I watched the NBA All Star Game tonight and that got me thinking. Whatwould my ultimate fantasy team from the current NBA roster look like?

I could choose any player from any team. But that would be pretty boring…. The main restriction is to pick a head coach and then pick a team that would fit that style of play. For the purpose of this exercise, D’Antoni is my head coach.

This would be my starting five:

PG Nash
SG Kobe
PF Dirk
SF Marion
C  Amare

When I came up with that list, I was pretty surprised. 3 of the 5 are already starters for the Suns. The other two are huge upgrades over the current starters (Kobe for Bell, Dirk for Diaw). Imagine what Dirk would do with Nash as the PG again and D’Antoni as the head coach. I struggled with Amare as the starting center for a couple of minutes…. Played around with the idea of Timmy, Dwight, CB4, JON, Okur as the starting center instead. Amare just seems perfect for D’Antoni’s system. Gasol was the other likely choice. It’s a tradeoff between what either of those guys give you.

Who would be in the second unit? Since I’m playing fantasy, the second unit would be pretty stacked too.

PG Agent 0
SG Ray Allen
PF  KG 
SF  Gerald Wallace
C   Gasol

It would raining treys if Ray had Nash as his point guard. I see Ray playing the open court with Nash and hitting those long range bombs on the break. It was hard to take Marion over KG but I had to go with the incumbent. Wallace and Marion are such similar players though Marion is better overall. JSmoove might also have worked out. Arenas would do the Hibachi thing all day if he played for D’Antoni.

Lots of big names missing from the list. The head coach restriction forces you to think of players that would fit into a system.

My first complete week at work has just ended (the actual first weekback only consisted of two days so it doesn’t count). Other thanperformance reviews, it was a moderately busy week filled with theusual.

Reviews were due at the end of the week and I tried all week to get started on them. Despite my best attempts I could not motivate myself past the apathy. Only the pressing deadline spurred me into action. Why do I hate working on reviews? It’s a basis for why working on them is hard.

To be honest, I didn’t have a good year at work. Not by my standards. I am a self critical person. The thought of going through every single thing I did wrong just brought out the chill within me. To be fair, my feelings about where I’ve worked have gone from mostly positive to pretty negative. Last year, I almost hit rock bottom…. I actually don’t know….. I might even have touched bottom ever so briefly.

The vacation made me take a step back. Helped me to think and put things within a larger perspective.

I have another home to return to. I’ll miss people around here deeply but it’s not The End. It means I can quit my job. I understand that now. A sense of calmness has followed.

I need challenges in my life. It is a personal limitation. Without challenges, I’m lost. Work used to be a challenge but it rarely feels that way anymore. I was in the middle of nowhere. Stuck in purgatory. The Marathon and NaNoWriMo (heck even fantasy sports!) helped fill in those painful gaps. It was not enough because I was used, addicted even, to the challenges I had at work. That’s what all my resentment, all my anger was about. It’s why I constantly felt bored, unappreciated, neglected, overlooked. The fundamental problem is I used work as my centre. I need to shift that focus.

What happens now? What will change? Small things… Small things….

Back home lonesome Johnny
Prays for his baby’s parole
He waits on the hillside
Where the Wyomie waters roll
At his feet and almost grown now
A blue-eyed daughter and a handsome son
Well from small things, mama
Big things one day come
Well from small things, mama
Big things one day come
- From Small Things, Bruce Springsteen

[I started writing this last weekend but didn’t finished it. It now includes my feelings about the second week]

Various random stuff that I wanted to write down.

Cool Apps I saw this week
The pipes are clogged I tell you. That’s what I was thinking when I heard Yahoo had launched something called Pipes. Tubes might have been a better name : )

As a programming language enthusiast it made me happy to see a mass market implementation of a visual dataflow oriented programming language. A very slick Javascript UI. For awhile, JD thought that they had done it with some Macromedia technology.

Speaking of Macromedia technologies, JD showed me www.etsy.com

That’s definitely very slick.

Fantasy Sports
The “Influential Fantasy Sport Observer” phenomenon is one that I experienced for a while. It has to do with my controlling nature. But it doesn’t help my team. I have gotten better at it. No matter how many times I observe my fantasy team within the course of a game, my fantasy players will not magically improve their performance. The best you can do is to start a team with the belief that you have set the optimal lineup and leave it till the next day. I’ve noticed that the phenomenon is more pronounced when the team is doing badly than when it is doing relatively well. Grrrrr…. it might explain why I was obsessively watching the team earlier in the year. It’s better now. Seriously it’s better now. I only check the teams like 3 - 4 times a day.

Writing
I’ve been doing a lot of my recent writing with Scrivener. RL used it for NaNoWriMo 2005  I think and he mostly enjoyed the experience. I’ve been playing around with a number of applications for writing. For NaNoWriMo 2005, I used Tinderbox to write a novel. That didn’t turn out badly since I finished the novel. Last year, I experimented with a number of other writing tools, WriteRoom, Avenir, Jers. I didn’t seem to enjoy any of them. WriteRoom showed that full screen editing works well for me. WriteRoom was good for that but it was too limited. Plus it used to be free but now costs money. For NaNoWriMo 2006, I finally settled on Smultron. Not a bad editor, it had full screen editing but I never felt comfortable with it.

I can hear Mic saying “why don’t you use Emacs?”. I don’t know why. Emacs would fulfill the primary purpose of a writing tool i.e. a tool for editing text. I have a hard time getting my thoughts focused on writing when I’m in that environment. My thoughts feel more logical, more constrained by my technical training. It’s not Emacs fault that I cannot switch my mental context.

Enter Scrivener. It’s an application that is growing on me. I want to see how much writing I do with it this month before I’m completely sold on it. The early going appears promising. I’ve written my most recent blog entries and my performance reviews with it. It has a nice full screen editing mode with some added amenities. It reminds me of Avenir which I was almost sold on. The key difference for me was Avenir is a novel writing tool while Scrivener is a writing tool. I’ll get a lot more use out of Scrivener than I will Avenir.

Tuesday Night
Me: I just went running
AD: I feel like running a half marathon
Me: There is Vancouver in May. JD said I should run it
AD: My knees are shot and I need to train but if you run it, I’ll tag along
Me: More like you zipping ahead
AD: No I’m serious
Me: How about I tell you this weekend after I complete a week of running?
AD: Offer stands for the next 45 minutes
Me: Oh alright
(walks to computer and checks the date for the vancouver half marathon)

I’ve registered for the event. 85 days til Race day. The website has a nice countdown clock: http://www.bmovanmarathon.ca/hm/index.php (I’m also procrastinating from doing my performance review. They’re due later today)

It’s a good motivator for me to start working myself back into shape. Hopefully it won’t take me too long to get into shape (due to the leftover fitness levels from December) I’ve also heard nice things about the course so I’m semi-excited. No particular time goal. It would be nice to just finish. I would not be too upset if I did better than 2:20 (my only half marathon time) though.

I won’t register for the SF Marathon until after the Vancouver half marathon. I’ll use Vancouver to decide if I want to run any marathons (or which) this year.