Running Good

So far, it's been a night of good news. We'll see how the rest of the night goes. Maybe I should go buy some lottery tickets.

"One time, baby, one time."

You know how you just root for things to go your way, just this time? You'll hear me say that if I go all-in and get called. Or, you'll hear it when my guy is on the line going 1-and-1. Well, my buddy CJ got into grad school. Good that he got in. I think that he needed this one to come through. I think that we'll end up rooming together somewhere next year. So that settles one outstanding issue.

"Let's roll."

Just got the note that I got my tickets for the Final 4. I'll be rolling out to St. Louis this Friday or Saturday. I don't have a clue what to expect, especially after the game last Saturday. But regardless, I'll get to see it in person. Unless someone offers me a big wad of Benjamins. Make that a really big wad :-)

Anyway, back to work.

-Chairman

Defining Sports Moments

This is the St. Louis edition, so we're throwing some love back to Jack Buck.

"I don't believe what I just saw!... I don't believe what I just saw."

Holy Saturday. The Rev gets to cut down the nets. I'm not sure that God cares about the outcome of sporting events, but just in case He does, it's good to know that not many teams will have an edge on us with the God Factor.

Well, I guess that I don't know as much as I thought... but we still managed to win. How? I'm not sure. 15 points down. 4:02 left. An arena in stunned silence? Right where we want them? Who knew?

I thought that we still had a run left, and I was pretty sure that Deron had a few more points let in him. I knew that things would even out - balls would start falling into our hands, and some of the bad ref calls would even out. I also know that we had a lot of time left. So even with us down a dozen with 2:30 left, I wasn't all that worried. I wasn't sure how it was going to work out, but I had a strange feeling that it was going to be alright.

What I didn't expect was seeing Luther turn it up a notch, force the issue on D, and be heads up. The entire team was great down the stretch - Ingram w/ a big J and bigger D, Powell w/ a tough drive. Dee scoring with speed and hounding on D, Luther making it happen, and Deron refusing to let it slip away. And while we let them shoot 52% for the game, down the stretch, they were 0 for 6 to end the 2nd half. And of course, we kept them 0 of 3 in the three biggest defensive possessions that we had.

There was absolute euphoria for us Illini in the stands. And probably utter disbelief from the Arizona fans. Even today, I'm still not positive that we won that game. And I was probably in the best shape of anyone in our section with 2:30 left in the game.

So, I didn't get home until 3am again. So I slept until 11. So what? Illini cut down the nets, move on to St. Louis. And I've got a ton of work to do. But for the Illini Nation?

"Go crazy, folks! Go crazy!"

Damn skippy, Jack.

-Chairman

What Time is it? Game Time!

Okay. 40 minutes until St. Louis. Our Stylin' Illini need to put together one more solid performance to make April at the Arch a reality. It should happen. Arizona played as well as it could on Thursday against Oklahoma St. 66% from the field. Clutch shot after clutch shot. But, they won't get the same looks in the halfcourt tonight. I'll be a little surprised if we don't win by a dozen or more. Arizona is a team that was up big on Wake Forest and then folded in the 2nd half. This is a team that had fits against Washington. I like our chances because we're actually bigger and tougher inside.

I think that we'll see that Arizona will try to run, but we'll be too good on offense for them to just run. And I don't think that they can score in the halfcourt on us with consistency. You'll see Stoudamire hit a few J's, but they don't move the ball well enough to really scare you, and Frye isn't a great offensive player.

We'll see. It's time to drive north. Go Illini!

-Chairman

Whoops.

Hmmm... you know what would be embarrassing? If you spent all this time and money on upgrading your laptop, only to realize that you just needed to blow the dust out of a few parts and to re-seat a couple components? Yeah. That would be sort of embarrassing. But it would be a good learning experience.

So I spent all this money on buying a new hard drive, and buying a USB hard drive to transfer all of the files. And it worked. I got this 100MB hard drive into my old laptop. And it was working fine. For about an hour. Then the same symptoms came back. It would just freeze, and then when I tried to power up, it just wouldn't kick in. Needless to say, I wasn't happy. That was when I looked a few manuals and stuff. Turns out that it could be an issue w/ the DIMM chips being loose. I was a little red-faced, but not too proud to give it a shot. I think that it worked. My ol' T22, just needed to have someone re-install the memory chips. The thing is running great right now.

It almost makes the T30 that I bought seem frivolous. But hey, there's always that tax refund, right? Not a big deal. I wanted to have another computer around, since my desktop is like 6 years old, and I got a decent deal on it.

Oh well. I never said that I was a computer genius. In fact, I think that I know just enough to give myself a headache.

As a side note, I've installed a counter on this page, as well as on http://kitchenchairman.blogspot.com , the companion site to this blog. Now we get to see if I have any lurkers here, and we can try to see who checks this page out w/out leaving comments. I also get to test out the theory that people are more interested in what I eat and what I cook than in the rest of my life (which admittedly, has been sort of blah of late).

Anyway, it's almost time for bed - going to Chicago to watch the Sweet 16 tomorrow. I-L-L... I-N-I!!!

-RG

Survive and Advance

A happier note today. From 64 to Sweet 16. Our Stylin' Illini are still at it, and actually looked really darned good against Nevada. We were up by 20 with 5 to go and called off the dogs. We're seeing how good Auggie really is, and we're seeing how good our halfcourt defense is. So who here was actually nervous about us getting to the Sweet 16? Of you who have your hands up, how many of you actually know anything about basketball? Looking around, at the non-show of hands, leads me to this thought. I hate all of the bandwagon fans that don't know a thing about hoops getting all worked up over things. At some point, I'll tell you how I knew we were screwed against Ohio St., even before Weber got beat down the stretch.

Next two rounds are in Chicago. First up is UW-Milwaukee. Their jerseys look like they would be for Army... every time I see that jersey, I'm thinking about those "Army of One" commercials. They look like a decent squad, but they play a style that we can handle - they want to run and create chaos. Sort of like Michigan St. Problem is, they're not good enough to do that against us. That's the style that we prefer. I don't really see much of an issue in that game.

Of course, after that comes either Arizona or Oklahoma St. If we make it to the Elite 8, that will be a much tougher game. Both teams are for real. Arizona can't roll with us on the inside. Stylistlically, I think that getting ready for the UW-Mil game will prep us for Arizona well. We'll have too many horses for Arizona to handle, if it comes to that...

Oklahoma St. is a little different. They're like us in that they can play whatever style their opponents want. They can knock 'em down and drag 'em out with their big guys inside (note - if Roger is matched up on Joey Graham, there had better be a quick double, or Roger may need a handgun to stop him). They also have some quick, quality guards that can run. A fun matchup would be Ivan McFarlin and James Augustine. Couple similar sorts of players - undersized at the 5 spot, but very active, long and lanky, and can run.

That will be a game worth watching.

Of course, we'll see how my prediction of Bruce Weber's status among the remaining coaches. I'm seeing a few coaches that I'd definitely place ahead of Weber... Izzo, Sutton, Olson, Knight, Tubby Smith for sure. Maybe Coach K tonight. Either Hewitt or Pitino. I'm not sure where I put Sendek or Romar or Wright. But Weber looks to be about average at this point. I'm just hoping that it doesn't come down to coaching, and if it does, that I'm just flat out wrong. The problem is, I'm not often wrong :-)

This week is spring break for me. I don't really get a break from work, but I do get a break from classes. Which means that I can catch up on various life things (like getting my oil changed, cleaning my room, working out, sleeping, or cooking) as well as some academic things like taking care of some research, some class projects, and finishing off a paper that's been sitting on in my inbox forever...

I may also buy a condo. I took a walkthrough in the condo that I'm interested in. It has potential. Nice, high ceilings. A fireplace. A huge room upstairs. There will definitely be some work that needs to be done - it's got a lot of wear and tear to it. There will be a lot of painting to do. And I think that there will be some things that need to be bought - dressers, maybe some furniture, though the current owner said that he'd leave the appliances and whatever furniture is already their. It's hard to really see what you need and what you can do when it's a mess inside.

Problem is, the asking price is a little more than it should be. I think that they're asking something like $110/sq ft. I think that the going rate around here is something like $100/sq ft. The place is a little older - built in the late 60's. I don't know how old the furnace or water heater are. There's also a pesky $100/month condo association fee. Really, that makes the place worth about $10,000 less to me. I'll see if I can get it down to a price that I can be comfortable with. I don't mind overpaying just a little bit for the location (which is awesome), but I'm not giving up the ghost on this one.

Anyway, hope that all the rest of you are good.

-Chairman

Bittersweet Symphony

I'm absolutely swamped with work, I'm exahsted, but I need to write.

A quick note on the sweet... I'll write more about it later... The Illini are number 1, and heading out to Indy for step 1. But we already knew that. We've known that for a while. We'll see how that run goes.

The bitter note... I hate how fragile our lives are. Not just in the physical sense, but in every sense. How does one simple mishap completely alter our day, our week, our lives? And all for what? I'm not even sure. Even when the writing is on the wall, you are still shocked to see things work out, and you always fail to see the human toll, whether it be on a scale of a million or a scale of one.

One of my best friends from high school is going to be getting divorced. It's going to be nasty, I think. He has a young son, who is going to be 4 this summer. This was one of those high school romances. C and J were the first (and to this point, only) couple in our "crew" to get married. They had bought a house. C's business was going well. They had a great looking baby boy. From the outside, things looked like they were going to be just great.

But there were rumblings. For a few months, I had heard through the grapevine that things weren't good. Of course, I'm a 14-hour drive from home, so I haven't been through that neck of the woods in a few years. So, I just figured that things would work out fine. C had always been a little gruff, and it was natural that there was a little rumbling going on. Only this wasn't a little rumble.

Tonight, I finally got to talk with C. Things aren't going to work out fine. Lying, cheating, maybe even stealing. J did him wrong. And C said one thing that just stands out. "For once in my life, I can say that I was completely innocent." I just hope that he can keep it that way.
From what I heard, over the last couple years, C has grown up for real. He's become a man. He now has a son to look after, to fight for, to do right by. C's going to fight for his son. I think that he'll probably win. And I think that will be so much tougher of a task than he has ever faced. C's a man who didn't do college. C has tried to carve out his own his own niche with his own hands, trying to avoid a gift from his parents (who are wealthy). C has brought a business up from concept to execution, and has expanded to a 2nd branch. He'll do just fine.

But I don't think that he has faced anything nearly this challenging. There was something in the voice. A sober reality. C realizes that he is lost. He sounded numb, if that makes any sense. I know for sure that I this is well beyond anything that I have faced. My tough spots in life have always come without any true emotional attachment. C will be divorcing the only woman that he has ever loved. I've always put myself into positions where I know that I'll be stretched, but I know that I'll come out on top. I don't know if C is in a spot where you can even declare a winner.

I absolutely hate having to take a call from a friend where I have no idea what I can say. I don't often get emotional, but every once in a while that moment hits where you know that you need to mourn. Tonight was one of those moments. I don't know where things will move for C. I'm going to take a deep breath and just pray that C and his son emerge stronger from everything that will be happening over the next few months.

And something that I'm reminded of is that when things go awry, when things look the most bleak, there's something that's crucial to remember. You find out very quickly who your family is, whether by blood, by relation, or by choice. It's not always who your share your genes with that you're closest to.

So with that said, much love to my extended family. You know who you are.

In the meantime, I need to get back to work... no rest for the weary.

-Chairman

Five Issues

Okay. I have time for a quick breath since I got volunteered to run an experiment at 9, and I have office hours at 11. Some random thoughts on our Illini.

The Stylin' Illini (thanks, Scoop). Still the best team in the country. We just took our foot off the throttle and let someone zip by us when we weren't looking. That's OK. All things being equal, you'd rather win than lose, but if you can still learn a lesson after a loss, then great.

Of course, I'm not convinced that we've learned our lesson. A few things to note:

1) We still like to use Roger to guard much bigger guys. That seems to lead to easy baskets for the other team in important situations. That really should change once we see some huge guy get 2 easy ones on him. I mean, the good Reverend is massive in comparison to normal humans. But he's giving up 2 inches and 25 pounds to most 4's out there. That's like Martha Stewart trying to keep from having to toss a Mighty Bertha salad while she was away on leave for the last few months.

2) Our in-game tactics are somewhat suspect, too. First of all, teams have scouted our our alley-oops. They get broken up more then they work now. Time to run that play from a different set. It's a bad sign when the other team is telling our guys where to cut.

3) Dee's fallen in love with that 3-point shot in someone's face. That's not high percentage. Open 3's are great. Contested ones? Not so much. I'm OK with someone missing open shots. That will happen. Taking bad shots? Not good, and if he's off, someone needs to yank Dee over and remind him to stay in the flow.

4) No more stalling out the offense, unless you have a really good reason to, and being up by 4 with 2 minutes left is not a good reason. Up by 4 with a minute left is. Here's the thing. All year, we've seen how teams will try to slow down the game on us by just dribbling out 25 seconds before triggering an offense. If the defense cuts off your initial move, this leads to kicking the ball out to someone 27 feet away, not in position to score, with only 6 or 7 seconds left on the clock. This is why we force turnovers and bad shots in the half-court. Of course, we then start to do the same thing. We let Ohio St. back into that game the last 3 minutes when we stopped trying to play offense, and tried to just take a knee and let the clock run out.

5) Last point. We need to know our opponents. When you're playing poker, if you know that you're superior to an opponent, you don't make risky calls when someone puts you all-in. You should be convinced that you're winning. You may not always be right, but that's how you play. Given more time, the better team is more likely to win. On the converse, if you're the inferior team, you're looking to exploit any possible opening. You go all-in if you're slightly ahead in the hand. You're looking for that one shot to take down a top gun because you know that if you have to play it out over the long haul, you'll get beat. Knowing that, realizing that we're up by 2 with 10 seconds left to go, what do you expect the inferior team to do? They're going to go for it all. You have to know that a 3 pointer is going up. They're much more likely to beat us by 3 points in one possession than they are to beat us by 1, given 10 possessions (like in overtime).

When it was all on the line, Thad Matta made Bruce Weber look like Chris Webber. Granted, Thad Matta is one of the truly excellent in-game coaches today, but still... why did it feel like we had Mike Martz on the sidelines? Now, I'm of the belief that we'll figure this out and just throttle teams, so that coaching tactics won't matter, but imagine this... tied ball game. 2 minutes left to go. Both teams have 3 timeouts left. Who would you rather have on the sidelines? Bruce Weber? Or Coach K? Rick Pitino? Bob Huggins? Boeheim? Calhoun? Tubby? Roy Williams? Gary Williams? Billy Dee Williams? Lute Olson? Bill Self? Mark Few? Eddie Sutton? Skip Prosser? Paul Hewitt? Tom Izzo? Bo Ryan? Rick Barnes? Larry Eustachy? That guy's my idol.

We've seen Weber allow bad matchups to linger way too long. Not switching Head earlier on to Pierce against Iowa at home (allowing Deron to get his 3rd and 4th fouls when Luther had none, making that game close, when we should have killed them). Leaving Powell on Breuner in the same game (he was their only offense, other than Pierce). Leaving Powell on Dials. Leaving Powell on Wilkinson. Switching on the high screen, leaving Dee on Sylvester. If your players don't recognize that, you need to call a 30, get them over and let them know where to switch and where to stay. (BTW - switching that screen is the best way to allow mismatches. Personally, I prefer hedge and recover. You can make your guys fight through, but that takes energy out of you and can often lead to easy buckets when there's a miscommunication...).

As far as where Weber stands, I'm not sure where I'd rank all of the coaches, but here's the thing. It's very, very likely that once you hit the Sweet 16, Weber will be in the bottom half of coaches remaining. If it comes down to a situation where coaching tactics can swing a game by 3 or 4 points... let's just say that I'd like Weber to have some more seasoning. If this is the NBA where you get 7 games to assert your dominance over a team, then I love our chances. Problem is, with one and done, you have to make sure that you're not letting an inferior opponent even have a chance to throw that haymaker, much less land it.

Like I said - it probably won't even matter. We're a cut above the other squads out there (save possibly UNC) and can play any style that anyone will want to throw out at us. We can run and gun. We can bump and grind. We can even alternate seamlessly. I just really hope that it doesn't come down to tactics. Because at that point, I'll just be hoping that I'm proven wrong.

But here's the call. We'll be stylin' and profilin' in April at the Arch.

-Chairman

You blink...

...and it's been 2 weeks since you post. Life just keeps on moving. Let's see... where to begin.
Me, Darren, and JK got to catch up with Tim a couple weeks ago. We hadn't hung out with him since the fall. It was good to catch up. He was telling us about this LGN diet. He wants to "look good naked" for when he gets married this summer. I think that I'm on a GLN diet. I'll let you guys decide what GLN stands for yourselves

Things are moving along with the PhD career. The other day, I got back some comments on my first journal submission. It's sort of interesting. Basically, you go off, and put together this article that you think is relevant and thought-provoking and like very much. Then you send it off to a journal. First, the editor looks over it. If they hate it, then they just "desk-reject" it. If they don't hate it, then they send it off to reviewers (apparently 3 or 4 of them). If they hate it, then they just reject it. If they don't hate it, then they look at it closely and try to shred it to pieces and send it back to you to fix (and fall more in line with a proper way of thinking - their way). This is called a "revise and resubmit." This is where I'm at. Revise and resumbit. This is actually very promising. From what my professor was saying, the comments that we got were very positive. I guess that his definition and my definition of "very positive" differ slightly. But that's just experience talking, I believe.

This comes on the heels of a weekend in Tampa. Warm weather was nice, though the rainy and overcast skies were a bit of a bummer. I actually had a great time down there. It was good to catch up with some people that I had met back in the fall out in Portland. It's like you make some new friends that you get to see 2 times a year and share your frustrations with. And this time, i actually met someone who was interested in the stuff that I was doing. It was cool, we just hit it off, and I think that there's room down the road for some collaboration. I dig it. The other neat thing was that I'm starting to really understand what's going on around me. It's cool to see people present and not just be blown away. I look at a lot of this stuff, and think that I can do work of that caliber. That's a good feeling.

On this trip, I also got to know some of my classmates from the U. a little bit better. It was cool. They're still a little different than me - lots of international students and lots of married people. I really like these conferences. I'm already looking forward to October in San Antonio. I get to see some cool work, hopefully will get to present some of my work, and will get to catch up with some fun people.

Of course, after these conferences, there's always a lot of work to catch up on. I was absolutely exhausted all week last week, and I'm still a little behind on work. Oh well.

The legs are feeling pretty good. Hit the gym on Saturday and balled earlier today. Got a nice lift in on Saturday and skipped a little rope. It felt nice to get back into things. This morning, I played really bad, and shot even worse. Still passed OK, but just couldn't do the things that I'm used to doing on the court. No explosion at all off the ground. I had this play where I grabbed an offensive rebound and wanted to just take a turnaround bank-shot. Normally, I can jump and square up in mid-air and hit that shot. Today, I realized that I didn't get off the ground very far, and that I was going to land before I got square, which would have been embarrassing. So, instead, I just throw up this jump half-hook that went about 2 feet over the basket. So it was embarrassing anyway. Oh well. I think that a full week of working out and skipping rope will help everything.

Went back to church on Saturday. It felt good. It was nice to sit there and appreciate things, even while thinking about the message through a critical lens. Part of the academic training is to think logically on-line. It makes for a very good tool when I listen to sermons. You just sort of piece together the logic quickly and see what they're getting at, and it also helps you discern inconsistent messages.

It was a very amusing situation after church. Darren was going out to Baker's Square afterwards with some people from his I-Team, so me and Rook were going to catch up with them. We made Darren promise to save us 2 seats since we were going to be like 15 minutes late. Figured that it would be cool to catch up with some folks from church. So we get out there, and walk in. There were like 2 tables of 15 people packed in and another table of 5. And Darren didn't come through, so me and Rook didn't have seats. Our option was to just sit at a table ourselves. We figured that we could just talk to ourselves somewhere else just as easily. So we went out to the bar to watch the Oklahoma St.-Texas game and have some bar food. Basically, we drove out there, said hello, and promptly left for BW's. Oh well.

Other random happenings - my laptop died. Well, the hard drive, anyway. So, I have to drop a couple Ben's on a new drive, and 50-spot on the recovery CD's from IBM, which probably should have been included in my original purchase. Oh well. At least I'll have my laptop back working soon. And I'll even have another laptop. Gotta love E-Bay. You can save a good 20%-25% off of normal prices. I just bought a used Thinkpad, selling for about $1050 from IBM's certified used laptop website, for under $800, delivered. Not too bad. It's not state of the art, but it's nice.

I'm also contemplating buying a condo. Great location. Need to take a walk-through and see what's going on. That would solve my living situation for the next few years. It's close to the campus bus routes, and really close to where I live now. I've been needing a home for a while. TFS-HQ has been nice, but it still feels like temporary housing. I hope that it works out.
Anyway, it's back to work. I'll try to get somewhat caught up tonight and tomorrow. And hopefully, I'll even get a little ahead of the game this week. I really need to have a true break when Spring Break rolls around, but that can't happen unless I get moving this week and next.

We'll see. Until then.

-Chairman