akrish

Every so often, I’ll get a phone call from one of my friends inviting me to come over and watch “the game.” If I’m not terribly busy, usually I’ll comply, not because I enjoy watching sports, but because I enjoy hanging out with my buddies. Recently, I only watch sports when I’m with my friends, in which case I view it as doing something with my friends rather than just killing time watching TV. So when I do watch sports, I don’t get very emotional about the game and I don’t really care about the outcome. That team X wins this championship really has no effect on my life, so why do I really care?

Almost all of my friends have a completely different take on spectator sports. They have favorite teams and favorite players, and are willing to defend their favorites from any attack. I just don’t understand where this fierce loyalty comes from. What have these players and teams done that merits your support? They haven’t protected and cared for you like your family, friends, and maybe even politicians or soldiers. They typically aren’t even people who you’ve met and found warm and friendly. They’re pretty much complete strangers who’ve miraculously earned your unconditional support. Please correct me if I’m wrong here.

What’s worse, is that people are (for some reason that I can’t grasp) emotionally attached to their teams and their moods change as their teams win and lose. I was with my friends watching when the L.A. Lakers lost in the playoffs of the NBA championship earlier this year. A lot of them are Lakers fans and they became pretty depressed for the rest of the day. It was really strange to see how my friends could get so affected by something that (in my view) meant nothing to them. However, there is the flip side, where my friends will be excited and energetic when their team wins, which is definitely a postive of watching sports. But I don’t even understand how someone can feel so close to people and things that they’ve never actually seen in person.

At any rate, I’ve never been that loyal to any particular team. I’ve never considered myself a devoted fan to any franchise or club. I’ve come across athletes that I enjoy watching but it’s mostly because they’re talented or fun to watch (i.e Rafael Nadal). When I watch sports, I enjoy the competitive atmosphere and the high level of talent in the players. I don’t really care who wins or loses, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good game.

When I was playing soccer competitively, I used to love watching televised soccer games. This wasn’t because I felt attached to any team (I would watch pretty much any game shown on TV regardless of who was playing or even what language it was in) but because I felt like I could actually learn about the game and become a better soccer player myself. To some extent I think this actually worked. I found myself trying to play like the athletes that I’d seen on TV, and in some aspects my soccer game improved. This made watching sports not solely about entertainment but also about self-improvement and gave me a motivation to watch.

I find it ironic that among my friends, I’m one of the more athletic ones, but one of the least interested in watching sports. I find it really strange how some of my friends will put off playing basketball until after the games over, when I’d much rather be playing basketball than watching other people play basketball. When I do watch sports, It’s usually not entirely for the entertainment, but also for the social experience or educational experience that comes with it. Either way, I’d much rather be doing something than watching other people do it for me.

Added: July 23, 2007: Prashant wrote a response to this article. Read it here

Since about 4PM yesterday when I actually started working on this site, I’ve been thinking a lot about how this site should be designed and built. The initial idea that maybe a lot of newer coders have is to just hard-code everything. This would mean writing my entries in HTML documents, manually moving entries from page to page etc. It didn’t seem like a very productive way of doing things, which got me thinking about some other, easier ways.

I know that there are a lot of blog-hosting sites out there, so I started looking at them for examples. Obviously they don’t let their bloggers write their entries into the HTML. That just restricts the number of users they have to mostly coders. I realized they must have some sort of web form that allows users to make posts and that they probably have some backend script that reads in the data from the web form and stores it somewhere. This seemed like a pretty reasonable idea to me, not only because it would let me leave my code alone, but also because it would allow me to make posts at any computer using any web browser, whereas in the other model I’d only be able to make posts when I have ftp access to the files on my server. It’s also a lot simpler in that I can write all the parsing tools now, and then I don’t have to manually do anything except write my entry.

I decided that this would be a good way to go, but how would I store the data? I immediately thought about mySQL because I’m pretty familiar with it and it wouldn’t be too difficult to create a bunch of tables (one per category) and then store date, title, content of each story in those tables. I was confident that this would work, but I also thought about storing my data in XML. The XML way would involve one xml file per category, each with ‘story’ or ‘entry’ tags that contain the date, title, and content of the entry. I settled on the XML approach because I’ve been working a lot with XML on wenote (my other site that’s currently being designed) and at work, so I’m pretty familiar with it, and I know that it’s very easy to use. Another minor advantage is that I can easily write articles in here before I create my web form (described above) for making posts. For example, I wrote this article directly in my xml document, and even though I don’t intend to do this, it does make it easier for me to get the ball rolling on this site.

Seeing how this is my first blogging site, I don’t really know if this is a good design plan, but it seems like it’ll work. I’m pretty happy that I’m getting a lot better at thinking of alternative ways to design things, but I do need to think more about pros and cons of each idea before just jumping into one of them. I’ll probably take a look at some of the more popular blogging companies in the next few days and compare my design with anything I can see about theirs. I’ve got a pretty basic, prototype implementation up and running but I’m changing it all the time, so I’ll describe that once I’ve settled on it.

So I’ve made some progress on the back-end of the page. I’ll explain it more thoroughly in the Projects section, but what I intend to do is have all of my stories saved in xml files that I’ll just parse and extract the content from. This is mostly just a test story so that I can see how multiple stories are displayed.