It's so funny, here we are almost two years since Linsanity, and the Knicks are a complete disaster. So what if the Knicks had kept Lin? It's a trick question, because it wouldn't have saved the Knicks, it wouldn't have even helped, but it probably would have destroyed Lin. He'd be where Raymond Felton or J.R. Smith are today. Wasted in body and spirit.
I saw a picture yesterday in an article about how to cope if you're the fan of an NBA team that sucks. There are so many of them. Not many as bad as the Knicks, but this is a year of extremes. Either you suck terribly, or you're great. And the distribution is mostly East vs West. Western teams are kicking ass. And for the most part the ass they're kicking is Eastern ass.
Anyway, back to the picture. It was a really sweet photoshop of LeBron James in a Knicks uniform. I had to look three times before my brain could parse it. What if LeBron had chosen the Knicks instead of Miami? Another trick question. He wouldn't be LeBron, the smartest and most driven player in the NBA (in addition to being the strongest athlete) today. LeBron wouldn't choose the Knicks because he had a choice. He went with the team with Pat Riley as CEO. And the owner, whoever he is, either just as smart as Riley and James, or he's smart enough to let them run the show.
Were it only so in NYC. We are stuck as a basketball town because one of the owners is absent, and the other is vain, over-confident, and as the Oracle says of Neo in the Matrix, "not too bright." It really is a toxic combination.
NYC, the richest city in still the richest country in the world. We have all the nicest things you can imagine, but we can't have a great NBA team because the guy who owns it thinks like a small-town boy. Could we trade teams with, say, Houston -- a town that has no appreciation for basketball? Or Indianapolis? They could probably use the money. What could we give almost any city in the US to take Dolan off our hands so we can engineer a good team, if not in 2013, or even 2017, maybe in say -- 10 years?
Because we're never going to get there with Dolan.
BTW, Carmelo Anthony is a wonderful player, and he's smart and he really cares. This is what's so great about basketball, it's an intimate sport. The players don't wear masks. And there are only five playing at a time. You get to study them. The Knicks are stuck in hell, and it's really no player's fault. A team is not the sum of the parts. You can't do math on the players on a team. The Knicks are proof of that. What the Knicks are missing is drive. You have to have talent, think as a unit, be smart, that's enough to get you on the court. Now what's your ambition? It's not what you say your ambition is, because Melo says his is to win a championship. But it's laughable when he says it. I'm sure he wants to be on a team that wins a championship. That means he has to hook up with a guy like LeBron. Years ago he was too young and lacked the confidence to let a stronger person boss him around. I think that's what the Knicks struggle is really about. The wearing-down of Carmelo's pride, and the circus sideshow, the comic relief, provided by Dolan.
Anyway it's fun to think about basketball, and more fun to write about it because none of it matters one bit.
I did several workshops with Jeru Kabbal in the mid-late 90s.
I did a website for him, and archived his tapes when he died in 2000.
Also a transcript of one of his talks.
When I was preserving his site, I saw that the links to his tapes were broken. I had let a domain lapse. Then the other day I came across them in an archive, and put them in a safe place in a folder on scripting.com. I figure if any of my sites survive over time, it's this one.
Here are pointers to the tapes, in MP3 format.
Jeru's teachings helped put things in better perspective for me, maybe his wisdom can help other people too, over time.
On Tuesday I posted a question -- how to serve HTTPS from an S3 bucket?
Several people suggested using CloudFront or CloudFlare. So yesterday I tried both.
These are not reviews. I'm just briefly reporting the results. I'm an HTTPS newbie. I'm looking for more info, and other options.
CloudFront
CloudFront is an Amazon service. Setup takes about five minutes, then about 20 minutes for them to provision it.
First, I set up a new bucket called tmp.scripting.com. I put a single file in it, hello.html, which contains a single line of JS, alert ("Hello World").
Then I went to the CloudFront panel in AWS, and created a new distribution. There's a big dialog with lots of options, but most of the defaults are fine. Choose one of your buckets, it assigns a domain name for you to use to access your distribution. You can provide a CNAME -- I did -- testsecure.scripting.com, pointing to the domain they provided. You can choose HTTPS, which I did (the point of the experiment). I don't have a certificate, and I am new to HTTPS.
I was able to access hello.html via ordinary HTTP, and over HTTPS using Amazon's domain, but not using my domain. This method will not work for hosting Fargo in a bucket that can be accessed over HTTPS without (as I understand it) spending $600 a month.
Sticker shock. I wish the big companies had left OAuth as-is, complicated for sure, but widely deployed. An individual developer can't spend that much money to jump through a hoop for large platform companies.
Hope we can do something to lower the barrier for independent developers. Amazon or Dropbox could do something here. My opinion: removing barriers to deploying static JavaScript apps is good for business.
CloudFlare
This service may be closer to doing what I need, but to find out I have to give them my credit card info, and I wish I didn't have to do that just to find out if it would work.
CloudFlare wants a whole domain to play with, which isn't a problem -- I have many that I'm not doing anything with. I gave them one and created a sub-domain, put an index file in it, a static HTML page that says hello.
To set it up, you go through a series of steps where you turn over DNS to them.
Now, it's not clear that they actually did anything -- because when I access the page I get the same headers that I got before I CloudFlare'd it.
Regardless, to get HTTPS you have to give them $20 a month. And it's not clear if that's on top of the $600 per month you have to pay for the certificate. (My guess that it is.)