The content import from my work blog to my more lifestyle, food and sports oriented life over here is about halfway done. Gentle readers will notice heavy music and strong words categories, mostly delving into prog rock, sci-fi and intersections of the two (like Avatar).
Google’s SuperBowl Ad: The Anti-Beer
I believe I’m the only person who thought Google’s SuperBowl ad was very well-produced and cute but utterly, totally demonstrative of what’s wrong with Google. It was an anti-beer ad. It was about using technology, instead of getting up off your butt and talking to your friends, going out for a beer, maybe even discovering things on your own and failing a few times in the process because you didn’t have the best search results. It’s acceptable; it’s called life. Again, I thought the narrative style was fantastic, and the storyline was endearing, but let’s be honest: this was a nerd fantasy played out in a search engine. Great to see all of the ways you can search in Google. Utterly stupid to think it’s going to make you better at relationships with French women. Or relationships of any kind. And therein lies the problem.
Greg Papadopoulos, amazing computer scientist, once said “All technology is social.” I repeat that often because it’s true – increasingly, whatever technology we use becomes woven into the fabric of our lives. The Google ad proved that rather strongly. But the converse — “Every social is technology driven” — is patently false, and should be. That’s what rubbed me the wrong way with Google’s SuperBowl spot: they assume that technology can ameliorate any social deficiencies, gaps or needs that we have. Technology helps (look no further than Cameron Sinclair’s Architecture for Humanity that marries technology to sustainable housing) but it in no way supplants the value of getting some face time.
Put in today’s terms: I’ll always drive the four miles to pick Bob up at his place and go for a coffee, and I went out of my way to be sure Bruce and I are on the same hockey team this spring, when we can enjoy a beer together after the game. Something I can’t do on Facebook, with Google, or using Twitter. And that’s a good thing.
Hello Kovi, Watch Out Ovi
The Devils have (a) made a trade worth talking about (b) landed a superstar (c) dealt a jolt to the team that is likely make them focus. It’s not just about the players, it’s also a statement of what Lou expects from his team and their efforts, and what he’ll do when he’s pushed to the point that coaching can no longer correct.
First things first: Hello, Ilya Kovalchuk. Woo-hoo! Love this guy. Complain all you want (or all Chico wants) about his backchecking and defensive coverage, because it’s completely beside the point. The guy is a pure sniper, great skater, and creative on the ice. The Devils’ offense of late has shown all of the inspiration and soloing capability of Cheech and Chong’s band (”We only know three chords!”) with Jerry Channel of Boston’s Neats on vocals (nicknamed “Mono-man” by the hip press in Bean Town). Pair him with Zajac and Parise, or with Elias, and he’s even more dangerous. Add to that the cultural aspect, which I think is far too often down played: Kovalchuk is a Russian, will be a good influence on Zharkov, and can speak a bit of mamalushen with Zubrus and Elias (Elias, like all Czech students of his time, was required to learn Russian in school. Not sure if he still speaks it, but probably can recall enough to holler “Shoot, you ugly lunkhead” in the mother tongue).
Second: Lou made the comparison to the Mogilny trade before I even got on the computer. At the time, Mogilny was one of the best shots in the league, and he delivered in 2000 when the team needed him. We loved Mogilny, especially what appeared to be a good influence on Elias. We are going to heap equal adoration on Kovi.
Third: Oduya hasn’t been the same player since he got hurt. Bergfors was great in the first twenty games and now looks like he realized he skipped a grade and suddenly doesn’t remember all of the math he was supposed to have brought with him. As for Cormier, Google on “Daigle” for what’s likely an equivalent story minus the head shots. That’s it? No Zajac, no Clarkson, no Martin? And they got back Salmela in return? This is a great trade for the Devils. I like JohnnyO in so many ways, but I like Kovi more right now.
Overtime: If this doesn’t send a shock through the locker room, I don’t know what will. It means that if Lou goes shopping for another blueliner, other guys who aren’t stepping up are likely to be shopping for apartments in the hinterlands. It changes the dynamics, the lines, the friendships. Shocks like this can be explosive, further fragmenting a team, or they can be concussive and help the guys stick together a little better. Let’s see what Langenbrunner does with his latest teammates.
Prediction: Deeper Cup run, and a player who can go head to head with the Washington snowman.
How To Beat The Devils
The Devils have gone from mildly upsetting to tragic. It’s Shakespeare on ice without the clever anachronistic puns. It hurts to watch, like the guy who wipes out on the ski jump slope during the intro to “Wide World of Sports” for those of you alive in the 1970s.
Here is the young person’s guide to beating the Devils:
1. Play 20 minute periods. The Devils don’t. Not even close. Between late goals in the Toronto game on Friday, and then coughing up two goals in the last 90 seconds of tonight’s travesty against Los Angeles, there was a goal with less than 30 seconds left in tonight’s game as well. This isn’t pee-wee hockey.
2. Take flagrant penalties. The Devils power play is 3 for 31. There was a stretch a few years ago when it was 4 for 100, and with the current 0-for-25 spurts we’ve seen, that’s easily equalled. If Langenbrunner is going to continue to make ridiculous passes into the middle when there’s no red jersey there, take him off the point. Put Oduya there, at least he can shoot the puck.
3. Get behind by two goals. Twice against Toronto, and then against Los Angeles, two goal leads held up about as well as a house of hockey cards in a nor’easter.
Lou lost out on the Phaneuf lottery, although I’m not sure he was a prize worth winning. But there are plenty of other defensemen who can shoot, move the puck, have a modicum more hockey sense than Mottau and White (combined) and know to clear the crease when the goalie is screened on a power play.. Maybe this is pee wee hockey.
Content Shuffle
I’m moving all of the non-work related content from my Sun Microsystems blog over to the Snowman, mostly to separate personal stuff and give it a long-term home. So you’ll see about 300 new blog entries show up, but none of them very recent — search, category results, tag results, and some cross-references will play out a bit differently.
Pain and No Gain
I haven’t written about the Devils since mid-November because frankly, there wasn’t much to write about through the end of 2009. They were playing well, scoring goals, coming up big on defense, and Niclas Bergfors was making a bid for the Calder Trophy. A short stint as the best team in the NHL, a nice lead in the Eastern Conference, and there was much to celebrate as we came up on New Year’s Eve. Then the wheels fell off.
The Devils are 6-7 since December 31st, and are angling for the middle of the Eastern Conference pack. It’s not just one losing streak or a few bad games — it’s an entire 4-week period of inconsistent, low-scoring, badly played hockey. And as a fan, this is ugly and distressing. Of course, it’s also about the time the Devils ask us to pony up for playoff tickets. Advice to Lou: win a few games before sending bills, or your aren’t selling out the playoffs this year either.
Right now the Devils are simply painful to watch. They don’t move the puck well, their defense is shoddy on a good night, they aren’t scoring goals, and the power play has ceased to exist. They’re getting shut out (twice in this span). Half of their goals seem to come on long feeds for breakaways or semi-breaks, which feels more like pond hockey than the NHL. One power play goal in nearly an entire game of power play time is pathetic – and that goal was more of an errant pass by Parise that happened to rattle into the net. Getting beaten to every loose puck, and making passes that So it’s time to write about this mess of a team — or lack of a team — because it’s both cathartic and because this seems to happen once every season.
What’s wrong?
Injuries: Elias, Martin, Clarkson. Zubrus is back. Oduya hasn’t quite been the same end to end rushing guy since he got hurt.
Trepidation: Way too much passing, not enough shooting. Too much thinking, not enough driving to the net. I think you hit a point when things are running badly that you worry more about not making mistakes rather than making something happen. Failing to create opportunity is the first problem. How many passes miss their target, have no target, or are intercepted by an opposing player in the slot?
Leadership: Hate to say it, but where are the reports of a team meeting? Of the team doing something without Lemaire in the room, of the captains sitting with the team and airing out whatever it is? Seeing Langenbrunner get angry and skate hard is encouraging; but this has to carry over to the guys who have the “A” on their jerseys as well.
Defense: Colin White is making dumb plays, or no plays, and when he’s on the ice with Mottau they seem to amplify each other’s bad choices. The most egregious case here was in the Montreal game over the weekend when there were three red jerseys behind the Devils’ net, while Cammalleri was eating a sandwich in the slot. Worse than basic coverage, the defense isn’t starting the puck out of the zone, and there are more times per game than you can count where the Devils get pushed back in on a forecheck because the puck doesn’t make it through the neutral zone. I’d even argue that the breakout schemes the Devils have been using through the first half of the year were well-scouted and now well-checked by their opponents. It’s only getting harder from here, not easier.
Rookie disappearance: I was expecting big things out of Bergfors, Corrente, Zharkov, Halischuk. Bergfors looked great early in the year, and now he’s just vaporized. Zharkov had his moments and now can’t produce. Halischuk is just gone. Yes, it’s unfair to ask rookies to make up for veteran players with solid locker room personalities, but absolutely no contribution from the new kids is worrisome.
This streak of ugliness, like all things, will pass. But I think the Devils need a wake-up call; a specific action and point of focus that will rally them through the Olympic break and into the last third of the season. I can’t watch the hockey equivalent of the Mets any more.
Everybody Skates New Jersey Weekend
This weekend is a big one for USA hockey: it’s the annual Hockey Across America when USA Hockey stimulates interest in the sport, from youth to professional levels. With the Vancouver Olympics a mere two weeks away, there’s palpable excitement about hockey around the world. Next week also brings the beginning of February, the start of the NHL’s annual “Hockey is for Everyone” diversity emphasis. It’s a big deal of a weekend for snowmen of all shapes and sizes.
Coach Jon Schwartz of the NJ Dare Devils special hockey program is leading the “Everybody Skates New Jersey” cross-Garden State tour this weekend, building on the Hockey Across America and diversity themes. There are 54 rinks in NJ, yet very few offer special needs hockey programs. What Coach Jon and the ESNJ team are asking is simple: each rink should set aside one hour a week for special needs hockey, and as the program draws attention, it will become self-sustaining. The Bubba and I have personally seen the great things done by the DareDevils players and the program, and we’ve been proud supporters for the past several years. At the same time, the DareDevils program is growing, and everyone would benefit from more, local programs that get players involved as mentors and junior coaches, get the rinks involved in the community, and provide more opportunities for special needs players of all jerseys to find a place to play.
The weekend starts Friday morning at the NHL Store on 6th Avenue at 46th street in Manhattan; it then continues to visit every one of the 54 rinks in NJ over the next 54 hours, ending at The Rock on Sunday afternoon when the Kings visit the Devils.
Get involved:
Come to the NHL store and meet EJ Hradek and Bill Daley on Friday, where 20% of the morning’s sales will support special needs hockey.
Visit the web site or Coach Jon’s blog. Follow @54in54 on Twitter.
Sign the petition supporting the ice time allocation for special needs hockey. Join NJ Devils Colin White and Jamie Langenbrunner who have lent their digital sharpies to the cause.
Come see the Bubbas at the Ocean Ice Palace in Brick, NJ, on Sunday morning around 9am, when we’ll be joining the tour for the home stretch.
Remember that NJ’s autism rate is among the highest in the nation, with about one in 94 kids diagnosed along the spectrum of autism. As the common Facebook status thread reads, kids with autism don’t want to be cured, they want to be accepted – what better way to demonstrate acceptance than in one of our most tribal groupings — joining a team. We need more teams for these prospective hockey players to join. That way everybody skates.
Channeling Relief to Haiti
Local tragedies have a way of uniting us globally. I was first made aware of this when Roberto Clemente, much beloved Pittsburgh Pirate, was killed in a post-earthquake aid and goodwill ambassador role in his native Nicaragua. All of baseball mourned #21, who was just responding through the goodness of his heart.
This week’s disaster in Haiti calls for the same global response. Thanks to fellow Tiger Melinda Millberg for the following list of advocacy groups who will get practical, functional aid to Haiti. I’m a huge supporter of Cameron Sinclair’s Architecture For Humanity (disclosure: in a previous role at Sun my team and I helped build his website and architecture sharing content management service as part of Cameron’s TED prize), and clean drinking water will likely become a rate-limiting factor for survivors.
American Jewish World Service Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund
Partners in Health, already on the ground in Haiti and mobilizing their relief efforts.
Action Against Hunger. Text “HAITI” to “90999″ from the US to donate $10 to the Red Cross. The US State Department very quickly put together this number to channel relief contributions directly to first responders.
Wyclef Jean’s Yele foundation to permanently improve the lives of the most impoverished in his home country of Haiti. Text “Yele” to 501501 to donate $5 to Yele Haiti.
United Jewish Appeal (Federation)
Architecture For Humanity Cameron Sinclair and his non-profit Architecture for Humanity can be found at virtually every developing world disaster site on the planet. These guys are a collection of design and housing geniuses who work tirelessly to provide shelter for the most deserving.
Charity Water works to bring clean water to the 1 billion people on the planet who don’t have it.
How Not To Do Yoga
About a month ago, I started going to yoga classes with my wonderful wife in an attempt to regain some flexibility, perhaps slowly get back into “skating shape” and just enjoy a little adult time with my spouse. It’s been fun, mostly because our yoga instructor is patient, tolerates my constant chatter, and will let me cheat a bit on the poses when they involve grabbing parts of your lower body.
I have all of the hip and lower leg flexibility of a Barbie doll. Some things don’t rotate in the intended direction.
Empowered, perhaps stupidly, by this low-key yoga, I decided to take a class at a hotel. How hard could “flow yoga” be anyway? It was not a pretty sight or set of sounds. Here’s how not to do yoga:
Enter the boat pose, then announce that your boat is sinking. Or being boarded by pirates. There’s still some latent pirate fear in the Antilles.
Slip out of the tree pose into the “shrubbery pose,” and continue falling to the floor in “lawn clippings pose.” I’m very lopsided when it comes to the tree poses, as my left side balance is still uneven due to a 5-year old broken leg (even an ankle break affects hip flex, a major factor in balance), and my right side has muscle memory from years of marching band downfields.
Create your own sequence of dog poses. I went from downward dog to upward dog to “hungry dog” and “pastry eating dog.” Put in the proper order this transforms a basic Sun Salutation into a Breakfast Salutation. And the way I completed the poses it resembled more of a McDonald’s Dollar Menu tribute than anything reflecting the light and peace within me. Non-sequiteur: It’s worth seeing It’s Complicated just for the downward-facing dog joke, after having survived a month of yoga.
I’ll close by saying that the light in me honors the spicy chutney in you, and I hope to find peace in the place where my iced coffee and my now strained back meet, most likely in my office chair.
The 2009 List
It’s that time of year again. And what a long, strange trip of a year it’s been. Some thoughts from 2009:
Work moment.Trip to India in April, at the tail end of a tour that took me to Mexico City, Johannesburg, Mumbai and Bangalore. While meeting with the technical managers in the Bangalore office, someone mentioned that “innovation is a bad word now.” The ensuing discussion – of how innovation is not a substitute for direction, leadership and strategy, nor is innovation in the form of disruption necessarily a strategy in itself – was frank and bi-directional. The “new isn’t better unless it informs strategy” maxim shaped much of my thinking around cloud computing as the year progressed.
Family moment. There were more than a few this year: watching the Devils implode in the strangest playoff game I’ve ever seen, with my son there for mutual comfort; getting to see Renaissance in concert for the first time ever, and seeing Yes for the umpteenth time; spending a long weekend in Atlantic City with my wife, daughter and sister, and laughing until we were exhausted every day; watching my son play football for the first time, and seeing him earn a varsity letter in hockey, the first in our family since my sister lettered in x-country letter 25 years ago; going to a Yankees playoff game with my daughter, sitting closer to the airplanes departing LaGuardia than the field, but loving every second of it. Tops, though, was an afternoon and evening spent slicing, dicing and eating and our way through the Chef Allen’s reality cooking experience, as my wife and I celebrated our anniversary by working for our dinner.
Nerd toy. Tie between the old school and new school. Old school: drum set, purchased from a work friend and representing one of the biggest challenges to my marriage in more than two decades. Not a good thing to have down the hall from your home office when you’re doing a podcast. New school: USB 8-track Alessi mixing console, prompting the completion of the basement “Studio Zero”.
T-shirt. Jeph Jacques “Bear Monster” shirt, followed closely by his “Robot Family Tree” shirt. Bear Monster has become my preferred travel t-shirt. Also found out that I’m not the only one who thinks it’s important to travel comfy: Cory Doctorow told me he can’t understand why anyone who would thousands of dollars for a business class airline ticket, fly in a suit, only to arrive looking rumpled and uncomfortable.
Reading. Finished Neal Stephenson’s Anathem to start the year, and it was one of the best books I’ve read in ages. Worked my way through his Baroque Cycle, all 2,700 or so pages of it, and it was enjoyable but egregiously long. When the stock market was close to its bottom, and New York City was easy to nagivate due to reduced commuter traffic, Cory Doctorow slipped me an advanced reader copy of Makers and it reset a lot of my expectations around work, value, and doing what you love.
Email. None of mine, and not really an email (again). Our daughter got a message that opened with “Congratulations” and was from her first-choice university.
Thoughts for 2010: Striving for “balance” between all parts of my life and those of my family members. Laughing as hard as I did over the July 4th weekend. Spending time on micro-sized projects, whether it’s helping the band with their website or getting a friend’s consulting business represented in a blog, or investing in economic bootstrapping through kiva.org. Finishing up Professional WordPress and trying hard to write a little bit, each day, along with exercise, eating fruits, spicy sauce, and vegetables daily, and cheering for the home team. A decade ago, we felt that bubble-induced sense of everything being directionally wonderful, and yet almost everything went pear-shaped from our sense of security to the economy to our trust in government institutions. Ten years after, when at times it feels like many things are going wrong, it’s time for Randy Pausch’s head fake, realizing that we have the means to drive the course correction we want.
