I’m looking forward to the start of the NBA season tonight.  The Lakers are the one sports team that I’m not a fairweather fan of.  Probably has to do with attending games at the Great Western Forum when I was a kid and growing up with them.

It’s nice that the Lakers are so strong again.  Last year, when they started 17-2, there was talk of eclipsing the Chicago Bulls’ improbable 72-10 record in 1995-96.  But they “only” ended up with 68 wins despite having Andrew Bynum go down in January and being pretty much out of commission the rest of the year.

This year, with the addition of Ron Artest, Bynum looking strong in the pre-season, and the Lakers coming off a dominant playoff run that culminated in the championship, the expectations are even higher.  As you’d expect, there’s again talk of that inhuman 72-10 record (LAT).

Winning 6 additional games to end up at 73-9 seems easy enough — heh — but I’m not going to make any predictions at where they’ll end up.  A key injury could be the difference between 50, 60 or 70 wins.  (I can’t believe I’m talking about 60 and 70 wins so casually.)  But that’s what the last 30 years of Lakers basketball has done to this city — nothing short of a championship is considered a successful season by LA fans.

Here’s a video of the 1987 ring ceremony presided over by Chick Hearn.  Chick looks so young here — he’s definitely missed. (via LAT Lakers Blog)

Speaking of LA’s basketball expectations, there’s the flip side. The Clippers have the #1 pick in Blake Griffin and a bona fide star in Baron Davis, but nobody cares about that team.  All expectations are that they will ruin the careers of those guys and have an early summer vacation yet again.  It’s striking the difference in expectations between the two LA teams who play in the same arena.

Screenshot of U2 webcast on YouTube

There were so many things right with the U2 live webcast on YouTube tonight that I have hope for the world again.  If you didn’t get a chance to see the webcast, click on the screenshot over there on the right — it’s been annotated with the things that struck me.

Some thoughts:

1. How many albums do you think U2 sold tonight?

Based on the Twitter stream at #u2webcast, it looks like it was truly a worldwide audience.

Brilliant example of leveraging the Internet to gain more fans and sell more albums.  See, smart musicians in conjunction with smart organizations show us that the Internet is tool that is good for music.  (Are you paying attention RIAA?)

I wonder what were YouTube’s share of the benefits.  They must have spent a bunch on bandwidth.

2. Google is still a smart company.

Kudos to YouTube/Google for putting the Twitter stream front and center on the webcast page.  They could have easily left out Twitter and just let YouTube commenters have the forum, but I’m sure they got much more exposure and reach by putting Twitter ahead of the YouTube comments.

3. On a personal note, this webcast brought back memories of my introduction to U2 via Achtung Baby, the first time I listened to Joshua Tree (and then listening to it over and over again), the anticipation (and honestly, slight disappointment) of Zooropa, and the U2 concert I went to at Staples Center years ago.  Happy memories.

That U2 concert is easily in the top 2 live concerts of my life. The other was Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl.  I think U2 puts on a better show, but the Radiohead concert was downright transcendent for me (probably because of the weed).

I’m a fan of the Bravo show Top Chef.

Just discovered that head judge Tom Colicchio has a blog about the show and posts after each episode. To my surprise and delight, his posts are authentic and insightful, giving us fans something to tie us over until the next episode. Great job Bravo for the show blogs! And great blogging Tom!

Now for some predictions.

My sister has posited in past seasons that you can guess who the eventual winner is based on how often the producers interview the cheftestants (love that word). I’m talking about those short reality TV interviews within the episodes. As for my sister’s theory — maybe. I wonder if anyone has counted up the mini cheftestant interviews to see if the theory is correct. In any case, that theory is in the back of my mind every time the cheftestants do their reality show interview.

My guess is the final 3 will come down to Bryan, Mike V., and Jen. Kevin and Mike I. are strong candidates too, but don’t see them as strong as the three I’ve picked.

In the beginning, I thought Mike V. was the strongest, then I switched my bet to Bryan. But now, I think Jen is going to be the eventual winner. She seems to be the most consistently exceptional. Plus, she’s got a lot of interview time. ;)

PS: If you haven’t been watching, you can catch a few episodes of Top Chef on Hulu. Unfortunately, Bravo only allows a couple episodes on at a time, and not every episode gets on Hulu. Boo. +1 to Bravo (really, NBC) for the blogs, -1 for the Hulu decision.

I don’t understand this revamping of the search UI by Yahoo.  I’m pretty ambivalent on whether their selling out to Microsoft is a good or bad thing. Yeah, it sucks that the search space is down to two players, but whatever. Yahoo’s never been that great at the engineering side of things.  They are, however, a great content/media company.  They should just embrace their strengths and stop trying to fiddle (unsuccessfully) with the geeky stuff.

My first taste of Drupal was the 4.6 version in 2006.  I very clearly remember running into the flexinode module and thinking “OMG, custom content types!  Woo! That’s exactly what I want in a CMS!”  Haven’t looked back since.

Below are the slides that Dries used to present the State of Drupal at Drupalcon ‘09.  Yeah, it’s from 5 months ago, but I just ran into it and it was entertaining, so I’m sharing it here.

If you’d rather read about the State of Drupal, here’s a writeup from Lullabot of Dries’ talk.

Watching the slideshow is entertaining, even without sound or the actual text for reference.  It very clearly shows the rapid evolution of Drupal and the Drupal community.

I’ve worked in IT for nearly 10 years now.  First as a help desk operator, then a Linux sysadmin, and now a Drupal developer/webmaster.   In that time, I’ve run into a handful of really perplexing problems.  ”Perplexing” meaning after hours (usually, days) of troubleshooting, I can’t figure out why the system is suddenly unstable.

You know those type of problems, right?

The kind that’s so perplexing that you’re sure it’s gotta be a hardware problem, even though your years of admin experience tells you it’s almost never (like 99.999% of the time) a hardware issue.  But you’ve looked at (seemingly) all the possible software causes.

I was just reminded of this recently, and I’m here to remind you:  It’s never a hardware problem.  It’s always a software problem.

PS: If you’re looking for VPS or dedicated server hosting, Rimu Hosting is a great choice.  When they say they have “professional technical support with a personal touch”, they mean it.  Rimu has by far the best support team of the half-dozen hosting companies I’ve worked with. And great support is the only differentiator that matters when choosing a hosting vendor.

So this is what happened today:  idle blog reading, leads to following link in the comments, leads to finding material written 4 years ago, leads to learning lots of new stuff.

I’m finding that this happens more often these days.  Gotta love the blogosphere!

I’ve learned more from idle blog reading in the years after college as I did in the years I spent sitting in those lecture halls at UCLA.

As I read Fred Wilson’s commentary on the Ideal First Round Term Sheet, I was thinking that it’d be nice if there was a “for dummies” type of introduction to the term sheet. A term sheet is the contract between the entrepreneur/company and the investors/VC.  It’s full of jargon that a first-time entrepreneur, who is busy building a company, is probably not familiar with.

Wouldn’t you know it, Brad Feld (another VC) has already written a very informative series on Term Sheets.  Here’s the entire series:

1. Price
2. Liquidation Preference
3. Board of Directors
4. Protective Provisions
5. Drag Along
6. Anti-Dilution
7. Pay-to-Play
8. Dividends
9. Redemption Rights
10. Conversion
11. Conditions Precedent to Financing
12. Vesting
13. Information Rights
14. Registration Rights
15. Right of First Refusal
16. Voting Rights
17. Employee Pool
18. Restriction on Sales
19. Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement
20. Co-Sale Agreement
21. Founders Activities
22. Initial Public Offering Shares Purchase
23. No Shop Agreement (also Unilateral or Serial Monogamy)
24. Indemnification
25. Assignment

45% of employers check social networking sites before hiring (NYT)

I’m surprised the number isn’t higher.  An employer is doing themselves a disservice by not checking online for mentions of a potential hire before offering them a job.

The survey mentions social networking sites, but doesn’t say what percentage of hiring manager just do a simple google search.  I wouldn’t specifically go to the social networking sites.  I’d google a potential hire’s name and see what comes up.  Their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles should be on the first page, unless they have a very common name.

One of the commenters on the NYT article says,

Why don’t HR people try doing their JOBS instead of using stupid social media sites to screen candidates?? Spare me. What laziness.

I think the HR people who are doing Internet searches as part of the screening / hiring process are actually doing their job better.

Compete’s July newsletter highlighted the explosive growth of TweetMeme in the last 3 months.

Aggregator site Tweetmeme crushed it in July, ramping traffic by 85% month over month to 11.8MM UVs, suggesting that there is some real value in combing through the noise and offering consumable information.

I’ve been hearing for over a year now that Twitter is the social news killer.  That the future of sites like Digg and Reddit is to succumb to Twitter.

TweetMeme’s rapid growth is the first real evidence I’ve seen of it.  But this evidence is compelling!

TweetMeme provides those retweet buttons that bloggers can embed on posts so readers can quickly RT the link.  TweetMeme also tracks how often the link is retweeted.  On their homepage, they show the hottest links being tweeted.

Looking at the Compete charts below, there are a lot of people are going to tweetmeme.com to find interesting news/links. In the last 6 months, TweetMeme has gone from basically zero to nearly 12 million unique visitors.

(Click the images to see the full size.)

Tweetmeme.com Unique Visitors Last 12 Months

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s compare TweetMeme’s 12m visitors to Digg. They still have a long way to go, but if TweetMeme continues on this trajectory, they could catch Digg in 6 months.

Tweetmeme.com vs Digg.com Unique Visitors

Just for kicks, let’s compare some other social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Delicious and Stumble.

The Reddit and Stumble lines closely overlap. (I don’t know if Compete tracks the Stumble toolbar. Probably not. These numbers look way too low.)

Look at how TweetMeme has already surpassed Reddit. And it’s growing like crazy and the other social news sites are staying relatively flat.

TweetMeme vs Digg vs Delicious vs Reddit vs StumbleUpon