Dear Prof J.

I posted all these today, but obviously I didn't do all the assignments today. I wrote down my notes at the time I was doing the assignment and then posted them today. In this spirit, there was something that I wanted to post a while back but never got around to, so I'll likewise post that now as well:


Over the years, I’ve seen some of the most exciting Knicks games at Madison Square Garden. I watched as Patrick Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon battled it out in the ’94 finals. I screamed when Hubert Davis hit the three-pointer to put the Knicks ahead, 93-90, with half a minute to play, capping a run in which the hometown team outscored the Hornets by 15 points in 8 minutes. I sang, Go NY Go, because, as the song said, that year was the Knickerbocker’s season. I yelled “Defense” at the top of my lungs, because the Knicks, now down only two games to one and showing some life, had pulled to within one point of the Spurs and needed a defensive stop in the worst way.
Yet, in the last few years, something has left The Garden. The atmosphere just isn’t the same anymore. The crowd is relatively quiet (if not downright thin) through the first three-and-a-half quarters. The players themselves seem to just be going through the motions. Watching a game early last season, I got the feeling that I cared more about the outcome of the game than the players did. The Knicks don’t hustle anymore, they don’t show grit anymore, they don’t do anything that made them so popular back in the nineties.
And why should they? The regular season means nothing. More than half of the teams get into the playoffs, including teams with sub .500 records. And as the Knicks showed a few years ago, an eighth seed can win the conference, so playoff positioning doesn’t matter, either.
Yet, the luster isn’t just missing from the regular season. The Knicks, and indeed their fans, as well, showed a lackluster effort in their first-round ouster at the hands of the Raptors last year. There were as many empty seats as occupied ones during the pre-game introductions, and the crowd noise was so feeble that the music drowned it out. This was not as I remembered it from seasons past.
A year ago I wrote an article about how much the Knicks had lost when they traded away John Starks and Charles Oakley. The Knicks would miss the fire that those players brought to each and every game, I wrote. And yet, it seems today, they have lost much more. They lost their identity. Not just by losing Starks and Oakley, but also Ewing, Davis, Derek Harper, Anthony Mason, Greg Anthony, Xavier McDaniel, and so many other names that fans, in ecstasy, used to sing along with Mike Walczwsky. We watched these players blossom. We watched the very same players floundering under Stu Jackson and John MacLeod flourish under Pat Riley. We watched them mature, grow into the league. Over the years, we could perhaps stand to watch a few replacements, but now the entire team has been turned over. At the end of the day, it seems, fans want to root for people, not uniforms, and the Knicks have not provided that for us.
And so it has come to pass that I have completely lost interest in the Knicks. The game, to me, has become too monotonous to enjoy, the players too hard to root for. It seems like a telling sign that none of the reporters who cover the Knicks can bear to root for that team – a rarity in sports journalism. My distaste for this Knicks team, and my waning interest in the sport in general has make the NBA my least favorite professional sport (I still love the college game), behind baseball, football, and hockey.
And that’s why I passed up two free tickets to this Tuesday’s Knicks game against Michael Jordan’s Wizards.
Sure, I would have enjoyed it. But only for the historical perspective of being at Jordan’s first game back. It would not have been because I would have enjoyed the game being played any more than beforehand. In fact, I would only have gone for reasons other than the game itself – you couldn’t drag me out to see a Knicks/ Wizards game otherwise. So I felt it would be hypocritical of me to attend the game when somebody else could be enjoying it much more.
Some people are going to say that I’m crazy, that I’ve lost my mind. Other people might say that I’m principled. I’m just thinking ahead to the future, when one of my readers has an extra pair of tickets to a Mets game, and realizes that nobody would enjoy the game more than I…

"Cell Yell" is a funny concept. People really do yell on the cell phone. But, we have to take the good with the bad. Just last week I left my car lights on and had to call AAA from my cell phone. Then I called home to tell them I was going to be late. And my grandmother, who lives in Belle Harbor (where the plane crash was) called my parents from her cell phone to say that she was stranded at Waldbaum's after the crash. They came to pick her up, and when they got there they called her cell phone to designate a place to meet. So, cell phones do have their benefits.

Chapter 5 was pretty basic, dealing with the periphirals on a computer. Not so new, not so interesting. Hey, they can't all be winners!

I was recently at a party with co-workers who are not Jewish, and don't really know what's going on in the middle east, and they actually echoed the view that the US was attacked because of it's stance on Israel. Simply put, it's an ignorant opinion. Anyone who knows a few basic facts understands that. In fact (and this is the short, short version), one could show that it is more likely that the reverse is true - that the Arabs hate Israel because of America and it's Western Ideals.

Anyway, Chapter 9 deals with using computers as a communications tool. Instant messenges, email, fax, voicemail are all examples. Video conferencing is a very interesting way that companies who are spread out can communicate.

Chapter 4 gave me a better understanding of how a computer works. I knew some, but very little of this information beforehand. The new terms and concepts were very interesting, but I can see how they get very complicated very quickly.

The L.A. Times article surprised me. I was not expecting to see that so many people found time to write about 9/11. Those who love near ground zero gave very terrifying, if not saddening accounts of the tragedy.

I found the chapter illuminating and helpful, in that it separated each area of the software. It taught the basics well, and showed me new tools that I was not aware of. I think that the spreadsheets and graphs section was most useful, and that will help me in the future.

The blog has gone a long way since its creation by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. I look forward to using blogger as a reference tool in the future, since I know that I can find articles posted (complete with rebuttals), as well as lists of certain links to Web sites that people find interesting.

Blog can also be used by those who want to express themselves online, and those who want to keep a journal.