time to build a run

Filed under: basketball — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on February 21, 2010 at 11:02 pm

The four new Rockets have now been dressed for two games, and half of them have seen playing time. Kevin Martin came off the bench in both our losses whereas Jeffries had his debut in the ketchup-mustard alternate today, against the Hornets. So far, the signs have been encouraging, but unfortunately the “W” has been in the wrong column for the Rockets, on both days.

Yesterday’s loss to Indiana stung particularly hard, especially since these are the teams that the Rockets have to beat to make it to the playoffs. Indiana is currently the second-worst team in the Eastern conference, and considering that the worst team are the lowly New Jersey Nets (who will probably end the season with a single figured number of wins), this was a harsh loss. What was worse was that the Rockets lost despite scoring 115 points. I think Indiana average in the mid-90s this year, but yesterday they put 125 on us.

Kevin Martin came off the bench and Ariza moved to the small forward position, as expected. He had a particularly nondescript shooting night, scoring 14 points going 3-16 from the field. Today wasn’t much better, as he went 5-12 against the Hornets. He’s yet to hit a three pointer in a Rockets uniform, too. However, he seems to be getting into the rhythm, especially late in the game today. It’ll be up to Adelman and his staff to get these new additions to get into the system asap. The Rockets commentators suggested that this may take as many as 10-15 games. Unfortunately, with 27 games remaining in our season as of now, that may be a bit too many.

Jared Jeffries played his first minutes today and he was pretty impressive, especially on defense. The 6′11″ length that he brings us is definitely going to help us. The Rockets are already a pretty good offensive rebounding team, from what I remember, and if Jeffries can repeat performances like today’s, where he grabbed 6 offensive boards, we’ll be in good shape. Jeffries did miss a couple of easy lay-ups and for some reason he abhors the dunk. Late in the fourth quarter, Jeffries took drop in lay-ups with no one at the rim instead of flushing it down. Perhaps he’s just playing it a bit easy until he gets comfortable with his team and the coaching staff.

Jordan Hill and Hilton Armstrong are yet to see minutes. It’ll be interesting to see how many opportunities they will get to earn a spot in the rotation, going late into the season.

Our schedule next week is rough–we play Orlando, who dealt the Cavs their third straight loss today, on Wednesday, followed by back-to-back games against San Antonio and Utah on Friday and Saturday. So if we think it’s going to get easier for our new players to adjust, we’ve got another thing coming! Let’s see if Kevin Martin and JJ can prove that they are a proper replacement to Landry (who had 18 points in the Kings’ loss to the Suns tonight).

One more off-topic point. I saw T-Mac play yesterday for the Knicks against the extremely hot Oklahoma Thunder and he certainly impressed. Now, one game is not enough to judge anyone, but I think one can safely conclude that no one expected McGrady to put these sorts of numbers up any game this season, let alone the first one. He had 19 points at the first half, and what was particularly encouraging for him was the fact that most of these points came from layups. As usual, though, he missed a pair of clutch free throws that could’ve earned him his first Knicks victory, allowing KD to tie up the game with a deep three and beat the Knicks in OT. T-Mac’s performance was impressive, and he is a player I will follow closely this season (I already added the Knicks to my League Pass). Let’s see if he has the legs and conditioning to come back and play his best basketball night after night.

the customer ain’t king

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on December 09, 2009 at 10:12 pm

This is a rant directed towards NBA League Pass.

A few weeks ago I complained about ridiculous blackout restrictions that prevented me from watching the Rockets here in Austin, just about 200 miles away. Since people had been complaining for ages without the NBA or anyone who could do anything giving a shit, I decided to stifle my voice and instead purchase a pricey NBA League Pass package. I bought the cheapest one available–that allows me to watch games that are not blacked out by regional restrictions for any 7 teams. It came out to something like $90 for regular season, which isn’t all that bad since that’s equivalent approximately a month and a half of cable for me (which I’ll be downgrading as soon as I can, since the only reason I bought this, more expensive, package is because it has the regional Fox Sports channels, which I found out later they blackout for NBA).

My experience with League Pass has been decent. I’ve been annoyed at the fact that they use a proprietary Flash player which means that I cannot do anything to change the ratio (they output 4:3 whereas my TV is a widescreen 16:9), the scores that take up about half the screen and the fact that they don’t show actual half-time shows. These issues I can understand because (a) they wouldn’t want to provide free advertising to the half-time show sponsors and (b) the entire system was designed by UI dimwits.

What I cannot accept, though, is the fact that sometimes games will just not show. And the reason is that whoever is behind their intricate UI setting up the streams has messed up what channel outputs what game. I had this occur sometime a few weeks back when the Rockets were playing a no-name team. That didn’t matter so much. Tonight, we’re playing the Cavs and were playing them pretty well. Of course, League Pass decided to output the Hornets-Timberwolves game. It went down to the last second–but I don’t give a crap about either of those teams. I was hopeful that the problem would be fixed after the Hornets game was finished and the pivotal fourth quarter began in the Rockets game, but now I have a blank screen staring at me that says “NBA League Pass Broadband Channel 1″. Googling a few forums, I found that the Rockets game is actually playing on the Spurs-Kings channel (who knows what channel that game is being played on?). Of course, the awesome part about this is since Austin is in the Spurs’ hometown sphere of influence, its blacked out on my League Pass. So my options for watching the game are basically down to one: watch an illegal stream from some site (justin.tv, ustream.tv, myp2p.eu pop into mind immediately).

Argh.

But wait, there’s more! The last time, in my frustration, I sent the folks at League Pass an angry email. I got a response about a week later saying sorry because of technical difficulties. Today their chat line happened to be open so I logged in to that. After waiting for about half an hour and posing my query, the representative, “Rebecca” told me that it was a technical issue that they had been notified of and that they couldn’t do anything. I guess their chat line is open for far more pressing issues such as “OMG I can’t install Flash”, which can be solved by using the great Google.

Thank god myp2p pointed me to a Chinese stream. Too bad I can’t understand the commentary…

enjoying the hot heat

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — sohum on May 25, 2009 at 12:05 pm

It has been a while since I updated this blog, but that does not mean I have not been eating mangoes in plentiful proportions (not that there is any direct connection between those two events). The last few days have been quite “busy” where business contains large expanses of time where I’m lazing around doing nothing in front of the television.

First and foremost, I want to give a shout out to the gym here at my parent’s new apartment. It is quite possibly better than the gym at Rice, though probably containing a fewer number of equipment. This is probably because the gym just opened and hence all the equipment is in mint condition! Anyhow, what this means is that I’m working out pretty much 4-5 days a week (the gym is closed on Mondays). What this also means is that I’m waking up at an unreasonable hour for a vacation (between 8.30am and 9.30am). Oops. Need to work on that and maybe workout in the evening.

I also played basketball at school last Tuesday, and am planning to go tomorrow, as well. ASB has changed a hell of a lot, but my performance in the MPH was torrid as usual. I don’t think I scoerd a single point on offense, although I did have the most number of layup opportunities (and I missed all of them). My jump shooting was poor. I’m hoping it’ll have improved by tomorrow! Not only was I playing basketball after a couple of weeks, but the conditions were alien as well (shut up, Shulmith!). Hopefully I’ll cab it tomorrow so I can stay later.

Another thing I have been doing the last few days is trying to get a decent grounding on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). One of those summer-projects of mine is a cricket simulator for an online cricket community I’m a part of, and I’m trying to work the UI through WPF instead of WinForms, since I have limited knowledge of both. It has been a steep learning curve, especially compared to the fun world of web UI programming. I’ve managed to find a few solid resources, though, so hopefully I should have a first version of the UI up later this week.

Our family went through the 2 dozen mangoes we purchased in little under a week, and we then purchased something like 2-3 dozen more. So there are a plethora of mangoes available for efficient consumption from the fridge. I’ve taken a few photos, but the camera and all the supportive cabling is too far away so that’ll have to wait for another day. Meanwhile, you can just trust me for telling you that the mangoes are, indeed, deliciously tasty.

Oh, I also watched a lot of the Indian Premier League (IPL) including the semifinals and finals. I didn’t really support any team after the Mumbai Indians crashed out, but I didn’t mind the Deccan Chargers, the eventual winners of the tournament. The thing that concerned me, though, is the fact that throughout the finals weekend, it was evident that the teams/players haven’t adjusted to playing after losing early wickets, yet. In all three games, the team batting first lost a few early wickets and then went into their shell and set substandard targets. In the semis, Deccan and Bangalore made short work of the targets set by their superior opponents, but in the final, Deccan managed to defend a small target thanks to a bit of luck. In the second semifinal, MS Dhoni was the key culprit after slowing down the scoring in the middle overs and being unable to accelerate towards the end. The man will have to do some thinking before going into the Twenty20 World Cup in a couple of weeks.

Also, a note on the NBA Playoffs–what the hell is going on? The commisioner must be in a frenzy as his Kobe-LeBron championship appears to be in jeopardy at the moment as the Magic have stepped it up. Although the Cavs still have homecourt advantage, the Magic look pretty good. Of course, the NBA Eastern Conference finals are not important enough to be screened on ESPN/Star here. The Western Conference games are shown… live. Go figure? Sure the Eastern Conference is usually boring thanks to teams like Detroit (=P) but still… Kobe and the Lakers have wrested back homecourt advantage after the Nuggets stole one in L.A. Game 4 is tomorrow and I’m contemplating waking up at 7AM to watch it.

I think that’s all for now. I’m just going to go back to my WPF self-training. Cheerios.

power to drive

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , , , , — sohum on May 07, 2009 at 1:05 am

Today, I finally achieved my New Year’s goal of obtaining a Texas Driver’s License, approximately 2-3 months after I had originally planned to. Oh well, I will not gripe about the delay as I have finally got it! The ZipCar has stood by as a good friend (although a somewhat expensive one). I was able to pass my road test this morning but had to come back later in the day to complete the license process since the computers at the DPS were down. However, I made it back at around 4pm courtesy of Johanna and the process took only about 10-15 minutes. I was actually surprised by the speed and friendliness of the staff.

The rest of the day was kind of stretched out because of traffic on both the road as well as the KFC where I had dinner. Ended up watching the newest episode of Lost at J&J’s place. I felt kind of meh about it. It seems to be dragging on the story very slowly and the whole time travel past-future nonsense is seriously making my head hurt a bit.

To ease the pain I focused in on the Rockets-Lakers game. Kobe came out fired up and shooting the lights out. The Lakers hit almost 40 points in the first quarter itself but only managed 18 in the second and at half-time the score was tied up at 57-57. Then the second-half blues hit the Rockets (again) and Kobe kept it going in a dirty, rough game with ample help from Gasol’s uncontested shots and Odom’s rebounding. Our defense in the paint has left a bit to be desired, although I suppose that comes from having to defend several long players (Gasol, Bynum, Odom) concurrently. The Rockets ended up losing but they still have the home-court advantage at the moment.

I spent the evening concurrently packing my belongings. I have managed to pack all my old textbooks away (hopefully the first step in the process of selling them off on eBay or Amazon). I also packed up my printer, so hopefully I won’t need anything from that soon… It appears that I do not have that much to pack. Packing clothes will take a long time, obviously, but I cannot really do that immediately. I hope to wake up tomorrow at around 10am and pack the rest of my non-cloth belongings away into my boxes. I have booked the ZipCar at a bit after noon tomorrow (since we have a Baker seniors lunch) and hope to sign up for my room and transfer a fair few boxes, then. It will also be my first time driving alone!

That’s all for now. Going to continue packing (or at least mentally organizing the packing).

inefficient dizzle

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , , , , , , — sohum on May 05, 2009 at 4:05 pm

I had great hopes that today would be a very productive day for me. I woke up at around 6.15am to get ready for my driving test, which I was hoping to take pretty early after getting to the DPS at around 7.30am. I was at the Zipcar by 7am and drove along with TGJ to the DPS only to find a pretty decent line outside already. Luckily we only had to chill for about 15 minutes and then were let in. I stood in the main line, not realizing that since I have my instruction permit, I don’t need to apply again for a driving license (apparently–this may still change, of course, because of the way bureaucracy works). After standing in that main line for about 15 more minutes I went up to the counter and was told I had to go to station 10 to schedule my road test and I did not actually have to apply for a DL.

So I went to that station and of course there were no spots available today. So I scheduled an appointment for tomorrow at 9am. On the way back there was a lot of traffic on main so I suppose in retrospect the result was good because I didn’t have to pay a late fee. Now I have one more day to worry about my road test! Humph. Came back today and could have started packing and stuff but instead I just bummed around on the internet, checking results from last night’s game (the Rockets won!!). By around lunch time I started feeling sick and coughing regularly. I hope I didn’t catch something at the DPS. :( I was already a little sickly with coughs over the last couple of days. I decided to take a 30-minute nap after lunch to sleep it off but that ended up becoming more like a 90 minute nap. And I didn’t feel much better when I woke up either. So I popped another Alerid Cold (I had one in the morning) and decided to take off work and nap again.

Now I feel a bit better but still not 100%. I’m thinking of going and working out so that I don’t feel completely sedated. I may even catch a bit of the baseball game after that. Let’s see…

So something else interesting happened today. At around 11am there were huge roars of helicopters going around. I didn’t think much of it but then Paul came in and told me that apparently a shooting had happened on the Outer Loop (the jogging track that surrounds the Rice campus). At that point news was bare but it is a little clearer now. You can read up on various articles on Google News. The gist of it was that some guy with a knife attacked a woman at the Light Rail station across from Rice and that officers followed this man. They then attempted to taser him without much success and as he approached them with a knife, they started shooting at him. He was dead on the spot, but apparently a bullet went through/ricocheted off of him and hit a bystander. There is no news about the status of the other guys.

Yesterday, I had a pretty awesome day, as well. I woke up around 10.30am and bummed around till lunch. I then worked from 1-4pm and worked out afterwards till about 5.30pm. Then, Alice and I went to dark room at the Rice Gallery since I was interested in seeing how the process of developing photos is. It’s pretty intense. And dark. There was a glow-in-the-dark clock in the room that developers are supposed to use to count the time in the various different liquids. After about 5 minutes of staring at the clock, the numbers start disappearing… But it was a cool insight into how exactly that process works.

After that we had dinner at South Servery and then we went over to her place to celebrate our shared love for tiramisu. Yup, we tried to make it. I don’t know yet how it turned out since it had to be chilled, but it was definitely not the 25-minute preparation time that was speculated by the recipe off of Food Network! You live and you learn, I suppose, and I guess the next time either of us have to make tiramisu we will have learned something (don’t know what yet, though, haha). I then came back on campus and managed to catch the last quarter of the Rockets-Lakers game.

Everyone and their grandmom has written off the Rockets in this series but Houston played great basketball yesterday (with a brave game from Yao Ming) to “upset” the Lakers and wrest away homecourt advantage. Kobe drilled in 32 points but he took some very bad shots and was not at all in rhythm (at least in the fourth quarter). Let’s hope him and Gasol stay in that groove!

That’s all for now.

the weekend before the weekend

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — sohum on May 02, 2009 at 10:05 am

These last few days had an inordinate number of activities stuffed into a tiny amount of time. Figuring that it would be good to have a place to live when I began work in Austin, my future roommates, a couple of other friends and I decided to road-trip to that funky town and get that process started. We had narrowed our choices down to 1, but that was not as “all-the-eggs-in-one-basket” as it sounds. I’ll get to that in a bit.

We left Rice at around 5pm on Thursday and managed to skip a lot of the rush hour traffic thanks to the HOV lane. Austin was reached at about 8pm, where we settled down and had dinner at Pluckers, the wing place. We also ended up watching Game 6 of the Rockets-Blazers series, which was a must-win game for the Blazers. Thankfully, they lost and the Rockets set a Western Conference semifinal date with the Lakers. That should be a pretty intense series, although I expect Kobe and company to be a little too difficult for us to handle. But you never know…

After that I dropped my stuff off at my ex-roommate’s (from last summer’s Austin extravaganza) place and we then proceeded to E-Bus it down to 6th Street. At this point we only had about an hour to spend, but in retrospect that was probably a very good outcome for my wallet, which was going to take a beating over the next 24 hours.

On Friday, Hubert and I put ourselves on the waiting list for a 2 bedroom-2 bath affair at the Riata. The Riata is a huge, and by huge I mean massive, apartment complex community in Austin, about 5 minutes from NI. There are more residents at the Riata than there are undergraduates at Rice. Yep. Huge. They have an 11,000 square foot athletic center, which was probably one of the major selling points. Oh, and did I mention there are 9 swimming pools there as well? Truly ginormous. And the best part is that rent is extremely affordable–we booked a special that means that we will be paying a maximum of $500 a month plus utilities. That price may come down even more depending on how the market is when we decide our apartment sometime in June.

After taking care of that business, we decided to stop by at Kona Grill in The Domain for lunch. Thanks to a discount coupon that Neal had, we got one meal off. So it was definitely affordable and worth it. We then drove back to West campus and picked up a couple of Rohan’s and Hubert’s high school friends and then drove to New Braunfels to go tubing. We are planning to do that again next week when my family is here, but it was nice to get a taste of what exactly it is–extremely relaxing although very likely to cause sunburn (which it did in my case).

We then had dinner at Rudy’s, which was almost adjacent to the river. Finally, we began the long and tiresome drive back to Houston. We reached Rice at around 10.30pm on Friday night. The weekend had just begun, although I suppose everyday is a Saturday if you are a graduating senior. I’m going to go take the Target shuttle and buy some stuff for Alice’s pool party now. The rest of the day will probably be spent beginning that arduous task of packing. I did reserve a 5 foot x 5 foot room at the nearest Public Storage for $50 a month. I’ll have to watch my finances these last few days because I’ve began spending money that I literally don’t have.