Dave's Thoughts of the Day: November 1st

Of all the months out of the year, October simply went the fastest.  I blinked, and it was gone!    What a tremendous sports month it was, at least in football.

Now we have a great weekend ahead.  I haven't decided yet what to do with the LOCKS.   I could do LOCKS today but normally I only do that if I want to predict a game that evening.  WELL!   Chargers vs Chiefs ain't it!  There's one giant point spread I have to jump on, and I'll reveal what it is in LOCKS.  If you heard the podcast last night, I bet you already know what it is.  Wink wink, nudge nudge.

"How do you like me now?'  This is apparently a new meme.  For example, you say a lot of mumbo jumbo and then at the end you go "How do you like me now?!"   It's all the rage!

One new trend I noticed in fashion was women who wear shorts with the pockets coming out from the shorts.  Basically they're pants that are cut off at the short level but leaving in the pockets... so you get these pockets hanging out.  It looks very clunky.   This is "fashion" in 2012.

In hi-fi, wobbly furniture is a huge pet peeve.  I tried too hard to get a TV stand and should have put more emphasis on its rigidness.   I went over to Redondo Beach the other night to pick up a stand for 20 bucks.  I use a TV stand because it's wider than a typical audio rack, ergo, you can put more things on it.   Another reason for it is because TV stands are easier to find on craigslist.  Anyway, I bring that baby home, it looks pretty nice, but the damn thing is way too wobbly!  When I shake it, everything rattles, and that's bad news for a record turntable.   Could not believe it!   Now I have to work out a plan to exchange this for something else.  But how will I get rid of the TV stand?

Now I'm resigned to finding a new stand of some sort.   Ironically the end table I was using for the record player was perfect.  I never appreciated that in all these years.  It's really heavy, and when I shake it, there's barely 10% of the vibration the TV stand had.   Perhaps all I need is another end table... and you can bet there's tons of end tables in the Los Angeles Area!

Oh!  I went to my local Vons last night, got the fried chicken, and it was perfect.   Thank you so much, local old beat up Vons... you all delivered in a big way.  It was delicious.

I rather enjoyed the question about "how much prep I do" for a Dave in the City Podcast.   It was fun to go over my prep work for the show.  It's not enormous but I'm always working towards setting up stats, data, and articles for any topic I plan to do.  Even when people bring up players I didn't plan for, I can usually get a new web browser tab up with baseball-reference or pro-football-reference dot com.

Adding to that, I used to do the entire show on just my desktop computer, back in Santa Barbara.  I didn't have a laptop in those days, so I couldn't use up the slow resources on a web browser.  It was hard to navigate all of that on one screen.  Instead, I would print all the needed articles and stats on paper and refer to them on the podcast.  The system as it is today is far better.  I have a laptop and on its screen I can view chat and stats.   I also use a third screen to monitor the virtual phone switchboard.

The podcast has been wonderful.  It's a lot of fun to do, and it's really grown since we started in December 2008.  We have our best-of show coming up in Mid-November.   It can't be as good as last year's best-of because we simply had such a phenomenal year I don't know how it could have been topped.  However, many great moments are in store and a few gems we may have forgotten about.  Stay tuned.

I went over a week without swimming but tried it again, on my own, yesterday.   I felt good out there, although rusty.   I made two tweaks to my various strokes that could be huge boosts.  First, I started to breathe every third stroke on freestyle.  I had no plan for this whatsoever, but naturally I started swimming and suddenly, I came up once every three.   It felt good and I had the oxygen to sustain, so I decided to stay with it.  My other change was I experimented with breathing EVERY stroke on butterfly.  I wanted to see if it made a difference in my speed.  In workout speed I went 33 seconds across a 25m pool breathing every stroke.   Then I tried it breathing every *other* stroke.  38 seconds.  That's such a huge difference, I'm going to commit to breathe-every-stroke.  I can't figure out why it makes such a big difference, but I'm happy with it.

That's all for now, enjoy your Thursday!