back in business

Ucla is going back to the final four. Our storied basketball program is back in business and returns to its familiar place among the hoops elite. Like enjoying a good wine, I needed to savor the memories of defense and clutch plays before penning my ode to this tournament run.

When the brackets were annouced and Ucla claimed a number 2 seed I knew we would make it to the final four. Getting past Gonzaga was a real test of my faith but these kids came through. We unleashed a suffocating defense and Coach Howland managed the game to perfection.

Thanks to streaming video from march madness on demand, I replayed the clutch Hollins free throws and the ensuing steal to find some great coaching nuggets. After the free throws, Hollins was quickly subbed out for a quicker Collison. Collison's responsibility was to cover deep which freed Mbah a Moute to cover the player inbounding the ball and allowed Bozeman to switch over to Batista. The ball was inbounded to Morrison who made a great pass to Batista. Batista was quickly swarmed by Farmar and Bozeman was able to knock the ball loose. Howland was in the game the entire time..perhaps it was coincidence that the play turned out the way it did, or maybe it's just because the guy can flat out coach.

It's so great to see the maturation of the players and the team's level of playthis past season. Ryan Hollins just became a millionaire by his play in this tournament alone. It's great to watch and I'm looking forward to this weekend's game.

espn's redesign + my first homepage

Espn's front page has gone through another design iteration. This is how it used to look. It was only a matter of time since they've been testing a similar look on their sport specific homepages. I like it a lot..check it out when you get a chance...the days of a left navigation bar are slowly fading away. Since it's been eliminated, more space is available for content. The readability of the top story and headlines, the main content I go to the site for, are much easier to read because of the extra space and size. On the tech side, I know they were early adopters of css and xhtml so I'm guessing that this design change wasn't as difficult as the first time they went xhtml and css.

My approach to css is quite pragmatic. I use it whenever possible but If I have to employ too many hacks to get it to look right in a certain browser, I will ditch it for a universal solution like using tables for layout. In fact, when I coded up the test score and census display for work, I went with tables because I needed total confidence that the achievement pages would render correctly for older browsers and drawing complex ,vertical bar charts whose display is CSS based is impossible without hacks.

on a separate note, I found my old college webpage while looking at the early espn pages. be sure to check out the random quote that appears on the bottom of the page.

Politcal spin in today's classrooms more common than the freshman 15?

I came across the most absurb topic today while perusing sfgate.com: "Radical" UCLA professors targeted by alumni group" The gist of the article is that some alumni group is encouraging current students to document politically biased salvos during lecture time in the form of a monetary finder's fee. I'm not really against students who want to make an extra buck in this manner since I too was once a poor, ramen eating UCLA bruin, hence robobruin, I'm more against corporations/individuals who deem it necessary to patrol a professor's political views.

This is college. Students are exposed to much greater ills than a professor spending a bit too much time on Bush and the war in Iraq. Heck, Jon Stewart probably has a greater influence and a more captivating presence on a college student's political views than his professor. We aren't talking about a bunch of impressionable kids like in Dead Poet's Society. Let's give UCLA students some credit here...these are some of the smartest young adults in the country and they definitely can differentiate textbook analysis and political slant during a lecture.

Let's say the argument is not whether a professor is inculcating a student with his political views but rather that he's just wasting time talking about an irrelevant subject. I checked out some of the targeted professors and they mostly teach political/social science/law classes. Are you telling me that current political affairs are off topic? Isn't there great debate about the legality of guantanamo bay or wiretapping US citizens by way of the Patriot Act? If the professor is just there to repeat what's in a textbook why go to class at all? His job is to expand and add to the textbook and that may involve some of his political views. I'm ok with that...I've never been brainwashed by a professor..they're some of the smartest guys/gals in the world but definitely not omniscient.

I'm just disappointed no Boelter hall professors were mentioned. I wouldn't have minded hearing some political spin during my time as an undergrad in the engineering building. That might have made those required fluid dynamic classes a bit more palpable. And it may have been fun to see the words 'Bush' and 'Liberal' used to demonstrate the Levenshtein distance formula. A computer science prof could even have slipped John Kerry in a state diagram that led to a flip flopping of results.