The Most Likable (and Hateable) Team in Basketball

The most likable team in basketball

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.

And, again, that's why they're likable. Lovable, even.

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.

Listen to This: What Happend At Dos Erres →

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

— Annie Correal (@anniecorreal) May 28, 2012

Quick Reading List to Instapaper Update

Social coding to the rescue.

My little tiny Instapaper-helper script got a tiny bit of interest. Thanks to GitHub user aldl, there's now a forked version that has a handy installer, to make it easier to setup.

You can check that version out here. I can't vouch for how well it works, but hey, if it doesn't work, you can always fix it.

Six Months of iTunes Match

It hadn’t occurred to me until I saw a thread on Ars Technica, but iTunes Match has been out for six months now. I’ve written a bunch about it, but I figured, once again, it’d be good time to give a quick recap.

First things first

$25/year for a full backup of all of your music is worth it.
$25/year for a full backup of all of your music, while simultaneously making it available to all of your iOS devices—iPhone, iPad, Apple TV—and your other Macs and PCs, is a steal.

At this point, there is simply no reason not to buy it. Even if you don’t want to use iTunes Match on your iOS devices, it is still worth it for peace of mind, to simply have another location to have your media backed up. Go buy it.

A few things are still flakey

There are a couple of things that are still not quite perfect. For most people, these will go completely unnoticed. If you buy all your music from iTunes, or have never spent much time tweaking and caring for your ID3 data, tagging your music, or creating nested levels of smart playlists, iTunes Match is going to work like magic for you.

But if you are one of those people who curates your music carefully, you’ll find a couple of small annoyances.

Album art still doesn’t sync perfectly

I don’t understand why, or why this is a challenge to solve (I’m sure there’s a reason, but I can’t get my head around it …), but Album Art still only syncs intermittently. And only seems to do so when you’re playing music, which means if you’re listening somewhere that you don’t have a good signal (wifi or otherwise), you’re going to occasionally get some stuttering UI performance in the Music app.

Play counts don’t update

Play counts still intermittently update. Not a huge deal, but if you use a lot of smart playlists, it can bug you. It bugs me. Mostly because …

Some smart playlists still don’t quite work

If your smart playlists are based off of “Most Recently Added”, they sometimes seem to end up based off of the “most recently added” to the iOS device (when you really want “most recently added to my iTunes Match library”). Smart playlists seem to sometimes ignore the “don’t show videos or don’t show music that isn’t on my device”, which can lead to playlists where you end up downloading stuff you didn’t want.

Annoying, but probably not something everyone will bump into.

A couple of “nice to haves”

There are a couple of things that would be nice to have, that haven’t been added yet. I expect that, in the future (with Mountain Lion and iOS 6 on the horizon), we might get a set of new features and enhancements, so in a couple of months (maybe at my 9 month review), I’ll have nothing to say.

But, until then:
* We need a better way to manage music on the iPhone/iPad. Going into settings to flip the switch between “Show all music” and “Only show music on this device” is painful. That switch needs to somehow be in the Music.app. Or maybe just a different UI paradigm entirely.
* In something that I think I’m the only one to ever notice, sometimes iTunes loses track of “where” a song is, i.e. is it in iCloud or on the computer. That tends to happen after music has been automatically downloaded after being purchased from the iTunes Store. It’s just weird. And it cleans itself up … sometimes.

Buy it

If you’ve bothered to read this far, and you haven’t bought iTunes Match yet, just go do it.

Reading List to Instapaper Update

I got a little bit giddy when I had the first couple of people follow (and comment on a couple of stupid bugs) my GitHub repository of my "Reading List to Instapaper" tool.

This whole social coding thing sort of works.

I made some small changes to clean up the code a bit (and comment it a bit better). Nothing dramatic—it still works the same way, but simply got rid of a requirement on Rails, which was needlessly in there.

The next step is to try to make a handy auto-installer, so you don't have to play with launchctl yourself. But, in the meantime, check it out if you use Instapaper and you're on a Mac.

Treat Yo Self … To Some Ice Cream

Quite often, I really love living in a reasonably trendy area.

For example, here's a simple sign promoting ice cream. Nothing spectacular.

But look closer. How are they promoting their soft serve?

Tom and Donna say …
Treat yo' self!

Awesomesauce.

Closing a Chapter

A couple of weeks back, the first company I ever worked at was seemingly sold off for spare parts.

It's not terribly surprising. I'm not really sure what Sensable has been doing for the past few years. The endeavor into dental seemed like it was maybe working, but it was hard to say because the company has changed focus 8 times since I left nine years ago.

Shit, has it been nine years?

From a pure technology perspective, Sensable was an awesome company and an awesome place to work. Cool technology, incredibly smart people (legitimately, some of the smartest people I've ever met in my life), a large enough niche to be self-sustaining (academia), with a couple of other niches to keep the lights on. Not being a business expert, nor privy to the financials, I'd guess the big issue is that when you take $40ish million in funding, you have to find a way to pay that back.

Unfortunately, the revenues never got there, and the leadership, in later years, seemed to be more interested in digging a deeper hole than finding an exit. (I'm just speculating; I don't actually know anything.)

In early April, the Sensable I knew ceased to exist. I'm sort of ok with that. I'm not sure if I know anybody who still works there—everyone has gone onto other things, often bigger and better—nor do I have any clue what the company was really doing these days. In reality, I haven't been clued into Sensable for years.

So, given that, why does this pain me a little bit? It's the close of a chapter of my life. Even though I've been gone for nine years (again … shit, that makes me old), I still see folks from Sensable from time to time. There are still emails and occasional get togethers. These are people I root for, as they were, to a person, almost all really awesome.

But that thread that tied us together—which had frayed and grown bare but not broken—finally broke. And that makes me a little sad. But, I'll still keep up with the folks I worked with and watch as they do new, awesome things.

(If the second company I worked for disappeared off the face of the earth, I'm not sure I'd really care. In fact, I know I wouldn't. That place was sort of a cesspool. Actually, not sort of; it was a cesspool.)

Spring is for Concerts

Spring is for concerts

That's a famous quote, eh?

Actually, it's not. While "Spring is for" turns up something like 2.3 billion results on the Google, "Spring is for concerts" turns up two. And, coincidentally, one of those results happens to refer to a different stop on of a tour that spawned this post.

Did that make sense?

Regardless of the nonsensicalness of the previous couple of sentences, I've seen a bunch of shows this spring (both with and without my wonderful girlfriend). Much of that has been documented on ye old Twitter and previously on ye old blog.

But, we lucked into some good seats to a couple of really great shows, and felt that it deserved a bit of verbage.

A little over a week ago, I saw Nada Surf play for the fifth or sixth time. As always, they were just fantastic. There are bands that just know how to play to a crowd and they connect in that way where it's not just the music, but you feel like you're actually hanging out with a big group of people and experiencing something unique (even if it's quite likely they pull off the same schtick in every city). Nada Surf is always like that.

This time did feel a bit more unique, as they covered a tune by The Gravel Pit (a Boston band they toured with back in the day), which probably doesn't happen everywhere (though, judging by setlists, at least happened in New York as well.)

About a week later, the girlfriend and I went to see Snow Patrol. There's a bit of backstory here. This was sort of our "bonding" band, as 2005-era Snow Patrol was a perfect bridge band between poppier music and "indie rock." So, they're kind of a foundation for our relationship.

Go us.

A few years back, we got ok seats to see Snow Patrol open for U2 at Gillette Stadium. We left super early so we could get to our seats and catch the opener. What could go wrong?

3.5 hours of traffic (on what should be a 40 minute drive) got us to the arena in time to have Snow Patrol leave the stage.

Perfect.

Cut to a couple of months ago. Snow Patrol sold out The Orpheum, but I found some "obstructed view" seats on StubHub.

Turns out, we were obstructed by the stage. Probably the best seats I've ever had for a "big" show. And, with the exception of not playing "Spitting Games", Snow Patrol were another band that made a big, likely routine for them, show feel somewhat unique and intimate.

Being in the front row didn't hurt.

You Dig My New Threads?

I'm sort of continually looking for a simple WordPress theme that will let me get most of the cruft out of the way, and just focus (mostly) on the text. I generally (stress generally) dig Tumblr's themes because they're, quite often, "here's a picture, here's some text". Simple. (Except when someone MySpace's their Tumblr up and turns it into a sea of icons and badges and animated gifs.)

Anyway, wp-svbtle came out, based on svbtle.com. Me likes.

So, I grabbed it off GitHub, messed around with things a tiny bit, and here we are. I'm sure I'll tweak it a bit more, and then get bored by it and change it again in three months. But for now, I'm happy with my new clothes. It's spring, the weather is nice, and it feels like I've just done a bit of spring cleaning on the old blog.

Feels like this, really:

(This is my street. Walking out to go to work some mornings can be quite inspiring.)

Reading List to Instapaper on GitHub

The Reading List to Instapaper sync tool that I built and mentioned about a week ago is up on GitHub.

I haven't had a ton of time to document it, but it's up live and you can clone it and get it running on your own machine.

It's been working for me for over a week now and I haven't run into any issues. I'm happy to answer any questions (or fix bugs) should they crop up.

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