For the few of us who remained dedicated Sacramento Kings fans all the way through game 82, the season ended with a whimper. The Kings teased us with occasional strength, but ultimately drove us crazy and fell way short of expectations. Now, our only hope is that they somehow finagle an early pick in the upcoming draft and look to rebuild what is truthfully not a very good team.

Until then, our friends at Ballhype are ready for the next stage: playoffs.

The site is offering Ballhype users the option to choose the winners in each round of the NBA playoffs, just as is popular during March Madness with the NCAA college basketball tournament. Unlike the typical March Madness bracket however, Ballhype will allow you to change your picks after the series have started and give you more credit if you picked against the grain. The earlier you pick correctly, and the fewer the people who correctly selected as you did, the more points you get. Should be very interesting to see how this shakes out.

As of today, my pick to win it all? Houston. Over the Cavaliers. I anticipate being wrong.

Sign up for yourself at Ballhype.

In order to outperform the market, it's a required element that you take a contrarian bent - either through buying into a stock early, shorting one at its apex before an eventual descent, or buying stocks on the cheap, if you feel they have been cut down to size unnecessarily, or by too much, effectively meaning you're betting on a near-term rebound. While I definitely subscribe to a buy and hold strategy for some stocks of reputable companies with serious short and long term upside, I have fallen victim at times by trying too hard to be a contrarian.

Take Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) for example. Outside of my 401k, I have never been a Yahoo! investor, until yesterday. While I've written previously that I think Yahoo! has lost significant market share and mind share to Google in the search and online ads arena, the company is no slouch. Following Tuesday's quarterly announcements which disappointed analysts, the stock took a significant haircut Wednesday, dropping more than 10 percent. Effectively, the company's stock was on sale for more than 10 percent off. (Unless you start getting picky and looking at current or future P/E)

So, given I had some available cash in eTrade, I added Yahoo! to my portfolio for the first time. If the stock regains half its one-day loss, I'll be up 5%. But, as sometimes happens, the first day's losses continue the next day or even further. Not only did yesterday's pummeling not include a late-day bounce, but Thursday's trading has seen Yahoo! go down an additional 2 1/2%, meaning instead of being up a few hundred bucks, I'm down a few hundred bucks, and I have to root for the stock to rebound just to break even, let alone make money.

This isn't the first time I've lost money on hoping to catch a bounce. It's called "catching a falling knife". If you see a stock taking a dive, and you're trying to accurately pick the bottom, wrong guesses can draw blood, just as much as they can if you, like I once did in 2002, sold Sun Microsystems at 2 1/2 bucks a share. (It now trades at nearly $6)

The question is, will I wait for Yahoo! to rebound, and make money, sell quickly to cut losses, or hold on until I lose even more? Those are the three choices. For now, I'm holding and waiting for an eventual retracing.

In the summer of 2005, I did the unthinkable, and left my iPod, chock full of tunes, photos and company data, on an airplane, when traveling from Chicago to Baltimore. Not having backed up my data in a while, I was challenged to find out a way to rebuild and not lose anything important, and starting over, with a new iPod, took quite a bit of time.

Not two years later, the newer iPod, a 60 gigabyte iPod Photo, has met a similar fate, once again having to do with air travel. This morning I flew from San Jose to San Diego, and upon reaching the hotel, plugged in the iPod to my laptop. After leaving the room for a few hours, I came back to find both the PowerBook and iPod were stuck in time. The seconds in my menubar weren't moving, and the iPod wasn't doing squat.

While the iPod isn't lost, it is most definitely dead, offering up only a sad iPod icon, and asking me to contact Apple support. It won't mount on my laptop, or play music. Although I've been better about backing up since the first incident and did a full backup to my laptop a week ago, this is in no way convenient. The iPod has served as the best way for me to easily transport data from one location to another, serving as much more than a portable jukebox. Now, it's a paperweight.

The question is, what to do next? Do I send it off to Apple to be repaired, uncertain as to when I'll get it back and for how much? Do I buy a new one, and junk the old one? Or do I stop with the iPod cycle and try something new? None of the options sounds cheap, and none is preferred to somehow magically fixing the one I've got, but here we are. Sigh.

Cross-posted to Athletics Nation...

Wow! What a series! 3 games, 33 innings, 2 walk-off wins by the A's, and the continued heroics of a player known only as VMC. After an extended sabbatical, Joe Blanton and Adam Melhuse return to critique the three part series against the Yankees in the A's "This Week at the Movies".


Click to See Larger Comic

Previous "A's This Week at the Movies":

Sep. 04, 2005: ANtics - Episode VII: A's Week At the Movies
Oct. 01, 2005: ANtics - Episode XI: Season In Review

Previous Super Scutaro ANtics:

March 26, 2006: ANtics Episode 2.5: Scutaro Skills

All Comics