Ok, I was wrong yet again. It what may be considered a pretty stunning upset, Jean Quan has taken the lead from Don Perata to be Oakland's next mayor. The ranked-choice voting system seems to have allocated a fair number of votes from my choice, Rebecca Kaplan, to Quan instead of Perata. I myself don't know the methodology behind how these votes are counted but it looks like there was some sort of round robin allocation spanning 10 rounds (confused yet?). Here are the results from the County of Alameda's website.

The tabulations have not yet been finalized so we'll have to wait another day or so before the registrar makes the official announcement. Still, it's a small victory given that I didn't think much of Quan (the lesser of two evils) but feel she would be more willing to work with people like Kaplan versus Perata who would cater to his cronies and be just an overall ineffective executor of the duties of mayor. He's good at playing the political game but Oakland has real problems that need to be addressed and not just someone looking for another item on their resume.

Came across rule.fm and was very impressed by the site design. Very clean, functional. I especially liked the way they setup their Take a Tour page. A great way of navigating through a long page. Just signed up for my beta invite so will give more details about the actual product suite itself when I've test driven it. Might be a good alternative to Basecamp...

We're experiencing some pretty amazing times in Bay Area sports (Raiders and 49ers aside). Giants are up 2-0 in the World Series and looking stronger than ever and the Warriors just opened the season with two good wins. Going into the offseason, I had my ideas about what they needed to do and of course, I had my opinions about the moves they made. Obviously, the biggest news was the sale of the team which trumps pretty much all other news. On the personnel side, they picked up David Lee but lost some players in Anthony Morrow and CJ Watson to free agency and Maggette to a trade to the Bucks. They also drafted Ekpe Udoh with the 6th pick.

Overall, I thought the moves were good. Getting Lee was great - a solid workman like 20-10 guy. Maggette was always going to be a defensive liability and never really made any team he played on better (a hollow 18-20pts a game). Udoh was a head scratcher but there wasn't anyone drafted after him that stood out. Plus with him being hurt, his grade is an incomplete for now. The one that I disagreed with the most was letting Morrow go and replacing him with Dorell Wright for virtually the same money. Why would you let one of the best young 3 point specialist go and pick up a scrub that never scored more than 8pts a game? Well after watching Dorell play in 2 games, I can begin to see the reasoning. He's not a flashy player but he's smart. Though he's a career 36.3% 3pt shooter, I saw him pass up a bunch of threes and instead pump fake and step in on his defender for easier mid-range shots. Morrow may be more accurate from outside but I doubt he has the maturity to take what a defense will give him. He'd rather force up a three as oppose to getting that closer shot. Though it's a long season, Morrow's currently averaging 8.5pts a game versus Wright's 19.5pts. But the reason I have more faith in Wright is that he doesn't seem like he's forcing anything. Plus he plays much better defense - something the Warriors need to focus on to make it to the next level. We'll see how he and the W's fare against their biggest test to date - at Staples against the Lakers on Sunday...