Yahoo hiring Marissa Mayer as CEO was probably one of the only moves Yahoo could make to keep the company relevant in the short term. This is a major shot in the arm for Yahoo, putting a real technology person in the head spot, someone who (at least from the east coast) has some major star power and real dork creds.
She's smart, she lead Google Search during its heyday, and she's a pick that makes perfect sense. Which makes the fact that the pick is shocking enough to keep Yahoo in the news for a few more days (and enough to make everyone wonder why she wasn't on the shortlist of speculated options all along).
But, more than that, Mayer should at least keep some smart people from abandoning the Yahoo ship, giving her time to plot a new course. It'll be interesting to see where Yahoo goes, as the places they are really strong (Sports/Fantasy Sports, News/Finance, arguably Flickr, I suppose Yahoo Mail is still big) are places that are strong, but not really growing. Do they double-down and try to take ownership of those areas? Or do they carve a new path?
Two days ago, Yahoo had a short list of uninspiring candidates, with all of the interesting ones saying publically they had no desire to lead Yahoo.
Today, Yahoo has a new CEO with legit technology credentials; it makes a huge leap forward by having a young, female CEO; and Yahoo now has more of the world's attention (and probably not just the tech world) than they've had since the shareholder revolt, which is not what you want attention for.
See, interesting. Really interesting. Way more interesting than if Yahoo had just hired another media person. Now I'll pay attention to Yahoo for more than checking my 15 year old email address and managing my fantasy football teams.
Dr. Drang at leancrew.com pieces together an IFTTT recipe plus some python to give you a nice archive of your Tweets. If you're a big dork, it's worth the 20 minutes to get it all pieced together, so you can have a text file with all of your tweets. If you need some help pulling an archive of your tweets, there are some nice apps / tools / scripts to help you do that (or drop me an email).
But now I've got every stupid thought I put into Twitter sitting in a text file so I can go back and relive my inanity.
Internet-dork-hero Brett Terpstra puts together a nice little ruby script to quickly let you find and edit text files (in the editor of your choice), based on a partial file name. It'll come in handy for those folks who don't do a good job remembering either the location or the name of that script they were working on.
Now, if someone could just help me figure out a way to get Coda 2 to let me do the Quick Search on sshfs mounted volumes, I'd be a happy nerd. (I'm guessing I need to get Spotlight to index the volumes, which I haven't been able to do yet).
"In researching the kickoff time shift, the NFL analyzed games from the 2009-11 seasons and found that 44 games required part of the audience to be switched to a mandatory doubleheader game kickoff," a release from the league reads. "With a 4:25 p.m. ET kickoff time, that number that would have been reduced by 66 percent to only 15 games"
Butchered, awesome Jerry Glanville quote aside, the NFL is probably the most fan-friendly, forward thinking professional sports league (at least when it comes to non-concussion-related topics). Sunday Ticket, NFL RedZone, and NFL.com give you almost anything you could possibly want to see on Sunday, if you're willing to pay a bit. If you don't want to pay, you still usually get at least three games on Sunday, and now, if the early game is close, you won't get yanked away before seeing the final plays of the game.
If the NFL would follow MLB and the NBA's lead and put out an app (at say $10-20 a season) that let you listen to the radio broadcasts of any game, it would probably make a gajillion dollars.
MLB, with its At Bat app and web service, Apple TV/Xbox Live integration, and really well done MLB.com and MiLB.com sites, would be a shoo-in for fan friendly behavior, but their continue adherence to their absurd YouTube and blackout policies mean that, no matter what they do, they're always going to be second place.
I've been playing around with the really nice wp-svbtle theme by gravityonmars (which is an open-sourced version of svbtle.com. I like the simplicity of the theme, though it doesn't always fit my needs perfectly.
So, occasionally, you might see things get broken as I try to figure out how to fit what I like (not having images and videos right against the border; supporting comments) into the theme. If you see something that I've broken, go ahead and shoot me an email/tweet/comment.
On my drive into work lately, I saw a giant tow truck towing another giant tree trimming truck, which lead to the obvious thought of "it'd be funny to see a tow truck towing a tow truck", and then to the obvious next thought of "but it'd be wayyyy funnier to see a tow truck towing a tow truck towing a tow truck."
So, of course, off to the internet I went.
Not surprisingly, I'm not the first person to ever throw that query into google:
This is picture sort of sated my need for tow truck recursion, but kind of fails because the last truck isn't a tow truck.
But, I think this is what finally ended my search for tow truck recursion and let me get on with my day:
It only could have been better if somehow the last tow truck was also towing the first tow truck. Anyway, it's Friday and it's 95 degrees out and the Heat are NBA Champs. I needed a distraction.
That's probably not, truly, an apt description of the 2012 Boston Celtics, but that's how I feel about them. As an NBA fan, a Celtics season ticket holder for five years now (and already renewed for the sixth), I've been lucky enough to see the Celtics at their most recent peak. As a long time Celtics fan (going back to the '84 team, when my favorite player was DJ), I had the great fortune of being spoiled in my formative years, watching the Big Three (original flavor) and the great Lakers/Celtics battles.
I then had the misfortune of watching the Celtics muddle through the 90s and a good part of the early 2000s, right as I was getting my own disposable income. Now I could buy my own seat to watch Vitaly Potapenko or Alaa Abdelnaby, and a bunch of really, really bad Celtics teams. And not even likably bad, when a team tries hard and has a bunch of young players. Just bad. No ball movement, isolation, do-your-own-thing-bad.
I think that's why I gravitated so much to the Walker/Pierce Celtics of 2002. It's why I have an Antoine Walker jersey. The post-Pitino teams coached by Jim O'Brien worked hard, did the little things, and willed their way to an Eastern Conference Finals. They were a likable team because, even though they didn't play great basketball, they did all the little things that makes you like a team: hustle, help teammates up, take charges, etc.
They were likable.
But now I sit here, at 1 am on a Monday morning, knowing I have to work in 7 hours, writing about a team that has a ridiculously special place in my heart. A space the same size as the 2004 Red Sox have. This Celtics team (from 2007 until now) is loathed, outright loathed, by many NBA fans. And that's why, to us, they're so likable.
They're loathed not in a LeBron James/Miami Heat way, but in a "man, I hate that guy, but I wish he was on my team" way.
The last few weeks have been an example of that. They are an old team—whenever they do the starting lineup intros, I'm always amazed that the last three guys, Allen-Garnett-Pierce, have played 15-16-14 years in the league. They're hurt—KG's never been quite the same since he blew up his knee; Ray is on a bum ankle; Pierce is playing with a sprained knee. They push and they shove and they dive and they take charges. They talk trash. They take bad shots on one possession, and then run the most beautiful plays on the next possession. They're run by a point guard who is so mercurial and so talented that even when he's turning in a triple double, the home fans wonder if he's even really trying.
This team should have been dead and buried a number of times. But they keep coming. They find new ways to win. They find new ways to piss off opposing teams and opposing fans. They legitimately feel like they have a connection to the fans. I know KG might end up somewhere else next year, but he's really made me, made us, feel like if he does, we'll still be his real peeps.
I don't know how else to describe it. I don't think I've even done a good job describing it. It is just a feeling you have when you start to feel like maybe you really are the 6th man on the floor. When you think "maybe if I yell a bit louder, they will try a bit harder", and it seems to work. When the 9th man, 10th man, 15th man on the team comes up with big plays day after day.
They are a team made up of players where opposing fans say "man, I hate that guy, but I wish he was on my team." We hated Mickael Pietrus before he came to Boston, and now we (mostly) love him. Tonight's game is a perfect example. I think he may have committed 15 bad fouls and airballed 42 3s, but he got two straight massive offensive rebounds. Because that's what this team does.
I loved the 2007-08 team. But I may love this team more. They shouldn't be in the Eastern Conference Finals. They shouldn't be tied 2 games apiece. I shouldn't be sitting here, still sweaty and wired from being at the Garden, writing about this team.
But I am.
We've got at least two more games with them, and I hope, a bunch more after that. I'm not ready to lose these guys yet. I need to see more KG knuckle pushups, more Marquis Daniels flexing, more of everything about this team that makes them so damn enjoyable to watch.
Unless you root for the other team. Then you hate them.
I like to pretend I'm a reasonably well-educated person, with an interest in history. But I had no idea (or had completely forgotten) about the atrocities that took place in Guatemala in the early '80s. So, when I started listening to the weekly episode of This American Life, I figured I'd be in for a nice history lesson.
Instead, I got one of the moving, spellbinding, fantastic hours of radio that the This American Life team manages to put out a few times a year. (Don't get me wrong—the podcast is consistently excellent—it's just that it's not this magical every week. No one could be that good.)
I don't want to ruin it, or give anything away. If you haven't listened to This American Life before, this is a great place to start. Leave yourself an uninterrupted hour.
The best teaser for the episode comes from one of the contributors:
Criminals often leave clues — in this week's @ThisAmerLife they carried them away and raised them as their own. Listen: bit.ly/LC2Kc6
