Friday, March 21, 2008

Random Thoughts, Sights and Sounds - A Potpourri of Knowledge

Following in the successful footsteps of the Boston Red Sox, and New England Patriots, the Boston Celtics have quickly (and somewhat under the radar) become a legitimate threat to win the NBA title.

With the additions of Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and many others, the thought was that the C's would be much better than last year's 24-win team, but what they've been able to accomplish in a few short months can be categorized as shocking, even to the most avid Celtics supporter.

They have gone from being viewed as a run-of-the-mill playoff team in the Eastern Conference (at the start of the season), to one of the top two teams in the East (with Detroit), to the top team and the East, and now is there anyone out there who would argue that they are not the top team in the league.

A week ago, the biggest question surrounding the team was - How would they fare in handling the daunting task ahead of them - going on the road and playing three games in five nights against the iron of the Western Conference - San Antonio, Houston and Dallas.

Their demolition of the three teams from Texas proved to be an exclamation point.

They rallied from a 22-point deficit against San Antonio. The next night, they crushed a Houston team that had won 22 in-a-row and last night overcame a fourth quarter deficit to beat Dallas. That's a season sweep for Boston (6-0) against teams from the Lone Star State and makes them an astonishing 23-4 against the much tougher teams in the Western Conference.

This is a team that before the season many so-called 'experts' figured would win between 45-50 games. They were right in that the Celtics would get to 50 wins. I'm sure they didn't figure that it would take just 62 games to do it.

We've now reached the point (in terms of fans expectations) that anything less than an appearance in the NBA Finals, Garnett and Company, would be a huge disappointment.

It's made having basketball in Boston a lot of fun again.

Quote of the Week: Comes from my soon to be three-year-old son, Dylan (who's quickly going from three to 30). Keep in mind his quote comes completely unprovoked as we were driving around last weekend shopping for a birthday present for his Mom.

Dylan: I'm going to sell Mommy on eBay.

Me: Buddy, if it was that easy, Daddy would have sold Mommy on eBay a long time ago and gone to a bar with the proceeds.

Music Note of the Week: This week's note isn't going to be about a particular band or new song, but rather a way of getting music.

With all of the concert footage up on YouTube, I've often wondered how great it would be to have the some of these live performance as .mp3 files to play on my iPod. Yesterday, I wondered no more. As with everything else in life, you just have to enter your query into Google and they will give you the answer.

New Google Slogan: Google: We Answer all Life's Questions.

Anyways, go to http://www.vixy.net/ and download their free desktop software. Once you download their software and launch the program, the converter (by default) gives you this part (http://youtube.com/watch?) of the url. You supply the rest of the URL and choose MP3 (audio only) from the 'Converts to' Menu and in a few minutes you'll have your audio file. SWEEETTTT!!!

Finally, Happy Easter to all.

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