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Celtics injuries? Kobe Bryant’s shooting? Nah, tech’s the real story at NBA Finals | NetworkWorld.com Community

Having just bought a set of four tickets in the bleachers for the 6/11 Sox game against the Orioles, I saw this NetworkWorld story (thanks to Uncle Fester) pointing out the role Lenovo’s ThinkPads play behind the scenes in the NBA. Having been a fierce Celtics fan in the halycon days of the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s, I would dearly love to see the Celts vanquish the Lakers on the home court parquet. So where’s my tickets?

Lenovo is a primary sponsor of the NBA. Indeed, the NBA statisticians cooked up a stat — the Lenovo Stat – that predicts the best combination of a team’s players against another team’s best set. Here’s what the NetworkWorld reporter saw:

“The adventure actually started on Wednesday, when I was in Boston at a tech conference listening to a market watcher spew out numbers on virtualization and data centers and later squirming through a talk by an open source enthusiast whose presentation software or hardware was on fritz. I was momentarily distracted from the latter presentation when I saw an email invitation pop into my inbox from Lenovo to check out the big role its technology is playing at this year’s NBA Finals. A colleague says I must have pulled a muscle I replied to the email so fast.

While I have to confess I’ve never met with Lenovo during my two decades at Network World, checking out the company’s goods at Game 1 between the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers seemed like as good a time as any. Though as it turns out, I actually didn’t meet with anyone from Lenovo (so no, their execs weren’t buttering me up in a luxury box to encourage me to write something).

It was the NBA’s and Celtics’ top techies who showed a few other tech editors and myself around “the digital center of the NBA,” including a handful of laptops used to handle everything from game stats to clock starts/stops and video replays, plus a pretty typical wiring closet deep in the bowels of the TD Banknorth Garden. Meanwhile, sports reporters from ESPN buzzed around the players and coaches, and wacky DJs tried to out-scream each other.”

I am easily amused, but I was messing around with a boring FlipCam video of some traffic in Bengaluru shot last night (or was it the night before?) and I noticed one can now embed annotations in one’s videos.

I bet I could rent a car and dominate Bangalorean traffic, no one is worse that a Boston driver.

Back from Bangalore, taking Monday off to get some recovery in and perhaps seek a chiropractor to go after the torn serratus muscle in my back that makes me feel like a javelin target every time I sneeze. Tuesday through Friday in Cotuit, then Raleigh next week for meetings and that summer climate I miss so much (John Battelle coming to talk to the marketing teams about conversational marketing).

As soon as I get to the Cape, it’s the work out of the day, a green salad, and maybe a twilight expedition for a bluefish or two. Bengaluru was excellent this trip – very productive meeting with our emerging market teams, the stuff that made the company so cool to begin with, now to make it happen.

David Hill is the #19 Most Influential Person in Mobile Technology

Some linkage to one of my favorite peers at Lenovo, David Hill. This from laptopmag.com.

“In mobile technology, slim and light is a grail that’s forever receding, because what was last year’s impossibly trim is today’s status quo. This year, Lenovo has set the pace. Hill is the chief designer behind the ThinkPad X300, a laptop that pushes the envelope by literally fitting into it, just like Apple’s MacBook Air. A black yin to Apple’s yang, Hill’s creative risk-taking paved the way to a machine that packs more of the punch business users demand (removable battery, optical drive, built-in mobile broadband) into a remarkably compact and lightweight chassis, setting a new target for the competition.”

Was searching for the Paul Theroux reference to the Turd World given my current incontinent condition of amoebic dysentery and crossed legs in an all day meeting in Fungalore induced by something nasty I imbibed the night before …. and I found my first  blog.

It was a blogger blog written in 2002 when I was stranded in Switzerland working for a fricking villian right out of James Bond.

I was a lot more obscene and just as aggrevated  by airlines as I am today.

Every profession has its jargon. I just learned about retail point of sale “assets” known as wobblers and danglers. I think I know what they are, I just wonder if they are related the way stalagmites and stalagtites are ….

Nice shot by Brian Murphy on Flickr.

Just landed at the new Bangalore airport which is vast improvement over the old one, but a lot further away from the city center. Midnight arrivals are a fact of life when flying into India, but the car ride into the city was an excellent white-knuckler. India doesn’t have superhighways — but there is a really nice six lane one that runs for about ten kilometers out of the airport, before reverting to the old way of doing things.

That means some cosmic speed bumps laid down at random with a skull and cross-bones sign next to them, lots of trucks and construction equipment navigating at snail speed with no lights, weird roadside shrines, dogs tempting the fates, those buzzing little three wheeler black and yellow death cabs for cutie ….

I got to the hotel and they stamped my forehead with a red dot, hustled me to my room, and now I get to blog against the clock having signed up for a grand total of 30 minutes.

Home on Saturday.

Tom Doctoroff: My Olympic Torch Run: Planning, Propaganda and Passion – Politics on The Huffington Post
Good piece by JWT’s Tom Doctoroff on carrying the Olympic torch in China:

“A few days ago, I ran 100 meters in Minghan, an outlying industrial district of Shanghai and home to one of Jiaotong University’s five campuses. It was difficult not to be moved by the participants’ emotional release and spectators’ unity of ambition. Despite China’s awkward progress on many issues of concern to Westerners, its resolve to confront operatic challenges – from natural disaster to economic crisis – is inspiring. That’s what the Torch Run was ultimately about.”

Twitter – John Battelle’s Searchblog

“I am very, very tired of the ouroborosphere’s take on Twitter. It’s time for the service to either fish or get off the pot, so to speak. And with $15mm in the door, it’s obvious which way it has to go.”

Echo chamber, reflecting pool — whatever you want to call the closed-terrarium of social media pundits that tweet and post and opine all day long about tweeting, posting, and opining — Battelle nails it best with “Ouroborosphere.”

And trolling for Yanks tickets on Twitter? That’s like looking for supermodels at a sardine cannery.

1. I am off to Bangalore tomorrow night. Lufthansa business class through Frankfurt. The whole ordeal always remind me on 2001: A Space Odyssey and the hibernation pods – I am seriously into ear plugs, noise cancelling headphones, eye patches and massive overdoses of Restoril washed down with post-takeoff scotch. Stewards have had to slap me awake on approach to the landing I get so numbed out. Back next Saturday.
2. I wonder about people who use twitter on weekends. I think I need to unfollow about six people who seriously get under my skin and just annoy the snot out of me.
3. I need to find Manny Ramirez’s 500^th homerun from last night’s game against the Orioles and watch it.
4. I received seasons one and two of The Wire for birthday presents and wonder why I didn’t get into it the first time around. Seal of approval for me is the involvement of my favorite crime writer, George Pellecanos.
5. Reading list:
   1. The Night Gardener, Pellecanos
   2. The Pequots in Southern New England, Hauptman and Wherry
   3. Around the World Singlehanded, Pidgeon
   4. Flyfishing for Bonefish, Brown
   5. Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, Rippetoe & Kilgore
6. CrossFit remains a daily feature of my athletic life. I am slowing getting into fierce shape with my eyes on a single goal come next February. I won’t talk about that, as I am in Nike-mode and “just doing it.”
7. I am not fishing enough this spring. Today perhaps.
8. I can’t garden enough because May was a cold washout.
9. I need to go paint my boat.
10. I think I am in China for the last few days of July and most of August
11. I need to write a big post updating Lenovo’s sponsorship of the Summer Games.
    1. http://summergames.lenovo.com
    2. Joe Nocera has a good piece on the value of Olympic sponsorships in the sports supplement (magazine thing) in today’s NYT
    3. Yes, I saw the front page piece on the Chinese Olympic Rowing team. Pretty impressive. I would love to get an invite to watch a practice at their center in South China. The Chinese have been surprising people the past two seasons as they are not a traditional force in elite rowing.
12. I need an awesome camera for the Olympics and need to start building my portable reporting kit for blogging my coverage of the Games. I’m thinking a Lenovo Y510 IdeaPad (I’d go Thinkpad X300 but they lack SD slots which are crucial for digital camera work), a nice SLR Nikon with an 18:200 lens, FlipCam, and perhaps a digital audio recorder and mic if I want to do any podcasting. I really want to nail the package I tote around – from batteries to knapsack.