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Putting these two stories 1-2 on a website seems like a very poor editing decision.

VentureBeat link

Hawks beat the Lakers 86-76 to keep a 3.5 game lead over Miami

Tiger hits from deep on 18 to win at Bay Hill

Sparty shows up and takes down Louisville 64-52.  When Tech finishes something like 2-49 and UK ends up in the NIT, I deserve to enjoy a little Schadenfreude.

And, as conflicted as I may be by just how much of a weasel he is, if Kentucky can pull Calipari I may just start liking him so long as he doesn’t do what he did to UMass.  No matter what, he can obviously recruit and coach.

Yesterday we had out big presentation for Red Hat, the open source software company that makes a Linux distribution for companies to run on their servers.  This was a semester long project involving top executives at the company, and we were finishing it off with a 25 minute presentation followed by a 30 minute Q&A session.

The main point here is that I had to look nice.  I had taken my clothes to the dry cleaner Wednesday and the plan was to pick them up Friday morning before the presentations started at 11.  Also, I needed to go buy a pair of shoes at Lenox Mall because I finally wore out my previous pair walking all over Europe, and I just couldn’t stomach wearing a pair of plastic Target dress shoes, even for a day.

The morning starts innocently enough, I toss on some jeans and a white undershirt, some dress socks a hoodie and sneakers.  I throw my suit jacket in the car and head to the dry cleaners and about 9, 2 hours before I have to be dressed at school.  On the way out of the neighborhood I hit the train tracks.  Train.  Ugh.  So there goes another 8 minutes of time.

About 2 blocks away from the dry cleaners I realize “Crap, I don’t have a tie” so now I have to buy one of those too.  I do some quick mental calculation and decide that I guess I have to go to Macy’s now instead of Johnston and Murphy so that I can get a cheap tie.

I get to Macy’s right when it opens at 10am, stop in, grab a nice pair of shoes and a tie and I’m off with time to spare.  This may just work out fine.  And then I get to school.

Getting out of the car I do a quick inventory:

• Shirt, check
• Pants, check
• Jacket, check
• Shoes, check
• Tie, check
• Belt, wearing one so che…

Son of a…. I’m wearing a light brown belt.

Other fun story, there’s some kind of gas main break in Decatur so we have no hot water.  SWEET!!!

A company called Flat World Knowledge is working to create open-source text books.  What that means is that you wouldn’t pay for books any more, which is huge when I probably spent around $4500 on books in my undergrad career, and around $1150 so far in MBA school.

It’s kinda like wikipedia but written entirely by experts in their respective field and professionally edited before being released to the public.  That’s awesome and I really hope it takes off.

One service that I’ve used which is something kinda similar is MIT’s OpenCourseWare project.  This offers up lecture notes, assignments, tests, and solutions from about 1800 MIT courses.  It basically allows you to sit in on any class you want at whatever schedule is convenient to you.  If you ever get the desire to learn something new, be sure to check it out.

Also, I’m working on the Vienna report.  I have a big strategy project due Friday (it’s 100% of the grade for the class) so I may or may not have it finished before the weekend, but hopefully you’ll like it.

10 days of Europe and one of rest later, and I’m back.

I’m going to do a proper write up with pictures later (actually, probably a few write ups since it’s too much to make you read at once) so I’ll just hit on a few of the highlights here in more of a stream-of-consciousness format.

-Movie watched on the flight over: The Rocker.  No in-seat entertainment system = me not happy.
-Vienna was the nicest city out of the 3 we visited, but is filled with mediocre looking people.
-The Dean of the Czech university we were working with said it best, “Your male students must love it here, we have cheap beer and beautiful women.”  Amen Dean.
-What Vienna lacked in beautiful people, it more than made up for with beautiful architecture.  Some of the churches there were just amazing.  The most moving one for me was actually the smallest one we visited, and one we just kinda stumbled upon will trying to stay out of the rain.
-That said, the view from the top of Karlskirche is something you have to see if you go to Vienna.
-Big thanks to classmate Ben who lived in Vienna for a few years and hooked us up with a to-do list of lesser known sites that turned out to be an awesome resource.
-Apparently everything in Central Europe is named for a Karl/Charles of some sort.  I’m amazed none of the country names can be traced back to him.
-As touristy as they are, guided tours are a great resource to get to know about the history and significance of different structures in cities you are visiting.
-Brno is like a bigger, better, older, cooler Athens.  It has about 400,000 people, about 70,000 college students, over 800 years of history, and good $1 beers.
-While I know they enjoyed our time there, I think the Masaryk students were relieved to see us go so they could finally get some rest.
-Prague seems to be trying to become the next Amsterdam, which is a shame because it’s a beautiful city.
-I didn’t really want to go to the 5-story club, but I did and ended up with a few good stories out of it.  Besides, how often are you going to be in Prague?
-It was unfortunately cold for the entire trip; mid 40′s was the highest it ever got.  If we had just another 10 degrees it would have been absolutely breathtaking.  I have to go back at some point when there’s actual foliage.
-Movies watched on the flight home: Madagascar 2, Transporter 3, Four Christmases.  Yay for individual systems and my love for awful movies.

So that covers some of the highlights for now.  I have about 250 pictures of my own to sort through, and a couple thousand that other people took and which we are working on putting together right now.  I will write some more in depth reports later, decorate them with our awesome photography and then let you waste another couple minutes of work.

Also, MLS just started back up so you can expect a lot more posts on that in the coming weeks/months.  Don’t expect any ELO ratings for a few weeks, I’m going to try to give it some time to normalize before I go making people angry.

Alright boys and girls, I’m outta here.

I’m off to school for the standard 8am Thursday meetings, then one class, and then the airport for my Vienna/Brno/Prague trip.  I’ll have my laptop, but only because I need to write my sections of a strategy paper while I’m on the plane.  Also, I’m obviously leaving my phone here as well.

So, if you really really really want to get in touch with me I may check email once or twice over the next 10 days, but mostly you’ll just have to wait on me.  This clearly means that any and all posting will be limited as well.  I’ll try to get some pictures uploaded while I’m on the train or something.

Have a nice week!

Surprisingly good 2p2 thread recently called “Crazy **** you would do if you were a billionaire”

Here are some of the best ideas:

I’d like to build a house where all the rooms are floored like air-hockey tables so that you could glide effortlessly all around the house.

Solid wacky billionaire antics here

Martingale the Bellagio for $1,000,000 units.

In case you don’t know what the Martingale system is

I’d blow an absurd amount of money setting up prop bet material, mostly for sports.

Stuff like the best random high school basketball team in some small state against the WNBA champions, whether a random OOTer could go 3 rounds with de la Hoya, Curtains versus a Kasparov who has to be completely sloshed the whole time, Sklansky versus El Diablo on the SAT, Spain versus Manchester United and that kind of thing.

Stuff people argue about endlessly but other than the really clear ones the argument could go on forever. It would be so sick to be able to splash out enough money that even elite athletes and rich dudes would go all out so a lot of these fun drunken conversations could be settled.

This is awesome.  There are so many of these things people argue about like “Florida versus the Detroit Lions” that someone using their money to set these things up would probably be able to make it all back on TV revenue.

I would buy the rights to TV shows that are going off the air. Then pay the entire cast and writers to continue making episodes just for me and my friends. Only TV shows i like of course.

In case you ever wanted more Arrested Development.

perfectly recreate the old n64 bond levels like complex and temple. then fund some engineers to invent all the guns from the game but of the paintball variety. even paintball proximity mines. then play paintball

The GREATEST idea, by far.  You could charge me $40 and hour and I would still live at this place, dropping proximity mines all over the levels.

Not sure about details, but I’d definitely spend a lot of money on ruining the lives of people I hate.

So now we’ve got someone going all Count of Monte Cristo on us, what could possibly be the best way to accomplish this?

I would pay ABC and the writers and actors of Lost to permanently take the show of the air and swear them all to secrecy.

You bastard.

So now, what’s your plan for crazy things to spend your billions on?  Please see this movie if you need some inspiration.

Yeah, sooooo, this week’s links are not what you would call “so good.”  I was pretty busy most of the week and that apparently kept me from stumbling across as much cool stuff as normal.  I understand, you’re disappointed.  I apologize.

What is This? (Gizmodo)
It’s a link to a couple cool “maplets” which are applications that tie in to Google Maps and let you do cool things.  This one lets you visualize all of the air travel patterns in the US.

A Few Minutes With The Daily Show (Paul Kedrosky)
A couple clips from recent Daily Shows that are pretty entertaining.  I know a lot of these have been floating around lately, so if you’ve already seen the segments with NYT columnist Joe Nocera and John Stewart ripping CNBC analyst Rick Santelli then there’s nothing new to see here.

Web Apps: HTML to PDF Converter (lifehacker)
This is a handy little application that lets you turn a website into a pdf file.  Now, usually you can just email someone a link, but if for some reason you can’t (and I’ve definitely stumbled onto one a few times) this is a great and very easy solution.

It’s been a pretty good weekend so far after a rough week of classes/work.  Pete and I played golf yesterday down at Whitewater Creek, which neither of us had ever played before.  I was a little less terrible than usual while Pete would’ve broken par if he didn’t go in the water a couple times.  It’s always nice to be trying to figure out how to make a shot from inside 75 yards while your playing partner is putting 50 yards of cut on a 3 wood from 205 out to keep it under a 20 foot high tree and then himself a 15 foot eagle putt.  Yeah, that’s fair.

Later on we went out with Andy, Dekalb, Dot, and Kevin (aka Macon Crew Lite (no Blascovich)) and sat outside at Neighbors in the Highlands for a few hours before going over to Buckhead to watch George and Elsberry just destroy the dance floor.  Oh yeah, in case you didn’t know, Elsberry’s new goal in life is to learn how to breakdance.  He’s practicing a good 10-15 hours a week at the house, thanks to the fine folks at bboy.org, and he started to pull some of it out last night.

Today we went to Piedmont Park for a few hours since it was 75 degrees and sunny, and Lucky Day was starting around the same time.  Now, we aren’t exactly “pay $30 to hang around and drink” kinda people, so we just hung around the park slowly tiring ourselves out through various sports.  It was really nice though, and we ended up with a group of about 30 friends by the time I left.

Now it’s time to go meet up for dinner at Taqueria del Sol with Ross (aka Cardo) who’s in town from LA, and see what’s been going on with him ever since moving out west.

those “50 Things to Do Before You Die” lists is that they basically just turn in to a “Here’ 50 Cool Things I’ve Done” list.

Take the more recent one I saw, and that provoked this fury, by a guy who has “spent the better part of the last decade abroad” for example.

Not surprisingly, his list of things to do consists almost entirely of things that come from living/traveling abroad.  Well don’t you feel so accomplished that the list of the 50 most important things a human being could ever do just happens to line up perfectly with what you choose to spend your life on!

Oh, and by the way, number 44

44. Enjoy a freshly rolled cigar in Cuba. Taste a hand rolled specialty close to its source.

is stupid because Cuban Cigars Suck.  That’s like telling a whiskey connoisseur to visit the Jack Daniels plant.

Similarly, having to read these things from a sports fan turns in to “Visit Fenway Park, Visit Wrigley Field, Watch Ohio State dot the i, Go to a Final 4, blah blah blah.”  These lists serve no purpose except to pat yourself on the back for a life well-lived.

So stop reading other people’s lists of thing you “Have to Do” and just do whatever you want.  Then you can make some snarky lists and feel better about yourself.