This is interesting because I’ve been wondering about this for a long time myself.

Jeff Van Gundy offered a modest proposal and everyone laughed. Van Gundy was not joking.

Weeks before accusations could begin that teams were tanking games to improve their chances of landing either of the season’s celebrated college prodigies, Greg Oden and Kevin Durant, Van Gundy offered a solution. Make the entire first round a lottery. One through 30. Put every name in a hat and let luck determine the draft order.

Right now, only the really crappy teams get solid shots at improving through the draft, so if you’re a team with decent management that manages to keep you in the middle, or moving up, then you’re never really going to get anyone of merit without getting lucky. By the same token, really good players who end up with perennially bad teams are just plain stuck until their rookie contracts run out.

I understand the notion of spreading the wealth and trying to level the laying field, but I think the teams who don’t dog it every season need to get a shot in the draft as well.

I get really pissed off by the fact that cheese slices are so much smaller than the slices of bread they’re most often be placed upon.

Until I get around to write about my frightening seven months at that hell hole of an agency, Prestige Communications, here’s a really good article about the transition from the employed to the self-employed.

It’s a little different for me, because I was freelancing for eight years straight, before joining Contract and then Prestige (both as Creative Director). The ad agency bug had bit me a little and I spent 13 months split between those two before realising that most people here are unethical, political and crooks (Yes, I had a reasonable amount of money ripped off by Prestige).

I’m now back in the comforts of my home, but trying to figure out how to work up the discipline that will allow me fight of my two kids and get some work done. It’s not easy, but I know it’s doable since 1) I’ve done it for years and 2) I completed one ‘loadsa work’ job a fortnight ago with my poor wife serving as bodyguard.

Digital Web Magazine - To Dance the Dance of Freelance

For years, I’ve been able ‘eye’ a page and tell whether I was looking at Helvetica or Arial. I never really knew how I knew, but I knew. The designs using Arial didn’t look quite as refined and never seemed to be spaced properly. I think the latter problem stemmed from the fact that ‘proper’ designers don’t use Arial, so it was pretty likely that the page was put together, sans correct leading and kerning, by someone new to design, or someone who just wasn’t very good.

A little history about Arial’s origins — It’s a typeface that Microsoft made ubiquitous when it bundled it with Windows 3.1 and eventually their Mac apps as well. The popular misconception is that Microsoft asked to have Arial created in order to avoid the licensing fees that would’ve accompanied Helvetica’s wide distribution. While the the reasoning is considered to be correct, Arial already existed as part of Monotype Corporation’s list of typefaces.

Helvetica is owned by Linotype and you’d need to hook up with them if you wanted to distribute the face. Since MS didn’t want to go that route, they talked with Monotype about using something similar and settled on Arial because of it’s uncanny match of proportions.

As to why Monotype had a Helvetica knock-off to begin with, I found this:

Like many traditional type companies, Monotype had a number of “similar-to” or analogue designs in their library, dating from the years when type was tied to a specific platform, and each hardware company had to offer the popular designs in order to keep their hardware business viable. However, when they entered the cross-platform world of digital type, Monotype stopped this design plagiarism for a while and focussed on their great collection of classic designs. After a time, it seems that Linotype’s dominance of the PostScript market (due to a more extensive library and to jumping onto the PostScript bandwagon much earlier, as well as owning part of the printer font set) was too threatening, and they decided they had to have core-font equivalents.

The precedent, Times New Roman PS, was easy to justify. When Monotype came out with their first PostScript imagesetter, they were offended at the idea of having Linotype’s Times in the RIP, considering Times originated with Monotype. They prepared a modified version of the original Times New Roman in which the glyphs were fitted onto the widths used in the 12-point Times of the LaserWriter set. I did the Type 1 production for the ROM font.

Several years later, things got more serious, and Monotype created Arial. I’ve been told that the decision to make this an analogue of Helvetica was a late decision by new upper management, but others are certain the direction was there before that change transpired. Monotype had definitely returned to the slipperly slope, and continued with Z-Antiqua.

Anyway, here’s how tell Helvetica and Arial apart.

Oh well, Kobe’s scoring streak ends at four games, though the Lakers winning streak . Good enough for me, though Marc Stein at ESPN figured it would go at least six.

So you heard it hear first. Kobe is going to take his streak of 50-point games all the way to next Friday’s home game with Houston — one short of tying Wilt Chamberlain’s record of seven consecutive 50-pointers — when the slow-it-down Houston Rockets will finally hold No. 24 under a half-century.

The LA Times wrote after the fame against Golden State:

Kobe Bryant’s pursuit of Wilt Chamberlain was halted after he scored 43 points, but the Lakers secured their season-high fifth consecutive victory by beating the Golden State Warriors, 115-113, Sunday at Staples Center.