Musician of the day: Pat Martino

Pat Martino Live at Yoshi's was one of my favourite jazz guitar CD. He was playing with organist Joey DeFrancesco and drummer Billy Hart on that disc. Finally I have seen the "real" thing: Martino played at Yoshi's in a trio setting again this week. This time was in SF though. (The CD was recorded in Oakland in 2001. The SF branch didn't exist back then.) And the organist was Tony Monaco. I liked his playing so much that I bought his CD, A New Generation: Paesanos On the New B3, back in 2004. Interestly, that CD also featured Joey DeFrancesco as guest.

I don't need to sing more praises for Martino's playing. Just want to mention the story he told: back when he was 16 years old, he played in a club call Small's Paradise in Harlem (BTW, I just read from a biography of Jimi Hendrix that he has also played there before he was huge.) And there was another nearby club in Harlem called Count Basie's. Wes Montgomery was playing there. Martino was close to Les Paul then. He was a fatherly figure to Martino. Martino took Les Paul to Harlem to see Montgomery during his break at his gig at Small's Paradise. During Montgomery's break, he came over to Martino and Les Paul and introduced himself. He said his 2 biggest influence was Charlie Christian, and guess who else? None other than Les Paul! Les Paul stayed there the whole night and Martino got back to his gig. When he was done and back to Count Basie's, 5 guitarists were hanging out outside the club. Who are the other 2? George Benson and Grant Green!

Star of the day: Armando Galarraga

Let's all urge MLB to do the right thing and credit Armando Galarraga with the perfect game that he deserved. Detroit Tigers' Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game against Cleveland Indian into the 9th inning with 2 outs. The 3rd one should have been an out too but the umpire screwed up the call (even he admitted it!)

I root for Galarraga especially because he was on my championship winning team in the fantasy league a few years ago (I picked him up as a free agent!) BTW, he is really a class act. He didn't even go into any heated argument with the umpire.

Sports highlights: UFC, F1 and mostly racing

It was Super 14's final last Sat. I couldn't watch the 2nd half but I guess I didn't miss much. The Bulls was leading at half time and went on to beat the Stormers and successfully defended their title. There won't be Super 14 next year as the league has expanded to 15.

The Rampage-Evans fight turned out to be not bad. Rampage looked passive in the beginning but he showed a bit of his old explosiveness at round 3. Evans did a great job trying to dominate.

The weekend was mainly about auto racing though: I watched both NASCAR races, Indy 500 and F1. I can't remember when was the last time the F1 race was actually more dramatic among all of them! I mean, the dominating driver in the beginning didn't win! The TV commentators mostly agreed that Vettel ruined teammate Webber's day but it wasn't so clear cut according to post-race analysis. After that crash, there was another close battle between teammates, Hamiton and Button. And that was just spectacular: Button passed the race leader Hamilton and the latter was able to regain his lead and went on to win. Another great finish I watched was the GT class of American Le Man Series at Laguna Seca Raceway at Monterrey. The Porsche passed the Bimmer at the final restart. These cars are more stock than those race for National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (yeah, that's NASCAR) and they didn't need double file restart to have exciting passes during restart! It deserved to be more popular than it currently does. The coverage was not typical (wasn't even live). Instead, it's more like a documentary, which served as a great introduction to uneducated fans like me. As predicted, hardcore fans didn't like it but I agree with the posters here that it would have got even fewer audiences if the full 6 hour race was broadcasted. Kudo to CBS for showing it.

Congrat to Danica Patrick for her 6th place finish at Indy 500. It was much better than expected!

Star of the day: Barry Alvarez, newly elected college hall of famer

In my book, he is the best football coach ever (on a 2nd thought, maybe tied with Mack Brown and Jimmy Johnson :P) Congrat to him for being elected to the hall of fame! It is an amazing feat for him to turn around the Wisconsin football program that had been losing for a long time into a three-time Rose Bowl winner in a decade.

Music of the day: Purpose Built

This is an album by jazz bassist/band leader Michael Janisch. This album reminds me of Dave Holland's recent works. I believe that is a big compliment. Here is the line-up:
Michael Janisch: acoustic bass (1, 3-7, 9-11), electric bass (2, 8, 12); Aaron Goldberg: piano (2, 3, 9, 10); Jim Hart: vibraphone (1, 4, 6, 11); Jason Palmer: trumpet (2, 7, 8, 11); Paul Booth: tenor saxophone (1, 2, 6); Mike Moreno: guitar (2, 8); Patrick Cornelius: alto saxophone (5, 11); Phil Robson: guitar (5, 9); Walter Smith III: tenor saxophone (1, 8, 11); Johnathan Blake: drums.

And to be honest with you, I have not heard of any of them before but they all played impressively on this album.

Tech of the day: My非佛

鑑於富士康近月接連發生多名員工跳樓事件，本人建議各位iPhone用家下載「非一般唸佛機」App，南無阿彌陀佛。

Music of the day: Rainbow in the Dark

RIP Ronnie James Dio. The legendary heavy metal vocalist and band leader died on May 16th. I did not realize he was 67 as he always appeared so energetic. His work with Black Sabbath and his own band were amazing as he never sold out to the mainstream.

Tech of the day: Slingbox and Pace TDC577X DVR

I was trying to configure my Slingbox to use the new DVR we got from Comcast. For some reason this model does not show up from Slingbox's list. Fortunately, with the help of the great Google search (and more importantly, its cache) I found that I could tell Slingbox I am using a standalone DVR, then choose Comcast as the brand and DCT34XX as the model. (I should have thought of this since Comcast uses the same remote for all boxes anyway)

Star of the day: Viswanathan Anand, the world chess champion

Anand has just successfully defended his title from challenger Veselin Topalov, a former world chess champion as well. They were all tied through 11 games. Anand won the 12th and final game of this title match.

Star of the day: Dallas Braden

Another no-hitter from Bay Area's baseball team (Giant's Jonathan Sanchez did it last year)! And this one is even better: a perfect game (where 27 batters are all retired.) I was happy to see Mark Burhle threw a perfect game for White Sox last year. This one is certainly more surprising since Braden was not as highly regarded as Burhle. I hope the A's and Braden do better than the Sox and Burhle did the rest of the reason though (basically they went downhill from that game on)

Topic of the day: Progressive Insurance lives up to its name

Kudo to Progressive for being brave enough to go against conservatism in the States by making a commercial that feature a gay couple (not explicitly stated but a lot of people think so):


It's sad that so many businesses either pretend gay people do not exist or bow down to the extremely conservative/religious groups. I would sing more praises for them if the marketing guy at Progressive admit that's a gay couple (instead, he said they are modelled after Joey and Chandler from Friends but Friends expert like me know they are not) Besides, I really find that Progressive ad lady very annoying (my buddy agreed with me too)

Topic of the day: It's hard not to like SF

The title sounds like an old jazz standard but it's not (That would be "I left my heart in San Francisco") For one thing, you could always count on hearing live music somewhere. I went to Fishermen's Wharf earlier this week. Saw a guy playing classic tunes on violin and another guy playing blues guitar and harmonica. It was good entertainment. And during one of my regular bookstore trip, a gentleman saw me skimming through Michael Lewis' latest book "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine" (about the current recession and its cause: sub-prime mortgage) and started chatting with me. He was a teacher and had met Lewis in person at his school and gave high rave about this book.

The only disappointment in SF this week was actually not its fault: my buddy, a visitor, wanted to buy a Sony product so Sony Store immediately came to our mind. The Metreon (a complex with shops and movie theater) had a big Sony presence. It was a "flagship"-type of store that showcase Sony's great products (like TVs, camcorders and most prominently, video games) Too bad they were all gone! What a pity! There was a time that people flock to Sony Store. That's when people ridicule that Apple was trying to open its own retail stores!

Sports highlights: Champions League semi, Stanley Cup playoff, NASCAR

Who would have guessed it is Bayern vs Inter in the final 3 months ago? Most of our friends didn't even give Inter a chance 3 weeks ago! In order not to jinx the team I root for (like I did so many times on this blog before,) I am not going to mention which team it is.

I haven't watched much of Stanley Cup playoff so far. So glad that our local team, the Sharks, at least made it to the 2nd round, unlike last year. They won the President's Trophy (best regular season record) but lost in the first round so unexpectedly. Well, this year another President's Trophy winner got eliminated in the first round. I am not a fan of the Canadiens but it was exciting to see them beating the high-powered Washington Capitals. (In fact, 3 out of the last 5 President's Trophy winner were ousted in the first round! I guess no one wants to win it in the near future >:)

Last but no least, what an exciting finish for the NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Talladega last Sunday. As expected, there were a few big wrecks. And Kevin Harvick barely beats Jamie McMurray at the finish line, literally, at the 3rd green-white-checker restart. It is race like this that gets me addicted to NASCAR. For every boring race, you get something like this. Not a bad deal!

Tech of the day: HP bought Palm

In the storied history of Palm, one of the mobile computing pioneer, another new chapter has been written today: it was acquired by HP. As a gadget lover/user, Palm always has a special place in my heart. In the past I have owned 3 PDAs that run Palm OS (though only 1 was made by Palm. The other 2 were Visor made by HandSpring and the Watch PDA made by Fossil) Although many companies faded away quickly in the tech industry, it is still sad to see Palm going from having a really dominant product like Palm III, Palm V to having also-runs like Palm Pre (which probably has some good technologies but no one really cares) Almost everyone uses a Palm PDA 12 years ago. Now I do not know anyone that uses Palm Pre. The newest Palm I have seen my friends used was a Palm Centro! And Palm hasn't really have any game changing product since Treo 600, which was THE first successful smart phone with PDA and phone functionality integrated properly.

On the other hand, it seems fitting that Palm went to HP, who has made quite a few legendary mobile computing devices themselves, like the HP-71B, a handheld computer that runs BASIC and HP-200LX, a handheld that runs MS-DOS Even though HP seems to have lots its edge in building such devices, evident in the fact that they dropped their own Jornanda-line of Windows CE/Pocket PC in favor of the iPAQs from their acquisition of Compaq.

Will Palm ever be able to come up with another game changing/domainant device? Let's keep our finger crossed.

Movie of the day: Crazy Heart

I seldom watch Oscar but I did this year and saw Jeff Bridges won something for his performance in this movie. I like the Bridges brothers because of The Fabulous Baker Boys, a movie about a jazz piano duo (played by them) and drama caused by the addition of a female vocalist (played by Michele Pfeifer) It was one of my all-time-favorite movie. For some reason, I didn't realize Crazy Heart was also about music until I read about it from the cover story of the latest issue of Guitar Aficionado. From the same article I also learned that Jeff Bridges was actually a decent musician (he learned playing guitar for a long time) No wonder he was able to portray musicians so well in both movies.

Unlike the role of a jazz pianist from The Fabulous Baker Boys, Jeff Bridges played a country guitarist/singer in Crazy Heart. Country is not really my cup of tea so I have some doubts whether I would buy/rent it. Fortunately, it was available on my flight and there was no reason not to watch it for free. And I enjoy it a lot. I even enjoy the music to a certain extent. On the other hand, I'm not sure the movie is that great. For example, his relationship with his student (also a bigger star than himself) seemed a bit superficial.

Topic of the day: Cinderellas in college sports

From my experiences, college sports are full of upsets (well, at least I feel that it happens more often than pro sports. Maybe it's because pro teams are more consistent. Sometimes a heavy favourite is indeed much better than its opponents and thus no surprise. And the rest of the games are usually quite evenly matched and no surprise there either)

Butler, who made it to NCAA Basketball final as a #5 seed, was certainly the "Cinderella" that is getting a lot of attention this year. However, I would argue Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) was even more deserving because their hockey team went to final 4 as a #15 seed (among the 16 teams in the tournament) before losing to my Wisconsin Badgers.

According to this article, their players are "ordinary" science/engineering students (just like yours truly!) and didn't receive scholarship like the student athletes from schools in major sports conferences did. On the other hand, it actually helped the team to stay together longer instead of losing good players every years to pro leagues.

Sports highlights (and lowlights): MLB Opening week, Champions League, F1

Last weekend was not as eventful as the previous one but it was special because it was the opening week of the new baseball season, started with none other than Yankees vs Red Sox! The funniest thing was, the commentators mentioned this was supposed to be the year of defense but the offense exploded in the first game! Also on the next day, 3 games ended with winning teams scoring 11 runs (1 scored 16!) Another funny incident was that our own Giants, Eugenio Velez, made the news because his jersey has "San Francicso" misprinted on it :D

As far as boxing/MMA went, the "big" fight was Bernard Hopkins vs Roy Jones Jr and it was booooooring! Both of them looked way past them prime and have nothing left. None of them showed any stuff that could knock another down except low blows. I literally fell asleep during the final rounds, which was good for me 'coz I got some good sleep before watching F1 from Malaysia, which was not that exciting either but it was fun to see Alonso trying so hard to pass the car in front of him and ended up blowing his engine. BTW, the Taiwanese ESPN commentator was really good. He kept saying Alonso's car was problematic quite a few laps before the problem materialized.

Even though I tried hard not to watch the Man U vs Bayern Munich Champions League quarter-final 2nd leg, I got regular updates thru IM from my 2 friends (1 Man U supporter and 1 hater!) That's certainly heartbreaking to see them going from hopeful to hopeless for a Man U fan like me.

Caught a few minutes of NCAA Hockey Final 4 actions. Glad to see Wisconsin advanced to the final. Go Badgers!

Topic of the day: Cloud computing and pollution? Blame Apple!

A few years ago Greenpeace admitted that they picked on Apple so that more people were aware of the environmental impace of computer technology. You might think they won't do that anymore. Wrong! Here is a headline from AppleInsider: "Greenpeace criticizes Apple for carbon footprint of iPad cloud"

I am not trying to defend Apple/iPad but all computing "gadgets" (e.g. smartphones, netbooks) these days are constantly making use of the internet (call it the cloud if you insist)

However, I do agree that our world will be less polluted without the cloud. Consider this, if everything is stored locally on your HD:
1) it uses less energy since you have to pay your own electric bill and more likely to turn off your computer (and thus the HD) when you're out.
2) you would be constantly deleting unnecessary data instead of simply adding yet another HD. On the contrary, with all these providers offering high limit free storage in the cloud, you won't bother to delete the junk.

Trivia of the day: honey and golf

I learned this from radio yesterday: in the past, golf ball manufacturers used honey as the core of golf balls!

Sports highlights: GSP, F1, Hong Kong 7 plus more

Last weekend began with an NRL game. Then there were a couple of big events during the weekend: George St Pierre totally dominated in his UFC fight against Hardy. Gotta give some kudos to Hardy though 'coz he really defended hard and avoided submission (his arm was twisted really bad twice but he survived!) The F1 race in Australia was much more excited than expected, probably because of the rain. It was exciting to see Hamilton quickly catching up near the end of the race, which caused Webber to crash (and he couldn't pass Alonzo either) Of course, the home team winning the Shield in Hong Kong Seven Rugby was huge too. (It was not the Cup, but we were happy for the team no matter what)

Both the IndyCar race at St. Petersburg and NASCAR at Martinsville were delayed from Sunday to Monday because of rain. Both were exciting! My idol Danica Patrick had a decent showing by finishing 7th. And Denny Hamlin's surge from 3rd to 1st during the final restart (with 2 laps remaining) at Martinsville was simply unbelievable! Everyone thought he was done when he went to the pit and gave up the lead a few laps earlier in the race.

Also catched an Aussie rule football match, a bit of NLL and NCAA Hockey (Go Badgers!)