Are the 2008 Los Angeles Lakers the team to beat in the NBA? The answer to that question is NO. That answer might come off as a surprise to many people considering I’m a die hard Laker fan. Don’t get me wrong I want them to win the championship this year, next year and every year thereafter but the truth is they do not have the experience right now. The only Laker players on the current roster that have the playoff experience past the first round are Kobe, Fisher and Luke. The rest of the team do not have the experience needed. With that said, everyone always sleeps on the Spurs until they realize that they are still playing in June. So my take is this, the Spurs are the NBA Champions and until they are knocked out of the playoffs THEY are the team to beat. They have the experience and they always seem to turn it on at this time of the season and of course the playoffs. I hate to admit this as watching the Spurs play is like watching paint dry but that’s beside the point because they do what it takes to win.
OK so we’ve settled that San Antonio is the team to beat and that’s great and dandy. But… and this is going to be a big BUT.. LA has the TALENT along with Mr. 24. The Lakers might not be the team to beat, but they are contenders in a big way. Its true that most of the roster do not have playoff experience but speaking as a loyal fan whose followed the team from day one this season I believe that the lack of experience will be outweighed with the talent, drive and determination of the team. Sure San Antonio is the team to beat but LA will be the team to beat team.
Last.FM has been around for awhile and is considered the main player in the evolution of the online music social revolution. I am a late bloomer as far as being a user as I only registered back in December of 2007. But I’ve been a loyal user since my discovery. Last.FM has a ton of features and once you have registered you will be greeted with a myriad of choices on what to do to get started with the revolution. The main feature that draws me to the site is “Scrobbling”. Basically Scrobbling is Last.FM’s way of logging the music you play within your Media Player (iTUNES, WinAmp, Media Player etc..) and create charts based on what you’ve listened to. But as I just mentioned they have alot of things going on for the site.
The following are some of the features I use and have found valuable are:
- Last.FM client – This is an external program that will run in the background and will scrobble the songs you play. The client also has a plug-in that will scrobble items you play on your iPOD. This is the feature that I really benefit from, since I listen to most of my songs away from the PC.
- Charts – After scrobbling your music, last.FM creates charts that you can modify and browse through. I find this feature interesting, I can go back a certain week/month and see which artists, songs I listened to during that time period.
- Neighbors – Last.FM will generate 50 neighbors (other users) each week for you based on the musical taste that you have scrobbled.
- Friends – This is after all a social network. Making music buddies is a breeze, you can request a friend request to a random user, neighbor or anybody that you find interesting. You may also get friend requests from people.
- Widgets – An awesome feature that Last.FM offers, you can have your recently listened tracks show up on your facebook, myspace, blog etc…
- Journal - You can also create a musical journal from within the website.
- Groups – You can join or create your own.
There are a ton of other things that the website offers and all this is free and and really addicting. I’m still in the process of fully discovering the site. So far in 4 months of listening, I have listened to a total of 4882 tracks, my top Artist is Jack Johnson who I’ve listened to 349 times.
If you haven’t started yet, I’d say go ahead and start scrobbling. It’s fun and pretty much addicting.
When working on the PC, people tend overuse the desktop as the destination in which they save most of their items to, or at least I do. As a result the desktop ends up with a bunch of items that you do not actually need. This tutorial will help you keep ONLY the items you want to keep on the desktop.
- Go to your desktop
- Right click and select “Properties“
- From the Display Properties screen select the “Desktop” tab.
- From the Display tab click on the “Customize Desktop” button.
- Then click on the “Clean Desktop Now” Button.
- This will take you to the Clean Desktop Wizard click “Next“
- Select the items you want to clean up. Unselect the items you want to keep.(Note: Items selected will not be deleted, they will be moved to the Unused Items shortcut which will be a folder on the desktop)
- After figuring out which items you want to move to the Unused Items shortcut click “Next“.
- Then click “Finish” to perform the action.
