It’s the NBA Playoffs, the perfect time to peruse sports columns, blogs, and general comments from fans and haters. I had forgotten how much of the game – specifically, the hype and rumor mill that the media drives to keep the chatter alive – is about statistic overanalysis and unfounded conclusions. Well, that, and the third-grade trash talk.
At some point in modern sporting history, though, someone came up with the ingenious idea of trying to quantify sports with stats. Now, I think it started as a good idea; in basketball, other than the points scored, people first started caring about rebounds, assists, steals, and other metrics that correlate with a team’s success on the court.
It makes for a pointed study in using stats to say whatever the hell you’d want.
I always figured sports would be the bastion of cable – it’s the one video category people will still willingly spend money towards, whether to just get cable for ESPN or a new HD television set to view the action in full 1080i glory.
Turns out, though, that the current NBA playoffs (with games broadcast between ABC, TNT, and ESPN) are already freely streamed online:
ESPN 360
TNT TV
Sure, it makes a poor replacement of an evening on the couch or in the bar with friends, but for those who stay in the office as late as I do (or don’t feel like paying $50+ a month for three channels), it does its job of halting productivity admirably.
When we last left off, I was busy prying open my new Mac Mini to get at its deliciously compact innards with a screwdriver and putty knife. Opening up and messing with the internals of the Mini is much more annoying than it should be, but I was able to shove two new sticks of RAM and a new hard drive in the machine with minimal warranty-voiding destruction.
With it finally sitting attractively underneath the TV, I spent some time upgrading it into an actual useful media box befit of the pedigree looming overhead. It’s still a work-in-progress, but the requirements for a living room media center running OSX are a bit different from the workstation/gaming PC setups I’m used to:
A week ago, en route to our respective workplaces, Sui and I noticed a poster ad for Gunnar Optiks on the BART. Being an optometry student and optican (and thus being familiar to pretty much all the noteworthy lens and frame manufacturers; they like to indoctrinate early), I was surprised that she had not heard of these guys.
One workday Google search later, we found what they were offering: fashionable, Oakley-style glasses, catered to heavy computer and television users, designed to reduce eye strain over work/play marathons ().
A few days ago, Sui linked me an inspiring lecture by Randy Pausch on Time Management, and I think it’s worth a watch. A little background: Randy is a professor in Computer Science (automatic + points for me) at Carnegie Mellon with only months left to live after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, and became famous after contributing to CMU’s figurative “last lecture” series with his own literal last lecture. ()
While that speech is famous for its own right, I found his subsequent talk on time management interesting and resonant with my own experiences:
I had recently finished the Hong Kong drama series The Drive of Life (歲月風雲). An epic 60-episode production (each show is an hour long), the shooting primarily done in a trio of cities – Hong Kong, Beijing, and Vancouver – previously unheard of for a television series. It covers the multi-decade history of a wealthy business family through the Asian and dotcom financial crises to modern times, through relationships and business successes and failures, and the complex character interplay during tough times.
The show also spends significant time celebrating Chinese ingenuity; not a surprise considering it is sponsored by the Chinese government to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to sovereign Chinese rule, but some of its influence is blatant and distasteful propaganda and tarnishes an otherwise excellent show. I wonder if anybody watching the show really believes in the stated convection of the characters’ patriotism and love of all things Chinese.
It has been a while since I got hooked to a Chinese drama series, so it took only a week (something like 7-8 shows a day) for me to fly through the DVD’s. While the story was captivating and acting superb, I can’t help but be reminded of all the clichés by drama series since the beginning of time, plot devices overused to the point of being offensive in their dismissal of viewer intelligence:
It’s the NBA Playoffs, the perfect time to peruse sports columns, blogs, and general comments from fans and haters. I had forgotten how much of the game – specifically, the hype and rumor mill that the media drives to keep the chatter alive – is about statistic overanalysis and unfounded conclusions. Well, that, and the third-grade trash talk.