Brian Alvey

Years ago when I came home from college, I got into a basketball arcade game called Run & Gun. It had two big screens, five-man teams and you could play two against two facing each other. Konami didn’t have licensing from the NBA, so they had teams like Chicago and Salt Lake City and the players looked familiar, but they weren’t allowed to call them Michael Jordan, Karl Malone or Magic Johnson.

Walter and I pumped a lot of quarters into that game. He was usually Los Angeles and I was Salt Lake City. Since this was an NBA rip-off I decided that my Mailman should be called The Milkman and I’d shout “The Milkman delivers!” when he’d finish an alley-oop dunk or “The Milkman rings twice!” when he’d make another great play. In 1997 and 1998 when the Jazz played the Bulls in the NBA Finals, I was a Jazz fan and much of that was tied into how much fun I had with Walter on that arcade game.

Watching the Dallas Mavericks sneak by the Jazz in a five-game series in 2001 was depressing for a Jazz fan, but I got to watch an exciting new Western Conference powerhouse up close. I went to college in Fort Worth and worked in and around Dallas and saw probably 50 concerts at Reunion Arena — now the American Airlines Center — so following the new Mavericks wasn’t difficult. Of course when I lived in Texas the Mavericks were on the decline and even the Dallas Cowboys had an embarrassing 1-15 season.

Stockton retired. Malone spent a single season looking for a championship ring with the Lakers that looked great on paper but ended with a surprising exit at the hands of the Pistons. Malone retired.

There was no real reason to follow the Jazz anymore, but plenty of reasons to watch a winning Mavericks team. Mark Cuban has been blogging in my Blogsmith system, I got to meet Dirk Nowitzki at the All-Star game in Denver last year and I have gone from wanting to see the Jazz get a championship to wanting to see the Mavericks get one.

Their game seven overtime win in San Antonio was tremendous and even Steve Kerr wrote “The transformation of Dallas from a free-wheeling, jump-shooting finesse team to true championship contender is complete.”

If Dallas goes all the way, they might have this year’s screwed up playoff system to thank. By playing the Spurs in the second round they have already defeated their rightful third round opponent and their actual third round could be an easier one right before the Finals. We’ll find out.

We have another one of those CodeJams coming up soon and the pressure is on me to make it as interesting as our last one.

This weekend Niki and I caught up on three episodes of Alias and three Sopranos. During one Alias they showed the Santa Monica pier, so I pointed out how we stayed nearby for our last CodeJam and some of the landmarks like the Pacific Coast Highway.

Then during Christopher’s trip to LA on the Sopranos, he stayed at our CodeJam hotel, the Viceroy. I showed Niki the lobby (where we saw Michelle Rodriguez from Lost doing an EW photo shoot), the bar, the pools (where we watched CSI: Miami shoot a scene one morning), the elevators where they hassle Ben Kingsley and the hotel room where Christopher does lines of coke with a prostitute. It was just like reliving our L.A. trip.

Business Week’s Jon Fine has the Viceroy on his list of product placements on The Sopranos so far this season. He comments that the Viceroy is “beachside” as long as by beachside you mean “across the street from the beach”. “Across a busy street and one long long block away from beachside” just doesn’t sound the same, does it?

I’m not sure I am going to be able to find us similar Hollywood-level excitement in Westchester.

Maybe we’ll just build some interesting stuff, get to know our two new team members and eat well. I’ll let you know if we do anything interesting.

A longtime reader and I have been having a debate about Krypto, the super dog that lived with Superboy (a.k.a. the Last Son of Krypton*) in Smallville. She read my post about Ace, the crime-fighting Bat hound and she took the position that Krypto was already the dog’s name before he was placed into the rocket ship that got knocked off-course and drifted for years before finally landing on earth years after Superboy had.

I disagreed. I’m pretty sure that “Krypto” was his Earth name and that his given Kryptonian name was Ken-El.

Now if only there was a giant authoritative Internet comic book data repository I could turn to for a ruling on this one…

Maybe I should add “Ken-El” to the Wikipedia’s Krypto entry before I reply?

* Last Son of Krypton: does not include last daughters of Krypton, last pets of Krypton, other last sons of Krypton, last robots of Krypton, last intelligent life forces of Krypton, last miniature cities in bottles of Krypton and any other last characters of Krypton to be introduced later.

My good friend Craig bought us all Yankees tickets last December. It was a crazy coincidence that our game fell on the day he would leave his company to come work with me.

What a game. Niki’s favorite Yankee Jorge Posada did everything right. He settled down relief pitcher Aaron Small, survived a violent collision with Mark Teixeira at the plate and hit a walk-off two-run home run in the ninth inning to bring the Yankees back from 9-0 to an eventual 14-13 win. They matched the biggest comeback in Yankee history and Joe Torre said it made his top ten Yankees games list.

What a fantastic, memorable night.

Last night Niki and I saw Depeche Mode at Jones Beach. We will be spending a lot of time there this summer. We used to see six or eight shows a year there and then we had kids. I decided that it would be a good thing to start breaking away for concerts again — like the date nights some couples have, except it’s an hour away and it’s on the beach and there’s live music.

Neither of us had seen Depeche Mode before and it was a good show. Seeing them of course reminded me of one of the businesses I was considering before Jason and I decided to do Weblogs, Inc.

I had done my Meet The Makers event series and was gaining some fame in the web design community and one of the web designers I met mentioned that he was Dave Gahan‘s webmaster. “Perfect!” I said, trying to hide my enthusiasm a little. “Can you relay my business proposition to him?”

“I want to open a restaurant with Dave. We’ll call it ‘Pizza are Pizza’ and our tagline will be ‘I can’t understand what makes a man eat another brand. Help me understand.’ The highlight of the menu will be ‘Make your own pizza’ where you get to pick: your own … personal … cheeses!”

I never heard back from Dave or his webmaster so I partnered up with Jason instead and there I was last night — watching Dave from the crowd, imagining what we could have done together.

Now I’m hungry.

Interesting story in Valleywag yesterday about how I’m pissing off John Battelle by squatting his nom du com, JohnBattelle.com. I happened to be the registrant for all domains Jason had back in the Silicon Alley Reporter days and I don’t think I’ve ever met John Battelle, so it would be kind of silly for him to be mad at me. Fortunately, Valleywag did an update that explains why the domain registration has my name on it. Between SAR, Weblogs, Inc. and my own projects I have had my name on at least 3000 domain registrations so maybe I have more enemies than I’m aware of.

I must add that I’m a huge fan of Battelle’s Web 2.0 event since AOL CEO Jon Miller confirmed the Weblogs, Inc. deal on his stage last October. Who wouldn’t love an event like that?

Thanks to Valleywag for putting so much time and effort into the infographic and for using a more flattering picture than Jason’s.

Seeing Glenn Tilbrook play live rolls back time a decade or two for me. Of course closing down the bar he’s playing in at 3am rolls that clock forward again and then some…

The Peak’s birthday show on Friday was a blast. We met some good people including some of the DJs, we heard a decent set from Jeffrey Gaines — who is best known right now for a live soulful cover of Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes, but thankfully only did a few lines of that one before doing Tom Petty’s The Waiting instead — and I got to hang out with Glenn afterwards in his rock star tour bus.

Glenn did his usual Best of Squeeze: Pulling Mussels, Tempted, Black Coffee in Bed, Hourglass, Annie Get Your Gun and Messed Around. He did Letting Go from Play and a recent solo song called Hostage. When he did Piccadilly from East Side Story the whole crowd shouted out the line “Heart like a gun was just half of the battle” over and over and Niki, who had stepped away, thought the place must be filled with Squeeze fanatics. Not so, I explained. Glenn gave us instructions before he began the song.

My sister got us on the guest list after the show was sold out so we thanked her by calling her repeatedly during the show so she could hear bits and pieces. Thanks, Jenn!

My favorite little world class rock station in New York’s backyard just turned two and celebrated with a concert in White Plains on Friday night. Niki and I spent the evening without kids for the first time in a long time. Well, I’m on the road right now so that happens more often for me than her, but it was nice to put on some makeup — more her than me — and hit a bar to watch a couple of singer-guitarists, meet the Make A Wish ladies and mingle with the talent behind a great radio station.

On the way to the show we had The Peak on and they played Suzanne Vega’s Blood Makes Noise. Who else would play that song? College radio?

We saw a story on them in the local Westchester paper, so I had a good idea what everyone looked like.

Between Jeffrey Gaines and Glenn Tilbrook’s sets, I spent a few minutes chatting with program director and creator Chris Herrmann about how the station came to be and how its listeners are so connected to The Peak. It began as a peek into his own iPod and quickly attracted some veteran DJs like Jimmy Fink. We had some friends over one Saturday night for cards a year ago and after listening to The Peak all evening long they asked if it was our own CD collection. You barely notice the commercials. You can listen to them online while you’re in VA on a business trip.

About six months ago I did a phone survey where they wanted to know what I liked in a radio station. By the end of the call I had figured out that it was KRock trying to figure out what to do for a format when Howard Stern moved on to satellite radio, but I frustrated the caller over and over. “Who do you listen to in the morning?” they’d ask. “The Peak,” I’d say. “What station is that?” “107.1. You can’t get it in the city.” “You mean WBLS, 107.5?” “Um…no, that’s an R&B and Soul station. The Peak is 107.1. They play Jack Johnson, Elvis Costello, Marc Broussard, The Strokes, The Killers, old stuff, new stuff, you know, world class rock?”

Congratulations, Chris!

I have to say that I don’t totally understand my Canadian sister and I doubt she understands me either.

But when I have a gallon of Coors Light in me and Glenn Tilbrook is on stage singing I could only feel closer to her if we were Siamese twins.

A few weeks ago, Niki and I met Rachael Ray’s half-sister, but she wasn’t aware of her family connection.

Our waitress came over and when she smiled you would have sworn it was a younger Rachael Ray. We told her who she reminded us of and she said that we weren’t the first people to tell her that. Then she added that it was funny because she comes from the same small town that Rachael Ray does in upstate New York. She walked away and Niki and I both said at the same time, “Paternity test!”

I mean, she even went into the food services business just like her older half-sister. How coincidental is that?

The whole time we were waiting for our food I was hoping that she would load her arms up with more items than a regular non-celebrity human waitress could carry just to see if she could do it in one trip. She didn’t, but it did smell awesome and it was delish!