Sports, TiVo, and Niche Markets

I enjoy watching sports. Pro Football, College Basketball, and all types of Soccer. I also enjoy my DVR (not technically a TiVo anymore). Unlike many people, I enjoy watching sports on my DVR. I'm not hung up on 'live', and I really dislike commercials. I don't particularly care for halftime either.

When I watch Pro Football, I have to watch the game on the same day. I don't really ever watch it live, but usually I watch it within a few hours of 'live'. It is pretty difficult to avoid finding out the end result of the game for more than a few hours, and especially on Monday mornings in an office environment. College Basketball is better, but still tough to delay more than few hours.

Soccer on the other hand, is a niche market. Last weekend I recorded 4 games. The Chicago Fire, Chicago Red Stars, and the Men's and Women's national teams. I watched the fire game and the men's national team game over the weekend. The Red Stars and Women's game I watched during the week. I never heard the scores on the radio, no one twittered about it, and there was no water cooler talk. I am free to delay the games as long as I want. In fact, I've only heard scores from a Red Stars game once on the radio, on a really slow sports day. Even the WNBA gets more time than women's soccer. Does anyone really care about the WNBA?

I don't watch ANY television live. What's the point? I let my life be my life, and television provides entertainment when I'm ready. I'm glad the sport I enjoy most supports it.

The Simple Approach

I have a reasonable amount of archived email on my local hard drive, that I'd really prefer to store in Gmail. Since I use Google Apps for my domain I created a new account to store the archive email.

The next step was figuring out how I could get the email into the account. I started looking around for applications to export to Gmail or import from archive formats. Then I came across the simple approach.

I added the newly created GMail account to my email client that contained the archived email. Then I dragged the email from the archive folders into the new account. The email client dutifully copied it to the Gmail account, preserving the date and all other meta-data.

No tools needed. Simple, easy, and effective.

Vacation

After a two week vacation, I'm back home.

It was a great trip, and very relaxing. My family and I spent the time in Colorado exploring the Rockies and enjoying the peace and quiet. We hiked to the top of Flat Top, Twin Sisters, and Estes Cone, along with a few other great non-summit hikes. Here are some of my favorite shots from the trip...

In Golden we watched kayaks doing jumps in the river.


Calypso Cascades


An HDR image of Estes Park from Little Valley.


The coming storm, taken from the top of Twin Sisters.


Fireworks over Estes. This was the pre-game show.


Fireworks over Estes. This was the official show.


The hummingbird feader was popular. We refilled it 3 times while we were there.