Schonhose

One of the things I really wanted to add to my basketball statistics program was the possibility to export statistics for a game to a PDF file. After the initial thought a long search on the internet was needed to find a good class that can generate PDF files.

Nearly every class I have tried have some severe or minor flaws in the generated file. After much searching and trail & error I decided to stick with mPDF,based on FPDF, HTML2FPDF, and UFPDF, with a number of enhancements.

Although several CSS tweaks, for example the use of background images in tables, aren’t supported yet, this was the only class that actually made something readable from the HTML output I presented it with. If you’re interested in seeing an example of the output, you can find it here (700kB).

It is that time of the year again: March Madness has finally arrived. And as always I look to support the University of North Carolina men’s basketball team. This year they have earned a No. 1 seed in the 2009 NCAA Tournament and will open play on Thursday against No. 16 seed Radford (21-11) in Greensboro, N.C.

I’ll hope to catch some games online through the March Madness on demand: Watch live games from the 2009 NCAA® Division I Men’s Basketball Championship online for free.

Here is the Printable NCAA Tournament Bracket (.pdf) (located on the UNC site).

The quote of today is from Rudyard Kipling and this quote was used by Phil Jackson (former coach of the Chicago Bulls and current coach of the LA Lakers) to describe the teamconcept in basketball.

For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

Every once in a while I need new shoes, being for either basketball or every day use. Buying shoes is a real adventure, since I have special soles to prevent pain issues from Plantar fasciitis. On most shoes the inner sole isn’t removed easily making it hard to use my own soles. Luckily I still manage to find shoes which I like and can be easily modified to be used with my own inner soles.

Everyone who has bought a new pair of shoes has experienced another discomfort: blisters. To prevent these blisters it is recommended to ‘break in’ the shoes by walking in them for a couple of hours a day. And most of the times this works, for instance the latest daily shoes I bought were put immediately to the test by walking 4 days in Rome, Italy. No feet were harmed during these days, which was really nice. If only I was that lucky when I visited Dubrovnic. I got some really nice blisters from the shoes that week.

The fact is sometimes I get lucky and I forget what I’m suppose to do. However, my feet will always give me this little reminder if the combination with the new shoes don’t work. This was the case on monday when I went out playing basketball using my newly bought basketball shoes. The normally white socks turned to some pinkish color around the toes which was the first indication I forgot something. The pain in the shower and after applying disinfectant would be the second and third indication. So this is a friendly reminder to myself: save some agony and spend some time breaking in new shoes.