Bill Simmons to be Timberwolves GM?

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Two of my favorite things are intersecting today.  My love for The Sports Guy and for the Timberwolves could turn into a marraige as he’s launching a campaign to be the Twolves GM.  The Star Tribune did an interview (via email) with him here.

I personally think he knows the intricacies of the league, the contracts the budgets and the trades to do the job rather well.  Plus he has good NBA common sense. He knows how it works – arguably more than any other journalist.  Here are some thoughts he has:

I would think outside the box, and really, that’s what a team like Minnesota needs from their GM. I would go out to dinner with every [original] Minny season ticket holder — and there can’t be many — in groups of eight or 10 just to let them know that someone appreciates that they stuck with the franchise for this long. I would make a vow that, if we are ever eliminated from the playoffs in any season, from that point on, every home game is half-price and all season ticket holders get a half-price refund on the remaining games so they aren’t paying for crappy tank jobs. I would make myself accountable at every game and via email. I would make a rule that any T-Wolves fan could trade in a jersey of a player no longer on the team and get 40% off a new one. I would have a contest to find two T-Wolves fans to announce all our home games on Timberwolves.com, kinda like Mystery Science Theater but with diehard fans of the team. Etc etc etc. I have a million ideas. Really, you have to be an idea guy to be an NBA GM – you deal with a lot of stuff beyond “Which players should I pick?” And anyone who reads my column knows that I never, ever, EVER run out of ideas.

I would LOVE for this to happen.  One can only hope

Making Electricity

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Making electricity
Originally uploaded by pescatello

When driving this weekend down to Palm Springs, i came around a bend and saw thousands of windmills. It was an amazing site and got me thinking about our planet. Here are tons of windmills making electricity for all of us. They are reducing our need for foreign oil, and taking us out of the middle east. This wind is free and we’re taking advantage of it. It’s great.

It makes me wish i saw a lot more of these big guys on my drives through the dessert.  Or even on the great midwest plains.  Lord knows it is super windy there.

(note: i did this post directly from Flickr and it worked really well)

Engineering details

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Image via Wikipedia

Check this out:

The US standard railroad distance between the rails is 4 feet, 8.5 inches which is a strange number. Why this distance? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the distance they used. The people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Wagons have particular odd wheel spacing, because if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.

Those old rutted roads were build by Imperial Rome. They built all the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. The ruts in the road were formed by Roman war chariots. Because of the ruts, everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever.

So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman army were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.  Crazy, eh.

Now get this —- When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters (SRBs). The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds. So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.

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Portfolio’s Failure

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I’ve heard a lot of talk about the decline of print media these days. There were great speeches by Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson at SXSW.  Recently there was news of Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine shutting down after plowing through $100 million in two years.  Some people have used this as an indication of the flawed model of print, but reading this story from an ex-employee i think it’s more an issue of mismanagement and lack of execution.

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Here are some exerpts:

First, let me amplify, the magazine was a failure. It was not market conditions or the general economic meltdown that forced Si’s hand, it was a failure to create something that people wanted to read.

Yet in too many ways to enumerate here, we did not operate in what I fondly call a reality-based environment. In Lipman’s meetings, firings were never firings, stories were never bad or ill timed, mistakes were never made. The air had long been sucked out of that room, and few staffers seemed to believe anymore in the mission of the place, despite a collective desire, and I mean this, to do as good a job as they could do, given the circumstances.

Would the magazine succeeded if it was run currectly?  Who knows, but i do know from past experience at former companies that sometimes too much money is a bad thing as there is no urgency or common goal.  And when you have a leader making decisions that don’t make sense, you can’t help by become disillusioned and discouraged.  That seems to be what happened here.

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Babel Tales by Peter Funch

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peter-funch1

This is pretty cool.   A Danish photographer, Peter Funch, who lives and works in New York City has created a photo series called “Babel Tales” which consists of pictures of people passing New York City street corners.

Every photo is an edit of several photo’s he took at exactly the same spot in a period of two weeks. He then Photoshopped the images he captured to create the Babel Tales series.

The pictures are all pretty cool.  As a former New Yorker, i think these do a great job of catching the energy of the sidewalk.  People doing their own thing and creating a dynamic piece of art every second of the day.

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For a view of the whole series check out the Flickr photos

The best movies are like vintage port

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Cover of "Pulp Fiction [UMD for PSP]"

Some movies get better and better the more you watch them and sometimes you pop a flick in 20 years after you first viewed it and it’s the best viewing yet.  The Sports Guy explains this by comparing movies to wine:

Most movies are like chardonnays or pinot noirs — you can drink them right away or any time within a span of 10 years. Many cabernets, Bordeaux and Barolos hold their vintage really well and you can actually enjoy them for as along as 10-20 years. Kinda like “Midnight Run” or “Hoosiers.” The best vintage ports are drinkable right away (although it’s not advised), but they’re specifically designed to get better and better the more they age. So, if you feel that way about a few of your favorite movies, I’d say that’s your vintage port collection. By the way, my mom helped me write this paragraph.

These movies for me are Boogie Nights, Spinal Tap, Rushmore, Good Will Hunting, Almost Famous, and Pulp Fiction. What’s your vintage port collection?

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The movie Crash is #1 on Netflix

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I read a really interesting article today.  It turns out that since 2005 the movie Crash has been the top rented movie from Netflix.  That’s 4 years of renting.  Crazy to think about.  The article interviews the writer/director Paul Haggis about this phenomenon. He has no idea why this is the case and has some funny quotes:

“I just assumed it was some sort of anomaly,” Haggis told the Tribune recently. “I have no idea why anyone went to the movie in the first place, let alone rent it. It was a little independent film, and when people started to see it, I was amazed.”

“It doesn’t make it any better of a film. I just know that these were things that were upsetting me, and I wanted to get them out,” said Haggis. “I happened to like my second film [‘In the Valley of Elah’] better than ‘Crash,’ but no one went to see it.”

It doesn’t mention that maybe it’s because it won the Academy Award for Best Picture and nobody saw so everyone put it in their queue.  I wonder how many people got it delivered to them and sent it right back so they could get disk 3 of House a little bit faster.

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Fred Wilson's Take on Twitter

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Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...

There’s a good video by Fred Wilson about Twitter and what he, as an investor in it, thinks about it.  What he boils it down to is three points:

  1. “the single most important is that twitter from day 1 is a platform that others can build upon”
  2. “it is very one-dimensional…it doesn’t do anything that is not in the timeline….It’s power comes from that – it’s straightforward”
  3. “Twitter is the news feed for the web” as people embed links in their tweets and it’s now an alerting system

What else is interesting is that Twitter wasn’t pitched to Fred but rather he was an early user of it and he pitched to them to try to get them to take money from Union Square Ventures.  This is why i think Fred is one of the best VC’s in the business because he uses the products.  The web is all about product.  It’s not like the industrial revolution, it is a consumer facing which means that the usability is extremely important.  He is an early adopter and gets into the weeds. I have a hard time imagining other VC’s using Twitter when it was still a part of Odeo.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzl5k2B84Kg]

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