If there’s one cool thing about the internet it’s that it makes it easy to set up a specialty store for just about anything imaginable.  Case in point, I just discovered a store that specializes in outdoor basketball goals.  They carry a huge selection of indoor, outdoor, portable, wall-mounted and even poolside hoops. I’m not in the market for a basket right now, but when the kids get a little older I plan to start here.

As most people that know me a little bit are aware I’m a pretty big basketball fan.  My dad was a pretty successful high school basketball coach for over 30 years so I suppose it only makes sense that I would pick up an affinity for the game that I was exposed to from day one.  High School and College Basketball are by far my primary interests during the winter, but this time of year when those seasons have ended and the NBA playoffs are just around the corner my interest in the pro game really starts to pick up.

I’ve been thinking about starting some kind of affiliate campaign this week, but I hadn’t come up with any solid ideas.  Then last night while thinking about the coming NBA playoffs my two interests collided and I had a great idea for a potential niche site domain name.  I checked the domain name and surprisingly enough it was available, so I jumped on it immediately.

Even though the new site isn’t going to be a blog per se, I’m leaning towards managing it with good old WordPress just for ease of setup and management.  That’s just my initial thought though.  I have a lot of work to do in the next week or so to get things ready.

At any rate, I’ll definitely be covering this new project and the NBA playoffs a lot more as I start to make progress so stay tuned for a lot more in depth discussion.

Where were you last night when LeBron scored 48 to lead his Cavaliers to a game 5 double OT victory?

Webmonkey has a useful article comparing the pros and cons of four server side scripting languages: ASP, ColdFusion, Perl, and PHP. Personally I’m hoping to give PHP a try on one of my home machines sometime soon, and further down the road a little modperl action. Of course it’s always a matter of finding the time to do it.

Hey all you basketball fans. December 4th in Cleveland baby!

Fruit Loops I kiss you. I hear a tour with Mahir is in the works…

Even though in most ways I agree with the recently released Findings of Fact against Microsoft, as a resident of Washington State I’ve had similar thoughts about how what’s bad for Microsoft is bad for the local state economy.

Here’s an interesting dissenting view on the whole Microsoft deal. [via Scripting News]

I went out to my family’s house to visit with Kristen for a while this afternoon. I installed some nifty graphics programs for Kristen to play with while I was trying to come up with a cool cd graphic design.

At some point I got the brilliant idea to go out and shoot a few baskets.

Unfortunately for me (and my car’s poor windshield) I missed one too many shots and pretty much finished off my already well cracked windshield. Looks like it’s time to finally replace it.

The Ferris JV team started the day off right by beating North Central by about 25. The Ferris varsity team topped that with a 35 point win over NC.

G-Prep did one better by beating Central Valley 51-50 to hand them their first loss of the season.

Ferris plays Rogers today in what should be a pretty good basketball game at Ferris.

I came across this link [Internet Archive] at BunnyHop while perusing scripting news today and thought Nichole might find it useful.

I survived my visit up north to Mt. Spokane high school. The JV team is still not playing at the level we’d like. Of course they did win by 30 points…

I picked up a new green mechanical pencil called the Technician II between games. It works quite well.

Hats off to Mt. Spokane for their play in the varsity game. They played even with the Ferris varsity up until the last 3 or 4 minutes of the game and ended up losing by a surprising 4 points.

Tuesday we play Rogers and on a related note I just watched my first tv news sports low-light of the year. Rogers was playing LC in a close matchup and Q6 was showing some shots from the game. Then right in the middle of the piece a Rogers player travelled as he started to drive and they wasted a couple seconds worth of tv time on his meaningless layup following the turnover. Even worse they added insult to injury by making a stupid comment about the whole thing. I really think we could have done without that bit.

Just got back from the Zags game.

GU ended up winning by about 20. As usual I saw many people I know and work with including Mitzi.

Tomorrow Ferris plays Mt. Spokane way out north.

Today the Ferris varsity boys basketball team plays their biggest game of the season to date when they face Central Valley on the road for a share of first place in the GSL. Our only loss of the season was at the hands of CV on our home court back in December and there is no question the team has been looking forward to this rematch every day since.

Update:

Well, the basketball games didn’t turn out quite like I was hoping. The Ferris JV team started out the day by playing the worst 20 minutes of basketball I’ve seen this season. Luckily there are 32 minutes in a complete game. With 4 minutes remaining in the third quarter we were down 19 points, yet somehow thanks to inspired team defense and six 3’s by Kevin “The Trifecta” Aronson we managed to get it turned around and win by 5.

The varsity game on the other hand was a closely contested battle between two good teams that ended with a two point margin of victory and us on the losing side. Central Valley may have secured the league title with tonight’s victory, but they haven’t seen the last of Ferris by any means.