Danny Groner: NBA Season Salvaged: 5 Best Newspaper Columnist Reactions

After a 149-day lockout, the NBA announced this weekend that owners and players had finally reached a tentative deal on a collective bargaining agreement that will save the season. Well, 66 games of it. The season will start with a much-anticipated tripleheader on Christmas. While some questions still linger, some sportswriters have already begun to speculate what the short free agency and training camp periods could mean for their hometown teams.

As people are getting geared up for the season, some warn that things aren't exactly back to normal just yet. "It's nonsensical to declare winners and losers. Everybody lost. Just leave it at that," says Jeff Schultz in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. So what should we make of the new deal? Sportswriters sound off:

We'll get over it: "You cheer because the NBA is back with a season the way it should be. A 66-game schedule that begins with three marquee games on Christmas? Are you kidding me? They should do that every season," says Bill Plaschke in the Los Angeles Times. "The NBA is back, and right on time, the games now filled with extra meaning, the playoffs potentially filled with different teams." All is well again.

The game has been hurt: "If the players had any rights trampled during negotiations, they did a lousy job of communicating it. They lacked unity and, until filing an antitrust lawsuit late in the game, an obvious plan," says David Haugh in the Chicago Tribune. And David Stern seized on that. "But both sides suffered from the fact that, in lively cities such as Chicago, not enough people missed the NBA... The indifference reinforced the league needed the public more than the public needed the league."

TV contracts were too important: "There will be an NBA season; Because they couldn't afford to flush almost a billion dollars in TV revenue, the Grinches of greed gave it back to us," says Mike Wise in The Washington Post. "The three games played on Dec. 25 are a key component in the annual $930 million the league and its players receive from their broadcast partners (about one-quarter of the $4?billion that would have been lost with a canceled season)." That's what this deal was really about.

This deal helps the Bucks...: "The NBA commissioner had allowed the game to spiral out of control in so many distasteful ways," says Michael Hunt in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "and it was becoming very hard for a small-market franchise like the Bucks to do business." The league was getting a bit too top-heavy with a few dominant teams. "It's incumbent upon the Bucks to develop talent, keep the payroll commensurate to market size, and play well enough to sell tickets. But it's up to the league to give the Bucks a fighting chance to keep the players they develop." They appear to be trying to help.

... And the Celtics? "It's fair to say the Celtics got most of what they wanted regarding the schedule. There being 16 fewer games will help a team that almost certainly couldn't survive 82 in one piece. But the fact that the 66 they'll play will be squeezed into four months isn't the most promising prospect for Team AARP," says Steve Bulpett in the Boston Herald.

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Follow Danny Groner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DannyGroner

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danny-groner/nba-season-salvaged-5-bes_b_1115019.html

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Five Best Recipe Organization Tools [Hive Five]

Keeping digital copies of all of your hand-written recipes, favorite recipes from cookbooks, and other dishes you find on the web can be a difficult task, and there are plenty of tools to help you do it. We asked you which tools you used to manage your collection of hand-me-down recipes and favorite recent finds. Here's a look at the top five, based on your nominations.

Photo by Robert Couse-Baker.

Earlier in the week, we asked you which recipe organization tools you used to keep your collection in check but still get quick access to it when you're in the kitchen and need to know what to do next. You responded, and despite there being an entire industry of apps and services that get the job done, many of your favorites are multi-taskers.

Springpad

Springpad doesn't just clip items from the web, it also lets you quickly and easily add almost anything to your Springpad account, including hand-written notes, scanned documents, photos, entire web sites, and more. Plus, it organizes all of your items for you, and lets you quickly save a web site with a recipe on it and automatically add it to a collection of recipes you already have, complete with useful links and reference information that can help you when it comes time to start cooking. Plus, Springpad is available via webapp or mobile app on iOS and Android.

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Google Docs

Google Docs isn't really built to organize anything, but for many of you, it gets the job done when it comes to keeping your recipes together. Entering new recipes is as easy as starting a new document and typing it in, and saving recipes from the web is a copy/paste operation. Save them all in Collections based on dish, ingredient, source, or any other criteria you choose, and since Google Docs is a webapp, you can get to it anywhere, on any device, whether you're in the kitchen with your tablet or sitting at your desktop computer. Plus, it's completely free.

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Paprika

The only actual recipe management app in the top five, Paprika is available for Mac OS, iPad, and iPhone, and will set you back $19.99 for the Mac app, and $4.99 for the iOS app. Paprika is built to handle recipes, so the application has multiple views to help you see all of the recipes at once while you scroll through the steps, view large photos of the dish you're making, and a built-in web browser to scrub recipes from your favorite cooking and food sites. The app also helps you manage your grocery list, and can turn your recipes into a shopping list so you can pick up what you need to cook the meal you're planning. Plus, the app makes it easy to add and edit recipes, and will sync your recipes to the cloud so you can access them on other devices.

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Evernote

Evernote is the quintessential "save it from the web for easy reference" utility, and a number of you mentioned you also use Evernote for recipes. It makes sense: Evernote is easy to use, available for free on almost every platform including Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, and the Evernote webapp, in case you don't want to install anything. All of your devices are kept in sync, and while Evernote doesn't have any tools specifically to help you organize recipes, it does let you create notebooks based on categories you choose, makes it easy to clip and save anything from the web, including recipes, and can share those items with friends easily.

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Dropbox

Dropbox is a great file syncing and storage solution, but a few of you said that it's great for managing and sharing recipes as well. All you have to do is create a directory in your Dropbox public folder and create as many documents in that folder as you choose. Copy/paste any recipes you find on the web to documents and store them there, Create new documents with recipes you want access to in multiple places, and as long as they're all in your public folder, you can access them anywhere, whether you log in to Dropbox or not. Otherwise, you can just leave them all in a folder and get at them from any internet connected device, or your smartphone or tablet with the Dropbox app installed. Plus, it's free, and you likely already have an account.

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Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to put them to an all out vote.

Honorable mentions this week go out to YummySoup, a feature-rich and customizable recipe manager for Mac that lets you organize your recipes, add them easily and import them from the web, share them with friends, and create categories and lists to organize them. Also worth mentioning is the previously mentioned KeepRecipes, a great webapp that makes it easy to import recipes from other web sites, connect with other food lovers who are busy posting and sharing their own recipes, and even offers an iOS app so you can access them on the go or in the kitchen.

It's interesting that with so many recipe apps and utilities on the market that the top five are tools that do more than just manage recipes. Have another you'd like to mention, or something about one of the contenders you want to say? Let's hear it in the comments below.

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You can reach Alan Henry, the author of this post, at alan@lifehacker.com, or better yet, follow him on Twitter or Google+.

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/ZSeZFNQKSPc/five-best-recipe-organization-tools

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