Spring time is the best time!

As probably with most people, spring is my favorite time of the year. Our little family just came back from walking around "the Lake formerly known as Town" and it was quite pleasant. Vanessa and I asked ourselves afterwards why we don't do that more often. Then we remembered - it's not summer yet! This is why I love springtime in Texas. The heat of the summer has not enveloped us yet, the wildflowers are blooming, the trees are lush and green, and the mosquitoes haven't started attacking in full force. Of course, all bets are off once the month of May rolls around.

One of the biggest reasons I love the springtime is that I get to watch my favorite team, the San Antonio Spurs, take to the court for the NBA playoffs! I love this game! Well, at least I love the playoffs. The regular season, with an 82 game schedule that beings in October and ends in March, is just too long for me to spend much time getting into, especially since the playoffs don't conclude until early June. As a result, I find no need to watch the NBA during the regular season. I suppose that is one of the indicators that my team has been really good for the past few years. Actually, extremely good, winners of the championship for 4 of the past 8 years ('99, '03, '05, '07). The only thing they have failed to do is win it in back to back years, which is why some people say they still do not deserve the dynasty designation yet. Most of those people being bitter Laker fans (Cephas, Nikao, Sharon, Peter), Mavs fans (Jacob, Albert,) or Rocket fans (Allen, Tino, Isaac) hah hah.

While everyone in America is hoping for the "dream finals matchup" between the resurgent Lakers and Celtics this year, I am faithfully pulling for my Spurs to validate their dynasty with another championship title and prove the naysayers wrong. A first round sweep of the Phoenix Suns tomorrow afternoon would remind the rest of the league they better not count out the defending world champions.

I know I have probably already bored a lot of you already with all this basketball talk (if you are still reading, sorry Hannah and Vanessa) but I actually wasn't planning on blogging about my Spurs obsession. I really wanted to blog about the latest issue of Time magazine. We received it today, dated April 25th. What's suprising is not who is on the cover, Obama and Hilary, but the design and inspiration for the cover -

The NBA has been running a series of very cool commercials during the playoffs, where they have two current superstars speaking to the camera in a split screen format, the same phrase. Very compelling, you can check them out here . Anyways, I was shocked that such a respected magazine would use the exact same idea for their current issue. Yes, I understand that they are trying to make a correlation between the NBA playoffs and the Democratic candidate "playoff". But that means you'd have to be watching the NBA playoffs to truly understand the cover. Plus, if I was in the Hilary camp, I would be less than happy with such an unflattering photo of my candidate. Obama's photo looked like it was taken by a professional photographer, whereas Hilary's looks like it was a random photo pulled off someone's MySpace page. How come her head also looks so much bigger than Obama's? And who's idea was it to make one half black and white and the other sepia-toned? Bad photo illustration and design all around.

Time Magazine, "Where copyright infringement happens"

Vanessa the Visionary!

I stayed home with Benjamin today so Vanessa could attend a Microsoft(!) event. No, it was not your usual Microsoft event, as there were no IT nerds and geeks discussing the newest release of Microsoft software. Actually, the majority of the attendees were women! Based on the usual gender breakdown of Microsoft events, I am sure this was quite the statistical anomaly.

The event Vanessa attended was called "Vision to Venture: The Event for Women Entreprenuers". She was initially nervous about attending, since she doesn't have a business (yet), but I encouraged her to go, to at least hear the speakers and do some networking. There was a friend who also attended who had a code that knocked the price of the admission by half, but it was already pretty cheap to begin with. Plus all attendees received a free copy of Office Small Business 2007. They also gave a way a laptop, but alas my dear wife's name was not picked.

Vanessa said she learned a lot at the event. The three main speakers were all quite informative and entertaining. One of the interesting tidbits of info is that women start up more businesses than men. Another interesting fact is that many small businesses fail because they don't think big, and thus shoot themselves in the foot in regards to growth potential.

Seems Microsoft is smart in doing some forward thinking by advertising their small business services to these bright ladies. As for my bright lady, she tells me her priority at this point is raising our boy, and so will wait until she has more time before she makes the move from vision to venture.