jeffpaulsen

Go Blazers. Playoffs! Anybody who wasn't a basketball fan last time the Blazers were in the playoffs, here's how it works: we play a best-of-seven series against Houston. We get to see the same players face each other every third night. Playoff-level basketball is very physical, and as a result of this process, both sets of fans will hate the opposing team's players with the fiery hate of a thousand hates. This is not the generalized hatred of the opposing team, or ordinary dynastic hatred left over from previous disappointing championship attempts. This will be extremely personal -- I still remember everything Bill Laimbeer did as a Detroit Piston to make me despise him.

True fact tangentially related to the above: in summer 1990 I was in Germany, watching the World Cup soccer tournament. Some of my fellow exchange students and I saw an Italian player flop in a very obvious attempt to draw a foul. We decided that his name must be "Guillermo Laimbeeri", which none of the Europeans understood, despite our attempts to explain.

A plea for garden advice: the euonymous which I had planted for a hedge out front are diseased in some way. I am vaguely aware that there are sprays that treat various blights and molds. What the fuck should I do? I'm reluctant to guess at what's wrong and just try random chemicals. If they die, I could use a suggestion for a hardy evergreen hedge.

All my trees are fine, as are my lilacs.

Xigi is back in town, for those of you that know him. He is well.

Work is fine. I now have mad skills with WPF, XAML, LINQ, and WCF. I spent geekweek changing all our object serialization code to use the data contract serializer, and it's now so centralized that I'll be able to try others (eg, protocol buffers). I wrote a generic exension method that lets me order any IEnumerable(of T) using an IComparer(of T), which seemed to me like it ought to be built into the framework. I learned about shared code in generic exception handlers. Finally I ported one of our internal tools to use a pure MVVM pattern with WPF and XAML. It was all very energizing and mind-expanding and now I just want to not do a damn thing.

I am looking forward to a new tattoo. Totally psyched for it.

Background: some people think that the Portland Trailblazers should not have gotten Greg Oden in the draft two years ago. These people point to his injured knees and ankles, and further say that he has underperformed as backup center in the minutes he has played.

These people are dumb, and I shall prove it with science.

Oden will finish this regular season having played less than 1400 minutes. In that time, he's scored 514 points, made 411 rebounds, and 67 blocks. Question: has anybody else in the history of basketball statistics ever had a comparable rookie season with minutes that short?

Answer: Hall of Famer Robert Parish

Somebody who really wanted to put his thumb on the scale could correct this for how the pace of game has changed in the last 30-some years, too. My point, I guess, is this: Greg Oden still shows every sign of being one of the all time great centers in the history of the game. There's a lot that could go wrong, but it's not in fact going wrong yet.

For a final example, I point out Oden's fly up-and-under against Andrew Bynum from last week. Watch in high quality, you deserve it.

Did you know John Tesh wrote the "NBA on NBC" theme music? I did not, although in hindsight it makes sense. Would you like to hear it performed by a 25-piece orchestra? If so, click play.