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i think i speak for everyone that is in or around the basketball world when i say that we were all waiting for this game by lebron .

he’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent and we were all waiting for him to show it on the biggest of stages. 48 points. his team’s final 25 points. and, most of all, big enormous shots in a HUGE game on the road. welcome to the big-time, lebron.

we are all finally witnesses…

don’t watch this clip. if you have, you should re-live this before it gets taken down from youtube:

youtube link

where you end it by thinking, “what the HELL am i doing?”

never a good sign. this has been one of those days.

luckily, i’m off to *drumroll* portland, oregon for the long weekend, to escape and get some perspective. good wine, great microbrews, and green climate.

i came into the suns-spurs series with no real rooting interest. i’ve always enjoyed watching the spurs play (more than most fans) because i respect how hard they play and i love the disciplined nature in which they adhere to their style. i also liked (emphasis on the past tense) the suns and their tough run-n-gun mentality. most longtime readers will probably think that i hate steve nash, but i really don’t. he’s a really great player and he’s somewhat swayed me this year that his previous two mvp’s were deserved.

but after watching six games and listening to all of the commentary, i can officially declare that i am sick of the suns; they’re almost as bad as the mavericks as whiny jerks who can’t shut up and play hard. they don’t deserve to win the championship this year or any other.

major gripes:

1. if you think bruce bowen is dirty, then you should hate raja bell also. they are the same player. they use all the little tricks that physically overmatched defenders (and i should know, i was/am one) use on every play. it’s just bowen is better at it and the suns whine about it. and no, amare, he wasn’t trying to break your leg on that play, you whiny bitch.
   
2. steve nash flopped on the horry foul. end of story. you can’t get mad at horry for that foul or else you’re just a huge crybaby. watch the video in slow-mo; nash practically jumps out of bounds and doesn’t make a move to get up until his teammates come running in. if you want to blame someone for what happened after (besides the morons who ran off the bench), blame nash.
   
3. the nba rule is there for a reason. in fact, it’s there for the exact reason stoudemire and diaw left the bench. so stop WHINING about the suspensions. maybe some maturity on their end would have helped; there were no spurs that left the bench for the altercation.
4. mike d’antoni needs to stop bitching about every call. as i wrote before, that sets the wrong tone for your team and makes you look like a wuss. he talked in an interview about being “as mentally tough as the spurs, as we proved in game 4″. um no, because 1) you didn’t win game 4, the refs gave it to you, and 2) you whine all the time about small issues. doing so also impressed upon your team that it’s ok to whine; we even saw nash doing stuff down the stretch last night that would’ve gotten him tossed out of the game if his last name was Jackson.
   
5. game 4 was horrifically officiated and the spurs should have won. you didn’t hear any griping from them. they just came back and played their asses off.
   

what is clear from the playoffs is that mentally tough teams advance. utah has advanced by withstanding the emotional runs of the warriors and pounding them inside. detroit advanced by winning a physical battle against the bulls. cleveland advanced because vince pulled his usual disappearing act. and the spurs have advanced by playing their butts off in the situations that they were presented with and not worrying about what “should have” happened.

edit: truehoop has some similar (objective) observations

edit: and i hate columns like gene wojciechowski’s today that try to tell us we should wonder “what if” about the past. what if horry had never fouled nash?! well, what if david stern hadn’t enforced the rule and next year someone on the spurs ran on the court? what if leandro barbosa had played like he did against the lakers for this whole series? what if the spurs hadn’t shut down steve nash last night with great defense? how about any of those things?

i mean, but mr. wojciechowski, what if a giant unicorn had landed on tim duncan’s head in game 3, causing him to miss a game? who cares?! over those six games, the spurs were the better team that made less mental mistakes. no, no one deserved seven games because the suns couldn’t get it that far. get over it.

just a few minutes ago, while sitting in the new cafe on campus eating breakfast, i overheard the following comment (verbatim):

a breakfast burrito is amazing because… like… like… like… [as everyone at her table sat waiting in anticipation] it’s a meal that you can eat with one hand

i had to look over just to see the source of this comment and wasn’t surprised to see the commenter eating her breakfast burrito with… wait for it… two hands.

that got me thinking: the number of “likes” you use in a sentence needs to match the gravity and insight of your comment… or else you end up coming off a little airheaded. in fact, the correlation is more than linear. if you use one “like”, you’re probably ok with any average comment. once you get to two likes, you really have to say something of tremendous insight. once you get to three likes? your comment needs to be pretty earth-shattering.

the breakfast burrito as a meal that you can eat with one hand? probably not earth-shattering. but hilarious.

http://fuvoo.com/FuvooPermaLink.aspx?PostID=660

regarding dating

Originally uploaded by Mr. Mark.

just saw this on flickr. i think it speaks for itself…

one of the downsides to working out and/or running in the morning before work is that, if you’re out of shape due to illness, laziness, and laziness, your heart rate will still be up even after you’ve taken a shower and gotten dressed. for someone who sweats a reasonable amount, like myself, that can mean ending up sitting at your work desk dripping. not cool.

so as i rode my bike to work today (it’s a really gorgeous, globally-warmed day in the bay area today), i started pedaling really sloooowwwwwwwly, not wanting to sweat all the way through my shirt. it was pretty nice and i actually felt an easy cool breeze as i rounded the corner onto rengstorff. and then it happened:

this 35-year old, white-shirted asian guy (FOB), with one of those bright yellow velcro bands around his pant leg and shirt tail tucked into his khakis, passed me on his bike and (i swear!) actually turned around with a pitying sneer on his face. unbelievable! sure, you might be asking yourself, couldn’t jack just be imagining things? well, i could. and i also could have just let it go. instead, i did what any self-respecting hyper-competitive maniac would do: i decided to smoke this dude. on rengstorff (busy street!). at 9am in the morning. with cars whizzing past us. dressed in my button-down shirt and jeans.

so i’m picking up the pace heavily and about to pass him, when he turns and SEES me. and there’s a moment of “oh no you don’t!” on his face. and then it’s on like the tour de france. we come up to the overpass across 101 and the light’s turning yellow. but both of us speed right through it and aggressively climb up the short hill.

i won’t bore you with tales of who won (jack <– winner), but suffice it to say i’m sure we looked ridiculous. and as i cruised triumphantly into the work parking lot (wanting to turn back and also inform the fella that i ran about 6 miles this morning before destroying him in the bike race to end all bike races [the .75-mile rengstorff-google super sprint]), i couldn’t help but think how, mm, what’s the word… ABSURD i am.

when you’re 15, being competitive means you work really hard and get to make the basketball team. when you’re 25, being competitive just means you get to sit in the office sweating through your dress shirt, sucking down bottles of water, and trying to catch your breath.

one thing i like to do when i fly, usually for the first 15 minutes in the air, is to put on some good tunes and flip through my favorite piece of humorous literature: the skymall catalog.

as i flew home this afternoon, it occurred to me, while looking at the ridiculous Pop-up Hot Dog Cooker: skymall is all about the corner case. in software we call something a corner case when we think that only a small (maybe even insignificant) percentage of users will hit that particular use case.

skymall is literally an entire business built around absurd corner cases. “can’t reach the back corner of the wheel well while washing your car? here’s a brush specially shaped for that hard-to-reach corner of your 1988 oldsmobile cutlass.”

does skymall really make money?  it can’t possibly, right? designing for such crazy corner cases seems… crazy. my thought is that it doesn’t actually bring home any cash. instead, skymall exists purely to entertain folks like myself. it’s hilarious.

has anyone ever purchased something on skymall?

2 comments

you have to be a special level of unreasonable, as a sports fan, to find len pasquarelli’s newest article on tom brady’s contract restructuring interesting, but i do. as a devout 49ers fan, i’m very well acquainted with the pain that can come to a team when it makes too many of these “contract-delaying” maneuvers.

the 49ers used to do this all of the time back in the 90′s, eventually mortgaging the future of the team for immediate winning (hey, i’m not saying that it’s wrong to do so, but just that it results in an eventual period of cap nightmare). for the niners, the result was several years (during mariucci and erickson’s reigns) where we were cutting quality veterans left and right to clear cap room.

so what actually happened here? well to simplify the article, let’s take a really basic version (not exactly accurate) of the example. tom brady was originally expected to make, in base salary:

• 2007: $6M
  
• 2008: $5M
• 2009: $2.3M
• 2010: $3.5M

there are also additional roster bonuses and such attached to each of those years, but let’s just start with that number.

now under the restructuring, they essentially converting $5.28M of this year’s $6M into a one-time signing bonus that he is receiving, essentially, now. the thing about signing bonuses is that such guaranteed money, though it’s received once, is then spread out evenly across the years of the contract, adding to the player’s value against the salary cap. in other words (once again, leaving out key bonuses and other info), they are removing $5.28M from his 2007 cap number, and tacking 1/4 of that onto each of the remaining four years of his contract. something like:

• 2007: $720,000 + ($5.28M / 4 years) = $2.04M
• 2008: $5M + ($5.28M / 4 years) = $6.32M
• 2009: $2.3M + ($5.28M / 4 years) = $3.62M
• 2010: $3.5M + ($5.28M / 4 years) = $4.82M
  

so if you see what they’ve done, the patriots have really taken money off of 2007′s cap (to fit randy’s contract in), and forwarded the cap number to future years. it doesn’t look like a whole lot of change, but given a cap of a little more than $100M and around 40+ players on an NFL squad, you can see how adding a million or two can make a big difference.

it’s still a far cry from the wholesale full-roster mortgaging that the niners used to do, but it’s a move that will dictate some interesting future transactions. maybe i’m the only football nerd out there, but it’s interesting to me nonetheless.