NFL Draft

Tomorrow is the NFL Draft, one of my favorite days. Below are my NFL predictions on some of the top picks.

Jake Long (OT, Mich.) – Solid player, no rookie should be the highest paid OT in the game before even playing one game though. My Dolphins finally got something right.
Glenn Dorsey (DT, LSU) - Great player and will have a 6-8 year career before injuries will force him to retire. Very Warren Sapp Like
Matt Ryan (QB, BC) – Total bust. Numbers is college were inflated and never played against that many great teams. He will get killed in the NFL.
Darren McFadden (RB, Ark.) I say 2-3 years before he’s in a jail cell with Vick. He’s going to be the next Maurice Clarret. Somebody with his family issues getting a $40M contract only will lead to bad things.
Chris Long (DE, UVA) - Solid pick and will be a 8-10 year veteran.
Vernon Gholston (DE, Ohio St.) - Overrated tremendously
Keith Rivers (OLB, USC) - This is my #1 player. He s
Leodis McKelvin (CB, Troy) – So overrated, not a top 15 pick!
Sedrick Ellis (DT, USC) - Will be a beast in the middle
D. Rodgers-Cromartie (CB, Tenn. St.) – So overrated, not a top 15 pick!
Derrick Harvey (DE, Fla.) - I love him, but he is a late 1st round guy at best.

22 innings

So last night the Padres and Rockies played a 22 inning game. That is just insane. This past week I went to 2 baseball games and stayed the whole length, only 18 innings. I was tired at the end of each game. I can’t imagine playing in a game that long, let alone sitting in the stands next to some fat guy downing beers like they are water.

Photoshop Express

For those of you who haven’t registered for Adobe Photoshop Express you need to! This is a great online tool for photo editing, storing, and sharing. While I think the upcoming Fotonauts platform will be better and easier to use, it doesn’t have the amazing editing features that Photoshop Express does. Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

You going to eat that Ipod or will those salty peanuts work?

Sunday I had the pleasure of flying Southwest on my way back to SFO. I love Southwest, it’s the only airline I will fly because it is cheap and I can always get an A seat. Well my flight wasn’t completely full, only about 2/3. That means you don’t have to sit in the middle between 2 people. Of course the flight attendant made this announcement “please take the first available seat so we can have an on time departure” just as some idiot walked by my row. He decided to sit in the middle when clearly there was tons of room in the back. When I got up to survey the plane there was nobody sitting in the middle, but my row. What an idiot.

I love the fact that Southwest’s flight attendants are somewhat humorous and off the wall. I always wonder why there aren’t more lawsuits against them for sexual or inappropriate conduct on planes. I think it is entertaining, but sometimes I can see people being offended and they just let it go. I mean this is the airline that kicked a lady off for having too short of a skirt, but they let their flight attendants make off the wall jokes.

The highlight of the trip was the woman sitting across the row from me. She was like a female version of Earthquake. For those of you who don’t know who Earthquake is, he’s a 400+ wrestler from the 80s/90s. Once we got to cruising altitude she put on her iPod video and proceeded to watch something that was evidently funny because she started laughing hysterically. She caught her self a few times, but once she started bouncing up and down and the plane was shifting people started looking at her. When you watch videos or tv shows on a plane you have to remember you are in a public space that is confined. You can’t just LOL or make comments. At a few moments during the trip it looked as if she was going to consume the tiny device out of pure joy. How do you want anything on a 1.5×1.5 screen and enjoy it? Beats me.

One and done

This new rule that you can’t go to the pros straight from high school is stupid. I understand that not everyone coming from HS will be Kobe, KG, Amare, or Lebron but they all won’t be flops. If pro teams want to spend $25million on a 17 year old kid then I think that is up to them. The college basketball game is becoming watered down with all these people coming in for one year and leaving. Did Bayless really need to play a year at UofA to go to the pros? NO. He just took up a roster spot and a spot in the classroom that he didn’t need. Now I know people like Kevin Love benefit from going to college and becoming a phenom and I’m okay with that, but kids with clear talent shouldn’t have to waste a year in college to be drafted.

I’m pretty excited about the Suns-Spurs match up. Let’s hope we get some revenge on Big Shot Bob!

Bad Blogger

I haven’t posted much in the past few days so I’m going to do 2-3 posts tonight to catch up on stuff.

Brett

Only Bon Jovi could sell out the Prudential Center in Newark for 10 straight days…

I am back in Phoenix for the weekend. I flew out of SFO yesterday morning at around 6:25. Getting on the BART at 4:40 was an interesting task, but I made it. I really came back this weekend to move all my furniture out of Aviano and spend some time with people here.

I rented a Penskee truck and headed over to my condo to load everything up, man in the past 2 years I have gathered a lot of clutter. I finally got everything back to my parent’s house so we could have a garage sale. Luckily 2 people came by yesterday and bought most of the stuff since not many people came by this morning.

Last night I went with my family to see Daughtry and Bon Jovi in concert. My wanted to do so for her birthday so I had no issues. While I’m not the biggest fans of these bands, I always enjoy a good concert. It was well done and it is always nice to see how big of a draw Bon Jovi stil is. I mean they have sold more than 120 million albums worldwide and have been around for 25 years. My favorite thing is that Richie Sambora, when not driving drunk, does the cool sound effects for the band. He’s like a poor version of a beatbox.

Any band that can play 109 shows on 5 legs is great in my book. The fact they played 10 straight sold out shows in NJ is amazing.

Who in the world is using Orkut?

Well I am going home tomorrow; I’ve got to hop on the BART at 4:44am. I’ll let you know if I survive.

I don’t get why every single person with a web application or social network thinks they can survive with an ad based model. I get that people are willing to shell out money to MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and Youtube but those are the big boys. Why in the world would a major company pay money for a banner ad on your tiny site? I just don’t get it. I want to see a push towards paid models. I mean, wouldn’t you pay $12 a year for Facebook (only a $1 per month). If everyone did that it would generate $828,000,000 in revenue for them and maybe then that valuation of $15Billion would be somewhat accurate. I am still amazed that MySpace sold for $580million while Bebo just got acquired for $850million. I mean there is a big difference in the traffic and potential success of return on investment. Either Fox Interactive Media got a steal or AOL got screwed. I am going to go with AOL getting screwed as my choice.

Orkut just freaks me out. I mean what is it and why would anyone really use it? It has an Alexa ranking of 10 so obviously millions of people are using it everyday. Well I did some research and here it is from Wikipedia, “Orkut is the most visited website in Brazil and 2nd most visited site in India The initial target market for orkut was the United States, but the majority of its users are in India and Brazil. In fact, as of March 2008, 67.5% of the traffic comes from Brazil, followed by India with 15.4%.”

So 82.9% of all of Orkut’s traffic is from Brazil and India. That makes sense and explains why nobody in this country is using this dumb idea from Google

What Microsoft could get for $40 billion instead of Yahoo!

So this morning the Olympic torch came to SF. Yesterday there were huge protests right outside my apartments. Today the route was supposed to go along the Embarcadero. I was at the Montgomery Muni around 10am and there were copes everywhere, it was crazy. Later they moved the route and messed up where everyone was, go figure.

I was reading a great article on Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo this morning. This was the highlight of it and some great figures I think:

Here are a few suggestions for what else Microsoft could get for $40 billion:

• Hire 40,000 engineers, at $100,000 apiece, for a decade
• Acquire Facebook (estimated to have a market value of $15 billion), along with just about any other meaningful social networking site, including MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and LinkedIn. There would still be enough money left over to pay some consultants to help with integration.
• Spend eight times more than Google did last year to acquire traffic — and presumably make traffic more pricey for Google, to boot.
• Hire 80 million workers in China to do nothing but click on Microsoft properties and related ads for 10 years.
• Promise a free Big Mac to everyone who clicks on a Microsoft ad — and give away 14 trillion of ‘em.

I hear lots of sirens but I don’t see any accidents

So my apartment is right off of Market Street so there is a lot of traffic. I hear sirens all during the day and at night. Even while I am walking I hear them and see ambulances and fire trucks weaving through traffic. The  only thing that seems out of  the ordinary is that I never see an accident. Where are all these emergency vehicles going? In Phoenix I would always see accidents on the highways and side streets, but I haven’t seen on in SF in 3 weeks. Seems odd to me…