UngsungBlog: A (Fantasy) Sports Blog

Quick-hitters:

- When the hell did Subway neuter their $5 footlong deal? I had a hankering for some Subway tonight, and was bent when I saw that the $5 deal only applies to seven of the crappier Subway sandwiches!

Good thing the sandwich I really wanted—a Subway Melt—was only $6.

I think it’s time to start eating at Quiznos. Even if their deal is limited to a few sandwiches, I’d rather have Quiznos over Subway anyway.

(EDIT:  I just saw the commercial for this change.  The commercial states, (paraphrasing) “Due to the fanatical (???) response, we’re putting regular $5 footlongs on our new Subway Value menu.”  My apologies to Subway…I guess.)

- Current rebate-o-meter: $1,600, and I expect it to rise with the Memorial Day sales upcoming.

Current toothpaste-o-meter: a hell of a lot (+4), though I finally finished a tube last night! W00t!

Current backache-o-meter (number of consecutive days I’ve woken up with a stiff back): three. Where the hell is my Theragesic???

(Tangent: The following thought is rated R.

Certainly I’m not the only person that has had this happen to him. I applied some Theragesic to my lower back on Saturday, and either I rubbed some a bit too low, or the stuff spreads along one’s back like wildfire.

After applying the cream, I went to sit down on my sofa, when I felt a burning sensation…um…right in the crack of my ass. I had no choice but to take my second shower of the day right then and there :P.)

- For the love of everything that is good in the word, please make the Mac v PC commercials stop!

I have a feeling that McDonalds and Apple have minority stakes in TiVo.

- First, some thoughts on Cavs-Celtics, Game Seven.

LeBron 45, Pierce 41. That might have been the single best 1-on-1 playoff matchup I’ve ever watched (key word: “watched”; I have never seen the famous Bird-Wilkins duel in 1988). That game was one of those where the casual fan, like myself, was begging for at least one overtime; it was really that amazing. Pierce had it going the entire game, and LeBron’s back has to be sore, after carrying his team on his shoulders in the game.

(Tangent: Sometime during the game, the announcers were talking about how Pierce was the third option on the team, behind KG and Allen. I’ll concede that Pierce belongs behind KG on the pecking order, but Ray Allen? Ray Allen five years ago, maybe, but not the 2007-08 Ray Allen. I would have made this argument even before the playoffs started, even before Ray Allen aged before our very eyes.

How can Pierce be considered option #3? I always see him ranked so high on Yahoo’s Fantasy Basketball rankings! :P)

Now, could you imagine LeBron had some decent help? Sure, Z is a nice player, and West and Szczerbiak were decent parts, and maybe Ben Wallace wasn’t as much of an abomination as I expected him to be, but none of them exactly strike fear into the hearts of their opponents. Next year, though, the Cavs could really be a force to reckon with, with tons of expiring contracts ($30 million worth, I heard somewhere).

As for the Celts, they better hope to get something out of Allen in the next round, or there’s no way they’re getting past Detroit, assuming Detroit doesn’t put it in cruise control for the first few games of the series.

Now, on to Spurs-Hornets. At the start of series, we heard a lot about the Spurs’ championship composure as a huge advantage in the series, but we saw none of that in the first three games in New Orleans. Then Game Seven happened. The Spurs clogged the paint, and the Hornets morphed into a jump shooting team. It didn’t help that their shots weren’t falling, while the Spurs looked like they were shooting a tennis ball through a hula hoop.

Speaking of bad jump shots, Reggie Miller hit it right on the head in the fourth quarter: why was Jannero Pargo taking so many shots?

(LIVE EDIT: I stand by my comments, even after watching Pargo hit a pair of threes. Could the Hornets not draw up anything for Peja?

LIVE EDIT #2: What was with THAT shot by Pargo? I guess the Lakers better start preparing for the Spurs.)

If that is the Spurs team that the Lakers run in to starting on Wednesday, they could be in serious trouble. Who is going to guard Tim Duncan? Who is going to guard Manu Ginobili? Who is going to keep Tony Parker out of the lane?

Back to the Hornets: what happened in that third quarter? It appeared that the Hornets came out of the locker room completely listless, with zero sense of urgency, almost as if they knew a rally was coming. Unfortunately, that rally never materialized, and now they’re going to play golf.

Until next time.

Tags: $5 footlongs, back pain, cavs, celtics, chris paul, hornets, jannero pargo, lebron james, paul pierce, quiznos, spurs, subway, theragesic by Peter
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Quick-hitters:

- Is it just me, or are those Mac v PC commercials getting exponentially stupider?

Actually, I’m almost certain it’s not just me.

(You can tack on that stupid Mentos commercial, where the guy chews a piece of Mentos gum, and a girl comes up to him and drinks out of his mouth, as if he were a water dispenser. Yeah, because THAT makes me want to buy Mentos gum.

- Current rebate-o-meter: $1,244! And half of that is currently unfiled rebates!

Time to go on a shopping spree

- Quick NBA playoff thoughts:

1) David West is completely unguardable. The Spurs might win Game Six, but I don’t see any way the Spurs are going to beat the Hornets in Game Seven.

(Well, I can see one way: if Chandler and West aren’t 100% for the next two games, the Spurs have a shot.)

2) Orlando had two shots to win a game against the Chauncey Billups-less Pistons, and they couldn’t win one (and one was at home, no less!). Maybe Pat Riley will take over the Magic midway through next season.

Detroit’s gonna get a ton of rest, but I think that the Cavs-Celtics winner will be the Eastern Conference representative in the NBA Finals.

- Time for part 2 of my covert ops mission.

So after a bit of begging on the Slickdeals forum, I got an invite to purchase a Fonera from fon.com. I used this guide to assist me in hacking the Fonera.

(Tangent: Dammit! I didn’t realize that all the steps were compiled on to one web page! I had to print out four different web pages! Bah!)

As soon as I got the Fonera, I found that it came DOA! Argh. I contacted Fon CS, and they quickly sent me out another Fonera, which came in working condition. I decided to wait until the next time I was going to visit my parents to hack the Fonera. A week or so later (whenever I actually got around to visiting the parents again :P), I began preparation for the installation. I made sure to bring home the LF-B10, the Fonera, a spare router, and all cables that I needed.

Sure enough, I managed to forget a couple things! I decided to go ahead and hack the Fonera anyway, just to make sure that the Fonera would work as a wireless bridge. Unfortunately for me, I made the stupid decision of trying this at midnight.

(You see, the router and DSL modem are in my sister’s room, and she’s asleep early, meaning I would have to be hacking the Fonera pretty much in the dark. Browse through the fonera hacking guide, and you could see how I could easily make a mistake.)

I started out by plugging in my spare router, and connecting my laptop and Fonera to it via Ethernet cables. I got to step 4 of the first part of the tutorial, but could not get the Fonera firmware to downgrade to 0.7.1 r1. For the life of me, I could not figure out what the hell went wrong.

(If you haven’t figured it out by now, apparently I missed a key part of the tutorial: the hack requires the router to actually be connected to the internet! Fifty bazillion stupid points for that one.)

I grabbed my laptop, the Fonera, and the Ethernet cables, and hooked them all up to my main router, and began the process again. When I got back to step 4, I held down the reset button on the Fonera, and logged in to it (http://192.168.1.1), and was dismayed to see the wrong firmware version (0.7.0 r2, I believe)!

I looked over the guide, re-checked everything, and after two or three additional tries, I finally got the correct firmware version! W00t! I went ahead with the next step, hit submit, and was indeed redirected back to the Fonera.

I got to step 7, enabled SSH permanently, and began the process to enable Redboot (part 2). I got to step 10, and attempted to reconnect to the Fonera via SSH. That’s when I got a “Network refused” error. Grrrrrr. Immediately I thought that step 7 didn’t take, so I attempted to re-open SSH permanently again, starting from step 5. I ran the script again, and it appeared that the Fonera threw up all over itself. I got a ton of “invalid blah blah blah” errors, and I started pulling out my hair.

Unsure of what happened, I decided to start all over from the beginning. When I got to step 5 again, the Fonera threw up all over itself once again. Worse, I noticed that the firmware on the Fonera was 0.7.0 r2 again!

On a whim, I attempted to SSH into the Fonera again, and it worked! I entered the command to open SSH permanently again, and then I proceeded with step 10. I was hesitant to do this, though, as I couldn’t get the Fonera to downgrade to the “correct” firmware (0.7.1 r1, as directed in the guide).

Step 10 went to completion, and I attempted to access Redboot. For some reason, it was not working, and I immediately thought I bricked the Fonera. That’s when I read the instructions carefully, especially the blurb before step 11:

Make sure the Fonera is powered off. You also need to make sure you have a wired connection to the Fonera and an IP address in the 192.168.1.x range.

Again, it was late and dark. Never again will I hack anything late at night, I told myself. You will see later on, though, that I did not adhere to this

At first, I could not get into Redboot. It took me fifteen minutes to realize where I screwed up this time: step 12 says to ” Open putty and enter in “192.168.1.254″ for the IP address and “9000″ as the port number.” It says nothing about changing the connection type to Telnet (as the image states)!

I finally managed to get into Redboot, and prepared for the flashing process. I will neither confirm nor deny that I said a non-denominational prayer or ten at this point.

Each step, from 15-18, took me a while, because I was carefully typing in each character, triple-checking to make sure that I didn’t make a typo. It was eventually brought to my attention (from another guide I was reading) that I could paste commands into PuTTy simply by right-clicking! Bah!

According to the tutorial, step 19 was supposed to take about 10-20 minutes. I got really worried when that step only took about six minutes; I was almost certain that something went wrong at this point. Step 21 also took only a few minutes, and the final step only took a few moments. When step 22 finished, I could not bear to look at my screen as I rebooted the Fonera.

Once the reboot completed, I peered over at my screen, and was dismayed to not see the “dd-wrt” network available. I cilcked “refresh network list,” scrolled down the list S L O W L Y, and almost paraded around the room when the dd-wrt network finally appeared!

Much thanks to Krunk for assisting me throughout the hacking process, as well as setting up the hacked Fonera as a client bridge.

Part 3, including more hacking, to come another time!

Tags: david west, fonera, lf-b10, linksys, locationfree, mac commercial, mentos, nba playoffs, sony, spurs, wrt54gs by Peter
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Sorry, no Office review tonight! I really didn’t expect the Spurs-Hornets game to be THAT entertaining!

Quick-hitters:

- Does anybody own a Treo 700 series, specifically the 755p? My sister’s 755p is in a never-ending reboot loop, no matter how many times I soft- or hard-reset the damn thing. What the hell is causing this, and how the hell do you fix it?

The last I heard, she took the PDA to the Sprint store. Hopefully Sprint stores are not as clueless as their phone reps can be.

- Best Buy sent me this email earlier today:

Dear Peter,

In an ongoing effort to improve our services, we’d like to hear about your experience of having BestBuy.com products shipped. Please click the button below to fill out a brief survey about your recent purchase on 05/01/2008, including [items purchased]. It should only take a few minutes.

Thanks for helping BestBuy.com serve you better!

Usually, I have zero desire to fill out these surveys. However, in this case, I have less than zero desire to fill out this survey. You see, this order is currently on backorder!

Nice job, Best Buy!

- I get a balance transfer (BT) offer from either Chase or Citibank (boooooooo!) practically every day.

(Who doesn’t?)

Normally, these checks find their way immediately into my shredder. Most of the time, I get BT checks on my lowest-limit credit cards—$1,200 and $2,000—or on my primary credit card. If I’m going to take out a BT, I’m not going to “waste” my time on a small balance like $1,000, nor am I going to take out a big BT on a credit card that I use everyday. (Why? So I can pay 12% on my purchase balance?)

Today, though, I found a very interesting offer in the mail from Chase on my second-highest limit card, on which I already have a low-interest (3.99% for life) BT. I’ve received BT checks on this account before, but usually the offers range from weak—4.99% for life—to pathetic—1.9% for six months, and then the purchase APR applies. However, I got two different offers today:

• 0% until 2/09 (yawn)
• 2.99% fixed for life

2.99% for life? Considering that the existing BT on the card is at 3.99%, it would be reasonable to expect future offers to have a higher interest rate, especially when you consider that payments apply to balances with lower interest rates first.

I wonder what my credit score is if I’m being offered a 2.99% balance transfer rate. I know people with good-to-excellent credit card scores that are offered 3.99% rates for life.

- (from Consumerist…just spotted a minute or so ago, that is) I normally don’t shop at Walgreens, usually because CVS deal hunting takes up most of my time as it is :P. However, if one of my local Walgreens pulled crap like this, I’d boycott all the Walgreens in the area for sure.

Cliffs: woman falls into diabetic coma near the checkout register, two nurses and an officer nearby administer OJ and sugar, someone pulls a glucometer off the shelf, woman is rushed to hospital, manager runs out in a hissy fit and demands that somebody pay for all the items.

Seriously? Mr. Manager got pissed off over the loss of an EIGHTEEN DOLLAR GLUCOMETER, as well as some OJ and sugar? From the way he acted (according to the nurse and officer), they used his Gluco-tech 5000 series Professional Blood Glucose counter (accurate to 0.0001%!), went to the appliance section, grabbed a high-end juicer, stole an orange that the manager was saving for a snack, juiced the orange, and gave the patient the juice.

Walgreens’ statement was priceless:

“We’re sorry for the misunderstanding. The store manager didn’t arrive on the sales floor until after the paramedics have left, so he didn’t realize a medical emergency had taken place.”

So the two frantic nurses, the officer, the missing glucometer, and the sirens in the distance, not to mention the obvious commotion in the store, weren’t enough of a clue that a medical emergency had taken place? Not to mention, I think a “misunderstanding” is a slight understatement. At least Walgreens was nice enough to offer a refund on the glucometer…

Question: if the store manager insisted that the accounts of the nurse and officer were wrong, why did he not attempt to explain what really happened?

I hate to imagine what would have happened if the woman had bled on the carpet. Would the manager have demanded compensation for the carpet shampooer he would have needed to clean up the stains?

- Quickly…

It’s about time the Spurs’ Big 3 finally showed up for a game in this series. For three quarters, it sure looked like the Hornets were well on their way to a monumental sweep. I still think the Hornets will win this series, and I like their chances in Game 4. Manu’s got a bum ankle, and Duncan hasn’t been nearly as effective as he has in years past. If the Hornets find a way to slow down Tony Parker, the Spurs are cooked.

For the first time all series, we saw the fluidity that the Spurs offense possesses at times: quick passes down low to Duncan, forcing the double team, followed by several passes to open shooters or cutters. And was that a Michael Finley sighting?

For years, the Spurs were called “boring” and “unwatchable,” but I became a passive fan of the team.

(I know, I know. BLASPHEMY! And BLAS-for-you! BLAS-for everybody in the world…)

I just loved how professional the team was—a Robert Horry hip check notwithstanding—and I became quickly impressed by how easily they were able to reload their teams to contend for championships each year. Of course, it helps to be able to build around a cornerstone like Duncan. As far as their boring offense is concerned, sure, running their offense through Duncan could be considered boring, but it was damn effective, was it not? And now that Tony Parker has flipped the switch and is utterly dominating games with his speed and ridiculous finishing ability, how can anyone call this team “boring” any more? Who wouldn’t like Parker v. Paul to go a full seven games?

As far as the other game tonight is concerned, how about them Cavs and the greatest player in the history of the NBA? Is it bad Cavs offense, or excellent Celtics defense? I refuse to say a little of both, and I’m giving credit where credit is due: to the Celtics’ defense. I know that the C’s had a highly rated defense, but after watching bits and pieces of these two games against the Cavs, I know see why. It’s not that LeBron’s settling for jumpers; it’s that LeBron has no choice but to take jumpers!

Should the Cavs lose this series (I actually had them winning in six, and would now like a mulligan :P), we can’t pin this one on LeBron. Cavs fans can start blaming the Celtics’ D, and I hope this doesn’t cost Cavs’ coach Mike Brown his job.

Until next time!

Tags: balance transfer, best buy, cavs, celtics, chase, chris paul, hornets, reboot loop, sprint, spurs, survey, tony parker, treo 755p by Peter
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