I've been following Mark Cuban's blog with interest, and he often talks about changes he would like to see in NBA basketball. Many of the changes have to do with the consistency that rules are enforced, as Mark points out the differences between individual officials, players, time of the year, time of game, etc... in the way fouls are called.

Here's my 2 cents on what's wrong with basketball.

First, let me state right up front. Basketball is my least favorite sport. I can't watch it. Football is my favorite sport. Hockey keeps me on the edge of my seat with my heart beating at twice the normal rate, although I haven't gone to a game in decades. Baseball is a great sport to watch at the ballpark on a nice day. Heck, I like SlamBall more than I like NBA basketball. (SlamBall is fun to watch - check it out on SpikeTV Saturday nights.)

Some of these things may seem like fundamental basketball concepts, and so maybe I will never ever be a fan of the sport. But perhaps many people have the same beefs as I.

1) Often, the last 2 minutes of the game take 30 minutes to play. That's way too slow. The last two minutes of a basketball game are the slowest 2 clock minutes in sports. Zzzz...

2) With less than 5 minutes to go, either team can win. This drives me crazy. A team can be up by 20 points, but the other team still has a chance to win. What's the point of watching the first 40 minutes of the game? Just tune in for the last couple of minutes.

3) The intentional foul. So let me get this straight... a defensive player is allowed to intentionally interfere with an offensive player, forcing him to make a free throw (a lower percentage shot) in order to get the ball back with plenty of time left. That just lets the losing team have one more chance to get back in the game (see #2 above) and slows the game down (see #1). The offensive team should get to keep the ball after a free throw - that will cut down on fouls, speeding the game up.

4) While I'm on the subject, this whole concept of “team fouls”, where fouls over a certain limit cause free throws while fouls under the limit don't. So sometimes a team has “fouls to give“, near the end of a quarter. Fouls to give. What a stupid concept.

5) While writing this, I looked up the rules of the game on http://www.basketball.com/. Maybe it's just me, but the rules are WAY too complicated. The following is one example of a rule.

When a weakside offensive player is above the free throw line extended, his defensive man may be no lower than the "middle defensive area" extended for more than 2.9 seconds. When a weakside offensive player is below the free throw line extended, his defensive man must vacate the "inside lane" unless his man is positioned adjacent (posted up) to the three-second lane extended. When a weakside offensive player is above the tip of the circle, his defensive man must be no lower than the "upper defensive area" for more than 2.9 seconds. When a strongside offensive player is above the tip of the circle extended, his defensive man may be no lower than the free-throw line extended (upper defensive area) for more than 2.9 seconds.

Did you get that? This is just one subsection of the rules for defensive fouls - and I cut out more than half of that subsection. I bet most fans watching the game don't know all the rules. I mean, read the above... how could they?

When James Naismith wrote the original 13 rules for basketball, it was simple. I'm not suggesting we go back to that, but when you compare the mechanics of the game (put the ball in the basket) with the rules of the game, it looks like it's gotten out of hand.

There is someone living in Santa Monica, California by the name of Scott Duffy, who happens to be the same AGE as me, featured in Entrepreneur Magazine.

I wonder if we look the same too?

How to calculate the speed of light using a microwave.

After reading this, the theory makes sense -- if you know the frequency of your microwave (how many times per second it oscillates) and you multiple it by the distance one oscillation travels, you get the speed...  (From Raymond Chen)

Do I have to keep mentioning Mark Cuban's blog? Do I have to point out that if you consider yourself an entrepreneur, you would be foolish not to read every word he writes and learn from his experience? Man oh man.

Rules of Success. #1: Sweat Equity is the best equity!

Rule #1: Sweat Equity is the best start up capital.

... The minute you ask [outside investors] for money, you are playing in their game, they aren’t playing in yours. You are at a huge disadvantage, and it’s only going to get worse if you take their money. The minute you take money, the leverage completely flips to the investor. They control the destiny of your dreams, not you.

... The reality of taking money from non family members is that they are doing it for only one reason, to make more money. If you can’t deliver on that promise, you are out. You will be removed from the company you started. You will find someone else running your dream company. If this sounds like a scene out of the Sopranos or an episode you would watch on TV about a loan shark, you are right. The only difference is that it’s all legal.

... The reality is that for most businesses, they don’t need more cash, they need more brains.

I blogged earlier about a great, new client I am currently working for. I have been here about a month (already?) and this project is really interesting to me. I am learning lots and lots of new things. I am biking to work every day, so the location is a definite bonus.

In addition, I am persuing my MCSD for .NET. I have an exam scheduled for one week from today, and I am confident I will be ready for it. I will make the final decision later this week whether to postpone it or not. But at this moment, I intend to study hard and take the exam on Tuesday.

Also, I have been getting a number of emails recently asking me to do some small programming side-projects. That's nice. I helped a client this past week fix a PHP site, and it looks like I might build a CMS site for him soon. xguru.com has had two or three other email requests for bids that might lead to some side work for me or another developer.

And today I was contacted by an editor at McGraw-Hill Osborne about possibly writing another book.

All in all, any complaints I had two weeks ago about having tons of free time and not enough to do are gone. It looks like I will be working 12 or more hours a day for the next two months!

By the way, is this a sign of something? Is there a boom going on in the economy, and people are slow to notice? There is definitely something up with all this work that is landing in my lap...

The list of large companies offering their customers RSS feeds: Amazon.com, Yahoo, Reuters, BBC, Washington Post, eBay, Time Magazine... and the list goes on and on.  RSS has hit critical mass.

Here's where I see this going... the next version of Outlook and Outlook Express will have built-in RSS newsreaders. The next version of Internet Explorer will have a built in XSLT transformation for the RSS XML so that it appears readable to users. The next version of MS Office will be able to save documents to RSS format.

Think of how the HTML format has been supported by Microsoft tools and technologies. RSS should follow the same path.

The problem with Atom is that it does not present me with anything new. RSS seems to provide me with everything I need in terms of RSS publishing and/or reading. What has Atom got to offer?

I think I will remove my Atom feed for now. I don't want to contribute to the pollution of a clean standard.

This is a cool idea. I actually have an old Laptop lying around. I'm gonna investigate it a litte to see if I can do it.

From Robert Scoble (the Scobolizer):

Citizen Engineers: Build your own digital picture frame from an old laptop

I should have linked to this in an earlier post, but it's so cool that I think I'll call it out separately: Learn to build your own digital picture frame. That's part of a new feature we started on Channel9 named "Citizen Engineers."