I usually don't follow "celebrity" Twitter users. Most of the time the Tweets they send out is pretty useless. I could care less what people are having for lunch or who they are hanging out with. However, Ric Bucher of ESPN has some damn useful NBA information. For instance, he just Tweet'd that Antonio McDyess is going to San Antonio, 3 years, $15 million. ESPN.com, Yahoo! Sports, etc don't even have this up yet. Plus I think he's a Bay Area guy since his back drop during ESPN segments is always San Francisco locations.

Having spent most of my life in the Bay Area, my view of what constitutes "big business" skews heavily towards tech. I'm sure folks from New York would say financial services and folks from Los Angeles would say entertainment. It blew me away when looking at the latest Forbes report on the world's most profitable corporations that Oil & Gas Operations dominated the top 6 by a healthy margin. What's more jaw dropping are the revenue numbers. I thought Microsoft's $62 billion was a lot but it's dwarfed more than 7 times over by ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell. Just goes to show how far we need to go to ween ourselves off petroleum based products.

Back when I worked in SF, I used to attend a lot of San Francisco Giants games. I worked in SOMA and used to take a few hours off to see the afternoon games or head to the park straight from work for the evening games. Then I left the working world to do the start-up thing (ie, no time and no money), the Giants started to go down hill post-Bonds, and the invention of the Slingbox have made for a confluence of excuses not to attend live games. Today's game should give a lot of Giants fans hope for this year. A ton of good, young, home grown players alongside some decent veterans might make this the best Giants team we've seen in at least 5 years. It's hard to tell from my Slingbox screenshot but that's a 100mph fastball from Brian Wilson to end the game. Not sure I get his pharaoh's end of game pose though.

As a follow up to my last post, today's deluge in Oakland might be going overboard. However, too much rain is never a bad thing in the Bay Area. We could definitely use the extra water in our reservoirs. And if you own a rain catchment system (like in this article), you're loving a day like this. Water is such a valuable resource yet it's one that we often overlook because it's so easily available to us. Want a drink of water? Just walk to the facet and turn it on. Want to wash a little bit of dirt off your hand? Let's run our hands under the facet for a minute. I bet you'd think twice if you had to actually GET your water from an external source and bring it into your home. If you've ever gone camping for a couple of days, you'll know what I mean.