Chris Holmes Online

The folks at Gatorade® have been running ads for the past year or so asking the question, “Is it in you?” Of course, the question is meant to imply more than just the drink – it’s meant to ask if the makings of a champion are in you as well. Things like determination, heart, confidence, etc.

If you’ve been a Seahawk fan as long as I have then you know the answer to that question in the past has been a resounding ‘No’.

No, the Seahawks didn’t have it in them when they blew a 17-point fourth quarter lead to the St. Louis Rams at home last season; a collapse that was revisited by every analyst and sports talk radio show across the country for the remainder of the season. No, it wasn’t in the Seahawks when they blew a 39-29 fourth-quarter lead to Dallas last year, allowing the ‘Boys to score on a Hail Mary pass to Keyshawn Johnson, and then recover a subsequent on-side kickoff which resulted in a Julius Jones touchdown when the defense decided it was too tired to tackle anymore. And no, it wasn’t in them when they got to the first round of the playoffs, hosting the Rams again, and allowing their arch-nemisis to beat them for the third straigt time that season, promptly ending any hopes they had of making their way to the Super Bowl.

So no, It hasn’t been in Seattle. It – heart, determination, confidence – wasn’t in them.

But Sunday, that changed.

As John Levesque writes:

In the past three weeks, in fact, after losing a game they should have won against the Washington Redskins, the Seahawks have:

• Won an offensive shootout against a team that owned them last season, then
• Completely dominated and put the hammer down against an inferior team, then
• Won a close game their recent history indicated they should have lost.

The come-from-behind victory against Dallas signaled a turning point. It might not seem significant to anyone who doesn’t follow the Seahawks, but for those of us who have watched this team for many years, this is no ordinary occurance. Seattle doesn’t do this. They never have.

Historically, Seattle doesn’t come-from-behind. They’ve never had the moxie for that sort of game. But recent events are showing us a different Seahawks team. You only have to look at the last three weeks to see the transformation taking place. Beating the Rams, on the road, in a shootout, showed they’ve finally figured out how to get the monkey off their back. Pummling Houston showed they are finally able to destroy the inferior teams they are supposed to destroy – as opposed to their typical history of playing down to their opponent and letting them hang around in the game for far too long.

And now they’ve beat Dallas, in a game where the Cowboys were dominant at the line of scrimmage, and Seattle had to win it at the end by making perfect plays every snap. Every Hasselbeck pass was perfect – put in a place where only his receiver was going to catch it. And boy, did they catch ‘em.

What was probably the most impressive thing was the defense. It’s not Seattle’s style to win with defense. This team hasn’t seen a good defense since Cortez Kennedy was a second year young stud on the defensive line. But Sunday they shut down Dallas, holding Drew Bledsoe to a paltry 136 passing yards and snagging two interceptions – the last one critical, as it setup the 50-yard winning field goal.

And it all adds up to one very important thing: this is a turning point for Seattle. This is a different team.

Is it in you?

Yeah, I think finally it might be.

22 Months

Talking hasn’t been much of a problem for Jess, but lately her vocabuarly has exploded. When she first started attempting human-speak (as opposed to her native Jessie-speak, which sounds suspiciously like Pig Latin) she was very timid about it; one word here, one word there, nothing more complicated than a single syllable.

We would practice her vocabulary on the drive home from Day Care. I’d say a word I knew she could repeat, and she’d oblige as best she could. At first, we could only get about six blocks before we’d have to start repeating words. Then we’d get about halfway home before we’d repeat anything.

But now we’ve entered the dangerous time: she blurts out anything she hears, and she only has to hear it once. Carrie and I have been worrying about this time period for months, constantly warning each other about our liberal use of certain curses, trying our best to cut back on their use. We must avoid accidental use of those words because .002 seconds later we’re probably going to hear them coming out of her mouth, and then how will we explain it to the lady at Day Care, let alone when she makes her next trip to see the grandparents…

Outside of that, things are fairly normal. She loves the cats. Max is her favorite, althought that sentiment is not reciprocated. He hides from her under the dining room table, or behind the bed, when he hears her shriek of “MACK!” (the “X”, much like the “R” in Japanese, isn’t part of Jessie’s speech capability quite yet).

She also has a new habit: waking up in the middle of the night, and only going back to sleep once she’s tucked in between her mother and I on our bed. I am not sure I would mind this so much if (a) my slumber wasn’t interrupted in the middle of the night and (b) she didn’t flop and kick like a steelhead just dragged into a boat. The flailing and kicking continues all night long, and then escalates when she thinks it is time to get up (which is always pricisely 20 minutes before my alarm goes off, further robbing me of precious restful minutes).

I’m sure I’d be much more perterbed about the whole experience if she wasn’t so damn cute.

Serenity might be the best movie I’ve seen in 2005. I say might because when I saw Batman Begins this summer I was absolutely certain I was not going to see a better film for the rest of the year. It was perfect filmmaking. Not just a great comic book film, not just a great action film, but a great film, period.

So maybe a tie is in order.

Regardless, Serenity is great. I have never seen a single episode of the TV show it is based on, Firefly, so I had no preconceived ideas about the film. I wasn’t a rabid fan, just a casual outsider, lover of great movies and sci-fi. I wanted Firefly to be good, but I kept my expectations grounded on reality and past experience; I expected it to be mediocre. It was, after all, based on a TV show. And we all know how much I loath TV…

In this case, television actually helped Serenity. Dialog is cheap. Special effects are not. And television shows don’t have the weekly budgets to crank out minute after minute of effects-heavy footage. So they have to focus on dialog, character development, and good writing. Of course, few TV shows achieve this, but that’s the formula. That’s why Star Trek was never a whole hour of space fights and laserbeams; the budget didn’t allow for it. Hence the dialog and character development.

Serenity benefits from it’s television roots and focus on dialog. It doesn’t stray far from the TV formula that it grew up on. Normally that’s a death knell for a show trying to make the jump from TV to the big screen, because if the end product looks like a TV show, then you’ve failed to make a movie, and you’re certain to make a quick trip to the DVD bin, and then oblivion. But here, the television chops actually help Serenity from becoming another mindless special effects extravaganza. Joss Whedon, the director, knows that a great movie should tell a story, and that fantastic visual effects and blowing things up simply isn’t enough. After all, we’ve all seen the recent trilogy of Star Wars films from George Lucas, so we’ve had our fill of epic space battles and laserbeams. We’ve been there, done that. Serenity knows this, and opts to tell a story instead. And that’s where the TV experience really helps out.

I thought it was masterfully done. Especially considering I knew I was stepping into a movie with a previous history and a rabid fanbase, and I knew nothing about the characters or the world. Sometimes that makes for a bad movie, because the creators cater to the existing fanbase and don’t take the time to make the film accessible to outsiders. I was hoping the movie would take the proper care and time to involve me in a story, give the characters their proper developmental scenes, and immerse me in their world. They did.

Another thing that was great: no dedicated comic relief characters. The Fifth Element suffered greatly from the presence of a dedicated comic relief character. I hate that crap. It’s so stupid. It makes me acutely aware that I’m watching a movie. Suspension of disbelief is destroyed. Serenity has some nice quips, but they are never handed to one character charged with making the film funny. My brother-in-law and I discussed this after the film, the fact that at work the five of us are funny in various ways at various times. In real life there is no dedicated comic relief person, there is just everyone being funny when the right moment presents itself. Serenity reminded me of my work environment because that’s what it is really like when you have different personalities and people in a small space. Everyone brings their own sets of problems, humor and quirks to the table.

The bottom line, however, is that what really works for Serenity – what really underscores the brilliance of the whole thing – is the story. All of the dialog and character development is for naught if the story doesn’t work. But the story is one of the strong points of the film, and it doesn’t disappoint. I love a good Sci-Fi yarn, especially if it’s smart and not predictable. I’d explain it, but there’s really no point. It’s enough to know that the story is well done and makes sense, and lacks the illogical contrivances that often mar other Sci-Fi films, like Star Trek: Nemisis.

I thought Serenity would be a movie only fans of Firefly could appreciate, so I wasn’t super-excited to see it. But now that I’ve experienced it, I am glad I didn’t miss it. It’s one of the better movies of 2005, and maybe the best Sci-Fi film of the year (and yes, I saw War of the Worlds and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith multiple times). I hope the movie does well enough at the box office to merit a sequel. I would really like to see Serenity fly again.

The Model-View-Controller pattern is one of those things in programming life that looks really sexy on paper, kind of like Charlize Theron, but then when you see it implemented it ends up looking a lot more like Charlize Theron in Monster.

Or at least that’s what it looks like in the .NET world. And maybe .NET and it’s code-behind paradigm are to blame for the uglyness, because the clear delineation of responsibilities becomes blurred. Some people actually think of the code-behind as a controller, and some people do not. I find myself questioning: is the code-behind really a controller? If not, can it be used like one?

If you look at the code-behind as a controller in a MVC pattern (and I’m not saying it is), then there might be some value to .NET 2.0 partial classes. The problem is that I think the designers got the partial class implementations reversed.

When you create a new view (Form/UserControl) in the designer, VS2005 automatically creates two partial classes: the form class, and then a form.designer class that contains all of the designer generated code. The image at the top of this post shows two classes: CustomerView.cs and CustomerView.Designer.cs.

The objective here is to split designer generated code from programmer generated code. Sounds like it might be useful, right? But the implementation is backwards. Clicking on your form class in VS2005 (CustomerView.cs) takes you to the form designer in VS where you can view your form, edit properties, drag-and-drop components, buttons, textboxes, etc. But all of the designer generated code is in the other file (CustomerView.Designer.cs).

It seems to me that the developers got it backwards when they designed this. The CustomerView.Designer.cs file should be the file that is clickable to launch the VS designer/form editor. The CustomerView.cs file should be the file the programmer codes in. If you did it that way, you could then have a pseudo MVC pattern at work. All of the actual UI code would go in CustomerView.Designer.cs, and the Controller code could then go in CustomerView.cs. Heck, you should even be able to setup VS2005 to do this automatically with proper naming: CustomerView.Designer.cs and CustomerView.Controller.cs. Hook up your Model and you’re good to go.

Of course, none of that addresses the issue of reusable controllers, which is why you really implement MVC anyway (so you can hook it up to a Windows Form or an ASP.NET page). But at least in a .NET code-behind context, with partial classes, it would make more sense.

David Locke wrote a great piece today about Mike Holmgren’s endgame decisions last week against the Redskins, and the odds of bad things happening vs. positive things happening. It’s a pretty interesting piece, because it points out just how fearful head coaches can be in the waning moments of a game.

But the overall point of the article goes even further, pointing out the basic tenet that if you believe you’re going to lose, you will lose.

This is true of all sports. Heck, it even extends beyond sports into all aspects of life. Fear of the worst case only ensures the worst case will happen. Winners don’t fear the worst case – they pursue the best case scenario with everything they have. They believe they are going to win. They take the risk everyone else is afraid to take. They throw on third down. And they score when they do it.

Holmgren prevented the Seahawks from thinking like winners. He prevented them from attacking like winners. And ultimately, he prevented them from winning.

The article mentions that Holmgren is cautious because of a pass play he called decades ago that almost resulted in an interception, and thus almost cost him a game. I’m surprised his memory is so focused on a play from so long ago. Maybe he needs to jog his memory for a more recent event. I’m thinking about Seattle’s game against New England last year. Seattle was in it – had a chance to beat the champs – and let it escape them because New England plays like a winner. Third and eight. Does Brady make the safe pass? Nope. He throws a bomb to Deion Branch that covers some 40 yards, and the game is effectively over. High risk, high reward. That’s what a winner does.

Winners put the dagger in their opponents by being aggressive.

I don’t mean to make it sound like Holmgren is a bad coach – far from it. I love the guy. Aside from Bill Belichick and Andy Reid, there isn’t anyone else I’d rather have coaching my offensive unit. But he’s got to start believing in his players pretty soon, or they’re never going to learn how to win.