I'm Productive Once a Day

Something Something 2012

2012-01-07T00:53:00.000-05:00

I once made a statement that I didn't believe in New Years' Resolutions. I still don't; why pick an arbitrary point on the space-time continuum to make new rules about your life? But I can't deny that the start of a new year does provide a semantically convenient context to take stock of one's life. And so I decided to make some new rules for myself (not resolutions!) to follow in 2012.

But, I heard on NPR (I can't seem to find the link to the story, sorry) an interview with a psychologist on the topic of New Years' Resolutions. One of the main takeaways was that telling people your resolutions actually reduces your chances on completing them. This idea is counter-intuitive to me; I always felt that by telling people my goals, I was adding their expectations of me to my internal motivation*. But the interviewee stated that by telling people your goals, you actually alleviate some of the need you have to actually complete the goal; you've already shown that you're a good person with goals.

* Of course, if you are a reader of Joel Spolsky's work, you'll be aware of his ideas (not sure if they are originally his, but I learned them from him) on internal vs. external motivation. He posits that you can't really "add" external motivation to internal motivation. The external replaces the internal. So I was doing it wrong, anyway.

I made three new "rules" for myself for 2012, but I can't tell you what they are. But I will give you a hint.

7. 3. 30. *

That's all you'll get. Enjoy 2012!

* The numbers, Mason! What do they mean?!

Act Now to Offend Your Customers!

2011-10-11T18:44:00.002-04:00

Another company calling to upsell me! Does this actually work on people?

We get the Sunday paper for the coupons, and I get a call from a hurried rep. This particular rep apparently works on commission for Boston Globe, because she's trying to upsell me to the weekend edition (not even sure what that really is, she was talking too fast for me to understand). I politely declined once, and she persisted, saying she "wasn't looking for a long term commitment." I politely declined again, and she said "OK," and abruptly hung up.

My opinion of the Boston Globe has declined at this time. What could Boston Globe have done better? What if a rep (not under time pressure) called me to ask how I was enjoying the Boston Globe? What parts of the Sunday paper do I enjoy the most? What could they do to make my experience better? She would have learned that I order the Sunday paper just for the coupons. Maybe she could have talked to me as an adult and suggested ways for me to enjoy the paper I already get more than I do now. Maybe that would have led to me reading the paper. Maybe I would have decided that I wanted more issues of the Globe.

Instead, a pushy sales rep tried to push an upsell on me. Bush league, Boston Globe.

This Is How We Do It; or, Customer Service Done Right and Wrong

2011-10-06T17:52:00.000-04:00

Right on the heels of my last bad customer service experience, I've got two more tales about how to do it right and wrong.

I've been locked out of my Sovereign and Fidelity accounts for a while (I tend to forget my passwords) and finally decided to call them up to restore access.

I called Sovereign first. Calling the number in their "Your account has been locked out" message, I find that the number is their generic customer service number. Great, now I have to navigate the phone tree to find the "I'm an idiot and forgot my password" option. I finally get through to a rep. He asks me a few security questions in a near-monotone voice and unlocks my account. Without asking if I was able to log in correctly, he asks if I need any more help. I answer, "I'm all set," and he launches into an upsell attempt for either identity or overdraft protection. I cut him off once with "No thank you." but he keeps going. Realizing he is going to be graded on whether or not he makes this pitch, I wait until he's done, then restate, "No thank you."

With Sovereign fixed, I call Fidelity. Phone tree asks my SSN, and then immediately connects me to a rep. This rep is much more upbeat, even making jokes with me (well, laughing at my pitiful jokes). She is able to unlock my account and offers to wait while I log in. She asks if I she can help me at all, and I ask for clarification on a prior issue. She answers my question, and that conversation leads to a discussion about me possibly opening up a Fidelity IRA in the future.

I noticed several key customer experience differences between these calls:

The Sovereign rep sounded bored out of his mind. The Fidelity rep sounded excited to talk to me.
The Sovereign rep clearly had a script to follow. The Fidelity rep was given more flexibility.
At the end of the Sovereign call, I started thinking again about moving to a credit union. At the end of the Fidelity call, I felt excited about possibly opening a new account with Fidelity.
When the Fidelity phone system took my SSN, it knew that I needed to speak to a rep, so it directly routed me to one. Sovereign's phone system made me jump through hoops to get to the right rep.

But if you look at the technical differences, there are really only two: a smarter phone system and a better customer rep. This can't be that hard to set up, can it?

One More Thing...

2011-10-06T13:05:00.000-04:00

I'm really surprised how much Steve Jobs' passing is affecting me. I always thought he was a brilliant innovator but an arrogant asshole as well. I poke fun at Apple fanboys, yell about Apple anti-competitive behaviors, point out ridiculous pro-Apple bias.

And yet, you can't even begin to imagine how far Steve brought the tech world forward. Without question, his singular leadership made our world (not just tech, but the way we live our lives) better.

RIP, Steve Jobs.

(who is cutting onions in here?)

A Wasted Opportunity

2011-10-04T18:20:00.000-04:00

Just got a call from someone representing Dell (may have been outsourced) who tried to up-sell me on a more expensive warranty than the one I purchased with the laptop I bought a few months ago. The rep was extremely pushy, despite my gentle and polite but firm insistence that I did not want what he was selling. I finally had to hang up on him (I suppose I could have lied and told him I no longer owned the computer, but I wanted to see how the truth would work).

Seriously, Dell? I try to defend you, but then you pull a terrible customer service move like this. You had an opportunity to have a human conversation with me about how the laptop was working out, seeing if there was anything I needed help with. Instead, you insult me as a customer.

When my father bought an iPad, he received a custom email a month later from the sales rep asking how it was going and if he could help. Nothing about money or sales, just making sure he was settled and happy. The rep then helped my father fix a problem he was having without referring to outsourced tech support.

See the difference? Forget about the relative performance of Macs and PCs. The meta-ownership experience of the two systems are light-years apart. This is something that seems so easy to get right, and yet PC manufacturers (and plenty of other companies... ask me about my GM experience sometime) continually get it wrong.

One of the Little Things That Makes Me Rage

2011-06-17T18:52:00.005-04:00

I've been trying to learn my hotkeys for Visual Studio so I can operate much faster. The most common one I use these days is attaching the debugger to IIS. For years, in Visual Studio 2008, I would type "alt, d, p, w, enter". That would open the debug menu, select "Attach to Process...", select the first item that starts with "w" (almost always w3wp.exe, the IIS process), and attach to it.

Then came along Visual Studio 2010. I don't know what changed or why is changed, but now, I have to hit an additional "enter" in the middle: "alt, d, p, enter, w, enter". When using both VS2008 and VS2010 at the same time, this can get really freaking annoying.

I Don't Get Prisons; or, Rehabilitating our Penal System

2011-06-16T19:35:00.031-04:00

The topic of prisons, punishment, determent, and rehabilitation has been getting to me lately, and an NPR broadcast about Angola Prison really drove me to try to put my thoughts into words. The way I look at it, our criminal justice system looks sort of like this:

Crimes are actions that we as a society have deemed illegal because they cause harm to other people. Murder, burglary, and libel are pretty obvious examples of crimes that do harm to others. Self-inflicted crimes (most notably, drug use) have secondary negative effects on society.

As a society, we decide that people who commit crimes should suffer some consequences with the idea of reducing the number of criminal acts. For most crimes, the sentence is prison time. As I see it, the justification for prison time serves three purposes:

Determent: If people know they are going to jail if they do illegal things, they will be less likely to do them.
Rehabilitation: Criminals serving time may become rehabilitated and not want to commit crimes again either by a change of morals/outlook or by the fear of being imprisoned again).
Punishment: Society demands that people who hurt them are in turn hurt (the old Babylonian "eye for an eye" morals).

It seems pretty clear that determent doesn't work for a large portion of society. People who have been driven to commit crimes (either by extenuating circumstances or by a weak moral compass) usually seem to just try harder to not get caught. People who wouldn't commit crimes in the first place because of a strong moral compass (e.g. me) are less likely to do the illegal activities even if they were not illegal*.

* I'm well aware there is a huge amount of sociological and psychological research in the fields of motivation and morality.

Punishment seems to make sense, except when you think about the longer sentences. According to Louisiana's data on Angola, 73% of the inmates in 2010 were serving life sentences (there is some math at play here; lifers only leave when they die, whereas other inmates can finish their term or be paroled). What's the point of locking someone up for their entire life? Seems like a waste of a life.

Rehabilitation seems like the most valuable thing we can attempt with our criminals*. My wife once worked in a batterers intervention group, where she worked with convicted domestic abusers. After a once-a-week-for-40-weeks program, the recidivism rate was far lower than those who went to jail (granted, it is likely that this data is somewhat self-selecting; the judge could sentence intervention instead of jail time, and likely chose the more repentant men for intervention). I bet you many more criminals could be rehabilitated rather than just thrown in a snake pit with other criminals.

* I fully acknowledge that some people cannot be rehabilitated, and that life in prison or capital punishment are the only reasonable options for society.

I don't know where I'm going with this, other than to say it seems clear that our penal system could really use some work. Prison inmates are a drag on society, producing nothing, consuming goods and services, while (generally) falling behind in job skills. It's the 21st century; can't we do this better?

resharper - surround with

2011-02-03T17:53:00.000-05:00

I recently discovered a really useful Resharper command for Visual Studio: "Surround With". Simply hit "Ctrl+Alt+j" and you get a nifty menu with a list of common things your would surround code with. This feature makes programming simple: write the code, then add the hardening later. Booya!

Visual Overload

2011-02-01T17:45:00.003-05:00

I reached my record of running five concurrent instances of Visual Studio (four 2010, one 2008) recently. Seems like there should/could be a better way to have multiple solutions open at once, especially since each VS took about 500MB of memory each (with 8GB memory total, this wasn't really a problem, but it could be if I also had other high-memory programs open). Maybe one VS can have multiple solution-spaces open, like tabs, but at a higher level than the tabs for open files? Not sure, but it seems like a better answer is waiting for someone to discover it.

On Troubleshooting

2011-01-30T16:51:00.000-05:00

I think troubleshooting is a distinct skill that is technology independent. For example, Annie just called me in to the living room because the TV was displaying "No Signal", despite the fact that we were successfully watching TV earlier in the day. I don't really know anything about TVs and DVRs and tuners beyond "you plug the cables in where they fit", so I was slightly concerned. However, all my years of troubleshooting software bugs came through. Here was my process:

Sanity check: make sure all cables are plugged into the right ports and the TV is set to the right setting. Still not working.
Sanity check: turn off and on DVR and TV. Still not working.
Move HDMI cable from port 1 to port 2 on TV, then port 3. Still not working.
Get new HDMI cable from basement and test DVR and TV. Still not working.
Test laptop HDMI into ports 1, 2, and 3 on TV. Laptop output to TV not working.
Unplug power from TV, wait 10 seconds, plug back in. Eureka! It's working!

The trick is to continually isolate a single factor and remove that factor from consideration. If I had not tried the laptop, I doubt I ever would have figured out the problem. But I needed to test with an input other than the DVR to isolate the DVR and TV from each other to determine which was the problem. I'm just glad I was able to fix the TV so easily.

Derail

2010-10-22T18:48:00.008-04:00

So the 30 day meditation challenge did not go so well. It turns out that if you leave the house at 7AM and don't get home until 10PM (welcome to my Mondays and Wednesdays), it's hard to find any time in a quiet place, and when I do find that time, I fall asleep. Off the bat, I lost the challenge on the first Monday, but then the next day I had too much schoolwork to do, so I had no time that day... and so on.

A more realistic goal for myself would be to meditate three times a week. That way, I can make plans to meditate on certain days, and if the plan doesn't work out, I have time to make it up. Good idea, Ed, let's do it!

The lesson I'm taking away from this is that it is unrealistic for me to attempt to force myself into a difficult arbitrary structure simply will not work. I'm too much of a "seat of my pants" kind of guy (on the MBTI scale, I'm definitely a perceiver).

Next Stop, Meditation Station!

2010-08-23T18:30:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to try meditation for a long time. I read a fair bit about it (starting with The Relaxation Response and moving to the Internet), and after talking with a few people, decided now would be the best time for me to try it.

So I challenged myself. 30 days, every day, meditating. Just 20 minutes (with a few minutes on each side) a day, I can do this, right?

Well, it took me about a week from when I said that to when I first meditated. But that first meditation was yesterday! So that's good. What about today?

I decided the best way to help me continue to meet this personal challenge would be to post it online and give daily updates. This would both A) get me blogging again, and B) provide me with extra incentive. After all, I can't let my (two or three) readers down, can I?

Nitpicking a House of Cards

2010-07-28T22:56:00.001-04:00

I love the movie The Mummy. It's just a fun movie, and I'm not alone in liking it. The combination of horror and action and comedy (and even zombies!). But there are several bits of it that always piss me off.

In the beginning scenes with Ardeth and the Medjai, there are like hundreds of Medjai. But once Ardeth and Dr. Bey confront Rick, Evelyn, and Jonathan about awaking Imhotep, all the other Medjai disappear, off doing who-knows-what. It should would've been useful to have even a dozen scimitar- and rifle-wielding warriors helping out. (At least in The Mummy Returns, they mentioned the other Medjai had to get ready to fight the Army of Anubis.)
After Imhotep has "absorbed" three of the Americans, leaving only Mr. Daniels, the party is driving in car to get away from Imhotep's zombies. They know they need to protect Mr. Daniels to prevent Imhotep from getting fully regenerated (another case when more Medjai would have been nice). So why do they leave him unprotected at the back of the car? Dumb.
And then after the zombies pull Mr. Daniels off of the car, the party keeps driving on, knowing full well that they are letting Imhotep get fully regenerated. Sure, there were plenty of zombies, but Ardeth, Rick, and Dr. Bey were all pretty badass fighters. You'd think they could've held off the zombies while Mr. Daniels got back in the car.

But this whole blog post is a waste of bytes. It just bugs me every time, probably because I enjoy the movie so much.

Oh, By The Way, New Baby!

2010-05-12T18:41:00.000-04:00

Yeah, so my lack of posts recently was first a result of pregnancy (Pregnancy: not just for expectant mothers!) and now a result of our firstborn, Mia MacKenzie!

You can find more photos of our beautiful daughter at Flickr. Mia is more important than just about anything I've ever done, but I will attempt to get back to posting a little.

What is a TypeLoadExceptionHolder and What Should I Do If I Have One?

2010-02-18T13:41:00.000-05:00

Recently at work I was creating a new branch in Subversion for one of our projects when I ran into a little error on one an integration test called "Should_Send_Data_From_File_To_Server":

Object of type 'System.Runtime.Serialization.TypeLoadExceptionHolder' cannot be converted to type 'System.Collections.Generic.List<companyname.framework.persistableobject>'

TypeLoadExceptionHolder? What the crap is that? I tried Binging it (yes, I Bing now. Sorry Google, you lose this round), and after pouring through results, found this post by Michael Freidgeim:

Binary deserialization doesn't throw exceptions, but just replace some members(in my case it was enum, that was moved from one namespace to another) with this undocumented TypeLoadExceptionHolder class.

OK, so why was my binary deserialization failing? I wrote up a quick integration test to simply serialize and deserialize a file and it worked fine. But the sample serialized file just wouldn't deserialize in this branch, even though this exact code worked fine in the source branch.

I was nearing my wits end when I realized Michael had already nailed it for me: namespaces. One of the reference assemblies, "companyname.framework", had changed names in this release branch. It used to be "companyname.framework.core". And so the sample serialized file had the old namespace and couldn't properly be deserialized. The mystery is solved.

The moral of the story is Never trust canned data in your integration tests. Always suspect it when sometime goes wrong.

Force Feeding You Change

2010-02-12T15:23:00.004-05:00

Google loves to just drop new features in your lap. I remember when I first noticed Google Talk; I came back to my computer and Graham had dropped me a line, "yo fezzik, whats shakin bro?" (of course, Eric was the second person to send me a chat). I was all "WTF is this? Get out of my inbox!" But I got over it.

It reminds me of the way Blizzard would work their betas. For the Warcraft 3 expansion beta, when they added a new unit, they would make that unit overpowered so that everyone would use it (When they added "fragmentation shards" to the mortar teams, they made the effects so loud and big that they were impossible to ignore). That way Blizzard could see how people reacted to it, how they used it, etc. They would use that data to find the right balance.

That's just like what Google has done with Talk and Buzz. They just throw it right at you, in your face, in Gmail. You have no choice but to deal with it (yeah, sure, you can disable them both, but how long did it take you to find that little link?). And so now everyone is talking about Buzz, using Buzz, and Google can use all this feedback to flesh it out properly. Nicely done, Google.

Google Buzz: The Facebook-ization of Google

2010-02-10T08:58:00.001-05:00

Google surprised me when they suddenly launched their latest endeavor into the social networking world, Buzz. After one look and their introduction video, it seems clear they are targeting one competitor: Facebook. Sure, Buzz includes features from Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, and others, but those aren’t the main targets.

Think about it. Facebook is working on a new email feature. Facebook’s goal is to have you on their website for as much time as possible. I know plenty of people who would almost never leave Facebook if they could get their email there. Sure, there would still be users like me who actually post content into Facebook via Twitter linking outside content. But for probably 80-90% of users, Facebook becomes the Internet.

Google doesn’t like that future. Google’s business model is predicated on having users, well, use Google. They want users to experience all the web has to offer, and to find it all through Google Search. There are two parts to that strategy: pushing the openness of the web and empowering users, and then showing them relevant advertisements. Google cannot do all the cool stuff it does without the huge revenue base it has, but more importantly, all these cool things are there to keep you on Google and learn about you so they can keep showing you relevant advertisements.

So what is Buzz? It’s a reason for people who use GMail a lot to stay on Google servers. It’s an attempt to keep users from, once they’ve read their mail, leaving the site and going to Facebook. Will it work? I don’t know. I only have access to Buzz on my Android, in the Maps program, so I can’t say how useful it is. I agree with Eric that the technology involved is cool, but that goes back to part one of the strategy: pushing openness and decentralization. (Think about Google pushing decentralization. If everything isn’t in one place, how do you find it?) But the takeaway of this is that Google is reacting to the Facebook-ization of the Internet, and it seems to be a pretty cool reaction.

Building Integration Tests With Workflow Components

2010-02-03T23:30:00.011-05:00

A lot of blood, sweat, and tears have been shed over the use and design of unit tests, but what about the red-headed stepchild of automated testing, integration tests? They have fallen out of vogue lately in popular discussion, but they can be just as useful as unit tests. Just search for unit test best practices and integration test best practices; the unit test search has almost twice the results.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks I have found with integration tests is internal dependencies (external ones, like databases and webservices, are also a pain, but you’re on your own for them). If you have to test an “Approve” action, you probably first need to “Create” the object before you can approve it. You’ve written your “Create” integration tests, so do you make your “Approve” tests inherit from the “Create” tests? That seems kind of ugly. But you don’t want to have duplicate code, even if it’s just in the tests.

A better solution is to split your integration tests into “workflow” classes. Each workflow class represents an action you want to test, “Create” in this case.

public class CreateResults   
{
  //data to return    
}    

public class CreateWorkflow    
{    
  public CreateResults DoAction()    
  {    
    //Do the action, return the results    
  }    
}

You can use this code for your “Create” tests, but even cooler, your “Approve” workflow can consume the “CreateResults” object:

public class ApproveResults 
{
  //data to return  
}  

public class ApproveWorkflow  
{  
  public ApproveResults DoAction(CreateResults results)  
  {  
    //Do the action, using the data from the create test, return the results  
  }  
}

How cool is that?

Well, what if you want to have a workflow with various options? We can do that:

public class CreateOptions   
{    
  //inputs to the workflow
  public class CreateWorkflow   
{    
  public CreateResults DoAction(CreateOptions options)    
  {    
    //Do the action using the provided options, return the results    
  }    
}

You can experiment with using the “Options” and “Results” objects in different ways. YMMV. This may not solve all the problems with integration tests (and it’s not revolutionary, and someone else probably already did it), but it can make for some pretty modular tests and make your life easier.

Unexpected Benefit

2009-11-09T12:55:00.003-05:00

My sense of smell has always been somewhat lackluster, which has led me to on occasion eat spoiled meat and drink spoiled milk (explains a lot, right?). Fun times. But one of the pregnancy "symptoms" Annie is experiencing is an enhanced sense of smell. I've been able to use this to my advantage :)

"Hey honey, is this milk bad?"

"Babe, can you smell this deli meat? It looks a little... funky."

Alternatively, if I cook something good, to her the whole house will smell like it for a while, so it's in my best interest to cook as much deliciously-smelling stuff as I can. Look out world, here comes Chef Ed!

Get Busy Living, or Get Busy Setting Up Your Workspace

2009-10-03T15:31:00.001-04:00

For a long time now, I’ve been trying to make my work-from-home setup more usable. Or, more accurately, I’ve been complaining that my work-from-home setup is inadequate and then not doing anything about it. See, I have a desk in the basement, but it’s not really a computer user’s desk. Sure, it has a keyboard drawer, but there is no room on that drawer for a mouse, so my mouse-hand always ends up in an awkward position. Couple that with the fact that my desktop PC just croaked and I have no USB keyboards to plug into my laptop, and the desk became darn-near unusable. I tried using my laptop on the couch, but I either end up nearly burning my lap or hunched over the coffee table.

With the bare minimum in mind, I set out to Staples (just about the only tech retailer within walking distance of my job) to get a USB wireless keyboard. I figured $35, maybe $40, and my desk would be back in action AND I could use the laptop just about anywhere in the house.

I managed to get lucky; Staples was having a sale on the Microsoft Wireless Desktop 3000 (keyboard and mouse combo). $50 seemed like a good price for both devices.

Well, the keyboard is great, though nothing special compared to other keyboards (well, it’s no Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000). It just works. The mouse is the real winner. The bundled mouse is the Microsoft Wireless Mouse 5000, and it comes with “BlueTrack” technology. I don’t know what that means, but I do know I can use the mouse on just about any surface. Anything. I just flopped it down on the fleece that’s piled right next to me and it worked perfectly. I’m not sold on the location of the “forward” button, but I rarely use that anyway, so it’s not a big deal.

This is coming off like a shill review, so I’ll stop talking about the devices themselves (I have no relevant experience with wireless keyboards or mice to compare these to anyway). I’m sure Logitech’s offerings are awesome too (their MX500 mouse has been my faithful companion for years).

The point is that now I’ve got a very comfortable working environment at my desk OR on the couch. The nice side benefit is that using a wireless keyboard just makes me feel like a badass hacker too.

You Should Listen to Me: I Placed First in a Private Make-Believe World

2009-09-21T18:07:00.000-04:00

So all my waiver-wiring and managing risk and whatnot landed me a league title in one of the two leagues I cared about (and I came in second in the other one). Booya!

Mostly though, I'm excited that fantasy baseball season is over so I can focus on (fantasy) football, as well as the baseball playoffs. Fantasy sports really enhance my spectator experience, but it's also nice to watch a game and not worry about every at-bat and how it will affect me. Here's hoping the Yankees go deep into October baseball!

Not Even a Magician

2009-08-10T14:11:00.003-04:00

"I don't know. I'm not a magic person. I just play second base."

It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

2009-08-06T22:46:00.000-04:00

Fantasy Baseball has been good to me this year. In the two leagues I actually pay attention to, I'm in first place, one team by 4 games, the other by 19. And it's not that I draft well; I know I'm pretty bad at that sorta thing, and this year was no different (1 of the 10 guys I drafted in the last 5 rounds of these 2 leagues is still on my roster). No, it was all thanks to free agent pickups and waiver claims.

Grey of Razzball.com says it best:

You don’t want to be Cowboy Jon praying Matt Wieters comes up in June while you sit in 8th place not even needing a catcher. Or are you holding your waiver claim because you’re afraid someone is going to drop Prince Fielder? Who are you, John Q. Law? This is your job, why? Wait, even better. If you’re in a league with a guy who wears fancy dungarees and who would drop Prince Fielder, you shouldn’t be in that league. If you need a guy for your roster, then claim him. While your leaguemates are waiting for someone they deem worthy of a pickup, you’ll be grabbing all kinds of other players that are immediately useful.

That advice goes for free agents too. And better yet, free agents don't cost you anything other than the worst player on your roster.

Key players that I picked up off free agency/waivers this year:

Ben Zobrist
Mark Reynolds
Jon Lester (an impatient owner dropped him)
Andrew Bailey
Jordan Zimmerman (traded to get Casey McGehee)
Jake Fox (traded to get Leo Nunez)

I'm 19 games up in one league pretty much solely on the shoulders of Zobrist and Reynolds. Drafting is super important, as the basis of your team is formed in those first hours of the fantasy season. But even if your draft doesn't go according to plan (like drafting Garrett Atkins in the 4th round), you can still recover if you keep an eye on the game.

Did Anyone Else Hear That?

2009-04-29T21:49:00.002-04:00

I'm watching the Yankees @ Tigers game tonight on ESPN, and these commentaors have got to be the worst I've ever heard. They just seriously suggested that the 1-2 2 out pitch the ump called a ball was a good call because other umpires might've phoned it in and called it a strike just to get out of the inning. Seriously? Seriously.

Love-Hate Relationship

2009-04-09T14:51:00.003-04:00

Look At the Time Stamp

2009-04-09T00:10:00.001-04:00

Seriously, just look at when I posted this. Not doctored at all.

I just finished a daily merge for work. Yes, I took time off when I got home to eat dinner and watch a little TV. I still spent a whole day + some on a single daily merge.

Sometimes, I just hate source control.

Fantasy Baseball: Players I Own

2009-03-29T15:19:00.004-04:00

I always end up have the same players on many of my teams. I try to avoid it, but my research always ends up pointing me at the same players. This year I did a little better in avoiding repetition:

Carlos Guillen: Tampa4, Work League (WL)
Albert Pujols: Nine Bo Jacksons (NBJ), Tampa4
Nick Markakis: Garrett Anderson (GA), Tampa4
Chris B. Young: GA, Tampa4
Josh Beckett: WL, Tampa4
Gil Meche: WL, Tampa4
Ted Lilly: GA, Tampa4
Brian Wilson: GA, Tampa4
Rich Harden: GA, Tampa4

Hmm, on second thought, my GA and Tampa4 teams are pretty similar. Those are the two leagues I paid the most attention to, so I guess I didn't really succeed in spreading my risk. Oh well.

Programming Update

2009-03-28T23:33:00.003-04:00

Today was New England Code Camp 11: Developer Stimulus Package. What an awesome name. Thanks to Chris Bowen for organizing it. Unfortunately for me, I could only stay for the first four sessions. Got to learn about Silverlight, F#, and .NET 4.0. As always, Richard Hale Shaw was excellent, and Andy Beaulieu was also quite good. Fun times for all.

These programming conventions always give me extra energy for working on projects. This one came at a great time, because I had stopped work on Walrus since all of my fantasy baseball teams had already drafted. I now know (thanks to RHS) how F# really fits in, and how to use it as a library extension to my C# projects. Yay!

I also need to work on smaller projects. Things I can build quickly and learn small things at once. I plan to build an ASP.NET MVC app soon, but it has to be super simple so I can get it out the door fast. Maybe I'll build a blog. Easy, but somewhat boring. I haven't thought this through yet.

Nick is also urging me on, mostly by blogging and conversations on the train. He's on Twitter now at @nswarr, so you can follow him if you want. Eric always gets mad points for energy boosts.

Any ideas for what to put on edschwehm.com?

Why I Don't Like SOLID Principles

2009-03-26T21:07:00.001-04:00

SOLID princples:

Single responsibility principle
Open-closed principle
Liskov substitution principle
Interface segregation principle
Dependency inversion principle

This topic has been discussed to death in the tech circles, thanks to the whole tiff started by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. I'm just throwing my piece in the ring:

SOLID is good.
SOLID is not gospel.

The first rule of programming should be "use your brain." The first answer should always be "it depends." SOLID is not a silver bullet (because, as we know, there is no such bullet). There are going to be times where you need to write some code that is not pretty. Sometimes we acrue technical debt for valid reasons. Usually the reason is we need to implement some feature or bug fix fast, possibly because we're losing customers.

It really comes down to what Jeff said: "Quality really doesn't matter that much, in the big scheme of things." What matters is what we deliver to the customer. Of course, good code quality helps you deliver more and better apps to the customer. But the customer does not care that you followed the SOLID principles to the letter as long as the product is right.

Managing Risk With Bench Spots, Part 2

2009-03-17T22:37:00.000-04:00

In Part 1, I discussed how you can use a bench spot as a hedge against a risky player you drafted. In this part 2, I'll discuss how to decide what to do with each of your bench spots.

You basically have four options when it comes to bench spots:

Platoon: One guy who mashes right-handed pitchers, one who wails on lefties.
Upside: Younger guys who might outperform expectations
Pitchers: In daily leagues, you could have extra pitchers to try to rack up counting stats.
Injury risks: As mentioned in part 1, you can backup your risky players.

Platoon players can often be had for cheap. Their season stats and projections are not going to look good because they hit something like .200/.300/.300 against opposite-handed pitchers. If you keep one guy who mashes righties and one you matches lefties, you can get the best of both worlds. The downside is that you have to check the matchups every day. Also these guys tend to be less-than-stellar players who could lose their job at any point.

If you're reading this blog, you know about upside players. It's like drafting Evan Longoria or Colby Rasmus last year. Sometimes, you strike gold (see Longoria, 2008). Sometimes, the guy sits in the minors all year (see Rasmus, 2008). This category also includes guys like Elijah Dukes who have talent and always seem on the fringe of a breakout year.

In daily leagues, many managers will carry extra pitchers to try to rack up wins, saves, and strikeouts. This may not work as well with a Roto league (IP limit), but if you decide to draft pitching late, running extra pitchers out there can help offset the losses you made.

And finally, you can draft a backup for any of your risky picks. Better grab a backup 3B if you intend to draft Chipper Jones.

How do you decide what to do? By the time you're drafting bench players, you should already know how many injury backups you need. A good rule of thumb is that you want no more than half of your bench players as injury backups. You should also know if you need any platoon mates. You need to take care of these two cases first.

Once you've filled your obligations, then you can pick between upside players and extra pitchers. Make your picks based on your overall strategy (take pitchers if you need them, upside if you can).

And finally, remember that players can fit into more than one category. Andy LaRoche is both a backup 3B and an updside player. You want all your bench players to be as useful as possible, so keep an eye of for guys that fill multiple needs.

Managing Risk with Bench Spots, Part 1

2009-03-08T19:15:00.000-04:00

Derek Carty at Hardball Times had a great three part series on injury risks and how they can lead to great rewards. The basic premise is that if you combine a partial season of a good talent with a partial season of a replacement level player, the combined value is much greater than the sum of the parts. I totally agree with this premise (you can see me arguing in favor of it in the comments).

You can use this strategy for any player who is expected to miss time:

Matt Wieters will start the season in AAA, but is expected to be called up as early as May.
Chase Utley will start the season on the DL, and should be back within a month or so.
Rich Harden is currently healthy, but you never know when he'll be injured.
Max Scherzer will be the 5th starter in Arizona, but if he's ineffective they might send him to AAA for some work (unlikely but possible).

Clearly the Utley situation is the most valuable; you know how long he'll be out, and you can reasonable guarantee he'll be great when we returns. The Harden situation is the worst; you don't know when/if/how long he'll be out and if he'll be effective when he returns. You need to make sure to balance your roster with these risks.

Your bench spots are one of your greatest resources for managing risk. Instead of replacing an injured or ineffective player with a replacement player (i.e. free agent), you can replace him with a bench player. You chose your bench players based on your starters. If you draft Chipper Jones as your starting 3B, you'll likely draft another 3B sometimes in the late rounds. That 3B will be better than a replacement 3B. When you do this you're using a bench spot to hedge the risk you took by drafting Jones. (You can use DL spots in this fashion only if the player is starting the season on the DL, like Utley).

One of the greatest arguments against this strategy is that each replacement player requires a bench or DL spot. Some leagues have as few as 3 bench spots and no DL spots. Thus you have to decide whether to use you bench spots for extra starting pitchers, high-upside players, platoon mates, or injury risks. When planning to draft a risky player, mark off on your draft sheet that one of your bench spots should be reserved for a backup.

Next post I'll look into how you should decide to use your bench spots.

Moneyball in Fantasy Sports

2009-03-05T13:25:00.004-05:00

The main message of Moneyball was that Billy Beane built winning teams on the cheap by finding inefficiencies in the market and exploiting them. We can use that same tactic in fantasy baseball.

Let's examine a common fantasy expert recommendation: don't draft top-rated catchers in the top 100 picks. If you've been in many drafts, you've probably seen people who wait until the 19th round to pick up a catcher. In the same draft, someone probably drafted Joe Mauer in the 5th round. When you're deciding when to draft a catcher, you want to know what people think about catchers and the above recommendation. If you somehow know that everyone is following the above recommendation, you can bet that Russell Martin will be available in the 9th round and draft accordingly. That's a market inefficiency.

Another example: a common draft tenet is to not draft top-rated closers. If you know everyone is following this rule, but you really want Jonathan Papelbon, you can wait a few rounds more than you would normally to draft him.

It can be hard to figure out the trends of the draft while it's going on, especially in timed drafts like Yahoo's (90 seconds is not a lot of time). Some signs are obivous; position runs are the most obvious ones. When everyone is taking closers, the other positions are being neglected. Notice these trends.

Others inefficiencies are harder to spot. Typically you will only know how a drafter feels about single-spot positions (i.e. SS, 2B, and C) when they draft them, and then it's too late. The positions you can learn the most about are OF (undifferentiated), SP, and RP, since teams need multiple players for those positions. If you have time to keep track of your opponents drafting habits, you can see how they value those positions and make guesses as to when they might draft the next player.

You can also look at stat categories. Maybe runs are being undervalued. Maybe drafters are rushing to grab stolen bases. Keep an eye on available stats left on the board and how fast they leave the board.

You're not drafting in a vacuum; every other drafter is making moves, and every move they make carries a lot of information. In addition to your one draft sheet (you only have one, right?), you should have one scouting sheet. Take notes on your opponents. If you've played with them before, jot down your thoughts about them before the draft. If you can spot these trends before others do, you can get a huge advantage.

(I'm hoping to handle some of this in Walrus, so keep your eyes peeled!)

Just Do It

2009-02-21T17:17:00.000-05:00

You know, Nike was right.

Just do it.

I Love My Wife

2009-02-17T14:24:00.003-05:00

I love Annie because she laughs at my lame jokes.

I love Annie because she picks up some of my lame jokes and uses them herself.

I love Annie because she has the best smile.

I love Annie because she doesn't mind if I burp in bed.

I love Annie because she understands me.

I love Annie because even though she understands me, she still loves me.

I love Annie because she's good with remembering things and I'm not.

I love Annie because she takes care of me when I need it.

I love Annie because she lets me take care of her when she needs it.

I love Annie because she reads my blogs.

I love Annie because she doesn't laugh at me when I have ridiculous thoughts or theories.

I love Annie because she makes me breakfast on Saturday (and usually Sunday) mornings.

I love Annie because for some weird reason she hates to make coffee, so I do it.

I love Annie because she plays fantasy sports and usually beats me.

I love Annie because she hates computers (and in doing so, shows she's smarter than I).

I love Annie because she gives awesome hugs.

I love Annie because she's a pretty good kisser too.

I love Annie because she knows why I'm writing this list.

I love Annie because she smells really good, before and after perfume.

I love Annie because she loves to snuggle, and we fit together perfectly for snuggling.

I love Annie because she makes me smile.

I love Annie because she gets frustrated at little things that I can easily help her with, and then she smiles and says, "Oh, that was easy."

I love Annie because she likes playing racing video games with me.

I love Annie because she says things like "Why don't you go play Call of Duty with your boys," and she's not being sarcastic.

I love Annie because she has a great ass (oops, there goes the PG rating).

I love Annie because she buys me video games for Valentines Day.

I love Annie because she deals with all the craziness of my life.

I love Annie because she believes in her career and in helping people.

I love Annie because she loves sitting on the couch and doing nothing.

I love Annie because she loves being productive and getting things done.

I love Annie because she laughs at me for recording Dollhouse because Eliza Dushku is in it.

I love Annie because she needs 8-10 hours of sleep a night.

I love Annie because she lets me keep my eyebrows huge by not trimming them.

I love Annie because she loves me for me.

I love my wife :)

A-Rod Did Steroids

2009-02-08T11:58:00.003-05:00

When I saw the news on the ESPNNews ticker, I wasn't so much shocked as I was just disheartened. The whole time Bonds had been pushing to break Aaron's record, I wasn't too upset (well, ok, I was, but all those articles I wrote for the now-defuct BostonNow paper are offline so I can pretend I was calm) because I knew A-Rod would break Bonds' record and we'd have a new clean home run champion. But then this news came out.

In the immortal words of Morpheus, "I have dreamed a dream. But now that dream has gone from me."

So now my whole world of baseball, the years I spent watching and learning and loving the game, are all finally revealed to be a complete fraud. Bonds, McGuire, and Clemens, they're not isolated users now; they were just the first to fall, harbringers of the truth. I really started watching baseball in 1996, right after McGuire started crushing pitches at a rate faster than anyone had ever before. So really, my personal baseball story is now the story of cheating and steroids.

All right all right, I'm overdoing it a little. I still love baseball. I will still root for A-Rod. Maybe I'll appreciate guys like Jeter and Rivera more now.

Let's just say that I've shifted my hopes to Pujols now. Man can that guy crush a ball.

Joel Vs. Kent Smackdown!

2009-02-07T21:39:00.000-05:00

I've been listening to the Stackoverflow podcast for a while now and reading JoelOnSoftware for much longer than that. Joel recently started somewhat of a fight by laying the smackdown on SOLID design principles and 100% unit test code coverage.

Kent Beck was not fond of Joel's (self-admitted) generalization of SOLID principles. You can't really blame Kent, since Joel basically just dismissed Kent's whole deal.

Joel said that the client-specific interfaces principle was probable designed and practiced by people who don't write much code. Kent did not go into details about why he disagreed, simply lamenting that Joel doesn't understand his own responsibility as a popular personality.

Now, we could debate the merits of this until our ears turn blue*, but that's not what I have to add here. For people who are supposed to be leaders in their fields, they're not really thinking about things. Joel's most obviously talking about FogCreek-style software; shrinkwrap software that other software does not interface with. You know, where there is no client to have an interface with**?

All I'm saying is that we need to use our brains before we talk. That's all.

*I happen to come down on the side of Joel on this one, except for public APIs (which Joel acknowledges as an exception as well.

**Except the human client, but that's a whole other can of worms.

Game Log: Farcry 2; or, It's like Mercenaries but it doesn't suck.

2009-01-27T14:09:00.004-05:00

Initial impressions: A good game. I like how the story and gameplay is weaved together. Starts with a now-classic "being driven in car but can move camera" scene, then gets you right into the action. A few dynamics have me impressed so far, but we'll see how they hold up.

All The Pics from Minnesota

2009-01-20T17:33:00.001-05:00

Check out this album:

View Full Album

You can also check out the Flickr album, but it doesn’t have the nice auto-album feature that Windows Live does.

Coming to You Live from Minnesota!

2009-01-18T14:10:00.001-05:00

Annie and I are staying in Minnetonka, MN, in the loving wonderful home of Joe, Liz, and Jacob (Liz and Jake pictures below). We’ve wanted to come visit ever since Jake was born (August 8th, 2008), but various things have gotten in the way.

We finally made it (after my company gave me a sizable bonus… Thank you GLG!)!

On a side note, I’m using this post to try out Windows Live Writer. Paul Thurrott has great things to say about it:

This is the single nicest blog editor I've ever seen ... and it works with just about every single blogging service there is, and not just Microsoft's Spaces service. If you do use Spaces, all the better: Setup is simple, and you'll be up and running in no time.

So far so good.

And check out this scattershot photo album I automatically created! I just selected a bunch of photos and said “Insert as Album”. Sweet.

View Full Album

The Balance Between Safety and Speed; or, Does the Turtle Really Beat the Rabbit?

2009-01-15T16:26:00.000-05:00

Eric and I argue about programming all the time and about every little thing, but we're really just arguing about one thing. I value safety, and he values speed. Let me elaborate.

The safety I'm talking about is making sure my code works right. I'm for strong typing because it can help find errors at compile time. I believe that databases have to enforce their constraints as best they can even if you're the only client. I prefer centralized version control (CVCS) over distributed version control (DVCS) because the restrictions CVCS enforces promote healthy branching and code. I believe in continuous integration, including full unit and integration tests.

The speed Eric talks about is being able to write "5.times.per.day" in Ruby and have it just work the way you expect. Eric loves git because he's able to get input seamlessly from developers around the world and easily integrate new code. And he loves easily discoverable features of his languages of choice.

Most of the time, the programming context determines the value of the two assets. Building a mission-critical app that handles financial data? Safety rules the day. Building a site to determine if it is Christmas or not? Speed please.

Programmer personality also is a significant factor. I know I make mistakes, so I prefer to use tools that prevent/detect said mistakes. I also know that others might use my code at some point, and as anyone who has ever worked with someone else knows, other people are dumb.

The reason I just started writing about this was because I had to change a "Thread.Sleep" call in one of my integration tests from 2 seconds to 5 seconds. To make this change and formally deploy the code to my project's development environment, I had to run the code through the entire 12 minute build process. And that's AFTER running the unit tests locally (5 more minutes). It would've been so nice to circumvent the whole process. And I wanted so much to do just that! But I held fast to my rules, and now I know the published package built from that build is ready to be released to QA.

Johan Santana SP +++ Is Pretty Good

2009-01-14T13:21:00.004-05:00

Every baseball off season I prepare a note sheet with things I read or learn about baseball players that might help me come draft season. An example note from last season: "michael bourn of + like a cheap Juan Pierre; will get steals but kill your average". Sometimes I'm right ("brad lidge rp + give him a looksee") and sometimes I'm wrong ("nick swisher of/1b + especially in OBP leagues, slg .824 in ST over .464 career"). But I like writing these things down and taking stock.

My HSL note sheet for this off season has grown to 41 players (from A.J. Burnett to Zack Greinke, alpha-sorted by first name). I'm a little concerned that the majority of my notes are on starting pitchers (17). I also only have one negative note (sorry J.J. Putz). I've added a draft column to the sheet to suggest to myself what round I should target the player in. This information will work great with Walrus's "must-draft-by" feature.

There's just so much information out there and we can't keep it all in our heads the whole time. My HSL note sheet has been step one to organize my information. Walrus is step two.

Take That!

2009-01-12T19:44:00.000-05:00

Man, I'm looking like an expert myself. I'm not saying that I'm smarter than Joe Sheehan (or am I?), because clearly I'm not (otherwise I'd be writing for Baseball Prospectus). But at least I made one point :)

Haha I Take It Back

2009-01-12T15:17:00.001-05:00

Or maybe this is why Dell is at the top:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-biz-dell-computer-settlement-jan12,0,3118566.story

Just Let Me Buy the Thing Already!

2009-01-12T13:24:00.002-05:00

Most technically people I know hate talking to sales guys, preferring to instead do all their own research and buy from a website. I'm going to share a short story with you all about sales people.

A small web business decided to move from rented servers to owned servers, so the owner bought several server machines and rack space. He decided to save money by buying the hard drives and memory separately from the servers. However, when the server arrived, it did not come with the necessary drive rails for the hard drives. The company did not sell the drive rails, only the hard drives themselves with rails attached... for hundreds of dollars each!

If you follow the Stack Overflow podcast or blog, then you know that this owner was Jeff Atwood, writer behind codinghorror.com and cofounder of Stack Overflow. He ended up buying the drive rails on EBay for the right price, so the story ended well. But when I read his story, it reminded me of an exchange on the SO podcast I heard earlier. Jeff and Joel discussed that Dell sales guys give you a better deal than the website, and that "Dell is paying me [Jeff] to talk to a sales guy, and they are paying the sales guy a commission" (paraphrased).

I think they misunderstand why Dell wants businesses to talk to sales guys, and the story at the top of this post illustrates Dell's thinking. Companies want you to be happy with your purchase. They want you to buy from them again and to tell all your friends/coworkers/everyone how awesome your company is. The sales guys want you to be happy with your purchase so you don't return it and cost them their commission. So everyone at the company wants you to be happy with your purchase.

And they know things! They know how many drive rails come with each server unit and if replacements are available. They know if the laptop you want comes with a replaceable motherboard. They know the answers to the questions you didn't know to ask. And they know that happy customers are worth 5-10% off the bottom line.

The moral of the story is twofold. One, Dell knows what it's doing. It didn't rise to be the #1 seller of computers because of their pretty colors. Two, that people should consider talking to sales guys before making a purchase, no matter how much research they did. [UPDATE: Joel actually mentions this to Jeff in podcast 35, so he's still cool.]

Important caveat: this only goes for legitimate companies concerned with their reputation. Vince from ShamWOW doesn't care if you're happy because he got his $19.99 plus S/H.

Sins of an Aging Gamer

2009-01-11T21:01:00.000-05:00

I'm not old. Not by a long shot. But I am getting older and more mature. I'm also spending more time with my wife. And more time working on my house. I find I have less and less time to play video games. This is a huge bummer!

I had many video games on my wish list, and I got three for Christmas (Orange Box, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Sins of a Solar Empire). I already beat Portal and am playing through Half Life 2 in Orange Box. I'm saving Rainbox Six Vegas for a rainy day (since the online playing opportunities at this point are almost nil). That leaves Sins of a Solar Empire.

I installed it on our new laptop (a sweet rig, I might add) and fired it up the other day. I've been excited about this title ever since I read about (publisher) Stardock's decision to go without DRM. And I've been craving a new RTS to bide my time until Starcraft 2 comes out.

But after installing the game and going through the tutorials, I found that I had no energy for playing. None. I thought I'd be chomping at the bit to flex my mad RTS skillz, even if just against the computer. But combine the lack of a solid story element (or at least lack of one that pulls me in from the get-go) and no multiplayer aspect (I have no friends to play the game with) and I just have no drive to play.

There are a few elements at play here. I have less time to play games, which means I'm searching for a greater payoff from games I play. That means games I can jump into more quickly (FPS) and games I can play with my friends (Starcraft 2). And that excludes most RTS games that my friends won't play.

The real final point I'm making is that I realized that I'm getting older and I have to pick the games I want to play more carefully (and maybe let my friends' game selection guide me more). Of course, I can play all the DS games I want; what else am I going to do on the train?

Game Log: Fable 2

2008-12-31T14:20:00.000-05:00

I've played maybe 8 hours of Fable 2, and all I can say is that it sucks. I don't know how different it is from Fable 1, but I just don't like it.

Favre and Mangini Should Go

2008-12-28T19:53:00.001-05:00

I place the blame for the Jets' not winning the AFC East on Mangini and Favre.

That is all.

Merry Christmas Everybody!

2008-12-25T11:44:00.003-05:00

Hope you all get great gifts! (like the Yankees getting Mark Teixeira)

May your Christmas be merry and joyful!

You Know It's Fantasy Baseball Season When...

2008-12-22T11:54:00.006-05:00

My Hot Stove League note sheet is already two pages long.
I'm posting on other fantasy baseball blogs.
I've restarted work on my mid-draft fantasy baseball analysis tool (Walrus).
I've had a 2-hour conference call with league co-commissioners to determine rules for next year.

I Sound Like Joe Morgan: Mangini was Inconsistent

2008-12-22T11:26:00.001-05:00

When I look at each of Eric Mangini's decisions this past game, I can understand each one of them individually. But when you put them all together, they paint a very inconsistent picture of the third-year coach. Let me go through the key decisions and point out in each case what Mangini must have been valuing.

Opening drive of game, 4th and 2 feet, 2.5 yard line of Seattle (0-0):
Mangini decides to kick the field goal instead of going for it. He takes the (all but) guaranteed 3 points instead of taking a slight risk of no points. His decision here is conservative, valuing points on the board above a higher risk play. He also disregards the field position the Seahawks would start with. That early in the game, I completely understand just wanting to get some points.

Early in 4th quarter, after Feely nails a 45-yard field goal negated by a delay-of-game penalty (10-3 Seattle):
This time Mangini decides to play for field position. He has Hodges punt and pin Seattle on their 6 yard line (way to save your job, Reggies) instead of risking giving them the ball at about midfield. Again Mangini took the conservative play, but this time he was playing for field position instead of points. (And let's not forget that Feely absolutely drilled the 45-yarder so well it would've been good from 55 yards).

Late in 4th quarter, 3rd and 2 on the Jets 21 yard line, about 2:40 left (10-3, Seattle):
Most analysts will tell you Mangini's big mistake came on 4th down, but I think he screwed up on third down. We know in hindsight that Mangini was planning to go for it on 4th down (assuming the Jets didn't lose yardage). Why not run the ball? You have 3 time outs. You have the 2-minute warning. You have plenty of time. Thomas Jones averaged around 4 yards a carry. Or you could call a draw to Leon "Hot" Washington from the shotgun. Here Mangini lost sight of the game clock, really. He had tunnel vision and forgot about the run.

Late in 4th quarter, 4th and 2 on the Jets 21 yard line, 2:21 left (10-3, Seattle):
Ok, so incomplete pass, now it's 4th down. Mangini decides to go for it. Isolated from the rest of his decisions, I like this call. If you punt it, all Seattle has to do is get one first down and the game is basically over. And how hard is it to get 2 yards anyway (see previous play)?

But this decision is on the complete opposite side of the spectrum from his other decisions. He eschews field position, despite knowing that if they don't get a 1st down, the game is really over, as Seattle will kick a field goal to make it a 2-score game. Again, tunnel vision. He was in "4-down situation" and could not consider other options (the CBS crew did a good job pointing out the reasons to punt the ball there).

Of course, they don't get the first down (Favre decides to throw deep into good double coverage when all they needed was 2 yards?). Mangini is clearly showing his inexperience and lack of skill. He's not as smart as I thought he was.

It's My New Workout Regimen

2008-12-22T06:50:00.002-05:00

I don't mind shoveling snow. I even have this kind of macho thing going; I like to shovel now becausae I can shovel. There will be a point in my life when I won't be able to. And shoveling fits into my mindset very well.

That said, I shoveled snow for seven hours this weekend. That's not a typo. SEVEN HOURS!

Jets Suck

2008-12-21T18:46:00.002-05:00

It's a fact of life.

Going Once!

2008-12-15T14:14:00.001-05:00

Less than five hours left on most of my auctions! Strike while the iron is hot!

Baseball Prospectus Needs Some TARP Funds

2008-12-15T09:12:00.002-05:00

Joe Sheehan and Jay Jaffe both HATED that the Yankees did not offer arbitratrion to Bobby Abreu and Andy Pettitte. The gist of their argument was that arbitration meant either 1 year of a good player or draft picks, and if the Yankees wouldn't mind either of them on their team, then they turned assets into dust.

But they forgot to look at the other side of the coin. Abreu and Pettitte could be assets or they could be liabilities. The two players each made $16 million each last year. In arbitration they could easily earn $18 million each. Let's look at the opportunity cost of each.

Abreu's offensive has been steadily declining since his then-record-setting performance at the 2005 Home Run Derby, but he's still pretty good at the plate. His defense, however, is terrible. I'll leave the sabrmetric analysis for others, but with Damon, Melky/Gardner (or now Cameron), and Nady as full-time outfielders and Swisher and Matsui as backups, the Yankees hardly need a declining expensive OF taking playing time away from better younger players.

The case with Andy is even simpler. The Yankees knew that Pettitte only wanted to play for the Yankees. That leaves him with no leverage. Cashman wanted to give Andy a paycut, so offering arbitration would just be throwing money at him.

And the final argument is that Cashman knew what we didn't; that the Yankees were going to put the full-court press on CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett both. Knowing that, tying up $36 million in two players who are not the solution to the Yankees' problems would be dumb*. Fiscal responsibility, folks. It's a good thing.

* Now, none of us knew that, and of course Sheehan and Jaffe didn't know it when they wrote their posts. I disagreed with them well before Cashman signed CC and A.J., but I'm a slow blogger.

Bill Belichick is a Jerk

2008-12-14T19:13:00.004-05:00

I can't believe Belichick challenged that play... up by 29 (five scores) with 2:33 left to go, he challenged the spot of a Raiders 4th-down conversion. This guy has no sportsmanship.

Wow, the Jets Pulled That One Out of Their Ass

2008-12-14T16:17:00.005-05:00

So the Jets finally won a game against a team they should've beat. Thank goodness, it's about time.

The Jets looked like two different teams this game. During the 1st and 4th quarters, they looked like the team that dominated the Titans and went toe-to-toe with the Patriots. In the 2nd and 3rd quarters, however, they looked like the 4-12 Jets of last year.

Quick thoughts:

They have GOT to find a way to get Leon "Hot" Washington the ball more (1 rush, 1 reception, 6 kickoff returns). His 47-yard TD run in the 2nd quarter just proved how explosive he can be.
Mad props to Steven Johnson of the Bills. After his TD catch in the 2nd quarter, he pulled his celebration right out of "The Replacements" from Clifford Franklin (ball-glued-to-hands spike).
Favre's first interception wasn't his fault (two crazy bounces), but the second one was. What was he thinking? I know Favre has thrown his fair share of deep bombs, but he does not have the arm for it anymore. He underthrew the receiver (Cotchery? Clowney?) by 10 yards.
David Clowney made an impression in his first NFL game. He made a great catch by tipping the ball to himself twice. I hope he gets more chances to prove himself.
The Jets had more luck in this game than they deserved. The Bills choice to throw when all they had to do was run out the clock, and then the lucky bounce into Shaun Ellis' hands... hopefully they had karma to spare.

Miami won and New England is already up 21-0 against Oakland, so the Jets still need to win out.

It's A Problem!

2008-12-13T11:18:00.000-05:00

Filip Bondy: Master of Words.

"There was an absence of despair, which is good. There was no sense of desperation, which is not."

There was no despair. That's good. There was no despair. That's bad.

"When he speaks to the media, the coach talks in circles about commitment and consistency. If his players require a more direct translation of this dire situation, then here it is: Things could get very ugly around here in a hurry."

Now, I'm not an NFL head coach, but if I were, I wouldn't give the same speech to the media and to the players. Anything the coach tells the media will be read by every other team in the league! Let's just give up all our secrets, shall we?

"Laveranues Coles, whose recent quotes about Favre demonstrate a very fragile truce, becomes even edgier and outspoken as locker-room dissenters are empowered by failure."

My favorite part about this line is that in the very same issue of the Daily News, Ohm Youngmisuk debunks the theory that Favre and Coles do not get along.

"Millions of dollars in salaries are jettisoned in the offseason, while Woody Johnson re-thinks the club's decision to build a contender quickly by splurging in the free agent market."

I think it's hard to dispute that Alan Faneca, Kris Jenkins, Damien Woody, and Calvin Pace have had an immensely positive effect on the team. Faneca and Woody have cemented the O-line (and made D'Brickashaw Fergason and Nick Mangold far better), while Pace and Jenkins have given the Jets one of the best run defences in the league.

Clearly the failure is not with those four players.

Here ends my lame attempt to fill the void left by FireJoeMorgan.com.

Bold Prediction Wednesday! It's the Yankees Again

2008-12-03T11:23:00.002-05:00

Prediction: Yankees fail to sign CC Sabathia. Yankees do sign Mark Texeira for $120M over 6 years.

Help Me Help You!

2008-11-30T12:06:00.003-05:00

The best part of being at my parents' place in NJ is that they get every movie channel known to man. I've watched Spiderman, Spiderman 2, Jerry McGuire, Back to the Future Part 2, 6th Day, and a whole bunch of others that I can't remember. Of course, I also stayed up until like 3 every morning to watch them. Sweet.

Happy Turkey Day!

2008-11-27T18:26:00.000-05:00

Enjoy the food!

Game Log: Gears of War 2

2008-11-19T11:56:00.002-05:00

I just got Gears of War 2, and I love it. Here are some thoughts:

Multiplayer: I've only played about 4-6 hours of multiplayer, and it's been all Horde mode (you plus 4 of your closest friends vs. waves of bad guys). This game mode is more fun than I expected. Plus it's the only way I get to play as Baird. Booya.

Single player: Goddamnit this game is so huge! And I mean that. I've read the word "scope" used to describe GoW2, and they couldn't be more right. The most famous example is the developer making up for the Brumak scene from GoW1 (cut because of time pressure) by having you fight like five brumaks within the first 15 minutes of GoW2. That's big. Then you fight like three corpsers at once, two seeders, a ginormous worm, and a mega-fish (not all in that order). Not to mention new regular enemies and everything.

The basic gameplay hasn't changed too much; you still hide behind cover and shoot at bad guys. Two main things have changed: the enemy AI, and the scope (again). I've been flanked by grubs so many times it's getting me to think the XBox is sensient. And the battlefields are just much bigger (and much smaller sometimes) so you really get caught up in them.

I've said before that the #1 thing I look for in single-player games is immersion: how immersed can I get in the game. Whether it's emotional investment in the characters or just locked-in gameplay, if I forget about the outside world and are thinking solely as the protagonist, that's the win I'm looking for. GoW2 gives it all. They totally sideswiped me with an emotional scene; it came out of nowhere and I totally cried. But the thing is The dialog for that scene isn't even that great. I was just so invested that it hit me harder.

I have yet to finish the game so the ending may disappoint, but I'm already in love. I'll probably play though it like 4-5 times before it's all said and done.

Update 11/26/08: I've played a bit more multiplayer, all horde mode, with some new friends and random people (the matching system for horde is pretty solid). It's still fun, but I can imagine it getting kind of boring soon.

The single player storyline just totally surprised me, and not in a good way. Things happened that totally jarred me out of suspension-of-disbelief. I really hope they tie it all back together.

I Thought Slavery Was Illegal

2008-11-17T13:04:00.002-05:00

The Yankees sold a man to another team for $1 million. That's 0.7% of the money needed to sign Sabathia.

Gaming 2: Return to Gamingdom

2008-11-17T10:47:00.003-05:00

I was on call this weekend for my project's release. This meant I had to stay within 30 minutes of a computer at all times and have my Blackberry on me all the time (yes, they nailed me with a BB again. Sonuvabitch!). However, this bore unexpected fruit; Annie had plans both Friday and Saturday night. I could not make plans that required me to leave the house. Solution?

Video games.

I played more games this weekend (probably close to 12 hours) than I have the past 2 months combined. It was awesome.

Mostly I played Gears of War 2, but I snuck some Fable 2 in there as well (game logs on both forthcoming). The main takeaway I had was how much I miss playing games. Even a 30-45 minute gamebreak is refreshing. I guess I'm just hard wired for gaming.

I Was Almost Murdered

2008-11-14T15:49:00.001-05:00

I teach Pep Band at Tufts. I don't have an office, but I do have some storage space in an old office attached to the auditorium's "green room". One day this year, I went to go get my supplies, as usual. I walked up the steps from the basement to the green room when suddenly two angry Tufts police officers and two weird looking dudes in odd-fitting suits got in my way. One cop looked angry, confused, and worried all in one, said, "You can't go this way!" Odd, I thought. "I just need to get to the green room." The cop was insistent: "You can't go this way, you'll have to wait." The two weird looking men shared a smirk.

It was at this point that I realized that this was not a normal situation. The cops were worried, but not about me.

"OK, well, I'm a music professor, I need to get my music supplies from the office in the green room," I said.

The two cops looked nervously at each other, then the speaker looked at the two weird men. They made no motion whatsover. Apparently, that was the go ahead.

"OK, you have a key?" I did. I walked in the green room to see a table of bottled water, ice, and snacks. The green room never had anything but a dirty sofa in it, but now it was totally decked out. Thoroughly creeped out, I grabbed my stuff (forgetting half of it) and left quickly.

When I got to the classroom, I mentioned this encounter to one of the students who had arrived early. He said, "Oh, the Queen of Jordan must be speaking in the auditorium." Wait, what?

"The Queen of Jordan? For real?" I incredulously asked.

"Yeah, Queen Rania is here for the Issac Fares lecture series."

Then it all became clear.

The weird looking dudes were her bodyguards.
Their suits fit weirdly because they were concealing Uzis or sawed-off shotguns under the jackets.
The cops were worried I might get hassled, or worse, shot.

All because I was within 40 feet of Queen Rania without proper authorization.

Awesome.

FIRST PLACE BITCHES!

2008-11-14T10:41:00.002-05:00

I was convinced it was going to be a bad snap.

Jets, 34, Patriot, 31.

Things To Remember To Do When Sick

2008-11-12T14:42:00.003-05:00

Drink lots of tea (or other electrolyte-holding drinks).
Drink even more water.
Go outside for a short walk to get the blood pumping and get some fresh air.
Eat, if possible.
Take painkillers.
Sleep.

I managed to pretty much avoid all of the above (I drank a little, ate some, and got an extra hour of sleep). Next time I get sick I hope I remember this list.

Games To Play

2008-11-12T14:37:00.003-05:00

Gears of War 2
Fable 2
Castle Crashers
Braid
Trauma Center 2
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin

That doesn't look that impressive until you realize that the top 2 are at least 60 hours combined.

The Importance of Compensation Picks

2008-11-06T10:52:00.001-05:00

A lot of Yankee fans don't really get the way free agency and compensation picks work. Fair enough, it's somewhat complicated. That said, they also ignore the ramifications of these picks. Whoa dog, hold on a sec. MLBTradeRumors.com reports that Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain were both picked by the Yankees with compensation picks. How about them apples?

Resign Giambi

2008-11-06T09:56:00.002-05:00

This is my pipe dream:

1) Yankees do not sign Teixeria.
2) Yankees sign Giambi to a $5M/1Y or $8M/2Y deal.
3) Giambi holds down 1B until Posada moves there or someone else takes over (because we all know Posada's going to need some time there before his deal is up).

My reasons are this:

1) Giambi is a great teammate; this may be not appreciated but is important.
2) .247/.373/.502, 128 OPS+, in 145 games.
3) Yeah, he's a terrible defender. But his WARP-1 (Wins Above Replacement Player, defense adjusted) was 4.5 for 2008. For comparison's sake, Jeter had a 4.4 WARP-1 in 2008.

Come on, Cashman, pull the trigger!

VOTE

2008-11-04T09:05:00.001-05:00

So yeah, go vote. It's kind of important.

Revelations, Chapter 1

2008-11-03T14:18:00.005-05:00

April 14th, 2008:
Ed: My chest has been sore for like a week now
Joe: ouch man
Ed: and of course I keep thinking it's my heart
Joe: have you seen a doctor?
Ed: yeah, and I have an awesome heart. still doesn't stop me from thinking
Joe: You know, you might be lactose-intolerant
Ed: what?
Joe: That happened to me.
Ed: No way man, I ain't lactose intolerant.

October 30th, 2008:
Joe: It's possible you're lactose intolerant then.
Joe: that's what I've been dealing with.
Ed: Awww fuck
Ed: you know
Ed: you're fucking right
Ed: guess what I have every morning of every day
Ed: COFFEE WITH CREAM/MILK
Ed: I have some on my desk RIGHT FUCKING NOW

November 3rd, 2008:
Ed: you smart person you
Ed: suggesting I might be lactose intolerant
Ed: then being right
Ed: you douche
Joe: :)

ZBT, Harris Connect, and Me

2008-10-28T23:42:00.000-04:00

Some of you know I'm a brother in the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity. Joining was one of the best decisions I ever made. I met people I never would've met otherwise, done things I never would've done, and joined a worldwide brotherhood of pretty cool dudes.

Recently, the National ZBT organization* has contracted a marketing company, Harris Connect, to create a national ZBT alumni directory. They started sending out postcards, asking brothers to call them to update their information. Naturally, I looked for a website option, but they did not have one. I thought, "Well, no big loss" and threw out the postcard.

A little later I received another postcard, same as the first, but with the text "Second Chance!" Again, no website option, but I saw that the company name was "Harris Connect". Go go gadget Internet! Turns out they are a marketing firm. Well gee, that's great, let me give those guys all my contact info so I can get spammed to death. Next!

*A little perspective here: before these postcards started coming, I already was quite distrustful of ZBT National. The executive director, Jon Yulish, came to meet the executive board of our chapter of the fraternity. I was the treasurer then, so I met with him. He had me fill out a big form ahead of time, with fields for outstanding dues to undergrads and to alumni. We had pretty big numbers for both, as many brothers struggled to pay their dues. We survived with payment plans and whatnot, but Director Yulish was not impressed.

"Do you try to collect these dues from your alumni?" he asked.
"Well, we send out reminders now and then, but we don't make a concerted effort to collect them," I said.
"Have you thought about sending the debts to a collection agency?"
"No! I don't want to alienate our alumni! We have a pretty active group and they donate money, time, and goods to us often."

Then he said something that was just plain wrong:

"You have to remember, Ed: this is a business first, and a brotherhood second."

I couldn't believe how cold he was, and it took all of my effort not to walk out on him right there.**

** This is my inaugural posterisk. Woo!

Now I'm getting last chance emails from Harris Connect AND getting emails from a ZBT National employee who wants to personally meet with me! This feels like I'm being stalked. I guess I'm just going to be pumped for money, but I don't see why National would get any of my money ahead of my chapter.

Mood: Emo

2008-10-28T14:21:00.000-04:00

Well the Schwehmdawgs lost Sunday night, 20-9... it was closer than that though. We gave up 10 runs in the first inning, probably our worst-played inning of the year. I pitched poorly and several people made errors. Remove that inning and we played them tight.

And the Rays lost too, making it 3-1 Phillies. Not good.

And after the halloween party this weekend, I'm just fried. Even though I got 8 hours of sleep last night, I'm just physically exhausted. It's a good thing mentally I'm still alert, because I'm working on some research at work and it'd be bad if I was mentally tired too.

I think it might be a 3-day hangover from the party... man am I old.

A Tribute to the Best Phone I've Ever Owned

2008-10-24T08:52:00.005-04:00

This post comes at a time when I just learned that I will be getting the T-Mobile/HTC/Google G1 Android phone (enough keywords?) after all. A nice call to T-Mobile and they upgraded my upgrade to the full upgrade. And even better yet, it will be delivered on my birthday!

So before this information becomes obsolete, I wanted to pay tribute to my lone (cellular) companion these past months, the Nokia 1208.

This is close to actual size... on my monitor anyway.

Just look at that phone for a minute. It's such a mid-90's style. And you don't even see the UI there, but believe me, this phone rivals the Jitterbug for size of on-screen font. I bought this phone when my Samsung t629 died and I refused to pay more than $30 for a phone (I got this for $29.99 plus tax, so it's a wash). I'm going to put this next line in its own paragraph to highlight its importance.

This is the best phone I have ever owned:

It's better than my first phone (Samsung SPH-A400) because it reliably sends and receives calls.
It's better than my second phone (Sanyo SCP-700) because it's about half the size.
It's better than my third phone (Sidekick II) because it's not the size of a brick. Also, it was roughly 10 times cheaper.
It's better than my fourth phone (Samsung t629) because it doesn't break when I look at it wrong.

Let's talk about that last point. The t629 was a very fragile phone. The slider got sticky pretty quickly, and I had to stop the spring from sliding it because it was too fast and would make lots of rattling noises. Too little too late, as you can see what happened.

On the flip side, I have literally used the Nokia 1208 as a drumstick; At the latest Tufts football game, the Pep Band (which I direct) needed an additional percussionist for a particular song. We needed a cowbell player for Low Rider. So I grabbed the cowbell and asked Keith for a drumstick. He didn't have one; none of the drummers had extras. So I reached into my pockets, found my phone, tested it, and then wailed away. I probably played 15 different full-length songs with cowbell and phone. (Just to be clear, this was a musical-quality cowbell, not the crap you see people dingle at sporting events... no offense Rays fans, I love you guys!) And the phone works great!

So it's indestructible. That's awesome. The other awesome feature: a flashlight.

Yes, a flashlight.

Why every phone doesn't have one, I will never know. The Nokia 1208 has a $0.05 LED on the top of it that is bright enough to see keyholes, navigate over sleeping cats, and probably flag down help on the side of a night road. I mean, come on! How obvious is that?!

I highly recommend this phone to anyone who A) doesn't need Internet and B) wants a reliable, indestructible, and cheap phone. I'll sure be keeping mine as a backup.

UPDATE: T-Mobile has the phone on sale for $19.99 with a $25 refill card included. Hot!

Bold Prediction for the World Series.

2008-10-21T15:31:00.002-04:00

Rays in 4.

Update: FAIL.

Domain Squatters, Be Alert

2008-10-21T11:06:00.001-04:00

I'm probably going to register edschwehm.com in November at some point... Can't justify it now, but I want to get my home server set up first and I need time to do that. Said server is probably not going to be slackware anymore, thanks to Falcon being all .NET. Good thing Movable Type works on Windows too.

Schwehmdawgs Chronicles: The Final Chapter

2008-10-21T09:16:00.000-04:00

So the Schwehmdawgs won our game last night (and it was a nailbiter!) so we're going to the championship game on Sunday. WOOOOOO!!

To Be a Sports Writer, You Should Understand Sports

2008-10-21T09:02:00.006-04:00

Filip Bondy: I guess he doesn't understand any sport.

"The Jets' special teams appeared clueless on a pivotal fake punt, for one thing, which is indisputably a coaching failure." The Jets had run the punt-block call instead of punt-cover the previous two Oakland punts, so Tom Cable took advantage of that (Jets ran punt-block on the fake too)*. Sure, you could say that Mangini or Westhoff should not have dialed up that play, but it was a good call by Cable too.

"Why, exactly, did the Jets get Favre if they weren't going to let him be Favre?" Maybe so that defenses have to respect the long ball and not play 8 men in the box? So the cornerbacks and safeties don't play 5 yards off the line of scrimmage? Good passing quarterbacks open up the running game as well.

"It is impossible to overstate the importance of this defeat to Oakland..." I think I can overstate it: "This loss will cause the Jets franchise to collapse." Not overstated? How about this: "The Jets loss is going to cause humanity to end."

If you're going to use hyperbole, please make it interesting at least.

"Not a word was spoken in anger or with a sense of urgency, even as the calendar and the standings scream for something different." OK, so you want Mangini to get desperate and crazy and angry? Deviate from his game plan? Can you say "cool under pressure"? I happen to love when the coach is calm, cool, and collected in the face of adversity.

My favorite part of this column is the non-mention of the miscommunication on Favre's 2nd interception. Cotchery stopped for a 8-yard-or-so hook, Favre threw it deep under pressure. I guess Favre can do no wrong these days.

* Watch the return team linemen sometime on a punt. 80% of the time, you'll see only 1, maybe 2 guys trying hard to block the punt. The other guys are covering the punting team's linemen. That's a punt-cover.

RAYS WIN RAYS WIN RAYS WIN RAYS WIN RAYS WIN RAYS WIN RAYS WIN

2008-10-20T10:48:00.002-04:00

So I'm more than a little excited. Watching David Price absolutely destroy the Red Sox restored my faith in baseball (even if I'm even more convinced that Price is an alien robot from the future):

And just for fun, some pics from the Rays-Sox brawl earlier this year:

Walk the Walk!

2008-10-16T13:57:00.003-04:00

So I talk about development here. F#, nullable types, Walrus, Falcon... but what have I done lately? Nothing!

I have so much crap going on in the fall that I just get drained of energy. Pep band on Tuesdays and Thursdays, plus the games on Saturdays. Winterizing the home. Softball games.

Well, it all ends in November. Pep band and softball will be done, plus the house should be mostly winterized. If I don't start being productive by my birthday, I'm in trouble.

F#: For Me?

2008-10-16T13:09:00.002-04:00

So I realized that Walrus could possibly use F# for the rules engine for recommendations. How cool would that be? I could have a second project in F# that takes the draft object (containing the team rosters, draft order, league settings, and free agents) and spits out the recommendation list. I think that's what I'll do.

Schwehmdawgs Chronicles

2008-10-16T13:08:00.001-04:00

So we won the first round of the playoffs, 18-9. We played the same team we played in the last regular season game, and it was a resounding victory. Shabooya!

Only People Who Know Me Care About This

2008-10-15T11:39:00.003-04:00

My softball team, the "Schwehmdawgs" (I campaigned against that name), starts the playoffs tonight. every team makes the playoffs, but we're 7-1, good for the second seed. We've really gelled together this year. Sure, the top 2 teams from last season didn't play this season. Still, we're a better team and I'm really looking forward to a deep October run.

Don't Visit This Site!

2008-10-15T09:05:00.000-04:00

I once interviewed at TripAdvisor.com. I wasn't especially impressed by the interview, but I chalked that up to my own inexperience. I didn't get the job because the CEO misunderstood a question.

I asked, "TripAdvisor.com looks pretty complete to me. What features do you plan to add in the next 1-5 years?"

He heard, "TripAdvisor.com looks pretty complete to me. Why bother doing anything else?"

Recently, a friend of my interviewed there and was rebuffed as well. Though he managed to not offend the CEO, he was tripped up by several weak interview traps (e.g. asking him to write code to determine if a number is a triangular number, but not telling him what a triangular number is). He didn't get the job either.

Upon hearing about adventures in interviewing at this company, I decided to take a look at their website and see how it has changed.

I can't say I'd ever use the site. Even with AdBlock enabled, the site is still cluttered with advertisements. I tried searching for Tahiti; the site was just so ADD I couldn't parse any of it. It's so Web 1.0* it hurts my eyes.

What bugs me the most is that they actually seem to be doing very well! Look at these Alexa rankings:

It's beating the sites where you can actually book travel (ok I get it, travel research and travel booking are not the same category of webpage)! And in case you're wondering, that's good for a 414 ranking! I mean, this is just ridiculous for a terrible website! I'm just blown away by how people can actually use that site.

* One of the questions they asked me in the interview was How would I go about adding a table to a page. I described the table syntax, and the dev manager was all "No no I meant what would you do?" I tentatively asked "Well, if it was just HTML changes, I'd do the changes on a dev page, then copy that page to production." He turned to the computer in the office and asked me to demonstrate on the Tripsadvisor.com homepage. Thinking it was a trap of some sort, I was careful to explain every step as I saved a copy of the live page, made the change, saved, then opened in IE. He nodded then explained that's how they made many changes. This was their dev process? Yuck!

Don't Be an Idiot: Vote!

2008-10-14T08:48:00.005-04:00

I hear all too often voters talk about being disenchanted: "Why should I vote? I don't like either of the candidates?" "It doesn't matter who you vote for. They are all crooks and will all lie to you in the end." These viewpoints really scare me.

We live in a democracy. That means we elect the government. The government works for us. Yes, there is corruption, but it's so much better than it used to be (just think Boss Tweed). You know why it's better? Because people don't stand for it. Citizens get up and vote. They express their opinion, debate conflicting ideas, and support the candidate who most closely represents their viewpoint.

You have other more pressing issues? That's fine. If everyone were significantly involved in politics, it might get a little crazy. But take a few moments to look over the candidates' platforms and voting records, then take a little time out of your day on November 4th and vote. Seriously, it comes around once a year. You find plenty of time to play video games, right?

If you don't vote, you officially lose the right to bitch about anything the government does. You also lose the right to be patriotic, glad, or proud of anything related to the nation. You're supporting the corruption of our government. You're handing the government over to corporate lobbyists and evil men (think Dick Cheney). You are a part of the problem you claim to hate so much.

Get out and vote!

I Just Can't Do It

2008-10-13T19:01:00.004-04:00

With the Yankees not making the playoffs, I decided I'd turn over a new leaf. While I can't root for the Red Sox, I decided to be happy for them if they won. Hell, I know enough Red Sox fans to make it worth it to me socially.

Yeah, that lasted all of two games in the ALDS. Come on Rays, kick the crap out of the Red Sox!

Gift Censoring; or, You'll Poke Your Eye Out!

2008-10-10T11:55:00.000-04:00

Every kid knows the story; they want a pony, a My Buddy, or an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time, but their parents instead get them socks and sweaters (or maybe Legos if they're lucky). Their parents are gift censoring. Makes sense for kids. Not as much for adults.

I'm a nerd. I like video games. I maintain a wishlist on Amazon that is mostly video games, movies, and books. Yet when my birthday rolled around last year, I received zero video games from my parents, Annie, or Annie's parents (I only received one other gift, from Brian and Jay, that was a Gamestop gift card. Hello, Worms 2!). I didn't expect Annie to get me a video game, but I expected at least one game from the collective parents (note: I really liked their gifts, but this post is about censoring. If you read this, parents or in-laws, please take no offense! I love you!).

Annie normally acts as a sort of gift czar for me, so for Christmas, she tried to get more video games bought for me (I love this girl). I also changed the priority of all the games on my Amazon wishlist to "highest" and everything else to "medium" or less. I made out pretty good, but my parents still didn't get me any video games. When I asked them about it (in the most diplomatic way possible, as the gifts they did get me were awesome), they said that they didn't think I should really be spending my time playing games so they didn't get me any.

It is obvious that you can't dictate what gifts people buy you (though some people try). Even if you provide a large detailed wish list, some people will go off the list to add their unique spin to their gift, and that's encouraged. But outright avoiding a type of item from someone's wants? It can be annoying!

Trade Strategery

2008-10-09T19:55:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you need to upgrade a position on your fantasy team. Earlier this season (July) in my roto league, I needed help in HR, RBI, and AVG in the outfield, but I had extra starting pitchers. I saw a combination of need and excess that matched my excess a needs; a team with plenty of batting but that needed a top-line starter. We entered negotiations based around Josh Beckett for Ryan Braun but couldn't get anything done (he wanted more).

I noticed another team had a hole at 2B and a surplus of SPs. We worked out BJ Upton (whom I had been trying to get rid of), John Bowker (fresh out of free agency), and Mike Cameron for Cole Hamels, Edwin Encarnacion, and Alexi Casilla. I then turned and flipped Hamels, Kevin Slowey, and Mark Reynolds for Braun and Joel Zumaya.

So the entire trade for me looked like:

Upton, Bowker, Cameron, Slowey, and Reynolds
for
Braun, Encarnacion, Casilla, and Zumaya

Sure, the Zumaya-Slowey swap didn't work out so well (I needed saves badly). But the point is sometimes you have to run an end-around to get the stats you need.

New Project, Codenamed Falcon

2008-10-09T13:45:00.002-04:00

I've started working on a new project. It's codenamed "Falcon." Why? Because that was the first animal name I thought of when I decided to name it after an animal. Now I've got Walrus and Falcon.

I have to keep mum on Falcon though, because I actually think it could be really cool.

Sorry This is a Boring Post

2008-10-08T19:47:00.000-04:00

Eric and I recently had a conversation about how a candidate's personal life morals and ethics reflect their ability and skill at governing. I happen to believe that a person's morals are consistent throughout all of their dealings; a person who is immoral in one aspect of life has the capability to be just that immoral in all aspects.

John McCain had an affair while still married to his wife. He has admitted this as his greatest moral failure. I believe that moral failure is still a part of his DNA, and he is still capable of that failure. What could happen if he were president and were faced with a moral dilemma. Would he do the hard but right thing or the convenient but immoral thing? Just look at his life.

McCain is not the only person who has had an affair. No one is perfect. And having a divorce doesn't make one an immoral person. But it does say something about the man.

McCain's Health Insurance Scam

2008-10-08T14:01:00.000-04:00

So McCain wants to give individuals a $2500 credit and families a $5000 credit to buy their own health insurance. I once had to buy my own health insurance at a cost of $450/month. That works out to $5400/year. The difference works out to $241.67/month. I paid $70/month for a single plan at my last job (for a single participant).

So McCain essentially wants to increase health insurance rates on unmarried people by $170/month. Now that's leadership.

McCain's New Plan: Problems Again

2008-10-08T11:28:00.000-04:00

So John McCain announced a new plan at the debate to buy individual mortgages from troubled homeowners and renegotiate those adjustable-rate mortgages (ARM) into fixed-rate mortgages. He claims this is different from the existing government bailout plan because it goes directly to the homeowner and makes their life easier.

That's all well and good, but if he wants to buy Joe Sixpack's ARM, he has to find out who owns it. The whole point of this mortgage crisis is that the banks no longer own the mortgages; they package up thousands of them and sell shares in the package. That's where you get the mortgage-backed securities. I bet my mortgage (30-year fixed) is in part of a security, but it would be in one of the good ones (full of fixed-rate mortgages owned by people with high credit). The bad ones are backed by ARMs owned by people with bad credit and too low an income to pay the mortgage.

So if McCain wants to fix these bad mortgages, he has to first buy them. To buy them, he has to buy the bad-mortgage backed securities. So McCain's new plan is basically the exact same thing Congress has already voted on, with the added idea that the government would renegotiate the mortgages once it bought them. That added idea is a good one, I'll give him that. But if this is his attempt to make it a race, then hello President Obama.

This Drives Me Nuts

2008-10-07T10:15:00.000-04:00

It kinda bugs me when I see campaign contributions from company employees lined up next to candidate's names. Just because Smallpants McFry (Joe Sixpack's neighbor) happens to work at Goldman Sachs doesn't mean he represents big Wall Street. And just because a candidate accepts the money doesn't mean he is going to represent the views of the voter's company. Sure there can be a correlation, but it's not proof.

From the "Maybe They Should Rethink This" Department

2008-10-06T08:52:00.000-04:00

Have you seen this commercial for the Lincoln MKS? It's part of their "Our car is like a spaceship" series of commercials, most of which are pretty cool (though I'm waiting to see Patrick Stewart in the driver's seat saying "Engage!"). This one, however, has "Major Tom" as the soundtrack.

They might want to rethink the association there, as the character Tom in the song ends up lost in space, presumably dead, lost in space, committing suicide, or an alien. Oops.

In The Spirit Of Sharing Information: SQLBulkCopy Class in .NET

2008-10-05T21:07:00.000-04:00

I had an annoying problem at work the other day; how to copy a subset of data from one SQL Server database to another. This set included data from six tables. I looked at my options:

bcp (bulk copy) command-line utility
Dynamic SQL (select "insert into items (" + items.* + ")")
write a c# app to load the data into a dataset, then insert it into the new DB.
Use the Import/Export Wizard.

The first three didn't look particularly appealing, and the wizard only exports queries to data files; I'd have to do a lot of work to get those files to work.

Then I discovered the SqlBulkCopy class. In the .NET Framework 2.o and beyond, the SqlBulkCopy class gives bcp functionality in the managed code world. It made my life much easier.

Music Makes the People Code

2008-10-05T12:58:00.000-04:00

So I finally set up my speakers in the basement with my computer (Brittany, aka ed-255). Holy crap, I get so much more pumped down here with music! Wahoo!

I Haven't Ranted Against The Press Lately

2008-10-03T12:52:00.005-04:00

Filip Bondy: I swear, you really don't have a clue about how baseball franchises are run and how the baseball talent pipeline works.

Let's talk about player talent progression, shall we? The average baseball player spends several seasons in the minor leagues before being promoted to the bigs. The average age of these players tends to be mid 20's. I can't get numbers on this, but most players progressively get better until their high 20's or low 30's.

That in mind, let's look at the current state of Yankees youth who played in the Bronx this year:

Joba Chamberlain: age 23, less than 1 year in the minors
Phil Hughes: 22, 2+ years
Ian Kennedy: 23, 1 year
Robinson Cano: 25, 3 years
Melky Cabrera: 24, 2 years
Brett Gardner: 24, 3 short years
Justin Christian: 28, 3 years
David Robertson: 23, 1 year
Phil Coke: 25, 3 years

I look at that list and figure that at least half of those guys should get better over the next 3 years. Bondy, however, has decided that they're all crap:

"We aren't sure about Phil Hughes or Phil Coke."

I think you might be the only person on the planet who isn't sure about Hughes. I haven't heard a scouting report ever that thinks he won't make it. And yeah, we've only seen 14.2IP of Coke, but it was a damned good 14.2IP.

"We already see that Brett Gardner doesn't have the power to play center field on a regular basis."

I guess Bondy doesn't care that most center fielders are not power hitters, but let's forget about that. Yes, Gardner had a rough year this year. Yet he went from AAA to hitting lead off for The Most Storied Franchise in Sports. I'm willing to bet he had a little bit of a shocking transition. He also had a .296/.414/.422 line in AAA this season, and that .414 OBP sticks out. Plate discipline is a skill that translates directly from the minors to the bigs.

"Robinson Cano took a serious step backward in 2008."

I'll bet you in 2009 he beats his 2007 numbers. This kid is full of talent.

"Melky Cabrera is ordinary at best."

It's boring to say at this point, but he's 24! It's very rare for a player to peak at 22 (when he took over for Bernie Williams in CF and had a great year).

"Their starting rotation requires yet another injection of free agents."

This line is what gets me. Here is the current best guess 2009 rotation: Wang, Chamberlain, Pettitte, Hughes, Kennedy/Rasner/Aceves/Giese. Aside from the #5 spot, that looks pretty awesome. The Yankees do not need CC Sabathia (but they may as well grab him if they can). Add in a AJ Burnett or a Derek Lowe and that rotation starts to look awesome.

But the best part about that line is that Bondy doesn't understand what he's saying. You don't have to trade for free agents. Cashman will be careful about signing type A free agents (meaning the Yankees would have to cough up their 1st round draft pick), and if he managed to net any picks with teams signing his type A free agents (Marte comes to mind), then that changes the game too.

The Yankees get to drop $80 million off their books this year. Cashman has been saddled with these big contracts for the entire time he's been top dog. Now is when he really gets to shine. I can't wait to watch the Hot Stove League this year.

Wednesday Bold Prediction

2008-10-01T10:05:00.002-04:00

Mets sign Sabathia to a $31M/6 year contract.

10 Things From a Developer

2008-10-01T10:03:00.003-04:00

Two small thoughts:

I have to stop getting any coffee in the office as soon as I get in. It's messing up my stomach and impacting my productivity.

I have to realize that I'm a pretty good developer and actually use my skills to accomplish all the things I want to accomplish. This include Walrus, as well as some other projects.

Abstract This!

2008-09-25T12:35:00.000-04:00

I just recently installed Mozilla's Prism, and I gotta say, I love it. I have one set up for GMail, Campfire, and Google Docs (GDocs?), and those windows are super snappy. I do miss my Better Gmail extension for Firefox, but its no big deal.

I only have two big issues with Prism:

I cannot customize the download location.
All Prism instances run under the same process.

The first is mostly trivial; I download all my files to c:\downloads instead of the desktop, so that's just a copy/paste away. The second issue is more important. Google Chrome created the idea of browser process isolation; if one tab locks up or crashes, it does not bring down the other tabs.

That feature is awesome.

Eric disagrees with me that Prism "needs" process isolation; he thinks that the beauty of Prism is the UI, aesthetics, and speed. Hey look, I have my GMail "application" open, it's just one application, and look how fast and clean it is!

Well, process isolation is a vital part of that abstraction. When Excel crashes, it does not bring down Firefox with it. Likewise, when Prism-GMail crashes, it should not bring down Prism-Campfire with it. If Prism's goal is to abstract websites to be desktop apps, then each one needs to be isolated into its own process.