What I Did On My Summer Vacation

As the year comes to an end I've been taking inventory of the old blog and noticed that during the Summer my posting fell from my typical inconsistency of ~1 every 7-10 days to 1 in July and none in August. Well it turns out that I was taking 2 classes (1 each at UCLA and USC) and working and not posting. The USC class was my last class in the GIST Certificate program (I'm certified!). A week in Catalina that include lots of hiking, playing with GPS units, and a night snorkel (yeah, it was a-freaking-mazing). The UCLA class was equally awesome - Geography of Los Angeles. We explored a ton of themes and did a bunch of field trips (a trip to the LA River led by nature writer Jenny Price, Westwood walkabout including this apartment building designed by Lautner, and taking a Metro bus up and down Sunset Blvd.).

My partner and I did a final project on the LA River. We had to create a tour, make a google map (below), and then do a short presentation in the Pecha Kucha style (Wikipedia). Pecha Kucha limits your presentation to 20 slides and 20 seconds for each slide. So you have to choose images with maximum impact, choose your words carefully, and practice. It's great, I wish that my work presentations had similar constraints.


View LA River Map in a larger map

US Interstate System as London Tube Map

Awhile back Matthew Yglesias linked to this picture (from the Good Blog) of the US Interstate system made to look like the London Tube map (Wikipedia).



For those who have never been to London, go. I was only there for a bit but had a great time. Getting around on the Tube is intuitive, in no small part because of the ground breaking Tube map. Additionally you can sit back and see all sorts of slices of life because EVERYONE takes it. Whatever ethnicity or occupation that can be imagined will be on the Tube. Including jet lagged pasty American tourists.

Thank you Spammers!

So I'm getting a bunch of spammers on Nacho Lovers. I don't really know why since this is not really a place with a lot of users debating nacho policy (subject for a future post). Anyway, the comments have been rejiggered so that I now moderate comments on posts that are > 5 days old and you have to do the jumbled word thingy. So yeah.

2009-10 UCLA Basketball Update

Just a little post on UCLA basketball:

The season has started! 3 'official' games so far (2-1). We lost 4 starters from last year (and the remaining starter has already been suspended for 2 games for legal reasons) so a lot of new faces are getting playing time. The starting lineup last night against Pepperdine (Victory!) looked like this:

PG Jerime Anderson (So.)
SG Malcolm Lee (So.)
SF Michael Roll (Sr.)
PF James Keefe (Sr.)
C Drew Gordon (So.)

Coming off the bench senior walk-on Mustafa Abdul-Hamid got a lot of minutes (25ish) at guard. True freshman Reeves Nelson, Mike Moser, and Brendan Lane each got 8/9 minutes. Notable in their absence were Tyler Honeycutt (injury), Bobo Morgon (is not very good), and Anthony Stover (true freshman who might redshirt).

I have watched most of the games and my first impression is that we are VERY raw. Coach Ben Howland likes to ride his starters and usually rotates about 3 bench players, especially during Pac-10 play, so most of these guys played very little last year. Dragovic's suspension will actually help Nelson and Lane a lot as they will get a lot more playing time than they would have otherwise. If Dragovic comes back I expect their minutes to decrease significantly. Howland should really think about redshirting two or three of his bigs (Morgan/Stover/Lane).

We have very little depth in the back court, and Honeycutt's return from injury will be key. Moser has been getting a little playing time but our ball handlers need to get a lot better at facing pressure (Anderson and Hamid both looked pretty bad when they had defenders in their respective faces).

Overall we should actually be okay - middle of the road in the Pac-10 assuming our guys make improvements between now and January. No-one looks like they will make enough of a leap to jump ship early to the Pros but someone (like Lee or Honeycutt) could pull a Westbrook and make significant in-season improvement. We can only hope.

Anyway, you can read a lot more about this season at BruinsNation, Bruin Basketball Report Online, Jon Gold's blog , or Scout.

The New 'The Wire' Post

I have a secret. There is no best episode of The Wire. This flies in the face of my post on the Wire. Initially I wrote this post because I had just gotten into the show because of Bill Simmons (who is known primarily as a sportswriter for ESPN but also writes a lot about pop culture and media). He encouraged everyone to watch the show and like a good little Simmons lemming I did. I started during season 4, watched through to the finale, and then Netflixed seasons 1-3. It was brilliant. I'm sorry I didn't watch in order but I'm glad I watched. While most TV is simple entertainment and escape, this was TV with a purpose.

So why am I writing about this now? Well an interesting phenomenon about this blog is that for whatever SEO reason the Wire Post generates the most random hits from Google. When I first started the blog, I wanted to learn how this whole blogging process worked so I also installed some StatCounter html to track where people come to the blog from, what they're reading, etc. In fact, here's a map of my latest user activity (Hello Singapore!):



As I have thought about the phenomenon of the show in general, and the phenomenon of the stats for my blog post in particular it dawned on me: trying to decide a best episode is a monumental exercise in futility. It does the series a grave injustice. You can't just watch one episode and distill the entire essence - you really need to sit down with season 1, episode 1 and continue from there until the finale. And then think about what everything means. A lot. And then come to the realization that the concept of a 'best episode' for something so groundbreaking is really just a myth.

(And thanks to Matthew Yglesias for posting this and giving me a reason/excuse for this post).