I am a huge sports enthusiast. I love the Buckeyes (despite all their current woes!). I follow with interest the Seahawks, the Browns, USC, UW, the Big Ten, the Pac Ten, the SEC. I watch excessive amounts of college football, college basketball, pro football, and pro basketball. And of course I get sucked into Olympics, the Stanley Cup, World Cup, or pretty much any other major sports event. Except baseball, which is incredibly boring.

I spend waaay too much money on sports. It is embarrassing to add it up.

* Season tickets to OSU football games, parking pass, and all the travel and other costs associated with attending OSU games – thank goodness my folks and sister usually cover the tailgate, thanks! * Occasional bowl tickets and bowl trips. The 2002 National Championship win against Miami was the greatest trip ever. * Other sporting event tickets a couple times a year. Latest: Rat City Roller Derby here in Seattle. Highly entertaining. * A stupid amount on cable/satellite service. Because despite all the promise of IPTV and sites like Hulu, if you want to watch live HD sports, you pretty much need to pay for cable or satellite. And not just the basic package either, but the packages that pick up all the ESPN channels, the Big Ten network, and the Fox Sports channels. And given all the recent NCAA football TV deals, I am sure my costs will just go up here. * And of course I buy magazines, t shirts, jerseys, “giant foam fingers”:http://www.overstock.com/Sports-Toys/Ohio-State-Buckeyes-1-Fan-Foam-Finger/5967412/product.html, “Fatheads”:http://www.fathead.com/, and all other kinds of fan gear.

My daily web reading includes all the online sports media. The major branded sites of course, but also all the blogs covering college football, and there are some great ones – “EDSBS”:http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/, “Dr. Saturday”:http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday, “Smart Football”:http://smartfootball.com/, and oh so many more. And the beat writers for local media covering the teams I care about – the “Dispatch”:http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/buckeyextra/dispatch-stories/osufootball.html, the “Plain Dealer”:http://www.cleveland.com/osu/, the “Seattle Times”:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/sports/, the “Orange-County Register”:http://www.ocregister.com/sections/sports/usc/, the “LA Times”:http://www.latimes.com/sports/college/usc/, etc. I hit the web sites, consume the RSS feeds, subscribe to the tweet streams.

NCAA basketball pools? Bowl Pickem contests? Regular season pickem challenges? Of course, though I have never really gotten into fantasy football, thank goodness, because I would probably love it and burn way too much time playing it.

I’m not alone in my obsession or my spending. Thank goodness sports mania is more socially acceptable than other bad habits, the amount of time and money spent on sports each year is mindboggling. College football as a business took in $3.2B in revenue last year, making $1.1B in profit (“PDF”:http://www.sbrnet.com/pdf/college-football-financial-stats-by-division.pdf). There are games on nearly every day of the week now, and possibly spinning into Sunday in a big way if the NFL labor problems continue. And TV coverage is growing apace, with all the major conferences following the Big-10’s lead and spinning up dedicated networks. 50 million fans attended games last year, a “record”:http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/sports_college/2011/02/record-setting-year-for-college-football-attendance.html – only stadium capacity limits prevents this from being even larger.

The NFL is an even larger beast in revenues – $9B in revenue (“PDF”:www.thebostoncompany.com/core/…/May11_Views_Insights_NFL.pdf). Not as many people attend the games as at the college level, but the media rights, merchandising rights, etc. are worth far more.

Expenditures don’t stop at watching games – fans will obviously buy anything having do to with their teams. I consider my collection of jackets and hats to be fairly modest. I haven’t begun to tap into the richness of the market. The range of products and services available is stunning, for example:

* “Grill grates”:http://www.ohiostatealumni.org/shop/marketplace/Pages/OhioStateGrillGrates.aspx. * “Longaberger baskets”:http://www.ohiostatealumni.org/shop/marketplace/Pages/LongabergerTallTissueBasket.aspx. These first two make some sense given the tailgating scene * “Pottery”:http://www.ohiostatealumni.org/shop/marketplace/Pages/OhioStatePottery.aspx. * “Furniture”:http://www.collegechair.com/. Starting to get a little far afield * “Credit cards”:http://alumni.usc.edu/benefits/bankofamerica.html. * “Travel”:http://www.texasexes.org/travel/find_trip.asp. Not just physical goods! * “Toys”:http://www.buckeyeshoppingdeals.com/fan/ohio-state-buckeyes-mr-potato-head * “Wine”:http://www.personalwine.com/catalog/site_affiliate_index_label.php?name=texas * “Fishing reels”:http://ardentreels.com/products/viewProduct2.asp?prodId=92. * “Fashion Apparel”:http://www.meeshandmia.com/UniversityofNebraskaAll.html. For some definition of “fashion” * “Perfume.”:https://masik.com/index.php/university-of-florida. What does a Florida Gator smell like? Or aspire to smell like? and how is that different than the fragrance aspirations of an LSU Tiger * “Galvanized Buckets”:http://www.amazon.com/NCAA-Oklahoma-Sooners-5-Quart-Galvanized/dp/B003M9YPRU

My smartphone/tablet doesn’t really deliver much to me. Given all this enthusiasm, it is suprising to me that the iPhone (and other smartphone) and iPad experience for sports is so tepid, so undeveloped – no one has figured out how to extract money from me on my mobile device. My #1 app for following sports on the go is Twitter. I download a bunch of free score apps (ESPN and Yahoo Sportacular are both reasonable) which are fine, but I don’t pay a dime for any app or service. Given the willingness of people like me to pay for damn near anything, this is surprising. There are a bunch of sports checkin apps, but they don’t provide any real value – no better game info, no scores, no video, and honestly the enthusiasts just aren’t on these services.

What’s missing?

* Video. Realtime, clips. This is the biggest glaring problem. Particularly on football Saturdays. I want to see highlights of my team, highlights of other games, full videos of other games, plays of the day, video summaries of action in other conferences. During the week, video highlights of the upcoming opponent, clips from last year’s game, etc. And I want it on demand. I can get some of this flipping around channels on the TV but I can’t get it on my device. I’d pay for it but no one is offering. * Opponent information. The tweet stream is good but I’d love more. What are all the opponent blogs says. What are the opponent mainstream press sites saying. Latest updates on injuries. Some curation/editorial would be good here. In the week we play Nebraska, where do I go to read all the pregame Nebraska material – blogs, newspapers, analysis, forums, etc? Where do i load up on Nebraska Hate gear? Where do I find Nebraska jokes? * On site experience. There are some real challenges to deal with with respect to on-site, game day services. The load of 150K people all trying to use their phones around Ohio Stadium is crushing. If I was a carrier I’d offer a peak location package, truck in some antennas (cell and wifi), and charge more for peak location use. No idea if the economics would work out here. Beyond just connectivity, I’d like “PointInside” like features at the game. Where and when does the band perform. Where are various other pre-game festivities. Where is the best tailgating activity. Where can I grab a pedicab. Where are the porta-potties. * Scores and stats. The ESPN and Yahoo Sportacular apps are fine, but they totally break down under Saturday load. There must be a way to better architect these for load. I am always super frustrated at some point on Saturday due to the lack of current reliable score info. * Deep focus. The existing mobile apps from ESPN, etc, are all super generic, covering all sports and all teams. I’ll pay for depth coverage of college football or of Ohio State. I won’t pay for apps that cover tennis, golf, baseball, and football equally well. * Gaming. Fantasy football is obviously popular at the NFL level. Nothing comparable really exists at the college level. Yet the level of personal identification with teams, the level of passion is probably greater at the college level. A great college game will need to leverage the intense rivalries in the game.

Sports enthusiasts have proven they will spend stupid amounts of money on their sports mania. It is surprising to me that no smartphone apps have done a good job targeting this user base and trying to separate them from some of their money. I spend more money on stupid casual games apps on my smartphone than I do on one of my main avocations in life, and this seems out of step.

Insert Disneynature Ocean Blu-Ray disc into PS3. “Oh your Blu-Ray player encryption keys are out of date, you must download an update”.

Spend 5 minutes wandering through obtuse PS3 menus to find the system update choice, “Oh your network connection isn’t working”.

Spend more time figuring out where and how to config the PS3 wireless connection.

Download the update, reboot the PS3, and bam all my bluetooth PS3 controllers quit working. Go find the right USB cable and remember how to plug in a PS3 controller.

Complete the update. Thankfully bluetooth controllers come back to life and disc now plays.

20 minutes, incredibly obtuse messages, just to play a movie. What do regular humans do? Obviously they don’t play Blu-Ray discs in PS3s.

3 books about frontiers:

* “Travels in Siberia”:amazon by Ian Frazier. The author wanders thru Siberia over the course of a decade. Interesting as a travelogue covering some very rough territory. Interesting in it’s explanation of the role Siberia has had for the Russian nation – untameable unending frontier, prison, safehouse in times of war, source of great natural wealth – and the ambivalent effect on the nation’s psyche. I would have liked a little more character study of the people met on the road, but a good read. 4 stars on Amazon, 3.91 on “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7966160-travels-in-siberia, I’d give it 3.5. * “The Floor of Heaven”:amazon by Howard Blum. The intersecting tales 3 men and the Yukon gold rush. Contrast the frontier spirit of the American/Canadian west – boundless opportunity and optimism – with the Siberian spirit in the first book. 3.9 stars on “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9581463-the-floor-of-heaven, 4.5 on amazon, I like this a little better than the Siberia book as the characters have much greater depth. * “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking”:amazon by Anand Giridharadas. An Indian-American returns to India to understand his and his family’s past, and to participate in the economic growth of the country. Interesting for its explanation of the nature of the family in Indian culture, and how that is changing with economic growth. 4 stars on Amazon, 3.58 on “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9706504-india-calling, it was a fine read, I’d give it 3.5.

A technical read:

* “Hadoop: The Definitive Guide”:amazon by Tom White. Kind of a maintenance guide for Hadoop and tools. Not the best intro to the technology, but useful at a certain level. Different editions get 3-4 stars on Amazon, “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6308439-hadoop gives it 3.75, I’d say 3 stars at best.

And then escapism:

* “The Hunger Games”:amazon, “Catching Fire”:amazon, “MockingJay”:amazon by Suzanne Collins. Avoided this series but all the movie talk finally sucked me in. Fun. The first especially. While targeted at young readers, the ending is not simplistic at all. Generally get 4.5 stars on Amazon and Goodreads, I would certainly agree. I am excited for the movie(s) now…

Today’s example of design gone astray – the “ostrich nap pillow”:http://design-milk.com/ostrich-nap-pillow/

“John Scalzi”:http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/05/24/the-2011-hugo-voters-packet-now-live/ points out that you can join the World Science Fiction convention for $50 and get electronic versions of all the Hugo nominated works. Amazing deal.

Another batch of largely escapist fare:

* “Hominids”:amazon by Robert J. Sawyer. A many-worlds story, featuring an Earth dominated by civilized Neanderthals. Engaging but not much new here. Amazon says 3.5 stars, “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/264946.Hominids says 3.7. There are two more in the series but I won’t chase them down, I’d give this a 3. * “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe”:amazon by Charles Yu. What if time travel was mundane and cheap, if everyone did it, if we screwed up our time traveling lives just like we do the rest of our lives? Nicely executed. Amazon says 3.5 stars, “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7726420-how-to-live-safely-in-a-science-fictional-universe says 3.3, but I enjoyed the exploration of cheap, available, screwed-up time travel. 4 stars. * “Fuzzy Nation”:amazon by John Scalzi. 4 stars at Amazon, 4.25 at “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9647532-fuzzy-nation. Entertaining tale. Avatar meets John Grisham. Scalzi writes very comfortably. I’ll say 3.5 stars – entertaining but not memorable. * “Galore”:amazon by Michael Crummey. Tried to go highbrow with this trendy pick but just boring. Tries to make ensemble of intriguing characters but not enough focus on any one character to make me care. And this story is all about characters. Amazon says 4.5 stars, “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9647532-fuzzy-nation says 4.25, but I gave up on it. 1 star. * “Hull Zero Three”:amazon by Greg Bear. A long trip to the stars in a generation ship goes very bad. Imagine “Lord of the Flies” with all kinds of advanced biotech. Amazon says just 3 stars, “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7975415-hull-zero-three says 3.2. 3 seems about right. * “The Last Detective”:amazon by Peter Lovesey. My second Lovesey, another very good English detective tale. Very human characters all around. 4 stars on amazon, 3.75 on “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/815595. I’d say 4, I found it all to be quite touching for a detective tale.

Been spending a lot of time playing around with GPU programming for scientific computing the last couple weeks. Fascinating stuff, GPUs are computational beasts. Some observations:

* If you want to get into it, “GPGPU.org”:http://gpgpu.org/ has boatloads of great info – news, tools, definitions, primers, etc etc etc. The place to start. * There is a good chance you’ll end up using OpenCL as the device- and platform-independent interface to GPUs. “Khronos.org”:http://www.khronos.org/ has tons of great info and in particular, the “OpenCL Reference Card”:http://www.khronos.org/files/opencl-quick-reference-card.pdf. Good stuff. * The OSX platform has awesome support for OpenCL within Xcode. Very easy to get up and going. Great sample code up at the “Apple Developer web site”:http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/search/?q=opencl. * Also tons of samples from “Nvidia”:http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/opencl/sdk/website/samples.html. * However…you may quickly hit a dead end on OSX because only the most expensive Mac Pros come with GPUs which will support double precision, and double precision is kind of necessary for scientific computing. Info on which Nvidia processors support double precision “here”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA. I could go whack around and build my own double precision math libraries for unsupported GPUs but what a pain that would be. * So onto a PC, I happen to have one with an ATI HD 57xx which will support double precision. WAY harder to get working OpenCL code working on a Windows PC tho. After much wandering around, the “AMD SDK”http://developer.amd.com/gpu/AMDAPPSDK/Pages/default.aspx seems to be the best way to get working buildable OpenCL sample code. The most freaking obtuse make files ever tho, I am ripping them apart. But if you start with one of the sample code bases and duplicate it for your use, it works. (C++ by the way). * However now I am currently blocked by limitations in the trig function implementations. Some discussion online that suggests that they are “single precision only”:http://forums.amd.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=390&threadid=137564. And even the single precision results seem to have crappy precision. I will definitely have to build my own.

UPDATE: a friend points out that Amazon also offers an “EC2-based instance with GPU capabilities”:http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/hpc-applications/. Worth a look

A handful of escapist fare…

* “The God Engines”:amazon by John Scalzi. Vicious little tale of a civilization and the creatures they revere as gods. Amazon says 3.5 stars, “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6470498-the-god-engines says 3.6. It is an interesting idea but not deeply developed, I’d say 3.5. * “Skeleton Hill”:amazon by Peter Lovesey. A fine English countryside mystery. Horses, cemeteries, gardens, countryside, civil war reenactments. A humble insightful hardworking detective, prideful upper class protagonists. A good example of the form. “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6445698-skeleton-hill says 3.63, Amazon says 4.5 stars, I’d give it 4. * “Strip”:amazon by Thomas Perry. Modern LA noir. Ok, showed more promise at beginning, but then lost some verve as the tale hopped around the ensemble cast. Would have been stronger to focus on one character, say the detective. Amazon says 3.5 stars, “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7024516-strip says 3.44, I’d say 3. * “Echo”:amazon by Jack McDevitt. Not his strongest effort. People running around the arm of the galaxy for just a modest payoff. If you are really committed to McDevitt then it is a fine story but if not, well. Amazon says 4 stars, “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8400986-echo says 3.68, I’d have to say 3 tops.

WIth hundreds of paper and ebooks in my reading queue, I need themes to decide what to read next. Why not books with “world” in the title? Presumably they all have some reasonable degree of ambition.

* “The Gone-Away World”:amazon by Nick Harkaway. Post-apocalyptic story of a world fantastically scrambled by some kind of quantum/entropy bomb. Engaging. 4 stars on Amazon, 4.14 on “goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3007704-the-gone-away-world, it is a solid 4. * “The Half-Made World”:amazon by Felix Gilman. A strange world of western expansion and industrial development gone awry. The archetypes of the Wild West and the Industrial Revolution walk the earth, driven by demons, fighting for dominance, against a never-ending western frontier. Even more engaging. 3/78 on “goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8198773-the-half-made-world, 4 stars on Amazon, also a 4 here. * “InterWorld”:amazon by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves. Nice YA science fiction title with all the classic memes. Reminds me of the titles I got hooked on – early asimov, heinlein, etc. 3.46 on “goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47701.Interworld, 4 stars on Amazon, I’ll give it 3.5. * “Underworld”:amazon by Don DeLillo. A more literary book than these others, written in a purposefully disjointed style that probably reflects true stream-of-consciousness of people. But I didn’t care about the characters and the plot didn’t advance well. Gave up 25% of way through. Amazon says 3.5 stars, “goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11761.Underworld 3.9, i can’t give it more than 2 stars. * “The Word for the World is Forest”:amazon by Ursula K. Le Guin. The story of Avatar, but subtler, more understated. and written some 30 years before Avatar. “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7672380-the-word-for-world-is-forest says 3.75 stars, amazon says 4.5 stars. It is a solid 3.5 but the author has of course written much better since then.

* “iPhoneTracker”:http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/. Cool toy to see where you’ve been and feed your feelings of paranoia. * “Portal 2”:http://www.thinkwithportals.com/. Of course. * “Qwiki”:http://www.qwiki.com/. I was kind of excited about this, but I can’t make my own Qwikis? Excitement way down. * “Acorn”:http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/. Haven’t bit yet but I’d love something less obtuse than Photoshop. * “Blogsy”:http://blogsyapp.com/. Seems like a brilliant Wordpress front end. * “Issue Bucket”:http://itunes.apple.com/ml/app/issue-bucket/id403133693?mt=8. Nice little frontend to bitbucket. * “You Gotta See This”:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/you-gotta-see-this/id379058646?mt=8. Stupid little stylized panorama camera app for the iphone. Fun. * Office365 beta. The individual apps (word, xl, ppt) are nice and well done. The portal gluing them all together with email and calendar is strange and confusing – two URLs, yet another ID different than my existing ID used at all msft sites, an insistence on downloading software. Chalk it up to beta.

Saving for later reference….

* “Netlib”:http://netlib.org/ * “NIST”:http://gams.nist.gov/ * “Trilinos”:http://trilinos.sandia.gov/ * “PETSc”:http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-as/ * “OpenCL”:http://www.khronos.org * “Nividia OpenCL”:http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/opencl/sdk/website/samples.html * “Apple OpenCL”:http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/search/?q=opencl * “NERSC”:http://www.nersc.gov/nusers/resources/software/. ACTS stuff dead?

Here’s what I’d like to see:

* Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones from Tattoo You LP * Tattoo by Jordin Sparks * I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire by The Ink Spots * Dancing With Myself by Billy Idol, themesong from LA Ink * Last Tattoo by Rehab

If our band was the Stanford band, you know this would happen. But then our band would suck.

Completely totally 100% agree with “this gentleman”:http://blutarsky.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/sometimes-the-ncaa-just-makes-me-want-to-puke/.

I don’t understand how anyone with a straight face can propose to generate yet more incremental revenue off the revenue sport athletes, without proposing anything regarding greater compensation for the players. This proposal will generate more money for media companies, for entertainment companies, for advertisers, for the NCAA, for schools. And $0 for the athletes involved. The athletes don’t even get to have a say in the process.

Nuts.

BTW, al.com is running a nice series on “the treatment of players in division 1 revenue sports”:http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2011/04/college_athletes_rights_who_fi.html. Worth a read. And nice pointes to “oversigning.com”:http://oversigning.com/testing/ and the related site “Parents of Players”:http://www.parentsofplayers.com/.

* “Roundest Object In The World”:http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/02/14/roundest-object-in-the-world-the-avogadro-project/. I could so bowl 300 with one of these. * “Sonic Black Hole”:http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-physicists-sonic-black-hole-lab.html. Bring one of these to your next meeting, watch hilarity ensue. * “Relativistic Statistical Arbitrage”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/04/relativistic-statistical-arbitrage.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29. This is why I would make a crappy day trader, I always forget to include relativistic effects.

* “Cleopatra: A Life”: amazon by Stacy Schiff. Bio of Cleopatra, with a sympathetic eye. A little long but she lived a fascinating life. 3.5 stars on amazon, 3.56 on Goodreads. I’d say 2.5, just drags on a little too much.

* “Deep State”:amazon by Walter Jon Williams. Terrible. No character or setting depth. Plot choppy. At one point I searched for author’s name on Internet, I assumed he had died and someone finished the book from his notes. The first book with the Dagmar character was good, but this is not. Amazon says 4.5 stars, Goodreads says 3.5, I do not get it.

* “Cowboy Angels”:amazon by Paul McAuley. Many-worlds conspiracy tale, reasonably engaging. Amazon says 3.5 stars, Goodreads says 3.3, OK this book is not going to win prizes, but it was engaging and way better than the book above.

* “City of Saints and Madmen”:amazon by Jeff Vandermeer. Hey I learned the word “farctated” from this book which makes it a 5 star book just on that basis. This is a very odd and compelling fantasy tale set in a very strange city. I love books that play with structure, this was awesome. And the author made his invented taxonomy of freshwater squid a compelling read – that is an achievement. 5 stars. Amazon says 4.5 stars, Goodreads says 4.