thaBadDawg’s Musings

I understand that Steve Kerrr trying to get the egg off of his face for the horrible Shawn Marrion for Shaq trade. And when it comes down to it I think he got the better end of the deal. He got rid of the slowest piece of his team that was designed for speed. And Ben Wallace can still play passable defense, if he doesn’t retire. That being said…

What the hell is Danny Ferry thinking? Didn’t he learn his lesson last year? The Cav’s built their team to beat the Celtics in the Eastern Conference finals thinking that they’d have a shot against the Lakers. And let’s face it, the Nuggets would have swept the Cavs too. When you gear up to beat one team, when you don’t meet up with them and you end up playing an entirely different kind of team you’re going to be screwed.

As a side note, look at the Lakers. They didn’t try to beat one team, they wanted to beat them all. And they did.

Now the Cavs are at it again, they are gearing up to beat a single team… the Magic. What’s going to happen when a healthy Celtics team exposes the Cavs fatal flaw? Shaq is a player who takes up a lot of space in the middle but he’s not going to demand the double team like he has in the past. And more importantly, he doesn’t have the speed necessary to keep up with the fast paced game most of the top teams in the NBA can throw at them.

And here’s the other consideration that nobody seems to be willing to address yet… Shaq is a glory hog. I’m not saying that LeBron has a massive ego to feed, but Shaq does. And on this team Shaq is definitely going to play second fiddle to LeBron. But at the end of the season, if (and this is a Shaq-sized if) the Cavs somehow win the NBA finals, does LeBron want to be like Kobe and have to wait another 5 years to win a title on his own to get out from under the shadow of Shaq?

Danny Ferry is a fool and I can’t believe he got sold a bill of goods from Steve Kerr.

I got 4 hours of sleep last night. It’s always a dangerous thing for me because I end up day dreaming most of the day and I end up being completely ineffective. It’s sad, but that’s the thing you have to put up with when you break scripts and have to spend all night fixing them.

At one point I caught myself rolling up Provo canyon on a motorcycle, a Suzuki GSX-R750 to be exact, pushing into the curves of the road as hard as the bike would let me, weaving around the slow as molasses traffic racing up to the top of Deer Creek so I could turn around do the drive back down again. But on the way back down the road was clear and since I had the road to myself I ripped my helmet off, put on my shades and rocketed back down the canyon at lightening fast speeds with the wind assaulting my face and the curves daring me to let off the throttle as I leaned into them as hard as the bike would let me…

…and then somehow I was transported back to the office where I was doing an interview with a reporter about something somebody had done. If you don’t believe the last part just wait and see… there’s video evidence.

While I was doing the DJ thing I had these 4 song setlists I would use because I knew I could always hit the transitions in between the songs and because I knew the songs worked exceptionally well together. I started thinking about it the other day, and since I had to work on a back track for a broadcast I started thinking about them again…

While chatting wtih a friend of mine the other day I had changed my status to One Perfect Sunrise As The Rush Comes and she inquired where it came from. Randomly my computer, on shuffle had played Orbital’s One Perfect Sunrise followed up with Motorcycle’s As The Rush Comes (G&D Chillout Mix). My iTunes has a ridiculously long crossfade setup so that I can get a better “flow” going on, and I started to think about how I could engineer the crossfade together to get a sweeter mix. And then I started to think about what tracks I could put together to make an insanely awesome mix.

1. Ranta /Darude
2. Silence / Delerium feat Sarah McLachlan
3. As The Rush Comes / Motorcycle (Gabriel & Dresden Chillout Mix)
4. One Perfect Sunrise / Orbital

Ranta has a dark beat with solo acoustic guitar sitting on top of it that gets you thinking of a face paced scene being played in slow motion. The beat, on it’s own, would leave you with a feeling of “I’ve got to get this done” and the guitar detaches you from that feeling. I could make some amazing video sequences to that song.

Silence is a slower smoother beat that with Sarah McLachlan’s amazing voice floating over the top of it. Her voice moves so nicely into this genre it’s almost like this is what it was made to do. I had to speed this track up 7% to get the beat into a pace that was more to Ranta’s liking.

As The Rush Comes was introduced to me by a friend as we were hanging out one day and she said you HAVE to hear this track. She played the Chillout Mix for me and I fell in love almost instantly. It’s kinda like Ranta in that it has a dark beat underneath an amazing voice. This voice isn’t as angelic as Sarah’s or isn’t as solitary as the guitar in Ranta but it has an edginess to it that gives it power. This track had be pushed 3.6% faster to get the beat where I wanted it to be.

The tracks went dark, smooth, dark and with One Perfect Sunrise you bring it back to smooth with a kick. This song actually is pretty close to the pace that Ranta sets (140 bpm) and I left the beat alone even though I really should have pulled this track back by a .25% margin to really make it match up, but I decided to put a delay between where the beat of the Motorcycle track ends and where the beat kicks in on this track. This track is easily the most fun one on the list and it’s why it wraps up the playlist.

I guess you can’t really call it a playlist anymore because I spent time matching beats and putting together good transitions (I don’t say perfect because I have friends who could do an amazing blend of thise tracks without even trying live.) If you know how to find me, either text me or email me and I’ll hook you up with a copy of this CD. It’s that good

I’ve been developing a CMS over the past several months to handle what will end up being a multitude of sites inside of APX. At the moment WebCore (the internal name of my CMS) is a ASP.Net MVC application. Somewhere in the future, to improve my skills with other languages, I’ll be doing either a Ruby or Java port of WebCore so that I can do Linux based installations as well. To put through WebCore through it’s paces we launched APX Gives Back on it. In terms of complexity, the site isn’t at all pressing the boundaries of what WebCore can do, but it helped me work out the kinks of the system enough to launch a full featured site.

Two weeks ago we set the new and improves APXAlarm.com lose on the world which for me is a minor techincal marvel. I’ve never written a CMS before and now I have one that, when finished, will be as robust as Joomla, WordPress, Umbraco, and a dozen other great CMS packages, but one that can accept data driven content from whatever angle I want to throw at it. APXAlarm.com actually uses two different data driven packages that plug in very nicely to the system. First is the Stories engine (been done 100 times before on every blog engine ever made) that allows the story’s content to easily plug into the template of any page. The second is a Products engine which takes a product’s details and makes it so that the content is easily formatted.

Not being a designer (and when you look at APXAlarm.com you’ll notice a beautiful design) I wanted to make a system that made it exceptionally easy for designers to do their work. I have to give a lot of props to the developers of StringTemplate for putting together such a robust templating package that can handle anything I throw at it. The design element of WebCore makes it so that any designer with a basic understanding of HTML can do what they want to and still have an incredibly powerful, data-driven site back up their work.

I’ve got quite a bit of hacks to pull out of WebCore and replace them with an even more comprehensive functionality, and as time goes on even the most robust CMSes out there will pale in comparision. All from little ol’ me. (All 280 lbs of me that is). Check it out… www.apxalarm.com is a FANTASTIC site. Plus, mad props to my partner in crime, Heber Eastman who put together the look and feel. I’m a developer, not a designer. Without him that site would look like crap and I’d have a WebCore that could do amazing things with nothing to show for it.

If Paul Harvey was right on 10 years ago, how true is this today:

If I were the devil…

I would gain control of the most powerful nation in the world;

I would delude their minds into thinking that they had come from man’s effort, instead of God’s blessings;

I would promote an attitude of loving things and using people, instead of the other way around;

I would dupe entire states into relying on gambling for their state revenue;

I would convince people that character is not an issue when it comes to leadership;

I would make it legal to take the life of unborn babies;

I would make it socially acceptable to take one’s own life, and invent machines to make it convenient;

I would cheapen human life as much as possible so that the life of animals are valued more than human beings;

I would take God out of the schools, where even the mention of His name was grounds for a lawsuit;

I would come up with drugs that sedate the mind and target the young, and I would get sports heroes to advertise them;

I would get control of the media, so that every night I could pollute the mind of every family member for my agenda;

I would attack the family, the backbone of any nation.

I would make divorce acceptable and easy, even fashionable. If the family crumbles, so does the nation;

I would compel people to express their most depraved fantasies on canvas and movie screens, and I would call it art;

I would convince the world that people are born homosexuals, and that their lifestyles should be accepted and marveled;

I would convince the people that right and wrong are determined by a few who call themselves authorities and refer to their agenda as politically correct;

I would persuade people that the church is irrelevant and out of date, and the Bible is for the naive;

I would dull the minds of Christians, and make them believe that prayer is not important, and that faithfulness and obedience are optional;

I guess I would leave things pretty much the way they are.

I’m about ready to drop my allegiance to the Broncos. Three reasons…

1. 2 years of completely screwing the pooch when it comes to defense. Cutler was already some ridiculous number like 14 and 1 when his defense held the opponents under 21 points. That’s two straight years that Shannahan threw away perfectly good playoff teams by not upgrading the defense.
2. I can respect that Josh McDaniels wanted a shot at getting a QB he was already working well with. That being said, WHO THE EFF MESSES WITH THE HEAD OF ONE OF THE 10 BEST QBs IN THE LEAGUE?!?!?!?!?! Cutler can throw for 4k a year and you think that Cassel is an upgrade? WTF? As a side note to this point, I think that Cutler should have stopped being a whiny little bitch, but when you are one of the 10 best QBs in the league you’re allowed to go a little prima donna on your team.
3. Instead of doing everything possible to get Cutler happy again they traded him. I’m not under any kind of illusion that Cutler is better than Manning or Brady, but he’s definitely in the same league as the Choke Artist (better known as Jessica Simpson’s Boyfriend), Aaron Rodgers, Phillip Rivers or Eli Manning. I would say with who is the league right now… Cutler is definitely a top 5 QB. And Denver traded him. Denver finally got a QB they could build around and now they are back on the search. Sanchez is good (assuming he falls that far)  but he won’t be Jay Cutler. In 2 years when Cutler is really hitting his stride Denver might just barely be getting on solid footing. I’m pissed.

End result? I already like Urlacher. One of the scariest mofos in the league now that Ray Lewis is losing his step. The Bears had already signed Orlando Pace and he has at least another 5 good years on him. With a solid QB Chicago should be able to find at least one good wide out if not two, running backs are a dime a dozen, and there is no way that they don’t maintain the O line to keep Cutler safe. Peyton and Tom will age out of the system and Jay will be the man, and Chicago will be the team three-peating. I’m this close to being a Chicago fan instead of an effing Broncos fan.

Yesterday I listened to an address that talked about the addiction of debt and how we constantly are tempted to get things we can’t afford by offering to let us pay for them over time. Given the shakey economic climate that we are dealing with, (and this even applies in good economic times) debt should be a tool that is used sparingly because one shouldn’t be going into debt over every little want at the expense of squeezing things so tight it edges out their needs.

It is interesting to me that me and my wife had already decided to erradicate our debt before listening to this address and that it comes more as a confirmation that our plan has solid backing. We’re going to pay off our cars, pay off our credit cards, pay off any outstanding debts so that the only thing we have to pay on, on a consistent basis at least,  is a mortgage. We need to be building a surplus instead of running close to a defecit. Having a surplus of resources can never be a bad thing (when properly managed) Running a defecit… well, that’s how homelessness happens.

This is what we need:

at least in Utah County…

http://pizzeria712.blogspot.com/

Go there. enjoy it. LOVE IT!

DEMOCRAT
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

DEMOCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The government taxes you to the point you have to sell both to support a man
in a foreign country who has only one cow, which was a gift from your
government.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the
milk, and then pours the milk down the drain.

AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised
when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you
have down sized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one tenth the size of an ordinary cow and
produce twenty times the milk. They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded
trains. Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give
excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour. Unfortunately they
also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don’t know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
You don’t milk them because you cannot touch any creature’s private parts Then
you kill them and claim a US bomb blew them up while they were in the
hospital.

IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.

POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who like the brown one best, vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can’t figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which is the
best looking cow.

CALIFORNIAN
You have a cow and a bull.
The bull is depressed.
It has spent its life living a lie.
It goes away for two weeks.
It comes back after a taxpayer-paid sex-change operation.
You now have two cows.
One makes milk; the other doesn’t.
You try to sell the transgender cow.
Its lawyer sues you for discrimination.
You lose in court.
You sell the milk-generating cow to pay the damages.
You now have one rich, transgender, non-milk-producing cow. You change your
business to beef. PETA pickets your farm. Jesse Jackson makes a speech in your
driveway. Cruz Bustamante calls for higher farm taxes to help “working cows”.
Hillary Clinton calls for the nationalization of 1/7 of your farm “for the
children”.
Schwarzenegger signs a law giving your farm to Mexico.
The L.A. Times quotes five anonymous cows claiming you
groped their teats.
You declare bankruptcy and shut down all operations.
The cow starves to death.
The L.A. Times’ analysis shows your business failure is Bush’s fault.