Sam wrote earlier today about when the office flooded this week. I missed this momentous event because I was on the road, grinding, working. Only this time, I’m not even allowed to say where I was. I can say that I am allowed to talk about where I was and what I did on Jan. 1, 2008, and I had such an amazing time that I’m going to write a post and set it to go live at midnight on New Year’s. So wherever you are at midnight New York time, give someone a kiss, take a drink of whatever, and then log onto SLAMonline. It’ll be worth it, promise.
In the meantime, I’m trying to maintain. I’m on the road again right now, on a different trip than the one I was on during the week. I realized I’ve been traveling a lot the other day when I flew to a city with a couple of different airports but didn’t have any idea which airport I was in until I arrived at that airport. I’m tired. My eyes are stinging. And I have so much writing to do that I’m actually kind of afraid.
Right now I’m watching ESPN’s Lakers/Kings preseason game, and I hate to say it, but I kind of like the studio crew of STEPHEN A SMITH, Jalen Rose and Mark Jones. Wait…as I wrote that, Mark Jones was talking about Spurs rookie Ian Mahinmi, and he noted that the Spurs continue to import “good gems” from overseas. As opposed to bad gems? That’s the Worldwide Leader in Sports, doing their thing! Glad that some things never change.
But some things do change, and The Links is one of those things. I know I wrote a few weeks ago that my goal was to post something every day, but it’s just not happening. A few years ago, I was able to do that because Ryan and Russ and them were busy cranking out the magazine. Now I’m helping crank out the magazine, and it’s really hard to do that and write stuff at the same time. Still, my goal remains to write stuff here every day, and I have a few ideas of ways to increase my productivity. For instance, don’t be surprised if you get a lot more late night posts on The Links. I’ve got other plans, too, but hang in there…
At the same time, I’m loving the stuff from Sam and Holly and everyone else running the takeover here on SLAMonline. When I hired Sam, I told him, “You know how when you have a job and it seems like your boss isn’t doing any work and it feels like you’re doing everything? Well, it’s going to feel that way for a while, but trust me, I’ll be working and at the same time I hope you’ll be learning how to do my job.” I don’t know if Sam even remembers that, but he’s taken my old job and run with it. Go on with your bad self.
I’ve still got three parts of the NBA Preview from me and Gilbert to post, but the flood seems to have wiped out the flash videos, so I’ve got our girl Lisa re-converting the files for me. When I get those from her, I’ll post them all at the same time. SLAMonline used to be me, a copy of Dreamweaver and an iBook. Now we’ve got like a staff and tech support people and everything. And we can’t do what we do without all the people behind the scenes you never hear about, from our man Andrew Pitt to Jonathan and Lisa.
But I still have a gig here, and I keep getting my hands on some cool stuff. I got a copy of the new Dwyane Wade Converse commercial, but I think the email I sent to our computer folk asking them to convert the video into a flash thing for our site got wiped out by the floods. Here’s the spot on YouTube, though.
The story behind the commercial is pretty cool: It stems from a letter to basketball that Dwyane wrote. Here’s a story about that letter.
And — and this is the dope part — this is the actual letter, in Dwyane’s handwriting and everything. I love that he still uses a spiral-bound notebook…
