Month: June 2013

Once a year I fire up the old NBA 2K10 and continue the basketball franchise I’ve been working on since 09. In my magical bball world LeBron is a Bobcat (read: Hornet) and the Knicks are perennial playoff contenders. My world mirrors the real one in one sense: The playoffs are fantastic. The stars you expect to shine do so on occasion, but the real flash comes from former nobody’s who thrive on the matchups and the moment. In the real playoffs and the real finals those heroes have stories that don’t always end with a happy ending, but sometimes they emerge at just the right moment to remind the world of their value. On Tuesday we saw an old hero reemerge as a young one staggered. On Thursday I suspect we’ll get a bit more of the same.

Heat in 7.

Game six came down to the reemergence of Ray Allen and a guest appearance of LeBron James. I believe Allen is all the way back now and recognizing he is at the tail end of his career, he will put on the kind of show we basketball fans will remember for an extremely long time. Miami can lose. They can play with that sense of insecurity and timidness we’ve seen for games now. Or they can play like they love the game, love the opportunity, and realize there is no tomorrow. That is how they spent the last 20 seconds of game 6 and that is how they will spend the first 20 minutes of game 7.

The rest is a mystery to me…

I’m struggling with exercise again. Part of it is transitioning back into a routine and part of it is just plum laziness fortified by by a way too hot Arizona summer. I must admit I haven’t done much at all with this. I’ve spent my summer watching bad TV and not feeling terribly guilty about it. I think that’s okay too, because when August hits I have no choice but to work like a man possessed. The TV isn’t all that great anymore. For the nearly 200 I pay for  DirecTV  I expect a lot more. There are a few highlights. Oliver Stone’s Savages was a fun ride. TNT also delivered with a series of shows based on books written by pop culture literati like David Baldacci.

Not a whole lot more to say tonight about that. I suppose in reflection I have let my brain rot in the hot sun for way too long. Maybe I ought to challenge it a bit…

Some Thoughts:

1. LeBron James reminded me that if you don’t bring it all the time and get mired in what just happened, you’ll never be as great as you’re supposed to be. He sucked for most of Game 6 and only woke up at the very end.

Over the past few years I’ve become a student of game theory. The use of games as a learning tool in the college classroom has made the classes more engaging for me as an instructor and for the students as well. The class itself is a giant game show, with the winning team constituting the winners. Over the course of the last few days I’ve been thinking about a total revamp to the game theory, moving the game from just a group phenomenon to an individual test of skill as well.

The catalysts for this change are two shows: The Big Brain Theory and The Hero. While these shows are very different, they add useful elements to the evolution of my own game design. Big Brain operates as an elimination show where the teams are not static. Each week new captains are chosen based on individual performance and those captains get to choose teams for the weekly challenge. In the Hero there is only one team and together that team decides which members go forward to complete certain challenges. Now I can see ways to use these two strategies together in the first three weeks of class in what I will call a ‘Draft Camp’ Each day will present a new challenge and at the beginning of each period 5-6 captains will be chosen to come forward and select team members. By the end of that period I will have solid draft rankings for each students providing me with an assessment of their individual skills in a number of ‘control’ areas.

The downside of this new strategy is that there is going to be people on the bottom. I can limit this by selecting tiers. You can draft as a tier 1, 2, 3, 4 (Rounds?) selection and each team must select a member from each tier. Still, starting a class where you are labeled as a bottom tier student is as likely to reinforce student apathy as it is to force that student off their butt to work. It is a risk I am willing to take. I am also ready to do the work needed to help that student figure out how to be a successful student. That is where The Hero comes in. In this show challenges may only be completed by certain people based on who did previous challenges. If I modify that to indicate that individual challenges can only be completed by certain tiers, this will most certainly force groups to ensure that lower tiered players are much more than dead weight.

I think the biggest change may come in the trades. This is a game for points after all, and attaching point values to tiers (Lower tier = higher point compensation needed) will really lead to some critical thinking about how to pick teams and how to add or remove members of a team. What is a member worth to you? I’m excited to find that out.

Now all I need to do is find a way to make it simple.

I’m trying to become a home improvement expert–the kind of guy who can build a loft, change a tire, and cook a meal all in a day’s work. I’m city. In fact, I’m inner city which means my familiarity with repair and design is tied to my familiarity with a phone. I call for what I want and it gets done. Here in the desert suburbs that too is an option, but you are supposed to be able to do a certain amount of building and repairing yourself. Presently, I have no talent in doing such things, but I feel like I am a work in progress.

Tomorrow I will further that progress by starting to lay out a plan for making my backyard work for my family. My middle kid is really into construction right now (he wants to build a drawbridge), so he and I may make an outdoor treehouse, a retaining wall, maybe even some sort of cool water feature!

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Handful of home improvement goals left for 2013 including making the yard into my dream oasis, finishing the kids bedroom design, and the office. The last project is important because that is where the magic happens in 2014.
2. The utter lack of foul calls in Game 5 of the NBA finals showcased home court advantage. Lebron James was relentlessly fouled on drives to the basket yet went to the freethrow line only a couple of times.
3. Speaking of basketball, the kids’ seasons start in 6 days. I still need to teach them how to shoot!
4. Starting a new morning routine where we get up by 7 and work on athleticism for a bit before the day starts. That means I need to sleep a bit earlier.

I have a Mac desktop. I have a mac laptop, my wireless network is built on mac’s Time Capsule. I have several ipod iterations, an Ipad, and to complete the collection, an iPhone. You could call me a mac guy. You could also call me an aging wanna be hipster who glommed on to a product identity that became essentially unsustainable with the death of its defacto creator, Steve Jobs. Apple is an idea and an identity. Unfortunately, that identity truly lived in the heart of its biggest supporter.

Apple captured the idea of cool at two points in my life. During college I looked at those boxy one-piece computers with the funny faces and said: Nerd Chic. I was all in. Unfortunately, all mac ever gave me back then was a picture of a bomb and an error message informing me that my latest story had suddenly become the victim of a terrorist attack. I caught the bomb so many times I thought I was Laos.

Fast forward to the next thousand years and mac is back and on the back of Steve Jobs, a meglomaniac ‘meanie’ whose constant health battles and innovative thinking captured the hearts of a generation of tech supporters. I bought right back in to Jobs’ vision. I wanted to shell out thousands for a macbook and as soon as I did I ordered a wicked cool sticker from Tokyo to show how my nerd chic had evolved. It made every bit of sense to go all in. Mac products are (as one friend put it) hermetically sealed. You buy all the products you need from their line and the set works together seamlessly. There are no driver errors as one often experiences with mac’s bigger and far more wealthy competitor Windows. From OS to end user, mac works as it should–on the surface.

Dig deeper and you find that in the absence of Jobs there is a decline in product usefulness and efficiency. My iphone, for instance, doesn’t hold a charge at all. While these errors happened in the time of Jobs, that leader understood that the experiences of a handful of end users could shape and thusly unshape the cool in a way that made it necessary to put out a product that not only worked but allowed the end user to feel good about themselves. Jobs’ macs were green machines that had a minimal impact on the environment (despite being assembled in Chinese sweatshops–but you can’t blame a corp for doing what every other competitor is doing). Post-Jobs macs are not green. That entire movement has been scrapped in pursuit of a higher profit margin.

I am not saying Jobs wasn’t a money loving fool. I am saying that he had enough of himself in his corp and enough history and awareness of what that corporate identity means to understand the value of a good product. These new guys understand the value of a good quarterly report. Mac is going to be pushed further down the road of maximum profitability for minimum product. Before long the hackers are going to catch on to how badly Apple has strayed from its vision. That’s when they’ll take action. That’s when the fall begins.

I’m betting it starts with the iPhone

First you have to be uncomfortable.

Nobody ever got better by being satisfied. In fact, being satisfied makes it more difficult to improve yourself. Look at the disparity between the (perceived) work effort of professional and collegiate athletes. You hear time and time again that the college guys want it more, and that is because they haven’t cashed that fat Tom Brady paycheck (or wandered into Giselle’s bedroom). You hear time and time again that the inner city street kid with 7 brothers made good in the NFL and brought up his entire family. That happens because that kid has to do it. It is his only way out.

Then you gotta have fight in you.

This is the hardest part. It is easy to lay down and to blame and to say, well this is my situation, so I guess I’ll make the best of it. Fighters say, this is my situation and I’m going to change it entirely. After they say it they act and they suffer and they push through all of the adversity. The rest of us see an overwhelming amount of adversity and stop once we’ve been overwhelmed. Fighters see overwhelmed as just the beginning. Remember: how we respond to failure is how we are defined by the world and by ourselves.

Winner’s don’t take days off.

You better bring it. When you slack, when you don’t give your all every moment of the time you get to walk this planet you are cheating yourself and you are telling yourself that it is okay to be a slacker because tomorrow you can be better. Well every tomorrow you are a moment older, less capable, less willing to change the way you lived yesterday. After long enough of living like this you hit the tipping point and you discover that getting back to being better is going to take more fight than you have left.

I say this for anyone reading and I say it for myself. Bring it every day, because before too long potential becomes an obstacle you never could overcome.

Normally, horror films are the things that get me excited about movie going. Between the tropes and the sheer number of new releases that fall on to the big screen each year, I always assume the next film is going to have a twist that makes it worthwhile. There has to be something, right? We are desperately removed from the era when someone can throw a load of poo into a projector and call it cinema. Or are we? After watching The Purge and taking a few minutes to consider what could have been, I am convinced that the worst days of cinema are yet to come.

I’ve watched all the Resident Evil movies. Though tempted to fast forward through them, I sat and watched just to see what what happens next would look like visually. I knew what was coming. I telegraphed each successive death and reveal like a middle linebacker marking the QB’s next play. I stuck with the films because visually, it was worth the cliche. The Purge is a bit like that. While the director attempts to draw your attention away from the actual ‘Bad Guy’ scenario, he does such a shoddy job with foreshadowing that you know the twist the moment it starts to unfold and you find yourself saying, ”bout time’.

Visually, the purge was a mess. It often felt like character choices where driven by the director’s shot selection. Wherever the director wanted to make a shot work was where the character’s were pushed towards, often moronically.

The dialogue was thin and lacked the gravitas of what is an exceptional discussion idea/plot: America is made new again by purging its poor and defenseless once a year. I wish I could say that the film captured this idea and put a great spin on it, but what you read is basically what you get.

What I got was an opportunity to eat some popcorn and see a few solid scenes in the middle of a hot mess.

I’ve reached a point in my product cycle where I’m forced to buy a new washer –my first independent washer purchase ever. The last washer came with the house and now that the POS finally pooped out, it is time to do the research. Here is what I learned: Research costs money. Most of the sites I attempted to access required membership, which tells me that while there are people online that do review for free, Google points at the ones that do it for cost. Speaking of cost, the price of a washer dances around that famed $1000 price point. That price point became known to me when I was shopping for TV’s. Above and below 1K is a major dividing line that determines who your buyer is.

I’m a buyer who is looking below the 1K line, largely because I’m a bit old school and cannot fathom spending the kind of money that would keep me in video games for over 3 years on a singular item that can be bought (in a cheaper fashion) for half the price. I’m also married and don’t do a great deal of laundry, so it isn’t really my call to make.

My wifey is aware of the 1K line and being a thrifty type chooses to play below it (thus providing her more cash to buy sneakers–which have a priceline all their own). She’ll dance closer to the line though, and I suppose we’ll spend 8 or 9 on a washing unit. I can’t complain. I like my clothes clean and my family happy. If that takes a few extra bucks, so be it.

ABC found the sequel to Desperate Housewives and it is cut from the same conflicts. The newest ABC hit, Mistresses, seizes upon the idea of marital conflict and raises the bar by hitting the notion of infidelity from every possible angle. Mistresses is sexy beyond comparison with stars whose names you’ll know from other hit shows (Alyssa Milano, Yunjin Kim), and secondary stars that sizzle (Shannyn Sossamon, Rochelle Aytes, Jes Macallan). Perhaps most interestingly, Mistresses represents the new normal. The show presents ABC’s version of multiculturalism with their standard of black, Asian, white, homosexual, and of course, blonde.

To begin, black beauty still doesn’t mean dark-skinned. While we’ve seen progress in the media, black beauty still must conform to european standards. You must be light-skinned. You must have straight (or appropriately curly–not kinky) hair. The Asian standard is the same, but not much change is required by Asian women to meet this standard. As we know, the standard of beauty is blonde and no show would be complete without the standard setter. Interestingly enough, IMDB lists the blonde actress first though Milano and and Kim are clearly the more well known and more important players in the show. That choice reflects the dominant ideology that being blonde and beautiful is supremely important when it comes to sexual attractiveness.

Sex sells and ABC is Avon. All of the people in the show are beautiful. Much like The L word, all Lesbians are viewed as Lipstick Lesbians, which is entirely in keeping with the show’s all is beauty theme, which though powerfully unrealistic is what draws the viewer’s eye.

Maybe I love this show because I don’t have enough drama in my life or maybe I still have a crush on Alyssa Milano. At any rate, I believe the show works to perfection in replacing Desperate Housewives and capturing an audience that is looking for something frivolous, detached from reality and super-engaging in that soap opera way. I haven’t seen the numbers, but I think this show is going to succeed in a big way.

One of the uncomfortable realities of flying out of JFK is your flight is likely to be delayed. I spent a ton of money taking a cab to the airport to make sure I wouldn’t be late for my 4pm flight. It turns out the flight is inexorably delayed, taking off perhaps three hours later. At least it gives me ten minutes to collect my thoughts.

New York was a life raft in a sea of sharks. I feel like I can finally remember the value and breadth of life. It seems a bit much, but the fact is this city is my muse. I came from here and I am connected to this place in the fundamental fashion a child is connected to a mother or a people to a planet. I will never feel that way about Arizona, despite my love and dedication to the land. I will always be a New Yorker first, and I believe that mentality will reward me well in my AZ dealings. Even when I run for office, the idea of NYC and that upbringing will influence the way in which I attempt to direct the campaign and eventually the city.

Big plans are what NYC is about and perhaps a bit of what I lacked. It is important in life to be a little uncomfortable. You need to have goals that are not ‘just out of reach’ but so close to you yet so far away that they are like the heat from the sun that powers you to build a ship and go out there and catch you a sunburst. I grew up in Harlem in a nice but relatively poor area to the 81st and madison wealth that defined my elementary school. I felt that sun everyday and built me a ship that took me all the way to college, a bit closer to the goal of having everything I wanted. Of course, what we want changes as we shuffle through life. What I want now isn’t what I wanted even 4 years ago. I am no rush to lead my college. I want to be a best selling author first. I want to travel and see things that will inspire me to be better and do more and live this one life that I have to the fullest.

It is hard to come upon those feelings in the suburbs.