I got turned on to this book about a year ago via review on si.com.  I drug my feet a little bit and kinda forgot about it until football season was over and I was looking for something to fill some time.  I ordered a few books from amazon, the autobiography’s of both magic and bird, gang leader for a day and When March Went Mad.  I’ve only finished one so far.

WMWM is a telling of the events that lead up to magic and bird meeting in the ‘79 NCAA national title game.  It tells some about how both players got there, the personalities of each, some about the teammates around them and a bit about the coaches and schools.  I thought the idea of this book was going to be an illustration of how this one game acted as a catapult for college basketball’s popularity.  After reading the book you gain an understanding of how this game was important, but it was just one of several things that helped boost college basketball’s popularity.  The thing that is difficult for us today to get our head around is how these guys remained hidden from the spot light for so long.  Today, we know about the stars damn near at conception.  It’s difficult for me to comprehend the lack of information that was available in the 80’s to mid 90’s.  Even growing up in that time I can’t get my head around what it was like before the information super highway.  I think if you remove Magic and Bird from college basketball it would have still gained popularity, but maybe it would have been delayed until the next superstar match-up (I don’t know when that was).  With how technology was delivering media to the masses though, the popularity explosion was inevitable.

I thought this book was very heavy on the Bird side of the story and rather light on the Magic side.  Maybe someone could look over it and say it was a pretty even mix, but that’s just the feeling I got while I was reading it.  Reading how both these guys moved up into their super-stardom was quit entertaining.  I can remember watching these two in the mid 80’s and idolizing Magic.  Being a young farm kid, I didn’t get to see any games besides what NBC televised on Sundays…and then whatever playoff games were on.  I didn’t read any stories about them or get any kind of feeling from their personality at all beyond what I saw on the basketball court.  Reading through this book has let me in on some things that were pretty interesting.  I never knew bird had a daughter from his first marriage…I didn’t know he was married and divorced before college.  I hadn’t realized he was drafted by the Celtics and delayed a year from entering the NBA.  Other things about his personality I found interesting as well. Magic, on the other hand, played out in the book just the way I thought he would.  He always seemed very up front about who he was and what kind of personality he has.  Unless the book is skewed…which I can’t possibly know.  Both, clearly, are winners.

The game itself wasn’t very interesting, the Spartans handled IU fairly easily.  Bird was way off his game, turning in his worse performance of the year.  He had a busted thumb through the tournament that affected him a bit and fatigue was a big factor.  Getting to the game was the interesting part of the book.  IU had an undefeated season going on while the Spartans struggled quite a bit.  Both Magic and Bird were mostly recognized as decent players but Bird wasn’t given credit till late in the year for how good he really was.  Things like that still happen today.  Sportscasters devalue a guy based on the school he attends and their perceived lack of a solid schedule.  The Spartans were hampered by their coach not handling them quite right and trying to dial in the proper game plan and lineup.

While the story of the players was very interesting, what really struck me in the book was the development of the NCAA T.V. deals after the game.  NBC pissed away their chance to be the dominate NCAA network.  They hired a president that didn’t value college sports, or sports at all, and basically insulted the NCAA with what he offered to pay them for the tournament.  That really opened the door for CBS who had the foresight to help the NCAA develop the tournament into what it has become today.  They promised them a dedicated set like what they had on their NFL program.  They offered to highly promote the tournament and televise a set number of games on the weekends and they even convinced the NCAA to do a selection show the Sunday before the tournament starts…all of which people still gobble up today.  Add to that, ESPN just getting fired up and planning to build itself largely on college basketball…and you have some pretty attractive T.V. deals.

If you’re interested in college basketball or Magic and Bird it’s worth reading.  You can pick it up for less than 10 bucks off Amazon.  It’s 275 pages of simplistic reading.

I have a couple other books to finish up, then I’ll be attacking “when the game was ours”.  It’s another Magic/Bird book that talks about their professional careers.

There is an interesting little app for the iPhone and Blackberry called Kobo (shortcovers).  It is apparently an ebook reader for the respective platforms.  I downloaded it but haven’t had any time to monkey with it yet.  Some of the books are free and it looks like a lot of the ones you have to pay for are around 10 bucks.  That seems a little high to me, if you can get a paper book for 5-7 bucks, shouldn’t digital be 3-4 bucks?

There was a review of it on the gadget lab site:

Kobo International E-Book Store Launches: Why Amazon Should Be Afraid

• By Charlie Sorrel
• December 16, 2009  |
• 10:52 am  |
• Categories: Media Players

There is little doubt that electronic books have gone mainstream. The question now is, in just which direction will the market go? It’s possible that the Kindle will do what Apple and the iPod did for music, essentially owning the market. Or things could split open, with many sellers competing on an open platform. Kobo is betting on the latter.

Kobo is a rebranded Shortcovers, which sells e-books that can be read on almost any device, from Macs and PCs to the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Palm Pre and any e-reader that can work with EPUB-format books, such as the Barnes & Noble Nook or the Sony Reader. Notably, the Kindle is absent from the list.

Shortcovers has been selling e-books for a while, but the rebranding to Kobo marks the first serious alternative to the Kindle as a platform. Kobo has teamed up with Borders, REDgroup Retail and Instant Fame, which to you and me means that the books are available almost worldwide, in the United States, Canada, the EU, the U.K., Australia and the Asia Pacific region. In fact, Borders will be incorporating Kobo into its store later next year. Kobo is also adding 1.8 million public-domain books from the Internet Archive.

To accompany the launch, there are a slew of new applications. I tried out the new iPhone app, which is, like the Shortcovers app before it, free. You log in with your existing Shortcovers ID and from there you can browse, sample and buy books.

Apart from a name change, Kobo has some new features. Now you can browse by category, choose from a new Top-50 e-books list, New York Times bestsellers, Oprah’s book-club picks and more. The app also has recommended reading lists (right now there is a “Season’s Readings” section, and a splendid “Canadian, eh” list) and a better search function.

It’s very easy to browse, and the Kobo app puts Amazon’s rushed-out Kindle for iPhone application to shame. It’s all done with full artwork for covers, and usually you can read the first chapter of a book (although a lot of the time, you only get to read the end-matter and not any actual content). Reading books is equally elegant, and greatly cleaned-up since the original Shortcovers app. Page turning is animated and actually looks like paper pages flipping.

But when you come to make a purchase, things go slightly awry. By now, most of us are used to in-app purchases on the iPhone, so getting bounced out of Kobo and tossed into a credit card form in Safari is an annoying shock. Once you have laboriously input your details, you are sent back to the Kobo app where your book is waiting for you. It would be more convenient if Kobo took advantage of the iTunes App Store’s ability to complete purchases within the app, with billing handled by Apple.

Subsequent transactions go smoother, and you only need to input your password to buy (it still requires a round-trip to Safari, though).

This reliance on Safari is, we assume, both a way to get around Apple’s 30 percent cut and also to make the experience the same across platforms. And speaking of platforms, only the iPhone and Blackberry have the updated applications so far, with the rest “coming soon.”

Kobo is so far the best and most comprehensive service we have used to buy and read books, especially for non-U.S. residents. It is still flawed, and it is a royal pain that Kindle won’t support EPUB books. But with its platform-agnostic approach, huge catalog and new heavyweight partners, we expect to see Kobo grow fast.

In fact, I’m pretty certain that my next e-book reader will not be a Kindle.

World, Meet Kobo! [Kobo blog]

Kobo Product page [Kobo]

Kobo for iPhone [iTunes]

boooorrrrrrrriiiiiinnnnnnnnnnggggggggg….till the end.  These books must be 1k pages or so a piece…and could probably be cut down to 1/2 that.  There is so much description that it gets old.  Part of what I like best about books is that it leaves a lot of the imagination of a scene to the reader.  Jordan describes everything in such detail that there is very little room for your own interpretation of what’s going on.  At one point of this book he went on for what must have been 2 pages about what some guard was thinking about…his family…something or other, the point of which was that he lost focus and someone snuck by him.  While it’s nice to know that a guard’s mind was wandering…I didn’t need to know 2 pages worth of what he was thinking…knowing his attention wavered is sufficient.

Something I’m not a huge fan of in this series is the transformation of Rand (the dragon reborn) into this great general with a huge level of arrogance.  In the beginning he is a humble farm boy…but his attitude to the world and how to manage his “subjects” changes so rapidly.  In all of Jordan’s over explaining, this is something that I don’t feel is explored enough.  We hear from all the characters how much Rand has changed, and how he is more and more arrogant, but we don’t get a feeling of where that change is coming from.  He has this grand plan he’s trying to work to battle the forces of evil…but we get no real foundation for this plan or what makes him think it will work.  Given the way things are setting up for them, we could understand if these thoughts and these strategic moves are coming from the voices of the past…but we never really get that much.  It’s just farm boy one day, General the next.  It seems like there is far more time spent developing the other characters and not enough developing the main character.

I found out recently that what was suppose to be the final book was split into three more volumes.  Hopefully that will be the “end” of this series.  While I doubt this series will really end, it would be nice if there was some resolution to the current plot.  This series as well as the sword of truth series are the reasons I will never start reading/listening to a book series that isn’t “completed” again.

I’m looking for something to do as I head up in the hills for a week or so here shortly.  With my new diet and my need to avoid drinking, I’m going to need to find something to keep me busy.  Also, I have always had a problem with boredom while out in the field.  I am able to handle it for about an hour and a half or so, but after that…I find it almost impossible to sit in one place.  An hour and 1/2 sounds like quite a while, but if I could extend that to about 3hrs or so I’d be more satisfied.

I’ve been searching a bit for a few books to take up with me.  The problem with that is I don’t know exactly what I like.  I’m a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, but it’s nice to break out of the mold a bit.  I’ll go bum around Barnes and Noble this weekend and see if I find anything interesting.  I’m not terribly optimistic though.  Something that would work quite well IMO is audio books.  If I try reading in the field, there is an obvious problem with that…but if I have a head set on the only sense I’m affecting is my hearing.  I’m not sure what it is about sitting in the bush, but when I do my ears start ringing something fierce.  I’m not sure if it’s the lack of sound, strain on my ears or a combination of both.  Beyond that, anything you do hear seems so magnified…squirrels playing in the leaves is ridiculously loud.  Listening to something might actually help out a bit with my comfort level and will surely alleviate my boredom.

I was listening to the WoT books at work, and from the looks of the reviews from this blog I got quit after book 5 due to extreme boredom with the series.  One of the issues not related to the book is that I listen to the previous days Lex and Terry podcast and that is far more interesting to me as it’s designed for a short attention span and some quick hit humor.  In the bush I won’t have access to these downloads so I should be able to get back into the books.  I started up with this series again for a couple of reasons.  They are suppose to be pretty good, and I thought that me being a fantasy geek was off my rocker for not being interested in them.  Also, the author dying brought me back into the series.  I had read that he had notes for the final book and some writing done.  I read that they brought in Brandon Sanderson to finish the series.  What pissed me off to no end is that the final battle which was envisioned by Jordan to be one book has now been broken up into 3 volumes.  IMO this is a new guy coming in, seeing a cash cow and making some money off of it.  It takes a series that I looked forward to having an ending in 2009 out to having an ending in 2011…unless it goes longer.  I hate reading a series that doesn’t have an ending.  I like a complete story and this is the fiasco that has made me decide to never pick up a series until the final chapter in the overall arc is written.

I have the audio books for this up through book 11.  The remaining books I have to listen to (6-11) take up about 10 gigs.  My walkman only holds 8 gig…you see my problem.  I’m not sure how many hours each book would take to listen to, but it is conceivable that I would have enough free time to listen to them all.  I’m going to have to bring a laptop with that has the books loaded on it the way it looks.  I should be able to bring the t21 along for this task, but I’ll need to reload that before I go (fun with beta os’s!).  It’s for cases like this that I would like to have a larger mp3 player.  Looks like 30 gig would be the optimal spot for me.  I should have thought about things like this before I bought this one.  That might have been enough to push me towards an iPod.