Dan Wilson’s Blog

I made a single prediction about the Nuggets  during my 2009 predictions post:

• The Nuggets will make it to the conference finals, and lose to the Lakers.

Nailed it.

I made three predictions about the Avalance during my 2009 predictions post:

• The Avalanche will miss the playoffs, Sakic will immediately announce his retirement, and Granato will keep his job.

They missed the playoffs, I got that right. They also had the lowest winning percentage since moving to Colorado. Sakic did not retire immediately, but may still retire so I am holding out for partial credit. The part I got dead wrong was that Granato lost his job, along with just about everybody else.

Westword has a nice post showing us the Kyle Orton we didn’t know, not that there was much of a Kyle Orton we did know before McJayGate. Money picture montage:

Orton gets his partyon

So it looks like we have the bimbo chasing of Plummer, with the potential drunken shenanigans of Griese.

Danstradamus’ bold prediction: Orton gets a DUI driving from a downtown hot spot to his palace in Greenwood Village after losing to the Chargers some time in the next two seasons.

Today the Denver Broncos schedule for 2009 was presented to me, and I had to reflect back on my earlier prediction about their season. My gut reaction was to say that the Broncos are in trouble. This list of teams is very tough:

• Kansas City
• Oakland
• San Diego
• Cleveland
• Pittsburgh
• New England
• Dallas
• N.Y. Giants
• Baltimore
• Cincinnati
• Indianapolis
• Philadelphia
• Washington

As I looked at this list longer, however, something familiar jumped out at me. Here is another list of opponents, with common elements in orange.

• NY Jets
• San Diego
• Buffalo
• Cincinnati
• Cleveland
• Dallas
• Miami
• Washington
• Indianapolis
• Philadelphia
• Baltimore
• Pittsburgh
• N.Y. Giants

Those of you who know your divisions well already know what team this is: the New England Patriots. The year: 2007. When those very New England Patriots went 16-0, setting the following records:

• Most TDs in a season (75)
• Most points in a season (589)
• Most total yards and passing yards for the season (6,580 and 4,731 respectively)

All this was accomplished with one Josh McDaniels as the offensive coordinator. He is now the head coach of the Denver Broncos, with potentially even more offensive weapons at his disposal. This revelation helped justify my earlier prediction in light of this difficult schedule. The Broncos could very well go 9-7. If that defense could just get a little better…

Ok, so I was wrong. But I will be the first to admit it. However, I wasn’t as far off as I had thought after watching the first half. Score-wise, I was off by a factor of two. Looking at Roethlisberger’s numbers, and discounting that last drive, it was pretty abysmal, as predicted. Not as bad as his last Super Bowl, but he didn’t win either game, his defense did. I am not surprised by that. Overall, I am bummed, as I was rooting for the Cardinals to pull it off. Yet another championship for fans who can’t shut the hell up and learn to be humble (ahem, Boston). And get those nasty, stinky, wet towels the @$&^ out of my face before someone has to get hurt.

I foresee a perfect storm for sucky, slow internets. As newspapers continue to die, the remaining ones and other web publishers will want to squeeze every last ad dollar out of their sites. What was once a site with a top banner will soon have ads in every last corner. These ads will also become more rich in nature: less text, more images, videos, and interactive Flash ads. Add to this a bandwidth drain, caused by these richer ads, as well as more people sitting at home surfing the internets since they can’t afford to go out anymore with a crappy economy. Then comes what I think will be the worst part. Also due to the bad economy, and ever slowing growth, online ad serving companies will skimp on infrastructure upgrades, causing pages to load dial-up-slow as they hang waiting to load an ad. The Denver Post did this for weeks. Also add to it that consumers in general will not be upgrading their hardware, or buying slow netbooks (yesterday’s technology, today!) that can’t handle a web page with four simultaneous Flash ads at once, and the internets becomes unusable for many. Expect future rantings on Flash, and its dark role on the internets.

Perhaps overly grim. However, I would recommend immediately switching to Firefox, and install Adblock Plus and Flashblock.

This year’s Super Bowl will be one of the most boring on record. One of two things will happen:

1. The Cardinals will solve the Pittsburgh defense, and it will be a blowout.
2. They will not, and it will be a low scoring, endless 3-and-out-athon, that make the commercials the only thing keeping people from leaving the party.

My money is on option 2, with a Pittsburgh win. Something like 12-10. And Roethlisberger will set new records for quarterback suckiness in the Super Bowl. Maybe 14-34, 0TDs, 3 ints, 130 yds.

I present my first annual predictions for the new year:

• The Playstation 3 will continue to underperform, and fall into obscurity.
• Twitter will continue to be the darling of the tech punditry, but will not have a tenth of Facebook’s users by year end.
• Netbooks will also continue to be the darling of the tech punditry, but their sales will maintain current levels or slow down. Consumers will realize that having a slow, crappy laptop with a small screen isn’t worth the $100-$200 price difference between a real laptop.
• Steve Jobs will go into a Bill Gates-esque like retirement at a minimum, with full retirement likely. (This fell apart before I even finished this draft with his menopausal hormone issue announcement)
• Windows 7 will come out this year, and it will have a different name. Regardless of how it is, it will be hailed as ‘better than Vista’.
• Google will be awarded a huge government contract, either in health management or information collection and storage.
• An innovative major national technology initiative from the Obama Administration will go to congress and remind us all how utterly incompetent technologically the members of our legislative branch are.
• As the economy continues to suck, young people will trim their budgets of landlines, cable tv, going to movies, and movie rentals, and keep or upgrade their mobile phones and internet connections.
• The economy will get much worst. Unemployment will go up a percentage point or two. Inflation will be on people’s minds. However, the news sources will get mostly tired of the story due to their and the public’s short attention span, and focus their attention on unimportant but sensational stories like when the Iraq war got old. Furthermore, as in the tradition of the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration will grasp onto and tout any positive economic data as evidence of their policies being effective, no matter how insignificant, abstract, or downright misleading the data point.
• Gas prices will hit a high of $3.50 a gallon, and are currently at their low for the year.
• Corruption will continue with the Democrats, giving the Republicans their platform for 2010.
• Next season, the Broncos will finish 9-7, and just miss the wild card.
• The Nuggets will make it to the conference finals, and lose to the Lakers.
• The Avalanche will miss the playoffs, Sakic will immediately announce his retirement, and Granato will keep his job.
• The Rockies will finish bottom three in the National League. They won’t even show a hint of promise.
• By year end, I will be telling myself to shut up about Apple already.