About halfway through my final proofread of the R01. Oh, happy day. To make my afternoon even sunnier, the biweekly Stanford barbecue tent reopened today on the CCSR lawn after an extended hiatus because of the rainy spring. Mmm, turkey burger.

The full version of Adobe Acrobat is great, allowing you to convert Word documents to PDFs on the fly. My only semi-negative comment is that when i convert big documents like the body of my grant (6 MB), Word goes into a sort of conniption fit as it performs the umpteen steps necessary to generate a PDF file. It looks like it's puking up random portions of the document for five minutes, until the pristine PDF magically appears in a new window.

we're like crystal
we break easy

Oh man, i'm really out of the loop when it comes to American sports. When the hell did Colts all-star running back Edgerrin James sign with the lowly Arizona Cardinals? Are there any other big name moves i've missed? Kobe Bryant is still a Laker, right?

Speaking of Bryant, there's a fairly laughable article on ESPN.com's Page 2 arguing that "Black Mamba" (as he likes to be called now) can't win in the public opinion polls because of the inevitable comparisons to Michael Jordan. Never mind the fact that Bryant all but asked for these comparisons to be made. The author comments how Bryant's season this year was nearly identical statistically to Jordan's 1986-87 season, when he was a budding superstar and playing spectacular on a losing team. The key distinction is that this was prior to Jordan's ascension to glory, before he found his leadership style and helmed his team to six NBA titles. Kobe's already won three titles, but then decided he wanted all the credit for a team that was anchored by Shaq, convinced management to send him to Miami in a horribly lopsided deal, and is now suffering the consequences. He's moving in the wrong direction, displaying that he is not a Jordan-esque leader but a potent scorer with a huge ego. Bryant craves that Jordan mystique, but has no concept of how to command a championship-winning team other than by shooting 50 times a night. When Phil Jackson tries to get him to play team ball, albeit with a subpar cast, he gets irked when his teammates don't perform and goes and sulks, à la Game 7 of the Suns series. Jordan built up his teammates, giving average players like Steve Kerr a chance to shine, playing the perfect triangle offense but having that innate sense of when to take over the game. Kobe just doesn't get it.