I Met Don Mattingly!

Last night, Dan and I went to a charity dinner for the Connecticut Sports Foundation Against Cancer at Mohegan Sun, where Don Mattingly was honored. Mike Francesca and Chris "Mad Dog" Russo, WFAN and YES Network's “Mike and the Mad Dog” emceed and the event raised more than $1 million for the charity.

The event was supposed to be a roast of Mattingly by his fellow Yankees and other figures in baseball, but as the New York Daily News' Bill Madden quickly found out after having a joke about Mattingly's recent troubles fall flat on its face, nobody was much in the mood for roasting. Mattingly was praised by the likes of Don Zimmer, Goose Gossage, Mel Stottlemyre and Jim Leyland, with other great players like Moose Skowron and Robinson Cano in attendance.

There were also live and silent auctions for some terrific sports memorabilia. I bid $60 on a ball signed by Hank Bauer, one of my Dad's favorite Yankees, and won it. So I'll be sending that down to him in Florida.

At a private cocktail party after the roast, I got to shake hands with Mattingly and get my picture taken with him. He was a very nice, down to earth guy and stayed at the party for a while, chatting with guests, taking pictures and signing autographs. I was really happy to have met one of my favorite Yankees, and I have the picture here as a souvenir of the occasion.

Thanks to Dan for giving me the opportunity. It was a fun time.

Gleeful About My eeePC

My Asus eeePC was delivered to the office this week. I read one too many positive reviews about the machine and decided I wanted to get one to see how viable it would be as an office machine. I love it. At the office, we have one of the OLPC machines that Eric ordered a while ago. So far, the only similarity I can see between the two computers is that they both run Linux. I think the OLPC isn't very intuitive, whereas the eeePC is easy to use right out of the box. After I unpacked the eeePC, I booted it up, was able to immediately connect to the office WiFi and surf the web with Firefox. I also set up an e-mail account in Thunderbird and then started checking out how well the included OpenOffice dealt with MS Office documents. Yes, it does handle Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint 2003 documents with ease, but it won't read the Office 2007 (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) formats. No matter, since we send all of these out to clients saved as Office 2003 documents anyway.

As an experiment, I edited a PowerPoint presentation on Conversational Marketing I was delivering to the team in the afternoon on the eeePC while sitting on the couch in the office. While it took a few minutes to get acclimated to the undersized keyboard (and some annoying things like a tiny right-hand shift key), I was able to easily make my edits. When it came time to present, I plugged the eeePC into my projector and delivered the presentation just as I would have if I were on a Windows machine. The eeePC would make a great machine for PPT road warriors, since it weighs only 2 lbs.

One of the things that really surprised me is how fast this machine is, with a Celeron M processor at 900 Mhz and only 512MB of RAM. It boots in 10 seconds and shuts down even faster. Applications spring to life. and working on this machine is a great testament to the fact that all these Linux propellerheads who constantly harp on how MS software is so bloated and slow might actually know what they're talking about. If all you need a machine to do out of the box is run an office suite, get e-mail and surf the web, this is a great $399 alternative to spending three times as much on a Windows ultraportable notebook, or wasting $3,500 on a Macbook Air.

I picked up an 8GB SM card to give me a little extra capacity, but there's room for a ream of office docs on the 4GB flash drive. Not having to spin the platters of a traditional notebook drive extends the battery life of the eeePC so it would be good on a cross-country flight or on a long car trip. I pulled it out on a crowded LIRR train, where my seatmates were practically on top of me and had no problem happily typing away, whereas doing same on my 17” HP notebook would have been impossible.

There are some shortcomings, like the 7” screen that runs at 800x600 resolution, and the small keyboard, but I don't see too many drawbacks to using the eeePC as an alternative to a Windows notebook. On nights where I don't feel like lugging my backpack home, or when I need to travel lightly, I'll take the eeePC with me. When you fold the screen down, the eeePC is the size of a paperbackbook. Do yourself a favor and order yourself one if you're a road warrior or if you have a significant commute to work. You won't regret it.

How Much Ya Bench?

Remember that SNL skit, How Much Ya Bench? Anyway, my brother in law Rob gave me his old bench and weights, and I put them up in my office last year and started working out regularly. I don't want to get like those muscle-heads you see walking around, but I do want to get my blood pumping for at least a half hour every day.

You'd be surprised at how many personal trainers and gym rats have a problem with that. When I lived in Bayside, my dad bought me a gym membership as a present, and the personal trainer assigned to me wanted me to eat Power Bars and take all sorts of odd supplements. I got tired of the "Get HUGE!" culture and never went back after a few months.

In the city, I was a member at Asphalt Green, which I think is one of the greatest facilities in Manhattan. I loved it there, except the trainer there was always trying to get me to join his powerlifting team. At one point, he took me aside and said, "Tom, some of us are just big, and we're meant to lift heavy things. You're never going to be one of these skinny guys who run. You're meant to lift heavy things."

So, yeah, I have a history of dealing with trainers who want to ignore my own fitness goals and substitute their own. Really, I have only a few reasons for wanting to work out regularly. I'd like to make sure my heart is strong, since I've had an irregular heartbeat in my past, and I want to make sure my ticker doesn't wear out prematurely. I also just want to get the recommended daily amount of exercise. After all, I leave my house at 6 AM, come to New York and sit at a desk for most of the day. I get home at 8:30 or 9 PM and I haven't exercised all day. It's easy to see that's a recipe for disaster. So I head upstairs to my office for a half hour and get the blood pumping.

Over the weekend, Rob's bench was on its last legs. The things holding the bar and weights up were held together with JB Weld. If I let that go, one day the weights would come crashing down on my neck.

Another problem was that the weights were those old, thick things that you could order out of the Sears Catalog, which meant you could only get so much weight on the bar before you'd run out of room. Not good.

I also broke the bench doing leg extensions the other week. Basically, it was time for something new. So I headed down to Sports Authority and picked up a Gold's Gym bench and cage set on sale. I also got a weight set to replace the Sears catalog weights.

If you think an Ikea bookcase is no fun to put together, don't buy one of these things. It took me two hours to put together. I'm glad I got it though. My chest and legs have been sore for a few days - I guess that means I'm doing it right.

Post-Super Bowl Reactions

Eli Manning is a MAN. He eats lightning and craps thunder. Talk about stepping up... Any athlete that can do what he did in the face of the press and fans ragging him the way they did is just tremendous in my book. I haven't really watched football all season. The game against the Packers was the first one I saw, and then the Super Bowl. To be truthful, I'm not a big NFL fan, but I will hang out and watch games if invited to someone's house. I'll even make food. To me, it's more about getting together than it is about being a fan of any particular team. If the Giants had lost last night, it's not like I would have been as crushing as, say, the Yankees losing the World Series. I was just happy to see a great, competitive game with some terrific strategic moves and great plays. I don't know how David Tyree managed that catch after Eli nearly got sacked. That Eli stayed up, and that the ball somehow magically stuck to Tyree's helmet long enough for him to get two hands on it, is nothing short of a miracle.

As we all know, though, there's so much more to the Super Bowl than the game.

As an advertising writer, I want to say a couple things about the commercials. They sucked. This year was the first year I remember commercials truly being unremarkable. The best one might have been the Coke commercial with the Charlie Brown, Stewie and Underdog balloons. And I still wondered what the point was after it was over. The Bud Light commercials featuring super powers were just dumb. Audi's take on the Godfather horse head scene was dumb. GoDaddy driving people to the web, where everybody has instant access to free porn, in order to see a racy commercial featuring Danica Patrick was dumb. Just about the only commercial that was intriguing to me was the Hyundai Genesis commercial. And that's just because of my own morbid curiosity about whether or not Korean engineers have solved the challenge of how to keep a 300+ HP car made of tin from exploding on contact.

The halftime show wasn't going to give Lewis Black any more fodder for comedy routines. I'm a Tom Petty fan, and I found that halftime show to be simply boring. No surprises, just the four abbreviated tunes that everyone expected. I figured they could have at least had Tom joined on stage by someone interesting. But I guess "interesting" isn't what the producers are going for in the post-Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction age.