Posts from February 2005

I grew up a Georgetown basketball fan.  My mom turned me onto Georgetown basketball and I watched most of their games during the Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning, and Dikembe Mutombo years. Although Patrick is and always will be my favorite Georgetown player, I also love the little guy Allen Iverson.

The first time I saw him dribble the ball as a freshman at Georgetown I was hooked.  He is simply one of the most enjoyable basketball players to watch.  He is tiny and yet he never fails to take it right at the biggest and strongest players in the game with an fearlessness that you have to admire.

Last night we took our kids down to Denver to see the NBA All-Star game. It was a blast. The east finally had a team that could compete with Iverson, Shaq, LeBron, Duane Wade, and a host of other great players.

We got there an hour before the start and got to watch these huge stars playing around with each other in warmups.  Shaq and Iverson must be good friends because they were having a great time with each other.

The game itself was like all NBA All-Star games, pure showtime.  There were alley-oops and dunks, big time three point shooting, and very little defense.  The game was close most of the way, but the east pulled away in the end to win 125-115.

And the MVP? None other than the little guy, Allen Iverson, who did everything for the east and deserved it.

It made for a great ending for a great night.

I was so happy to be there to witness it.

I recently received a call from an executive recruiter who was handling the Tivo CEO search.

I didn’t return the call because I am not interested the job and frankly I don’t know anyone who is.

But it got me thinking about what I’d do if I had to do that job.

OM Malik has a post up on what he thinks Tivo needs to do.  He thinks Tivo needs to emulate Apple by retrenching and focusing on serving the needs of the Tivo enthusiasts, called the Tivoted.

I think some of OM’s ideas are correct, but if I took the job, I’d do pretty much what Mike Ramsay, Tivo’s founder, has been saying he wants to do. 

I’d walk away from the cable and satellite operators who only want to commoditize Tivo and focus on building a low end version of a Media PC that allows people to bypass the cable and satellite operators and get their entertainment directly from the Internet. I’d build it on Linux and low cost hardware and use the Tivo brand to generate demand for the product.

I’d also get into the content aggregation business ala Akimbo and others to provide programming on this device.

As Steve Jobs has said, selling to the cable and satellite operatos is a no-win proposition.  So Tivo has to walk away from that business and find a new one they can serve.

That’s what I’d do if I took the job.

I don’t do too many blog obituaries.

But I woke up this morning to the news that Hunter S Thompson had killed himself.

This was a guy I love to read.  His book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of my all-time favorite books and I also loved Fear and Loating on the Campaign Trail 1972 and The Great Shark Hunt.  I’ve read a bunch more, but those three stand out in my mind.

I suppose taking a handgun to himself is the way it had to end for Hunter, although I wish it hadn’t ended that way.

Goodbye Hunter, I’ll miss you and so will the world.

We woke up to 6" of fresh powder and got onto the mountain as it opened.

We cut fresh tracks for a couple hours and then skied until lunch time.

Now we are headed down to Denver to catch the NBA all-star game.

I’ll blog that later.

So I finally found some time to check out Google maps.

They are, as everyone has said, amazing.

My point of reference is Yahoo! maps, which I’ve been using exclusively for all my mapping chores outside of my car for the past five years.

Google maps has a better and cleaner interface.  The maps are better, clearer, crisper.  They are much faster to load and to move.

The driving directions are right there on the map when you want them.

The only thing that Google maps lacks, and a big reason why I won’t move to them completely, is the "Smartview" technology that Yahoo uses to let you quickly find food, entertainment, transportation, ATMs, etc right from the map.  That’s a really handy tool that I use a lot.

Hopefully, Yahoo! will look at Google’s maps and learn from them.

Let the map wars begin.

Readers of this blog know that I really dig this record.

I’ve blogged it a bunch of times and songs off the record have been my MP3 of the Week a couple times.

But I’ve never blogged it as well as Tom Watson does in this great post that makes me want to put the record on again.  Only its 6:25am in Colorado and the family is still asleep.

Our family took up snowboarding about five years ago.  We used to ski as a family but now we board as a family, with the exception of me.

I can board and usually once or twice a year I strap one on and spend the day on it.  But I am "old school" as a kid said to me on the charlift today and I just enjoy blowing through the bumps on skis more than boarding.

The star boarders in our family are Jessica and the Gotham Gal.

Jessica has been really cranking on the board this year and she’s gotten to a new level.

She can ride pretty much any run on the mountain now and its a pleasure to watch her fly down.

But the Gotham Gal is the one who impresses me the most.  When she wants to she can put on her skis and hit the bumps with me, but she can also strap on a board and fly down the mountain with the kids and even keep up with Jess.

Found this via Jeff Jarvis who found it through Henry.

Jon Stewart gives us his take on blogging.

It’s hysterical.  You gotta watch it.  Jon can’t stop laughing.

Yesterday, the Gotham Gal blogged her frustration with eBay and PayPal.  And Meg Whitman replied.  For those of you who don’t know, Meg is the CEO of eBay.  That’s impressive, even if it wasn’t Meg herself who did the replying.  This is customer service in action.  eBay must be using pubsub or blogpulse or something else to crawl the blog world and then they have a proactive outreach program to deal with stuff like this.  You gotta love that.

Gotham Gal’s PayPal account and and mine somehow got messed up.  Neither one of them work on eBay anymore.

I had to open a new PayPal account with a new email address and a new credit card in order to pay for a gift that Jessica bought the night before.

I can tell you that both of us were incredibly frustrated with the Pay Pal through this entire process.  We’ve now got a PayPal account that works and we can delete the old ones and hopefully life on eBay will be better again, but the whole thing did leave a really bad taste in our mouths.

But the reply from Meg certainly takes some of the sting away.