Day: May 11, 2003

Hard to be ambivalent about the Los Angeles Lakers. They won today. Series is tied 2-2. I still want them to lose.

‘New Media’: Ready for the Dustbin of History? is an article in today’s NYTimes Week in Review.

Mr. Diller and others have come to realize that two things succeed commercially on the World Wide Web: searching (like Google and Yahoo) and shopping (like Amazon.com and eBay).
Is that what the digital revolution has come to? Back in the mid-1990’s, it was going to cause a media revolution.

Steve Lohr, the author, then goes on to write off the efforts of AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, and the media-focused efforts of Microsoft… all because commerce is the be-all and end-all. When you write a perspective article, and you refer back all of 6-10 years, I think it’s a bit early. Yes, journalism may be the first draft of history, but maybe the jury is still out? Of course, I’m biased. I work at a media company founded for the internet… in retrospect, at least. We’ll see. I’d like to think we’re still making history — though we can’t tell whether we’re going to like the story yet.

We’ve had a beautiful day here in the city, and all three of us spent some time down in the back yard. Part of our backyard has a beautiful, deep green, luscious lawn (the rest is concrete, porch foundation, etc.). Of course, that luscious lawn is fake. It’s FieldTurf, and it was one of the best decisions we made when redoing the back porch and our small yard. The motto my wife always throws out is “No mow, no grow, no H2O.” Given the San Francisco climate and my lack of interest in yardwork, FieldTurf has been quite the answer for us — and we only have a tiny back yard. After reading “Fields of Dreams?” from the NYTimes, I feel even more ahead of the curve. The article, which will disappear behind the premium wall eventually, isn’t about artificial replacements for the American lawn. Rather, it chronicles the increasing competition for fields, not only in cities, but even in suburbia. Of course, the examples are in Westchester, north of New York City, but I expect they represent other urban areas and their surrounds, too. The (proper) growth of girls’ sports and burgeoning leagues for adult recreation, competing against the price of urban land, means that the limiting factor for recreation is often the field.

The demand for more sports fields came as open space was diminishing and land prices were rising, and it has all added up to a shortage of athletic fields writ large.

As Ben outgrows kicking the ball in the house (any week now), and then outgrows the backyard (still a year or so away… I think), I’ll start to see this affect us more dramatically. Most of my sporting activities are more about endurance, but team sports are fun and integral to making friends… and they require space, whether fields or gyms. I’ll have to start paying more attention to how San Francisco handles this… it’s a long-term issue, so if I want to have a voice, I need to be informed now. I hope FieldTurf comes down in price, either through competition or other market forces.

I ran around the track at Kezar today. The track is open for public use. The field is not… has to be reserved.