smallchou.com/blog

but you can’t argue that they do one hell of a job of making the user’s first experience fantastic… unboxing photos

and it’s kevin durant.

we were walking out of hp pavilion in march, having just watched the ucla and kansas sweet 16 games, when tim threw out the question: “oden or durant?”

even then it was a foregone conclusion that the two of them would be exiting the college game and going 1 and 2 in the draft. my immediate reaction was kevin durant. and then i thought about it more, and i came up with… kevin durant. and then the draft happened last night… and i still say kevin durant.

i think that puts me in the minority, but i want to get it down on paper now: kevin durant will be the best player from this draft in 15 years*.

youtube link

make no mistake, greg oden is a great talent. he’s going to be a really good nba player. i have no reason to believe that his offensive game won’t catch up with his defensive dominance. but he’s stated that he “likes basketball,” but doesn’t “love” it. if you were comparing oden to any other player, in this draft, you wouldn’t care about that. but sometimes there’s a player who comes along special enough that you just need to put aside the conventional wisdom of “you have to take the center over the forward, because it’s harder to find a good center.”

kevin durant is a 6′10″ SF with otherworldly skills and tremendous athletic ability. when you watch him play it’s almost like he was designed to play this game. there isn’t anything on the court that he doesn’t do well with the exception of defensive footwork, and i have no reason to believe that he won’t improve in that area too. but those physical attributes and stats wouldn’t really be enough to rate him over oden. i think the adjustment comes when you consider his mentality.

kevin durant is, as several gm’s described him, a “predator.” a “stone-cold killer.” you watch him and he just wants to bury other players and teams. he plays with that malicious attitude of greatness, and he does it while playing his ass off. i think that’s what defines Mike from tim thomas. it’s that cutthroat nature that separated hakeem from patrick ewing, and larry bird from so many taller, faster, stronger players. it’s what got everyone so excited when they watched lebron in that game.

you can see it in those players’ eyes and it’s greater than any conventional wisdom about drafting a center over a forward.

when that forward is a 6′10″, 18-year old, scoring machine with a beautiful jumper, who rebounds and handles the ball, you take kevin durant.

*= barring injury

i don’t know how microsoft’s PR department is supposed to recover from this. hilarious:

parody of microsoft surface

Blogged with Flock

life goal #117: sit in the first row of the left field bleachers at Wrigley Field for a day game, snag a ball, watch a brawl, eat a hot dog, and drink Old Style… Check!

from nytimes.com today:

“The tactile feedback of a mechanical keyboard is a pretty important aspect of human interaction,” said Bill Moggeridge, a founder of Ideo, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, Calif. “If you take that away you tend to be very insecure.”

definitely worth thinking about. i, for one, know that i really like the mechanical keyboard on my LG phone. it’s really changed the way that i use my phone. *shrug*

i saw a really sick hand while playing in the 5-200 spread limit game at garden city this past weekend.

a loose-passive player (player A) raised it under the gun to $25. i called in the cutoff with AhTh. the small blind, a REALLY loose aggressive player with no ability to lay a hand down, thought for a while and then just called (SB). now at this point, as i looked back to player A, and saw him exuding enough confidence to topple the world, and thought about SB’s “wait-and-call”, i knew i was pretty much done with the hand unless AT, two T’s, or 2+ hearts flopped. the hand really isn’t about me, but the passive player A definitely had AK, AA, KK, and SB definitely had some hand in the range of (77-QQ, AQ, AJ, AT, KQ). goodbye, hand!

the flop came T64, with two diamonds. SB checked and player A, bet out $100, a really large bet into a $65 pot. before he even finished counting out the chips, my cards were in the muck; i couldn’t see him firing out $100 into a $65 pot with AK. SB thought a while and coolly called the $100. at this point i started getting interested: SB must have a bit of a large hand. my thoughts were TT, JJ, QQ, or maybe AdTd ?

the turn came with a complete black blank and SB checks. player A, starting to look nervous now (”please get out of my pot!”), fired out the max bet of $200. now SB goes into the tank, which causes (i think) everyone else to go into the tank and start thinking things like “holy crap, did this guy just call from the SB with QQ or KK? i mean, player A clearly has AA or KK.”

finally SB calls and player A stands up, clearly frustrated and praying for a blank on the river. he doesn’t get his wish, as it hits 9d and SB puts player A all-in with a $200 max bet. SICK. player A immediately starts yelling, “j**** c*****, did you just hit your f***ing flush on me?!” and, as if to show how large his penis is, he stands up and throws his $200 into the middle and flips up his AA angrily.

SB, ever the reverse-justifying pay-off artist, says, “no, but i did river you,” and flips up 99 for a rivered set. player A grabs his cards and flings them across the table at SB, stomping out angrily.

============

now i think everyone can see what a complete moron SB is. he tried to explain himself by saying, “well, i put him on a lower pair than me.” oh really? he pumped it to $25 preflop and fired two huge bullets into a T-high board with 88 or 77? i don’t think his poor play is up for debate (note: any time you’re trying to justify your play in a hand while you’re stacking chips, it probably means you’re coming up with that justification on the fly). but the really terrible play in the hand is the last call by player A.

if you look at it objectively, what possible hand could SB have played that way that is worse than a single pair of aces? KK or QQ could not possibly fired on the river after thinking so hard on the turn. a busted flush would be insane to bluff at the pot with player A obviously so committed.

basically player A made the terrible sin of the angry call. the “see? i had friggin aces. this guy totally sucked out on me.” basically he paid $200 to show everyone his great preflop hand and not get shown a crazy bluff. you end up seeing this a lot in these crazy action games; players that think no one has any right to ever run down their aces. it’s a sick game and if you can’t dissociate your ego from your play, you’ll never play well.

like doyle said, “this is poker, not solitaire.”

Marc Andreessen’s clearly a smart guy. Some interesting thoughts on hiring from him, namely:

Lots of people will tell you to hire for intelligence.

Especially in this industry.

You will read, hire the smartest people out there and your company’s success is all but guaranteed.

I think intelligence, per se, is highly overrated.

…

Most of the lore in our industry about the role of intelligence in company success comes from two stratospherically successful companies — Microsoft, and now Google — that are famous for hiring for intelligence.

Microsoft’s metric for intelligence was the ability to solve logic puzzles.

(I don’t know if the new, MBA-heavy Microsoft still does this, but I do know this is how Microsoft in its heyday worked.)

For example, a classic Microsoft interview question was: “Why is a manhole cover round?”

The right answer, of course, is, “Who cares? Are we in the manhole business?”

(Followed by twisting in your chair to look all around, getting up, and leaving.)

Google, on the other hand, uses the metric of educational achievement.

Have a PhD? Front of the line. Masters? Next. Bachelor’s? Go to the end.

In apparent direct contraction to decades of experience in the computer industry that PhD’s are the hardest people to motivate to ship commercially viable products — with rare exception.

is anyone out there looking to buy an ipod (of any type) right now? may be able to work out a deal… let me know

Finally, someone writes something SENSIBLE about the Donovan/Florida/Magic situation:

Donovan’s recent maneuver is one of the most unprofessional I can recall in college sports. He negotiated a contract with an NBA team, agreed to a dollar amount and the length of the contract, put pen to paper and signed it. Then, according to reports, he really “thought about it” and understood that he made a mistake….

Donovan said all of the right things but always left the door open. He never came out and said he was not leaving Florida, but always said that he was happy there and loved it.

But now we’re going to hear a different line from Donovan and some in the media. Don’t buy the line that will inevitably come your way. You will be told that Donovan was rushed into a decision by Orlando’s short timetable.

Jay Bilas: Donovan should repay Florida for his indecision

a couple of years ago, i remember reading a business week article on “The Revenge of Steve Wynn.” it was right as the new wynn resort was opening and, in reading the article, i found myself wondering what the back-story was. namely, it seemed like there must be more intrigue around the wrestling of mirage (bellagio, mirage, treasure island, etc.) from wynn’s hands. after searching around on google for about five minutes, i couldn’t find anything interesting and dropped it.

fast forward to last weekend in portland, when i happened upon this somewhat unauthorized biography of steve wynn, “running scared… steve wynnwhile browsing at powell’s.

basically, steve wynn is a crazy man. i thought the book was an effective biography, but really the most interesting parts were the wild ’steve wynn is buddies with the mob’ sections. i ended up blowing through the thing in less than a week; the casino business is friggin crazy…