Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Decade: The Second Half
Wednesday
January 5, 2005
Remember the Y2K scare and all the excitement surrounding that and the switch from 1999 to 2000? I do. Amazingly, that was FIVE YEARS AGO. It's hard for me to fathom that it's been five years. But time continues to fly by...
What's more is that we're more than halfway through the decade at this point. In less than five years, we'll have 2010 staring us in the face.
New Year's Eve proved to be a fun time. Bill Cunningham came over, along with his friend Jimmy, who it turns out is a cousin of Rob Philbin's (who I went to school with in grade school and high school). We hit the Green Iguana, which for a $10 cover was reasonably priced by New Year's Eve standards. In what is becoming a tradition, we did a Jägerbomb followed by a Coors Light right after midnight. Ironically, this is the same thing I had last year right after the new year began.
The only downer of the night was the news that Bill is moving to Boca Raton to take a full-time teaching job. I'm thrilled for Bill to have that opportunity, but I'm sad that he won't be around to hang out with anymore. I've had too many Tampa friends move away and/or disappear.
I've not been on here with a new commentary as of late, but that's because of being busy with website work (RadioHotTalk.com, my father's Tennessee Wastewater site, and especially DraftKing.com). It looks like Draft King is going to outpace last year; yesterday (according to my Google AdSense stats) I had more than 20,000 total hits, most of which came because of my 2005 NFL Mock Draft. I love my personal homepage, but it isn't exactly a cash cow. But it is an open forum for me to discuss whatever I please, so I do like it on that level.
For reasons that are beyond me, Google has not updated the source URLs for some pages I have that have pictures that seem very popular (in particular the Anchorman pic from January 15, 2004). I switched from .html to .shtml endings midway through last year, but still Google points to the outdated .html version of the page. So after months of waiting, I added some dummy .html files to the most frequently hit pages that automatically directs them to the .shtml version. Problem solved, I hope...
The Bubba The Love Sponge show status is looking better and better, and we're working now on prepping for our return. I can't go into details now, but things are definitely looking up for us.
I've found myself mesmerized and totally hooked on ESPN College Hoops 2K5 for the PS2, which I bought for $20 with some money that I received as part of my Christmas present. It's a great game, and it's already surpassed Coach K Basketball for the Sega Genesis as my favorite college basketball game of all-time. My brother Matt concurs; here's what he had to say about it:
"I really, really enjoy the playability of the game. One of my all-time favorite hoops games, right up there with the arcade version of NBA Jam and the original Jordan vs. Bird on the original computer."
I decided to do the "tough mode" where you start off at a low-tier school. My university of choice was Charleston Southern, which is in the Big South conference (not to be confused with the Dirty South). I lead them to a 14-9 season, and then I won the conference tournament, culminating with an exciting win over Liberty (who swept me during the regular season). From there I got a #14 seed into the NCAA tournament, but I was matched up with Oklahoma State. OSU crushed me, but it should be noted that Oklahoma State went on to win the tournament.
The gameplay is outstanding, and it overall is an outstanding gaming experience. I downloaded the rosters with the real player names from the internet, which helped increase the fun factor tremendously. Sega may be without the NFL license for the next five years, but so long as they keep making basketball games like this, I'll be happy.
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