am gonna liveblog Game 1 of Red Bull v. Ginebra game on Sunday, 7PM
Tag: BallEx
Of Lousy Domain Registrars and Good Workouts
The million fans of this blog (less 999,997) may have wondered where it went when this domain lapsed a few days ago. Credit (or debit?) my brilliant domain registrar for this oversight, as he failed to contact me beforehand – whereas SOP for registrars would be to contact you 3 months before.
Not only that, he doesn’t even apologize, merely replying after I texted him about it that it’s been relisted and it’ll be back in a few days. Yesterday he then texted to remind me of payment, after which I said ‘sure, just put me in your calendar (so it wont happen again) ok?’, to which I got no reply. EXCELLENT service right there, don’t you think? Especially considering I sent a fair share of business his way when I was still in the web design business. I’m just glad this is just a personal blog and not a critical service like the Exchanges. If I were still hosted at his service (he was my first host), I probably would’ve made a personal appearance to wherever he is in Laguna.
Continue reading Of Lousy Domain Registrars and Good Workouts
I Accidentally Deleted BallEx Today
But got it up from a day old sql backup. I posted this morning but I managed to retrieve that as well by being subscribed to my own RSS feed, so it was ‘backed up’ more or less.
Can I just say, WHEEEEWWWWWWW!
What I was working on needed a new db installed and I foolishly created one that was too similarly named to ballex’s DB. I made a few mistakes installing it so I decided to scratch it and start over by deleting the DB and – guess what – I deleted ballex’s instead. I definitely heard an audible gasp for air when I realized what I did.
The Best BallEx Post We’ve Ever Written
.. has got to be this one. John Dacanay wrote it while I provided the images (which has haaaarrrrd). John’s incredible basketball knowledge continues to astound me. He really is a walking basketball encyclopedia and I’m proud to help him in every way with his goal to eventually release a book.
Some interesting factoids (which I probably should publish on BallEx instead but am writing here anyway why not), is Billy Ray Bate’s terrible fall to disgrace, after having been feted like the 2nd coming here, going back to the US, falling into drink and cocaine which eventually culminated in trying to holdup a Texaco station, where he got $5.00 and 7 years in prison. All after what would’ve been promising careers playing as a Laker, a Trailblazer, a Rocket, a Bullet and a Crispa Redmanizer amongst many teams, even saying that while he was here, he was ‘like Michael Jordan. I could have anything I wanted. All I had to do was snap my fingers. I had my own condo, my own car and my own bodyguard with an Uzi. I had to fight off the women.‘.
A Review of ‘My Game’
This is a review of ‘My Game‘, an hour long documentary by director-producer tandem Carlo Ledesma and Mel Lozano that aims to highlight the roots of some of our basketball heroes, namely Nike talents Ren-Ren Ritualo, Don-Don Hontiveros, Arwind Santos, Jobe Nkemakolam, James Yap and Rico Maierhofer. Premiered last October 18, 2007 at the Powerplant Mall in Makati, it was a well – attended affair with a lot of prominent College and PBA stars in attendance, as well as numerous press and celebrities. Here are some reflections about the documentary. I will be writing about the players themselves in a future post.
First and foremost I’ll go right out and say that it is a terrific piece of work. Carlo Ledesma and Mel Lozano obviously put in a great amount of time and effort in this, but the most important factor that they brought is the one thing that previous and current coverage of basketball in the Philippines consistently fails to deliver – and that is soul.
Read the rest at Ballex!
Hosting Thoughts
Migs, the high priest of Linux and server administration, whom I always look to for advice on such things, told me to write about my latest hosting issues and so I shall. I suppose this is a good way to talk and archive the recent problems I’d been having with the sites and what I do to fix it, and how I’m starting to realize that whatever ‘fix’ I do seems temporary since the site’s traffic increase again anyway that as soon as I enhance / improve performance, traffic increases again. I am therefore plagued, within days, by either mysql inefficiencies or run out of RAM. Anyway here’s a rundown:
Here’s a screenshot of Aug. 30’s mysql issues. WordPress serves that up when it can’t connect to the db. I emailed Rimuhosting about it and they figured out I was having issues with one of my favorite WordPress plugins called Counterize, which allowed me to produce those interesting stats at the footer of KikayEx which says ‘x number of visitors visited today, xx number the past 7 days. xxx number total since forever, and so on…‘. We activated an option on mysql to produce a ‘mysql-slow.log‘ which lists down all the mysql queries that take more than 2 seconds to complete. The results were stunning, as Counterize apparently had queries that take as long as 20 seconds, and at a given morning (not even a whole day), there were 40 queries already. Here’s how it looked:
Ateneo: 2. La Salle: 0. My thoughts: 10
Note: For the sake of finally making a post here and to try and trick you into visiting Basketball Exchange by forcing you to click the link below to read the rest of it (I’m obviously very smart and devious), I’m reposting this here. If you wanna just go and read the whole thing uninterrupted then click here. See how I made you do that? See?
It’s the morning after La Salle’s heartbreaking (yes it is always heartbreaking to me. Always.) loss to Ateneo, 87-89 at Araneta last night. Obviously, I’m disappointed, but what the heck. What a game, huh? It was exciting all the way, from start to finish, and I promise you I’ve watched so many games for so many years it’s hard to get me as excited as I was when I watched it last night.
Here are some thoughts:
- That boy Salamat (15 pts) is fantastic. He is a true point guard and even acts and runs like it, with quick feet doing most of the motion and his torso up and erect, allowing his head to look steadily at what’s happening at the rest of the court. With good training from the Reyes brothers he can be a very effective player in the future.
- The Escueta boy (16 pts) is another revelation. One of those stick thin shooting guard types that’s deadly with the 3. He gives Chris Tiu much needed reprieve from scoring chores and reminds me of a smaller Jason Terry.
- Speaking of Chris Tiu (19 pts), this guy blossomed early and is still the epitome of cool confidence. What a stroke. He’s got that down pat, but I still think he’s too short so he’s got to prepare himself for the life of a point guard if he’s gonna turn pro. If that’s the case, he’d be behind pure PGs like Salamat or UST’s Cuan, so he might be in the mold of another Ren-Ren, which is unfortunate because the Philippines needs taller shooters. We’ll see what happens there.
- Rico Maierhofer (24 pts) has turned out to be DLSU’s main man, but I always thought it would’ve been Pocholo Villanueva (18 pts), an old school type slasher – or maybe it’ll be his year next year? In any case, Maierhofer is unstoppable, but still a little too raw and undisciplined. He needs to learn a bit more about life in the post and bulk up as well. In other words, try and find other ways to be more effective other than relying on his jumping ability and scrappiness. His athleticism is exciting to watch and results in sensational plays, but like all young athletes, gravity will eventually set in and he’ll need to slow his game down. He’ll need to develop a mid – range ‘money’ shot that doesn’t require so much effort. Think Tim Duncan’s bankshot, Kareem’s hook or Karl Malone’s 20 foot J from the either wing. If he develops a reliable shot he wouldn’t have to get beat up too much and reserve the spectacular stuff for later.
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I’m Going To Interview Kobe
Our good friends at Nike Phils. have for some odd reason found it fit for my lowly self to be in the presence of The Great One.
I’ve waited for approx 2 weeks to finally make this announcement, preferring to remain on the safe side by making sure first. However a few days ago I received notice that I should ‘spread the word’ (and even then I demurred), but I think it’s sure now, so here’s the lowdown. Kobe Bryant, no. 24 guard for the Los Angeles Lakers and probably the U.S. Basketball Team (they’d be nuts to cut him), and the current most famous basketball player in the world and consequently, the ‘face of the NBA’ is coming to Manila on September 5 to hold a few clinics and of course, promote his new Fall 2007 Kobe II shoes. If I might add, in recent years, I’ve come to regard him as the best basketball player in the NBA as well, and it’s pretty hard to discount that.
Announcing The Ballex Sim League,
and the formation of my Dream Team (Armchair) Basketball Analysts
Albeit somewhat late, I’d like to formally announce Exchange.ph’s latest project, The Ballex Sim League. Here’s the clickable graphic:
In a nutshell, a Basketball Sim (simulation) league allows you the chance to run an NBA team as its General Manager (GM). As such, you are in control of your team’s destiny for a period of months similar to the NBA’s. You can make player trades with other virtual GMs like yourself, adjust your player rotations, and even do such things as increase and decrease specific skillsets for your player(s). Factors such as salaries, salary caps, team schedules and a player’s ‘greed’ (or his desire to play for money / loyalty) are additional things to think about which add to it’s realism.
There are two areas a virtual GM need to keep track of, namely the page where the game results are shown here, and the forum above. After you make adjustments to your team and perform trade after trade at the forum, you observe the game results to see how things go and make further adjustments / trades as needed. A virtual Commissioner, in the person of Gil Moreno (forum id: Cola), runs the simulations via a software he runs on his computer, uploads these results, and confirms / allows / supervises over all aspects of trading and adjustments on the virtual league – just like a real commissioner.
Got Kobe?
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