This probably doesn't come as much of a surprise to any of you, but over the last several years, I've done a lot more watching of sports than playing. I've logged countless hours in front of the computer or TV, and not enough outside. As a result, my weight has gone up, my stamina has gone down, and the occasional physical push gets me winded.

This week I had a chance to break out of that funk a bit, playing in my first softball game since who knows how long on Thursday, and hitting the bowling alley yesterday. Yes, this is what it's come to - I actually find leisure sports like softball and bowling strenuous. Go figure.

Thursday's softball game saw me go 2-4 with a double and a single, a fielder's choice and a foul-out. Despite the fact I was stranded on base all three times, twice on third, our team won 12-7. I also didn't make any mistakes in the field, which was the low bar I had set for myself. Still, the mere act of swinging a bat again, running the bases, and chasing after flies or line drives in the field reminded me of muscles I haven't used in a while, especially the next day.

Yesterday I played two games at the bowling alley, tossing a 118 (in our warmup game) followed by a 178, a score I liked a lot better. I'd expected to be in the mid 140s, given that's the score I achieved the last time I went bowling, and the two scores averaged about that.

Now, my fingers I use to place inside the bowling ball are swollen. The leg I use to push off in throwing is sore, and I'm whining about being out of shape. Maybe I'll do something about it, and maybe not.

I've even taken to wearing a pedometer I picked up at a trade show which counts my daily steps. I was told that you should try to get 10,000 steps a day to be active, and I kid you not, in the month-plus I've been wearing it, I've never gotten there. The most I've achieved is around 8,000 and a typical workday's efforts is a lot more like 2,500 to 3,500, with the occasional jump to 5,000. That's clearly not getting it done. Maybe I heard wrong on 10,000. Maybe the pedometer is undercounting my steps. Or maybe I should just admit that sitting in a cubicle and going to meetings isn't considered cardiovascular exercise.

This evening, I had the opportunity to attend a fun panel put on by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, featuring some of the Valley's top reporters, from the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Forbes, CNBC, Kara Swisher of All Things Digital, and uber-blogger Robert Scoble. The panelists, all "Hot" in their own right, shared with the PR-heavy audience what they thought were the biggest hits of 2007, and what's next in the coming year.

Virtually all panelists said 2007 could be summarized through the success of a few companies: Apple, Google and Facebook, to name a few, the rise of the iPhone, user generated content, social networks, Twitter, and advertising-driven firms. But some said a tide was going to turn with the change in the calendar year, away from consumer-driven technology, and toward enterprise. Also, many expected a combination of bad news to hit the Valley and the economy at large - a market downturn, a recession, and bursting of what could be seen as the advertising bubble, with many companies riding the second wave to Web upstarts to disappear altogether.

Kara Swisher, author of AOL.com (a must read, featured in my bookshelf), was one of the stars of the evening, proving herself intelligent, quick, witty, sarcastic and perfectly willing to mock Second Life, Facebook widgets or the other panelists at any opportunity.

At the other end of the table was Robert Scoble, with Amazon Kindle alongside, playing the part of the only true digerati on the panel. His brazen openness and willingness to engage with his readers through his blog, through Twitter and Facebook, and request to be contacted by cell phone, was in stark contrast to others all too tired of PR pitches - most who said they preferred e-mail. He was one of the few to bring up private startup companies he likes, including Kyte.TV, and vehemently disagreed with CNBC's Jim Goldman on whether Microsoft was seeing a string of success with Vista, Zune and the XBox. And when he stated he read 800 RSS feeds a day, the response was one of shock from his fellow panelists, who jokingly compared him to the notoriously always-on Marissa Mayer of Google.

The far-ranging discussion chided the US government for being too focused on "the friggin' flag", as Swisher mentioned, instead of working to get the country in a leadership position on broadband and wireless, while nations like Vietnam, South Korea and Europe were able to get their act together. She postulated that had the development of the United States' interstate highways been managed in the same way, we'd be on cobblestones.

Other comments were that ad-driven media companies will see a spike in spending to the tune of $100 million around the 2008 presidential election, a one-time jump that will go away, painfully, in 2009, that Yahoo! better get off its kiester and figure out what it's going to do with all its users and products, and that Google just might continue disrupting every new market it enters, including wireless.

While I'd met some of the panelists and others in the room before, it was my first time meeting Scoble personally, but given our online discussions, talking with him had an immediate air of familiarity and friendship, one forged through shared experiences and points of view. (He was no idiot...)I'd be eager to sit in on more discussions like this, and to see if these notables were right with what they expect for 2008.

About 18 months after the first rumors of GDrive (code name: Platypus) debuted, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the company is setting up to offer customers the ability to store files on the Web from their computers and mobile devices, accessible via password, and can make them available for sharing, similar to Apple's iDisk, and a host of other services.

The addition of file vaulting makes a lot of sense for Google, who continues to expand its Office solution to compete with Microsoft's omnipresent suite. Given the amount of Web-created documents, photos and presentations to be created from Google's Office, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to see Google would be interested in giving their users a single common space to keep their files.

But it's not yet clear what the pricing model would be, or what, if anything, would set Google's services apart from other alternatives, aside from the Google name brand, and assumedly, integration with other Google services. The Journal admits as much, saying, "Google's market power and focus on providing easy-to-use services heighten its chances of having an impact."

While the details for the service are largely lacking now, this will certainly be an area to watch. The question is, with laptops being pervasive, location is becoming almost passé... so would online backup really have that much of an impact? I'm straining to see how I would use it. Despite years of being a .Mac subscriber, my iDisk is going unused, and if Google offered me a GDrive, it too might lie dormant.

(Additional commentary: PaidContent.org: Google’s Pie-In-The-Sky File Service To Launch)

The Sacramento Kings are losers. Always have been. I grew up listening to them lose on the radio and watching them lose gloriously on the rare occasion they made national TV. For nearly a decade, the team would be lucky to win 35% of games. Forget about the playoffs. They had no chance. No good free agent wanted to be a King. No good player wanted to be traded to Sacramento. Their draft picks were horrible, and they finished just about last every year.

But then, for a brief blip in time, they were a good team, running and gunning, and challenging the league leaders, including Shaquille O'Neal's Lakers, and Karl Malone's Utah Jazz. Oh but for a moment. Now the team has crashed down to their historical sub-mediocrity. Yes, they're in last again. Yes, they've lost all their games on the road, again. Yes, we're still paying attention and trying to care. But for some odd reason, this return to normalcy brings comfort, like a beaten prizefighter coming back for more after he's lost his quickness. It's the pummeling that reminds us of who we are as Kings fans.

More of my pessimistic, yet nostalgic, comments can be found on Sactown Royalty:
Now This is the Team I Know