California drought: Sierra snowpack is barely there.#
Esquire: 15 Forgotten Movies You Should Watch.#
Lifehacker: The Best Time of Day to Do Just About Anything.#
Mick Jagger sings a Dylan song for late girlfriend at private memorial.#
Now the main feed for Scripting News is the feed for the noteblog. Any stories from the essay site will appear as links in this feed. #
The main difference is the new feed has title-less items. Ones that work like tweets. They're short, may contain links, but don't have titles. #
The change was announced well in advance of its deployment. This feed fully conforms to the RSS 2.0 spec. So feed readers, if they claim to support RSS, should have no trouble providing a good user experience for feeds of this type.#
Part of the reason for doing this is that I write both kinds of posts, short ones and long ones. That goes back all the way to the early days of Scripting News, and to the beginning of RSS. Eventually, I conformed to the limits of Google Reader because it was so dominant. But that, ironically, made me dependent on Twitter for posting links. I decided that since Google Reader no longer exists, it would be silly to be constrained by its limits. And I want my links and essays to be in the same place. They will still appear on Twitter, but they will emanate from the blog.#
There may be some breakage. But the changes required by feed readers are so small that if they want to be compatible it should just be a few hours work, if that. And this was announced far in advance, with lots of technical details. So it could be that most of them already work. Fingers crossed! #
If there are any problems please let me know. #
Last night's basketball was amazing. It was also terrible, because I was pulling for the Rockets, I love that team. It looked like they had won yesterday's game. But the Blazers got the ball with .9 seconds left, just enough time to catch the ball and shoot. #
The ball came in. As it was being passed the announcer said "A three wins the game" -- I hadn't had time to realize that, and as he was saying it, Damian Lillard, the hot Portland point guard, aims, shoots and the ball, it arcs, floats, the place goes silent, and swooooosh it goes right in the bucket. But there was enough time between the shot and the basket to think "He'll probably miss," only to realize less than a second later that it was all over. The Rockets go home and Portland moves on. Oh how I wished it had gone the other way! #
It was an amazing moment for the sheer drama, and personality of it. The Blazers have great fans, and young Lillard is a real character and basketball star. But a Houston win would have made it amazing for another reason. It would have meant on Sunday there would be three game 7's, as there are three game 7's today. Each game 7 has a winner and a loser, like every game, but with the difference that there is no tomorrow for the team that loses. It's all or nothing, win or go home.#
No matter what, it's been the most incredible postseason. Sometimes end of season games are boring, but not this year. There haven't been any big upsets yet. Dallas, Memphis, Atlanta -- these teams, if they win, will knock out one of the leading contenders for this year's title -- San Antonio, Oklahoma City and Indiana. The other two games are closer matches: the Clippers vs the Warriors and the Raptors vs the Nets. It will be stunning if one of the losers is one of the league leaders. Something we'll enjoy seeing, for sure -- with the hope that maybe one of the remaining teams will go on to beat the favorite to win the title, Miami.#
As I wrote yesterday, it's a total burnout, in some sense I can't wait till it's over, because the pressure is so great. But it's the reason this is sport is imho the best one out there. It all comes down to the clutch, do you have it or do you choke. The teams that are left at this point have a lot of, as Walt Frazier would say, tenacity. We'll be talking about these games for years to come. And the games tonight and tomorrow are where it all comes to a head.#
As basketball was finishing up last night, Scott Beale, a longtime friend and proprietor of Laughing Squid web hosting, posted this gorgeous picture of a plane preparing to land in Amsterdam at dawn. #
It's a flight I've been on quite a few times. I know and love the feeling. You've just flown overnight, and didn't get a whole lot of sleep, but the sun is rising, it's a fresh new day. The world you're in now is waking up, as your mind is saying it's finally time for you to go to sleep. #
It's a fond memory for me, because I love spending time in Europe. And it was a nice way to shift gears after the crushing defeat in last night's Houston-Portland game. #