Madden's leaving..

Madden is retiring from football announcing :( He was the best, and the reason I always wanted to catch the Sunday night game.

Some of his quotes -

“Self-praise is for losers. Be a winner. Stand for something. Always have class, and be humble.”

“Coaches have to watch for what they don't want to see and listen to what they don't want to hear.”

“The road to Easy Street goes through the sewer.”

“The fewer rules a coach has, the fewer rules there are for players to break.”

Intermittency

It is crazy how intermittent my blog writing is becoming. I stopped blogging sometime last year, for wanting a fresh start sometime later. Then I started again around the NFL playoffs this year, but have again slowed down.

I guess it totally depends on how "busy" I am - in the sense how occupied with something else I am.

So, updates.. nothing much to write about. Gave a talk (look for "Prog701 - QWERTY keypad support" on that page - click on "Video") in relation to what I work on. It is strange to hear and see yourself talking on video - I sound nothing like what I think I sound - of course I hardly, if ever, speak to a crowd.

Manchester United won the Champs league! I was just starting out to be a fan when they did it in 99, and to get to see them lift it again is tremendous.

Lakers got slaughtered at the hands of the Celtics. No shocker there I think, the Celts were tremendous. It would take a way more mature team to beat them. Only way Lakers would have won was if the Celts made basic mistakes. Of course, didn't happen.

I visited Denmark - and it is only a 4 hour drive from San Diego :-). Well, I visited a Danish town in the US anyway. It is gorgeous, and incredible how authentic they've made it. The Danish pastries were.. well, hard to describe. Unlike the sugar-coma versions that we normally get in the US, these were just.. well tasted to be believed.

Anyway, hope this is not my last post for the next 3 months - the way I've been going.

Term-inal thinking

A general observation --

Even with so much history to guide us, and supposedly so many free knowledge tools at our disposal, so many decisions are made based on the short term benefit rather the long term potential.

For example, a football team hires a coach while evidently thinking of the long term. But give 4-5 bad results in a row, and the coach is no more. So, a coach's long term future is penalized because of short term failures.

Even when we buy lots of stuff on credit, we are looking at short term benefit (enjoying using whatever we buy) rather than long term potential (too much debt).

Stock market - if a company announces that it missed its earnings forecast by 0.05%, everybody sells the stock, and that too at a loss! Forget the long term potential of the company.

A company is making losses, so it will fire off enough employees so that the balance sheet again shows a profit. Of course, making a generalization here, but the point is still valid.

Are we getting too used to the I-want-it-now fast food philosophy that we apply to everything? What about some good old grinding out the good results, or sticking around in tough times and riding them out?

After all, it is the long term decisions that decide how we fare in the, well, long term.

Bolts hit colts

What a game. As a fan, this is pretty much as exciting as it gets. A fan by definition is a die-hard, who will believe anything is possible. But trailing 4th quarter, no Tomlinson, Rivers, Gates, Neal.. Billy Volek at QB and Sproles in the backfield, and Nanee... and you are only playing the Indianapolis Colts away from home in a divisional playoff. You get 7 points wiped off on a (terribly) wrong refreeing call. I admit I did not believe for a moment. But I was wrong. That was quite a performance, extremely gutsy.

Yes everybody wanted an Indy vs Pats showdown. One writer (if you can call him that) went as far as saying that the Chargers are a bunch of goofs because they messed up everyone's dream match by winning!

I think everyone was so caught up with the fact that this was going to be an Indy vs Pats dream AFCCG, they are just finding it hard to accept that Indy got beat at home against a team that they were a 10 point favorite to win. But this is the NFL, and I know what SD is made up of. They should have gone to the Superbowl last year - one fumble changed everything. But it is the same team that went 14-2 last year and the Pats needed a shade of luck to beat! You cannot underestimate a team like that.

I don't know what is going to happen on Sunday... how banged up we are. One thing I do know is that this is not going to be an easy game for the Pats. I know they will be ready, and I know SD will be ready, irrespective of available personnel. Forget about the regular season blowout, this is the AFC championship game. This is going to be an exciting game.

Trash talk

So you may have seen the video of Philip Rivers and co. going at Jay Cutler. And the whole he-aint-earned-it chant by Champ Bailey about that. 

 

Well Champ, here's the truth - if you aren't competitive in a 3rd straight game against your main divisional rival, you leave yourself open to that. I agree that it was un-classy and very un-Rivers like, and it annoyed me a bit too, but the classy thing to do Mr Bailey, is to hold in that feeling and show it to him the next time. 

I think this has been a tough season for San Diego. With all those expectations after 14-2 last year, with the firing of Marty in-spite of that, with the 1-3 start, with the blowout losses at New England and Minnesota, with the fires that forced the team to leave town for practice, it's not been easy. They have been expected to pick up where they left off last season, and do it with a new head coach, with new offensive and defensive coordinators. When it comes to football, San Diego fans will let you have it worse than Eli gets it from NY, if you don't play well.Rivers has been criticized a lot and squarely blamed for the state of the offense. This is his 3rd year out of college ball at that. 

So Mr Bailey, please forgive Phil, okay? He's had a tough time this season, and yeah, he's earned it.  He's earned the right to hold himself up and have some talk back at 10-5 with the no 3 seed almost locked up, all after that 1-3 start. I do think he went a bit overboard, but hey, that's competitiveness, why don't you plan to give some back when you play him the next time?

I am back

After 1 1/2 years, here I go again. 

It is hard to describe what all has changed in those 1 1/2 years.  Though I guess more than I, it is things around me that have changed - people, perceptions, visions, thoughts, actions, morals, beliefs and so on. The only constant is change, but sometimes things that remain constant are the things that define what does not need to change.

Well, this blog will change from what I used to write earlier. I will write more of what I want to write about now, which may be a no-brainer, but an important point nonetheless.

So, here I go again!