Our TiVo started acting up yesterday, which is a bit frustrating because it is only a couple of months old, but they are sending a replacement unit at their expense, so I can’t complain too much (other than to mention that their wait times for technical support are ridiculously long - even worse than the last time I had to call Dell). Anyway, during the course of the phone call they wanted me to try several different troubleshooting ideas before they were willing to send me a replacement, and near the end of the conversation, the customer service agent said, “I just need to you try one more thing before we can continue with the process. I need you to try restarting your antenna real quick.” Joy was sitting in the next room and she said my voice was both incredulous and a bit exasperated as I said, “Excuse me, but did you just ask me to restart my antenna?!?” The agent confirmed that he in fact did ask me to do just that. I explained (for the second time) that I have a passive antenna in the attic connected to the TiVo with a coaxial cable, and that’s it. You can’t have a much simpler setup than that, and of course, there’s no way to restart something that doesn’t connect to electricity in the first place. So I think the agent got a clue and said “Ok, nevermind, we’ll just go ahead and process a replacement unit for you.” Seriously, though, restart my antenna?!?
As any who knows me can confirm, I am about as far from a sports guy as you can get. However, some guys that I have lunch with each week are doing a fantasy football league this year and they invited me to join them, and I decided why not? I have a son and daughter now and I think learning a bit more about football (or any other sport) could be a very good thing, because who knows, they may turn out to love sports and I’d want to be a part of that.
But Wednesday night we had our fantasy draft, and how to you pick players in a draft when you don’t know anything about any of them? Well, as a math major in college, I decided my only hope to was to fall back on statistics. So I gathered fantasy player projections from a wide variety of sources and set to work making myself a combined master list. Since we were drafting later than some other people do, I was able to gather actual draft percentages for players so I had data from the “experts” as well as actual selection choices made by the the fantasy football community in general. Our league is hosted at Yahoo, and because apparently different places score fantasy football a little differently, I decided to weigh the Yahoo expert projections and community selections higher than other sources because those should match up with the scoring we will actually be using. I had 4th pick in the draft order and every time I just picked the highest person on my list who was still available and who fit a position I needed. That got me:
1(st round). (4th pick overall) Larry Johnson
2. (17) Willis McGahee
3. (24) Terrell Owens
4. (37) Marc Bulger
5. (44) T.J. Houshmandzadeh
6. (57) Ahman Green
7. (64) Santana Moss
8. (77) Baltimore
9. (84) Vernon Davis
10. (97) Ladell Betts
11. (104) Vince Young
12. (117) Kevin Curtis
13. (124) DeShaun Foster
14. (137) Neil Rackers
15. (144) Ron Dayne
16. (157) Eddie Kennison
17. (164) Carolina
I later dropped Eddie Kennison to pick up Mike Furrey based on some further analysis (and some updated news stories) after the fact. At this point, according to the full season projections at Yahoo, I should win the league by 48 points. Go figure. So I guess this is a random experiment in football knowledge vs straight statistics, as well as a test of how accurate pre-season projections really are, plus a little bit of plain old luck mixed in. But so far I’ve had a good time messing around with all of my statistics, and now trying to find out about each of the players I ended up with. I’ll post occasionally to update the status of my little experiment as the season goes on.
This list of questions seems to be going around our family. You can see responses from Ariana (the originator), Joy (third comment), and Becca. I have a few more of these question lists that I’ve answered previously here, here, here, and here, but these are my answers to the latest one sweeping the nation:
1. Were you named after anyone?
Not that I know of.
2. When was the last time you cried?
A few months ago we had to discipline Charis right before bedtime, and that made her really sad and it was hard to leave her to go to bed like that. Being a tender-hearted dad I eventually went back in once she settled down to give her another kiss and remind her that I loved her.
3. Do you like your handwriting?
Absolutely not. I don’t even hold a pencil properly, much less write legibly.
4. What is your favorite lunch meat?
Smoked ham (not honey baked or honey glazed or anything like that).
5. Do you have kids?
Two, actually!
6. If you were another person would you be friends with you?
Hopefully!
7. Do you use sarcasm a lot?
Yes.
8. Do you still have your tonsils?
Yes.
9. Would you bungee jump?
Nope.
10. What is your favorite cereal?
Cheerios.
11. Do you untie your shoes when you take them off?
Yes.
12. Do you think you are mentally strong?
Yes (and stubborn, too!).
13. What is your favorite ice cream?
Sweet cream from Marble Slab (used to be Ben and Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch before they discontinued it).
14. What is the first think you notice about people.
Eyes.
15. Red or pink?
Red.
16. What is the least favorite thing about yourself?
Lack of patience.
17. Who do you miss the most?
My friend Abe from college (who is far, far away up north).
18. Do you want everyone to send this back to you?
Sure.
19. What color pants/dress/skirt and shoes are you wearing?
Black shorts, no shoes.
20. What was the last thing you ate?
Hamburger at a cookout at a friend’s house.
21. What are you listening to right now?
My daughter talking and singing herself to sleep.
22. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?
Green.
23. Favorite smells?
Fresh sugar cookies, vanilla, and the beach.
24. Who was the last person you talked to on the phone?
My dad.
25. Do you like the person who sent this to you?
Absolutely.
26. Favorite sports to watch?
Olympic volleyball.
27. Hair color?
Brown.
28. Eye color?
Hazel.
29. Do you wear contacts?
Yes.
30. Favorite food?
Italian Market and Grill, Panera Bread, Steak and Shake, Marble Slab, mac and cheese, and nachos.
31. Scary movies or happy endings?
Neither, really. I like sad movies.
32. Last movie you watched?
The first two Bourne movies.
33. What color shirt are you wearing?
White.
34. Summer or winter?
Fall is my favorite, but I like winter way better than summer.
35. Hugs or kisses?
Both.
36. Favorite Dessert?
Caramel brownies (from my mom).
37. What book are you reading now?
Unfettered Hope by Marva Dawn.
38. What is on your mouse pad?
I don’t use a mouse pad right now because I have a G7 laser mouse, but the last one I used had a Monet watercolor.
39. What did you watch on tv last night?
The 11pm news.
40. Favorite sound?
Music, thunderstorms, and waves at the beach.
41. Rolling Stones or Beatles?
Rolling Stones.
42. What is the farthest you have been from home?
Cameroon, West Africa.
43. Do you have a special talent?
Nope.
44. Where were you born?
Long Beach, California.
Random news flash: my blog has now received more than 100,000 spam comments. That’s represents enough drug offers and get rich quick schemes to last a lifetime and then some. Of course, mixed in with all of the spam there have also been well over 500 comments from people like you. So thanks for reading and commenting back every now and then. I appreciate it!
I wrote about mowing at night several months ago, but this is a little different. Joy’s mom and dad had some leftover flowers they didn’t need, and they offered to let us have some of them. They had them all on a trailer, and they were a little delayed in getting here, so they probably didn’t pull into our driveway until 10 PM or so. So we were all out there with flashlights looking through all of the flowers in the trailer to pick out what we wanted. I’m sure the neighbors thought we were nuts. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the flashlight searching, because I didn’t think to get any that night, but these are a couple of pictures of our great flowers. It looks to me like we did okay picking by flashlight. :-)
As indicated a couple of months ago, we’ve been looking to switch away from Cingular to someone else for our cell phone service. Joy’s been bugging me to get new cell phones for about a year now, but I’ve been holding out for a yet-to-be-released Windows Smartphone that I’ve had my eye on for a while. But last week my old phone finally quit after several years of service. The button that you need to login to the phone, make a call, or answer a call stopped working, making the phone pretty much useless. With the phone I was waiting to get still not released yet, I had to find something else quick. We settled on Verizon and Joy and I both got enV phones from LG. We’ve only had them two days now, but they seem pretty nice. They are certainly more full-featured than our previous phones, and I can finally drive home from work without my cell phone dropping calls on me, which is very nice.
A few weeks ago I swapped the guts of my computer into a new case (Antec P182 for those keeping score at home). The case is very similar to the one I had previously (which makes Joy think the whole endeavor was a waste of time), but the primary difference is that it has space behind the motherboard try to run all of your cabling. That’s what I was after because it makes for a much neater appearance inside of the case and as a result it allows for better airflow and therefore better cooling. While I was swapping everything out anyway, I also decided to upgrade my CPU cooler and add a third party cooler to my video card. Both of the coolers are from Thermalright, and they are both pretty large pieces with multiple heatpipes and lots of fins. The CPU cooler in combination with the new case lowered my CPU temperatures by another 12 degrees or so, which is great. The pictures that follow will likely only appeal to fellow computer geeky people or other people who like to go a little overboard on things.
New Coolers:
CPU Cooler Closeup:
Full Motherboard:
After a long recovery after Cai was born, I think I’m finally ready to get back into the groove with this blog. I took about a month off after Charis was born, and this time it has been more like two months, but what can you do? And getting back into my blog also means I have every intention of finally updating new pictures of Cai. It’s not that we haven’t been taking pictures (in fact we have hundreds), it’s just that I haven’t been processing them for posting to the web. But I hope to get to that really soon.
While I’ve been gone I received a post from someone who found my mammoth Les Miserables post that I wrote back at the beginning of the year, and I got two comments from a dear old friend from college (my partner in crime with the original cardboard animal). Those comments were fun to come back to. So anyway, I really hope that you will notice much more frequent updates on this blog in the coming weeks.