripped 6′3″ and 254 lbs., while running a 4.4 40 with great hands? i’d also be really happy with picking aj hawk to shore up our linebacking corps. i got to watch him some on tv and it’d be a great pick-up. if something crazy happens and d’brickashaw ferguson falls to us, i wouldn’t mind seeing that pick either. basically i think we’re in a good spot no matter what happens, unless all three of those guys and reggie bush are off the board. now THAT would be a disaster.

1st Rd, 22nd Overall: depending on who we pick up with the 6th pick, i’d like to see a nice defensive pick here: either a DB (jonathan joseph, antonio cromartie, tye hill or someone like that) or an OLB (chad greenway or bobby carpenter?) if we don’t get hawk. i also wouldn’t mind seeing us pick up one of the wide receivers (chad jackson, santonio holmes, sinorice moss) that fall that far, particularly if we get hawk with our first pick. cross your fingers, as i will be checking in from startup school on my phone.

you know, you have to admit that these e-mail spammers are getting a little more creative.. check out this one that i got from a “lee_pang1″:

Due to the sudden death of my husband General Abacha the former head of state of Nigeria in June 1998, I have been thrown into a state of hopelessness by the present administration. I have lost confidence with anybody within my country.I got your contacts through personal research,and had to reach you through this medium. I will give you more details when you reply. Due to security network placed on my daily affairs I cant visit the embassy so that is why I have contacted you. My husband deposited $12.6million dollars with a security firm abroad whose name is witheld for now till we communicate. I will be happy if you can receive this funds and keep it safe I assure you 20% of this fund.I will need your tel mobile numbers so that we can commence communication.I await your urgent reply.
Sincerly Yours,
Hajia
Mariam.

i mean, what do these people exactly think that i’m going to do? “oh man, i feel really bad for this lady who is apparently looking to go into exile. i wish there was some monetary benefit that i could get from helping her so i could justify using my time in that way. whoa, $12.6 million dollars! nice! i’m totally in.”

c’mon now people, let’s get a little more sensible here. don’t you have something better to do with your life than write these emails? who wakes up in the morning psyched to be coming up with something like this?

i kind of want to write a response that says, “um sorry, 20% is only around $2.5M. i don’t help people for less than $3M.” i’d do it, but i’d be scared of the crazy porn ads that would spam my inbox. gotta love the internet.

oh, and i’d really like to know how she got my e-mail through “personal research” and was able to decide definitively that i could be trusted with $12M. that’s some SERIOUS personal research because i can’t even get my friends to hand over that much money.

that dunk was just plain filthy.

ESPN.com – NBA – PhotoId_1132139_

go watch the video highlight here on espn…

every time i fly on southwest (which is, unfortunately, pretty frequently) i vow never to take that evil, devilish airline ever again. the reason? well, besides the fact that the airline hasn’t departed a flight ontime in about 10 years (only on southwest will you commonly hear the line, “well, the flight was scheduled for 8:20, so i decided to arrive at the airport around 8:15 because it’s southwest.”), i think the airline website is a pain-in-the-ass to navigate. other people probably don’t care much about this, but i find the user interaction on the site to just be incredibly difficult and kloodgy (a term that we at oracle use to describe software that differs greatly from the user’s mental model). in fact, i was once in a presentation where a certain large enterprise software company touted southwest’s online interface as an example of the company’s great ability to service complex web applications on top of databases. i thought to myself: “hmm, southwest huh? that’s unfortunate.”let’s take one example: the login to your rapid rewards account on the site is incredibly stupid, requiring you to provide your southwest account number. besides people who have incredibly great memories (i think ivy has hers memorized), who in the world has the time to memorize a bajillion-digit number? there are so many ways to do a login correctly. they can use e-mail (amazon.com), SSN (fidelity), or even the tried-and-true *gasp* username (everyone) methods. any of these login id’s are relatively easy to implement and save the user a fair amount of grief. instead, they choose to use a multi-digit random account number that they issue to you. that’s great. good call, southwest. from a technical point of view i understand that issuing a user a primary key into your database and then having them access their records through that indexed column will be incredibly easy, but as a user i don’t really give a hoot what’s easier to do technically. and honestly, neither should southwest.

of course, this is just one of a host of issues i have with the website.

the reason i bring this up today is that i was randomly poking around on the jetblue site (which is generally beautiful and well-conceived) and noticed that the geniuses at jetblue have managed to obscure the whole account number thing from their users:

how in the world do they DO that? a little decision can go a long way in the world of interaction design. now if jetblue would just get some better coverage, namely SJC-LAS (note to self: you might be going to vegas a lot if you can remember the airport code), i might never have to fly southwest again. the downside? i might have to get to the airport on time for once.

so after the comments left on my last post, i think it’s probably a good time to put down some thoughts about america’s redheaded stepchild sport: soccer. here are some basic facts:

- more children and youths play soccer in the united states than any other organized sport. period.

- soccer is by far the most popular sport in the world by any measure.

- almost everyone else in the world calls “soccer” football, or futbol. it is also referred to in other countries as the “beautiful game”

- no professional soccer league has ever flourished in the united states; it has never come close to approaching the Big sports: baseball, basketball, football, and (now) nascar

so this is somewhat of a strange confluence of facts, don’t you think? everyone in the country plays soccer. everyone in the world LOVES soccer. and… for some reason, soccer is not that big in the united states.

first off, let’s address my personal thoughts on the game of soccer (futbol). i like it. as a kid i played ayso soccer and enjoyed it enough. heck, everyone i knew played soccer also. i loved basketball far more, but i certainly didn’t dislike the game played with feet. i think, in general, americans feel this way about the sport. there is nothing WRONG with it. we enjoy playing it enough. but for some reason, we don’t get embedded into the culture and excitement of the sport like other countries do. when i took Sociology in Sports in college, we spent an entire segment of the class talking about this. there were all sorts of theoretical and cultural explanations for the lack of popularity in soccer throughout the country, including “Americans didn’t invent the game so they think it sucks.” at the end of the day though, i think there are two reasons for its lack of popularity: the television and we’re not the best.

i guess it’s not really JUST the television, but more the television married with the relatively late arrival of the game in the american consciousness. but let’s get to the point: soccer kinda blows to watch on television. it’s true. it’s a beautiful game with amazing intricacies and fast action, but restricting it to a television screen is impossible for the tv producers of a soccer game. they either have to pan out too far, turning the players into ants scouring around a ball that you can’t see, or they have to pan in and see, at any time, the player with ball and maybe 20 meters radially around him/her. in soccer, that does not come close to properly representing the complexity of the game.

let’s compare that to basketball, where 90% of the time all ten players on the floor can be seen well within the screen. the boundaries of basketball are restricted to a 94′ long playing field, of which participants will usually only use half. in football, players line up in two rows of amassed bodies prior to the snap. true, action often runs off the screen, but the excitement of all running plays can generally be noted on-screen, leaving only passing plays to the imagination of the viewer. also, americans like seeing people hit each other.

baseball can focus on the central figures of the game (pitcher, catcher). nascar is in theory a simple conceptual ordering of cars, meaning that you can focus on a single vehicle and still, based on its standing, have a clear understanding of the overall action of the race, as it is (conceptually, at least) a two-dimensional game. that leaves just soccer and hockey, neither of which display well on television and neither of which have (really) captured widespread excitement in the US.

but why does this matter when actual in-person viewers and players of these sports can clearly grasp the intricacies of them? well, mostly because soccer started “behind” and is trying to catch up. to flourish professionally in the US means to get fans, and fans want to see one of two things from sports they watch on television: 1) excitement and understandable complexity (aesthetic experience), or 2) something that they can’t or wouldn’t want to do themselves. basketball? people feel like they understand the game (even thought they don’t) and they can’t dunk. football? people feel like they understand the game (but it’s far more intricate than they think) and they don’t want to hit or get hit. nascar? people feel like they understand the game and they don’t want to risk their own lives. soccer? they can’t understand everything that goes on on the field (cuz most of the time they can’t see it) and there is nothing particularly dangerous or mystifying that is done on the field.

so that brings us to the second point, because if it’s just that people in america need those two aspects of the television-viewing experience to get excited about a sport, then why isn’t the WNBA blowing up? one could argue it’s because the women don’t dunk, but several women have dunked in the past few years and that has led to zero increased interest in the sport. well, it’s because americans don’t like watching less than the best on tv. we don’t watch division II football because “it doesn’t matter”. we don’t watch minor league baseball because the majors are there. and therein lies the problem with the wnba: people inherently treat it like a minor league because we don’t perceive the players to be as good as nba players. period. that’s it. if the wnba all-stars played the nba all-stars in a full-court 48-minute game and beat them, then people might start watching the wnba. so, for soccer, because we know so many countries have been at it for so long, there’s very little chance that we’re watching the best players in the world in the mls. and so we don’t watch. it’s a mindset. so combine that perspective with the fact that soccer is the new guy, and there is zero traction.

so what does soccer need? fostering a grassroots approach to the game is not going to turn it into a big professional sport in america. no chance. people are too entrenched with football on sundays and nascar on whichever day it is that they race on. what soccer really needs in america? it needs the US mens’ team to win the world cup, more star players coming to the mls from europe, and some television breakthrough that allows people to better experience the game. until then? until then i guess mainstream america thinks soccer sucks.

as the nba season just ended, i thought this was a good time to roll out an entry that i’ve been writing for weeks. at a thursday “tim dinner” a few months ago, someone brought up the following question:

If you could pick one basketball player RIGHT NOW to start an NBA franchise with, who would it be?

keep in mind that all of the following factors count:

1) winning games: we want to win games. period. what player gives you the best opportunity to build a team to win? after all, winning ultimately, leads to…
2) filling seats: we want to make money off tickets, concessions, parking, the whole deal. this is a game, but it’s also a business. gotta get that paper.
3) team popularity: having a popular team nationally and internationally increases merchandising profits.
4) longevity: having the big aristotle (as an aside: i was SHOCKED to find out there’s no wikipedia entry for me to link to for ‘big aristotle’) might win you games and make you money, but what about five years from now?

i’ve been thinking about this a lot (yes, i do spend lots of time thinking about these things) and my list looks like this…

Popular choices, but not MY popular choices: Shaq, Steve Nash, Allen Iverson… all for various reasons.

I had a horrific time picking the fifth spot. Here are the other guys I debated amongst. Just missed the cut, in no particular order:
KG (+ versatility… – age, needs help)
AK-47 (+ defense, team play… – injuries, marketability)
Chris Bosh (+ age, overall game… – marketability? winner?)
Dwight Howard (+ age, defense, rebounding… – raw offense game, marketability? winner?)
TD (+ best player in basketball when healthy… – age, marketability)
Dirk Diggler (+ offensive game, clutch performer… – marketability)

5. Carmelo Anthony: i’m still not quite sure i want to pick carmelo at number five, as i struggled with this decision FOREVER. in fact, it’s the only reason i haven’t posted this till now. i think he made a tremendous LEAP this year. and any time you can get somebody who is that dominant of a scorer at the age of 21, you have to consider him even though he plays shit defense. add the facts that he is one of the top jersey sellers in the nba in one of its smaller markets and that he is incredibly clutch with a great public persona… bingo.

4. Kobe Bryant: regular readers of this blog know how much i detest kobe bryant. he is selfish, arrogant, and a bad teammate. he shoots too much. he demands the ball too much. and… he is the most dominant player in basketball. this guy takes shots that i used to yell at my players for even contemplating. he’ll jumpstop at the three-point line, pump fake a guy in the air, and THEN pull up for a 25-footer. and the craziest part is, you’re always shocked if he misses it, no matter how ludicrous it is. i heard an unnamed expert on the radio a few weeks ago say that he thought kobe was the most dangerous scorer he has ever seen on a basketball court. think about it: mike, kareem, and all the others always had a few spots on the floor and a few moves that they went to. they murdered you from those spots. but kobe? what’s his “signature” move? is there any move or shot on the basketball court that he doesn’t have in his repetoire? not to mention he also plays his ass off on defense and has big-game playoff experience. after all this, he’s only 27. that’s astounding. and if being charged for rape didn’t hurt his popularity with his fans, then really nothing short of pulling an OJ will. painful choice…

3. Chris Paul: before the draft last year, i wrote this about chris paul:

I still think this guy is the easiest pick to be a perennial all-star for the better part of two decades. he’s strong, fast, ultra-quick, smart, hits big shots, talented, supremely confident, defends like a beast, interviews well, and he has a ferocious mean streak….
ceiling: isiah, without the blatant homosexuality. marbury’s game with a winning attitude.
floor: steve nash plus the ability to defend my mom, not to mention real nba players.

the two biggest ass-faces in the draft last year? atlanta and utah, both of whom NEEDED a point guard. neither of whom went with the easiest pick in ten years. best of all, he seems to be a class act who plays his ass off with no baggage. awesome.

2. Dwyane Wade: as crazy is it is to pick anyone but my number one, i came thisclose to doing it. when wade was a junior at marquette, i was a huge fan. i picked them to go to the final four and thought wade would be a fine pro. he was versatile, defended SO well, understood the game, and seemed to have a quiet confidence that was obvious. i thought all those things and i never once thought he would be as good as he is today. he’s getting better every ten games, he’s getting stronger every year, he seems like a great person, he’s a top-level defender, and he is one of the five best in the league in the last five minutes of a game. i think he’s 1a. john hollinger thinks he’s the mvp this year.

1. Lebron James: let’s be honest, his birthday was December 30, 1984. i’ll type that again: 1984. that means that he’s 21 years old. 21! at 21 i was trying to figure out what beer to drink. he’s 6′8″ and 240 lbs. he has credibility with white corporate america and urban culture. he has “the look” and “the swagger”. but most of all, he’s one of the top four players in the game from minutes 0-46 and he’s getting better. only time will tell if he becomes the same in those last two minutes, but i think you’d be nuts to pick anyone else. of course, we’ll see how he does in the real show, starting saturday at 12pm pacific.

of course, the beauty of sports is everyone gets their own opinions. feel free to let me know where i’ve gone wrong…

tags: sports, nba

probably a little-noticed piece of news today, but the Niners picked up the 22nd overall pick in the upcoming draft from the Broncos for two lower picks (2nd round 37th overall, 3rd round 68th overall).

as a niners fan, i was elated by the trade, but not because we duped the broncos or anything like that. nfl front office people are inherently a suspicious and careful bunch, particularly teams that are in the higher echelons of the league. a small misstep in the nfl, with its salary cap and collective bargaining agreement, can damage your squad much worse than it can in baseball, for instance. so it’s not like the niners pulled a fast one on denver.

but for both teams, this trade makes a lot of sense. for denver, a team that feels it’s at a level where they are consistently competing in the playoffs, the draft is really about maintaining a high-level of performance. it’s about being able to place some well-timed bets on talent in the hopes that you can develop and blossom it into future stars to replace your current stars. with the salary cap structures and their ability to waive players’ unguaranteed money at any time, nfl front offices often backload nfl contracts with money that players will never get (for example: TO’s tiff with the philly front office last year over non-guaranteed cash that would NEVER have hit his bank account). the result is that most nfl contracts that look huge are not really so huge because the team can waive it at any time, paying only the guaranteed money (signing bonus, etc.). so a team like denver, with veteran stars and a decent cap number today will probably need to make adjustments further down the line to shrink their cap numbers; not everyone on the denver roster today will see all the money that’s in his contract.

think of it like this: every nfl team has a small greenhouse (the salary cap) and they fit all their plants (contracts) into the greenhouse today. but most of these plants are going to keep growing (back-loaded contracts) and eventually they will have to either throw plants out (waive players) or snip them a bit to make sure there’s room (re-structure deals). for a team like denver, with a nice, blooming garden, they don’t want to bring in another young plant that is already huge (first rounders make a lot of money) when they have a nice-looking collection already. they’d rather take two smaller plants that have potential for a lot of growth. then when some of the older large plants grow too much, or get too large for how ugly the look, they can junk those since these two youngsters are playing the cover-2 well, er, blossoming.

a couple of teams that have done well with this are the patriots and the eagles. a few years ago, the eagles had a couple of shutdown corners named bobby taylor and troy vincent. these were two of the best cornerbacks in the nfl and they were part of a great secondary and defense. so what did the eagles do in the 2002 draft? they took two cornerbacks name lito sheppard and sheldon brown. huh? sure they weren’t going to start over taylor or vincent. but 1) the eagles didn’t need them to start (or even play) immediately because the team was already so good, and 2) the eagles knew someday they wouldn’t be able to afford taylor and vincent. maybe sheppard puts it best himself:

“When I came here, I was in a great situation where I didn’t have to step in there right away. I got a chance to learn from the best corners to ever play the game. Along with what I brought to the table, I got some smartness of the game from those guys. When I did get the opportunity, I wasn’t perfect, but I was ahead of a rookie coming in.” philadelphiaeagles.com

lo and behold, a few years later, taylor and vincent are elsewhere, and sheppard and brown are part of one of the best secondaries in football.

of course, for a team like the niners, this strategy doesn’t work. we need people that can step in and play right away. could you find that in the second and third rounds? probably, but it might take some searching and some luck. in other words, our greenhouse is, how do i say, not as filled as that of other teams. we can bring in some big plants that have room for growth, but also have sizeable cap numbers, er, space requirements today. i like the move to pick up the extra first-round pick. those fifteen spots between the 22nd and 37th picks can make a big difference, especially if mike nolan and company have someone that they really like in the 20-25 range. now let’s all cross our fingers and hope we make some good picks.

either that or package the 6 and the 22 for reggie bush .

technorati tags: niners, draft, nfl, eagles

he’s going to be too humble to write about something like this in a public place, but check THIS shit out:

sharpcast blog post

some of you will, of course, wonder what that has to do with anything and who the hell is this charles guy. well, the ‘charles’ is my buddy charles srisuwananukorn (sorry for ruining the anonymity). this is, of course, the same guy who used to claim that he was going to be a medieval studies major at stanford… after he’d already taken about 25 CS courses. he has also been to me, at times, a minesweeper competitor, “Chuck”, a drawmate, and a good friend. and, of course, also ‘my bitch’. he has also been to many other people, ‘the guy with the sisters.’

so congratulations to sharpcast on luring charles away from microsoft. i enjoyed reading gibu’s perspective on their difficulties recruiting against the behemoth pseudo-startup enterprises of the bay area. they sound like they’re probably pretty excited.

i’m just excited he’ll be around the bay area to con into drinking beer on a tuesday night.

technorati tags: charles, sharpcast, recruiting

conversation between me and phillus…[10:04] smallchou@gmail.com: i’ll invite you on google calendar
[10:04] lehman.p@gmail.com: whoa…cool
[10:04] lehman.p@gmail.com: how do i get to that?
[10:05] smallchou@gmail.com: yeah
[10:05] lehman.p@gmail.com: is there a link to it from gmail?
[10:05] smallchou@gmail.com: ah HA

so i’m still wondering where that link is. also, all the reports about the calendar seem to say that it will semantically determine when a gmail message includes an event and give you the option to directly add it to your calendar… not seeing that yet… c’mon google, get it together Grouch…

tags: google, calendar, product

so here i was, dabbling around on my home computer in gmail, when i saw a tiny little ad on the right-hand side of the page that read “Google to launch new calendar service” from some seattle-area newspaper. “interesting,” i thought to myself. “probably time to go try this new thing out.”

after determining the proper url (http://www.google.com/calendar), i jumped into the application and was immediately underwhelmed. sure the interface looks pretty nice. importing the calendar from a CSV file was easy enough. creating new events seemed easy. editting an existing one was a cinch, for the most part, except for a funky bug where i can’t remove an end date/time from an event. sure sure, looks fine.

but i feel like, if this is the final beta product (oxymoron, i know), google seems to have missed something here. isn’t the whole purpose of having this calendar within a holistic google “suite” of products to NOT need to do all sorts of funky self-integration of stuff? in other words, shouldn’t this calendar be so connected to gmail (and more importantly, my contacts) that it’s a cinch to use? when i’m inviting people to an event, shouldn’t i be able to just click a bunch of my gmail contacts and voila?! i’m kinda shocked it’s not all there. scratch that. really shocked.

for a moment when i first clicked on the application, i was excited by the little “Google Gmail Calendar More>>” buttons at the top left of the page. i thought that this was indicating some piece of really clean integration in which i could toggle quickly back and forth between the pieces of the “google suite” (which i can only assume writely will join in the future). unfortunately, after i clicked on Gmail, the nice little buttons disappeared completely. apparently the link only goes one-way.

you know, the more these google products come out, the more i’m getting the feeling that they aren’t built by two guys in a tiny start-up anymore . feels more like large teams in a large company engineering large products without talking to each other. sounds more like google’s getting more large-scale all the time.

tags: google, calendar, product