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except when Isiah Thomas is involved.

For the last six months that I was working at Google, I sat next to Ben and we discussed, among a lot of things, his trivia site that he was building. It’s addictive, it’s a real labor of love, and they launched it today: http://www.qtoro.com .

I don’t know what the reaction is like elsewhere in the country, but the buzz on local sports radio last night and today is all about Barry Bonds’ last game as a Giant.

I’m not a Giants fan, but if you watched the game last night as any kind of a sports fan, you couldn’t help but get a bit emotional, even with all of the controversy the past few years. For several years, watching Barry Bonds was watching a baseball circus: amazing and, at times, absurd. Unfortunately over the years, it just became more absurd.

I think my overwhelming reaction to last night is, "What might have been." I wrote about this last year when ‘Game of Shadows’ came out, but I don’t think it’s been possible for me to watch Barry in the last year or two without thinking that he missed out on a great opportunity. As I look back on the memorable exits of so many baseball stars in my lifetime, it’s impossible not to note that Barry’s should have been the most triumphant.

He is the greatest baseball player of my lifetime. He (pretty much single-handedly) saved baseball in San Francisco. He is synonymous with Pacbell Park. He has 7 MVP awards. He was the second man to go 40-40 in a season. He has the single-season and career home run records (that, 15 years ago, seemed unbreakable).

But more than that, he was dominant like no baseball player since, probably, Babe Ruth. There is statistical dominance and then there is real live "Whoa, watch this because something insane will probably happen" dominance.

It was a bizarre ending for Barry and the Giants. McGowan was forced into shuffling Barry out the door by the team’s horrid play and the city’s increasing lack of appetite for Barry the villain. In many ways, it says a lot for McGowan that he would make it known before the season ended, so that Barry could get his last goodbye – when you compare that to, for example, how Emmitt Smith left Dallas, it leaves a decent taste in your mouth.

But Barry’s 15 years in San Francisco deserved better. From him, from the team, and from the Giants management. He deserved a triumphant exit that was fitting of one of the 5 greatest baseball players of all time – last night was nice, but it wasn’t enough. What might have been indeed…

Maybe I should just forget about ever purchasing a home in the Bay Area: nytimes ‘buy or rent’ app

For those of you wondering why I would have possibly gone to Portland a few months ago, nytimes.com has a great article about the prominence of Portland as a dining/drinking town now.

To be fair, I didn’t really know how good it would be until I got there, but the combination of great wine in the Willamette Valley, tremendous breweries, and fantastic restaurants turned out to be a lot of fun. It’s not laying on the beach drinking a margarita, but it’s good too.

Great article about Jim Buckmaster, CEO of craigslist.com, and the company he runs. My favorite quips from his management philosophy at the bottom of the page:

• Listen to what users want. Try to make the site faster and better.
• No meetings, ever. "I find them stupefying and useless."
• Forget the figures. "We are consistently in the black, so if we do better or worse in any given quarter it is absolutely irrelevant."

Interesting article/idea by the guy who started Livejournal, followed up by this week’s announcement from Six Apart about opening up the social graph. It’s a good read if you’re interested in things technology and (specifically) social web-related.

The short version is that, as a user of a ton of applications relying or built on my personal network of friends/colleagues/etc., I’m tired of going to all these sites and ‘adding’ all of my friends. It’s a tremendous problem if you think about it…

For example, I thought Twitter was pretty cool and seemed like a tremendous idea. I tried it out, liked it a lot, and thought to myself “This thing would be great if I could get all my friends to use it.” So I thought about inviting all of my friends to try it out, but then I realized I’d be spamming them and their responses would sound like this:

Hey, Jack just sent me an invite to this new application. It looks like another one of those social network things. Ugh, what a pain in the ass, I don’t want to go in there and add all my friends – I already use Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, Myspace, and that new one Hunkydory.com.

The result is that there’s a huge perceived “switching cost” to move from application to application, even though most of these sites/applications are built for completely different purposes. The example that Fitzpatrick gives (dopplr.com) is a site that really isn’t interested in replacing Facebook or Myspace. It just wants to do its thing. But by being labeled as a ’social networking site’, there’s really no way around the huge perceived “not another social network” phenomenon.

While it might be tempting for large social networks to think of that switching cost as a great way to achieve lock-in with their users, history has shown that type of strategy is rarely productive in the long-term.

My old officemate Ben once made the comment that his social network/graph is in his GMail account (or something like that). That’s a pretty powerful idea if you think about it – maybe the complete social graph can just be aggregated through all of your contacts in your email address book. I think it’s an idea that clearly carries a lot of weigh, after all why else are so many apps implementing the “Give us your email address and password and we’ll import all of your contacts/friends from GMail/Yahoo/Hotmail” feature?

But at the end of the day, my ’social graph’ is more than just the people in my GMail contacts. It covers a wider and deeper pool of people (I hope). An initiative like Social Network Portability could help me fully replicate that in a virtual form.

Well, it’s good to see that the wheels didn’t fall off the Google bus after I left.

Kidding of course, though it is bizarre to see something that you spent time on get announced after you’ve left the company. I had the same feeling when I read that R12 had released from Oracle (months later).

Want to know why our national team has been getting its ass handed to it in the past few years? Watch this clip from Greece’s victory at Eurobasket:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhlSipeAx4E

Listen to the Greek announcers, watch the Greek players, take a look at the Greek fans, and watch how devastated the Slovenian team is after the game. And this is just the quarterfinal game of the European championships, much less the World Championships or the Olympics.

Would you get that excited about the US team pulling off a comeback like that? I sure wouldn’t. At some point, when our basketball players were supposed to get crazy about playing for our country, they just didn’t.

This isn’t an indictment of our national team, just an observation: we can talk all we want about size and shooters and international rules, but at the end of the day we just don’t want it as bad.

Anybody want a 17" flat panel Dell monitor? I bought it like a year and a half ago, but now that I have a laptop I don’t need it. $100 and it’s yours?

Update: Whoops, it’s actually a 19" – UltraSharp 1905FP 19-inch Flat Panel Monitor with Height Adjustable Stand