Why I Love Watching The Detroit Pistons

Last year, I literally ran out of things to talk to my girlfriend about. Eventually Chris Rock was right, you can run out of conversation once you have been with the same person for so long. At the same time, I needed to get out and do something outside besides the usual yard work that I detest, and since you really don’t need a partner or expensive equipment, to play basketball, I started shooting free-throws at the local school court, while my kids ran around in the park area. Basketball is a young man’s sport. It requires a lot of jumping, running, and most of all what a lot of NBA announcers refer to as “athleticism”. I’m not known for any of these, but I can shoot baskets I thought at least. After some pointers and plenty of practice during the summer months, you tend to appreciate what basketball players do on the court.

Playing the game in real life is of course what it is all about, but watching elite players like Tracy McGrady is something which started to grow on me. I don’t ever see myself ever dunking like Shaq or Ben Wallace, but I do think that with practice you can develop a decent jump shot, nothing that compares with Dirk, but I sure wish I had his wrists. Getting the ball to arc and spin is the secret to great shooting.

This brings me of course to the Detroit Pistons which are my favorite team to watch at the moment. Not only do the Pistons represent everything that an average guy would like to be, meaning a champion player, but they also are entertaining to watch, and that is what the NBA is really about. It’s about putting on a very entertaining game that fans can watch and get into. Unlike other teams, Detroit does not have superstars like Shaq that can make their game easier, nope they have to work to win their games, by having every player put in his best efforts. This makes the Pistons one of the best team oriented teams in the NBA, of course it is even more interesting that their primary game is defense oriented, cause that means a lot of their opponents get pretty pissed off at them sometimes.

My favorite Piston is Prince. He is tall and thin, but this guy can defend some of the most elite players in the league cause of his long arms. His dunking and fast breaks are also improving this year and it’s always fun to see an unselfish player get his points in.

Since I have a couple of kids of my own, I feel that Rasheed Wallace is probably the Piston I can most identify with. I could see myself talking about my kids with Rasheed over dinner and I’m sure we would get along fine. It’s not that Rasheed is a bad boy, it’s that he’s too honest, probably one of the few players in the league that does not hold back on the court, nor in the press.

Then there’s Ben Wallace, the big man who blocks and rebounds off the glass. All I can say about Ben is that I would be proud to have my kid grow up and be half the player that Ben is. Big Ben has worked for everything he’s gotten and that is something I want my kid to learn.

Probably the most criticized players are Richard Hamilton and Chauncy Billups, cause they are the guards who have to score big numbers on a team that is primarily known for their defensive game and not their scoring. That is a lot of pressure for them, but Hamilton is the quickness and Billups is the clutch shooter for the team, and if Prince and Rasheed have a good game, the Pistons are unstoppable.

Netflix Review

Sometime during the holidays in 2004, I got fed up with the lack of good television and the dvd rentals at my local Hollywood Video no longer satisfied me, I started to look at Netflix. If you don’t know by now, Netflix is a rental service that delivers to your door via the good old US Postal Service. For $18 a month you can rent out 3 rental dvds at a time. You order the dvds through their website at Netflix.com.

On the website, you create an account and then set it up to bill directly to your credit card or checking account. You can then try the service for a couple of weeks for free and then pay the $18 after the 14 day trial is up. Once you have an account, you can add your movies to your queue by clicking on the ones you want. The site features a short description for every dvd and also user submitted reviews. You can submit reviews for dvds you have rented and after an initial editorial review they too will show up for the dvd you reviewed. You can also rate a movie using a 5 star rating system, by clicking on the number of stars you think a dvd deserves.

Your personal queue can hold as many movies as you like. I think Netflix offers around 25,000 dvds. I usually have about 30 in my queue, but many Netflix users have many more in their queue. You can also setup different profiles now for each account, in my case, the girlfriend can have her own profile with her own queue. You can set it up so that one profile rents one dvd, and the other rents the other two. The other feature which Netflix just added are Friends. This allows you to see what your friend has reviewed.

I have only had one problem with the service and it was that their website was not working for one morning, when I was adding selections to my queue.

As for the dvd delivery times, they range from two to three days. Most selections are shipped out the next day, after they receive my last dvd. Supposedly they are suppose to ship the same day, but one day delay in shipping seems to be pretty standard for me.

I usually don’t use Netflix for latest releases, instead I use Netflix for those hard to find dvds that I can never find at Hollywood Video, like the NBA at 50 dvd and some animation dvds which I never see at Best Buy.

Overall I like the service a lot and was planning on cancelling it after a month, but now I am convinced that the hour I sometimes waste by driving to the video store, looking at the same old selections while I’m there, and then driving back are definitely worth more than $18 a month, so I’ve decided to keep the service and save myself a lot of time in the process.

Back In Black

I put together a new theme design for Olaguez.net. It’s black and white, and totally based off of one of Apple’s hardware pages. Over the coming days, I start digging more into the CSS and change some font styles, but overall the graphics are done.

There really are not much in the way of WordPress 2.0 themes and the new Kubrick2 is still a work in progress.