The World: By Phil

by Phil Ricci The World: by Phil

By Phil Ricci, The World: by Phil

A couple nights back, Armando Galarraga was standing on the mound, literally one out away from history. Not only was he so close to a perfect game, but he would have been the second pitcher to throw one in a week; and the third of the year. Amazing. He had just watched his teammate make an amazing Willie Mays style grab in the outfield; and had a grin on his face like a school boy getting a piece of chocolate after class. It was his night. It kind of had to be. Guys were making killer plays, his location was flawless and he was only around his 80th pitch so his tank was still pretty full. He just had one batter left.

Everyone knows what happend next, right? 

Jim Joyce was positioned on the first base line as he had been all night; and other nights during his twenty two year Major League career. He watched as Galarraga went through each batter in succession, making his calls when needed. It seemed like it was going to be a special night. It was, but not in the way I’m sure he thought. When that fateful hit was made, Joyce dug in and watched as runner and pitcher charged the bag. The ball was fielded clean and over to Galarraga himself, it was close but he was totally…

“Safe!”

What!? What did he say? Did he say safe? I couldn’t believe it, Galarraga couldn’t believe it; and pretty much the baseball watching world couldn’t believe it. A perfect game gone in an instant; off a bad call. No off “the most egregious blown call in baseball over the last 25 years” as Tyler Kepner from the New York Times put it. 

As a matter of fact, you pretty much can’t go anywhere without hearing about this play. Every sports channel, station, writer and blogger have been pouring the hearts over just how bad it was. Many calling for Selig to reverse it, but all screaming about expanding instant replay, for Joyce to be fired; anything! I understand the frustration. My heart sank in that moment. I get that people feel that it wasn’t just Galarraga who was robbed, but them in a way as well. I understand that it just wasn’t suppose to end that way.

But it did.

What I haven’t heard is about the good side of the story. The side that actually teaches us something more than just about outs or replays. It’s the side that isn’t sexy or controversial, but it is the side that is needed and important. The Human Side.

After the call was made, the world exploded. People came out of the woodwork to attack Joyce. They screamed in his face, they called him some choice phrases that even the most beginner lip reader could get; and they beat him down with waving arms of frustration. Joyce took it all. He didn’t yell, didn’t respond, just accepted it. Keep in mind at this point he had no idea if he was wrong or right. He made a call that he felt was correct, but unlike the rest of us, he did not have the luxury of the repeated frame by frame replay that we saw. After the game was over the only thing he wanted to do was see for himself if he was right. Once he realized that he wasn’t, he broke down.

In business and in life we make mistakes. We will get the call wrong. BP has done nothing but get the call wrong since the explosion in the Gulf first took place. They spent the first four weeks blaming everyone except themselves for what is ultimately, their responsibility. The explosion and spill killed innocent people, destroyed thousands of sea life and has ended communitues of business. Jim Joyce missed a call in a baseball game. Yet he went out, found Armando Galarraga and with tears in his eyes, apologized.

“I just cost the kid a perfect game. I thought he beat the throw. I was convinced he beat the throw until I saw the replay. It was the biggest call of my career.”

For Galarraga’s part, the term “grace under fire” has nothing on this guy. Nolan Ryan, arguably one of the best pitchers in history who threw like a hundred No Hitters, never pitched a perfect game. Galarraga was one four letter word away from that fame, but when the call came down, he didn’t scream or jump up and down. What he did was go back on the mound and get the next batter out.

“I’m a calm person. At that moment, [I did] not get angry, I was more sad about it,” Galarraga said.

Sad, yes, but not rude. When Joyce came to him after the game to apologize, he accepted it, told him ”it was OK” and embraced him in a hug. In every interview since, he has been a class act. Constantly reassuring everyone that he is not going after Joyce or the call.  He even appeared on the CBS “Early Show” Friday and said “nobody’s perfect,” that simple.At the end of the day Joyce didn’t hide from his error, he owned it. He displayed the kind of courage and ethics that only a true professional can have. It’s not easy being wrong, but it’s even harder admittingit, especially when it affects other people in such a negative way. Yet in every bad situation, there is always something that can be learned. What I learned was that we could all use a little of what Galarraga and Joyce has displayed. Couldn’t we BP?

Until Next Time….

How many music players are there in the world? A lot. What makes them so different? That is a good question, but even that at times is hard. Really when you think about, the primary purpose of sites like playlist.com, Pandora, (the almost deceased) lala.com and even Grooveshark.com are all the same: play live streaming music while trying to build an online community. The better question is why do we become loyal to a certain one? My buddy is in love with playlist.com, another has recommended Grooveshark to me more times than I can count. Each has their reasons for this love and each of them are valid, but telling you to love something is not my job man. My job is to play around with each of them all and then tell you the good and the bad. You decide the rest for yourself. I know, I’m pretty generous aren’t I?

Today’s entry is the french based deezer.com. The first that really stands out about this site as soon as you arrive, is the multi cultural clash that greets you. Right on the front page is a combination of sections in English, French and German, which can be confusing. I perused around for the setting and instead found a tab on the top right that diplays the flags of the host country’s language. You will not find an American flag there, but the British Union Jack works just as well.

After that was sorted, I went to task on learning the site. The navigation is pretty simple so it didn’t take me long to figure out what goes where and how. 

A little background.

Deezer is the product of French based, Blogmusik and was launched on August 24th, 2007. It was the first ever French music site to actually sign agreements with music publishers for legal music downloading. As of the most recent update in May of this year, Deezer claims to have roughly four million users and a library of seven million songs. Not bad, but the selection is mot going to be what you may be accustomed to. Here’s the good and bad…

Pros:

• The site is easy to navigate and use.
• The player is simplistic and does not need additional downloads to work at all, so you literally show up, search and listen.
• You do not have to sign up for an account to go and listen to any songs either.
• Once you do have an account, there are a bunch of features that are free to users. You can create, share and rate play lists, write reviews, share with your social media, blogs and followers within the site.
• There are also options to put mini players with designs and personal play lists on your Facebook and blog pages.
• Integrated with iTunes for fast purchases.
• Easy sign up and cancel process.

Cons:

• The music selection is geared primarily to European groups and audiences. Acts with international presence have a home (Lady Gaga, Madonna), but others are non existent (All American Rejects, Switchfoot).
• Bands that are on do not have their full collections available.
• All of the site details, including Help, Blog and Press sections are all in French. This isn’t a knock in anyway. After all this is a french site, but it does make the experience lackluster for this poorly educated American.

Design:

When I first hit the site, I thought that I was on an iTunes page, so I wasn’t very shocked to learn that Deezer and Apple have a connection. Much of the fonts and color schemes seem to be in the Apple family. Regardless, it’s clean enough and breaks itself down into different distinct areas. 

What I think:

Overall, I can see why the site is popular in France. There is an awesome mix of Europe’s top artist, as well as those from the US that have struck the right chord (wow that was bad.). The site is simple, but has lots of nice features for all to enjoy. The company even holds festivals throughout France, Belgium and Hungary, bringing some of that regions’ biggest artists direct to the fans.

That being said, this is definitely a regional site. Unlike Pandora, which is pretty much universal where ever you go,  Deever loses it’s luster the farther outside the French borders you are. It’s not a bad site, but it’s not for me.

Until Next Time….

For the record, I am a geek. Not that this is surprising to anyone that knows me, but if you don’t I want you to understand that simple fact before we move on. Even though I have been running and managing people and businesses my whole adult life, the inner child in me is very predominant. In other words, I love me some comic books, summer blockbuster movies, sports and playing games online. Which is why today I am focusing my weekly review on a site dedicated to geeks like me who enjoy playing web based games: Playsushi.com

Funny enough, I discovered this site while playing on another free gaming site. It was my original intention to write a review on that one, but once I clicked over to Playsushi.com, I decided to stay and check that out instead.

Getting Started: 

The first thing you notice when you get to the main page is that there are a lot of games to choose from. Selection as you know is very important in gaming sites so that you can appeal to a greater audience. I have been to way too many site that are limited in their offering. It gets boring pretty quick.

I was personally greeted by a Batman promo screen as soon as I showed up, which of course geared me right up (Told you, geek), so I clicked on the “Play Now” button and was directed to download Playsushi’s software for free. The process was extremely simple and within a few minutes, I was playing.

Game-Play:

Now as you can see this isn’t XBox 360 graphics or anything, but the game-play  is effective, simple to learn and did the job just fine for me. Maybe even a little too fine actually, as my five year old promptly kicked me off to play Kung Fu Panda.

Family Friendly:

Which brings me to my next point. As I said before, there is a nice selection for all ages to enjoy this free service. Games like the aforementioned Kung Fu Panda for the little kids and slightly more detailed games like Quickhit Football for the older kids. (Like me!)

Design:

As far as the design goes, Playsushi is clean, well organized and easy to navigate. The ads on the site are all appropriate, but you have to be careful where you click or you might end up on a some sponsored site like I did. Wizard 101 to be exact. Good times. 

Here are the Cons:

Now there are some drawbacks to this that I want you to know about. No matter how much I may like something, I want you to see all sides.  

Nothing in this world is perfect, but somethings are just really too annoying, even for me. If you use Firefox to download Playsushi’s software, then you may get an unwanted add-on called ”PlaySushi TextLinks1.0.0”. You will know if you have it because regular text sites like Wikipedia or even CNN will have hyperlinked phrases that take you back to Playsushi.com.

Remove this at once!

There have been reports of this being dangerous malware, but there is no evidence to substantiate any of those claims that I can find. Regardless I am one to err on the side of caution, so here is the fix that seems to work: http://www.renownedmedia.com/blog/playsushi-textlinks-firefox-uninstall/

In all fairness, I switched to Chrome recently as my default browser (AWESOME by the way) and it hasn’t been there since. This is a Firefox issue apparently.

Overall:

Overall, Playsushi is a cool little site for both young and old kids alike. Outside of that pesky add-on issue there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it. I won’t give it my full blessing because I don’t like the fact that you have that extra worry; but if you don’t mind and want to give it a try, you’ll probably enjoy it!

Check out more at www.theworldbyphil.com

Until Next Time….

My wife loves the Oscars. I mean really loves the Oscars. She breaks out the wine, buys a bunch of snacky snacks and gets all cozy to watch a bunch of people walk down an aisle in dresses she could never afford and look important. That is pretty much how I feel about the NFL Draft. I mean just substitute out the wine with a cold Killian and it's pretty close to the same thing.

Yet on the eve of my favorite spring time event, I wasn't talking about my mock draft with my friends, or listening to my favorite sports talk show make their predictions about who will do what and when. Nope, instead I was talking and hearing all day about this putz:

If you don't know by now then I'll be happy to fill you in. On Wednesday, Roger Goodell, the Commissioner of the National Football League, handed down a six game suspension without pay to embattled Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, for his misconduct during his recent sexual assault allegations in Georgia. I say recent because this is not the first time that Big Ben has found himself being accused of attacking a woman. He faced similar allegations in 2008 while at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada. Those too were never brought to fruition, but caused a lot of embarrassment for the Steelers and the NFL, respectively.

The focus of intent for this article though isn't around the deplorable behaviors of a twenty eight year old child, that just happens to be able to throw and scramble with a football really well. What really moved me to write on this was actually a conversation that I was having with my wife about the Goodell ruling. We had just gotten home from work when she turned to me:

"So what happened to Roethlisberger?" She asked.

"Goodell laid into him. He got suspended for six games, maybe four if he gets help and follows all of these rules, but if he so much as thinks of screwing up again he will get more than that." I explained.

"Why?" She asked. I was a little taken by this actually. I mean I wasn't expecting that at all in the slightest. I was counting on "Good" or "Serves him right", but not "Why?".

"What do you mean?" I asked, obviously confused.

"Well he didn't get charged right? So why is he being punished by the NFL?"

Fair question. I had to think on it a minute. Then I remembered a quote that Goodell made back when he first took over as Commissioner, "I will do whatever it takes to protect the shield" he said. He was referring to of course the staggering rise of off the field player arrests and lawsuits. I remembered thinking to myself when he first said it, that it was probably the smartest, yet most difficult thing to pull off in this kind of league. I mean you don't pay guys millions of dollars to not play because of something they did off the field, do you?  Well yes as a matter of fact, you do.

Roger Goodell is a smart businessman. He understands a very simple truth, one that I have stated a bunch of times on here as well, your brand is everything! No one person is more important that the strength and viability of the entire organization. In other words, if you want to play this game on the field, you better walk the line off it too, because there are a bunch of little kids that adore you, look up to you and beg their parents to buy your jerseys.

"I recognize that the allegations in Georgia were disputed and that they did not result in criminal charges being filed against you," Goodell wrote to Roethlisberger. "My decision today is not based on a finding that you violated Georgia law, or on a conclusion that differs from that of the local prosecutor. That said, you are held to a higher standard as an NFL player, and there is nothing about your conduct in Milledgeville that can remotely be described as admirable, responsible, or consistent with either the values of the league or the expectations of our fans."

Those are some very harsh words to receive, but they are also dead on accurate. Not only will Roethlisberger miss the first six games of this season, but his name and personal brand is crap right now. The Steelers have even started to call around the league to see if there is a potential trade before the draft begins. As of this report, three out of the seven reached said no thanks. Mind you these aren't good teams either, but still they would rather suck some more than have that kind of baggage. It doesn't matter that he is a two time Super Bowl Champion, nobody wants to have to explain to their fans why they are going for a guy with these kind of ethics.

Sorry Big Ben, but your clock is running a little slow these days. My advice, get some help, stay in on Friday night, stop watching Boogie Nights and thinking that it's your life story and, oh yeah, grow the hell up!

Well needless to say, I will still be perched in front of my TV watching the draft in prime time for the first time ever. I'm excited too, even with all the drama, because I know that I have a guy running the league that I love who cares about it as much as I do. He proved it to me. He protected the shield.

Check out more stories and articles on www.theworldbyphil.com

Until Next Time....