I can’t remember what it was called, but there was for a while a popular Google game in which you tried to find a two-word ordinary unquoted search that would only produce an obscenely low number of results.
I propose that googling for a single word that produces exclusively online dictionary results on the first page= is a less difficult but very fun game. I would say to be a valid win Google must acknowledge the word on the top right with a link to its definition.
I can’t help but think this was especially clever.
I’ve played with this concept for some time, but I’d like to throw it out formally and see what happens. I’m climbing under my Fair Use fire blanket here, so to make it clear to men in black helicopters what I’m talking about here would be totally non-commercial and not open to the public by any means.
I have never done fantasy football, so me writing this is kind of like me writing an opinion paper on a magic system in Sigma. But, I know my statistics and Python, so maybe that’s enough. I’ve found sports.yahoo.com to be a most excellent target for screen scraping. Enough to get post-mortem statistics sufficient, as far as I read, to set up a basic fantasy football scheme.
My question is: what features are missing from current fantasy football implementations? Not really interface features (like real time updating, of course, or even dragging and dropping players or something), but more like in the ability to score points and make interesting choices. I can almost guarantee anything I might create would have a substandard interface.
My idea (don’t know if I’ve ever shared it before) is to somehow neatly implement the ability to make hedging side-bets. Like, let’s say you have the QB for the Vikings playing, but you assume if he has a bad day Adrian Peterson (woot) might perhaps have a good day. Or, that a bad day for A.D. might mean lots of stuffs from the defensive line.
But, I want this to look somewhat like option/swap theory in Finance. So, just like any form of insurance:
I feel like #2 there is not worded right, so I’m saying you need to be “long” something (rewarded for good performance), if you’re going to take a hedge that is ultimately “short” the asset.
In fantasy football, if you don’t have a rule #2, you end up just allowing people to have multiple players at the same position. Stupid.
Of course, rule #1 makes sure the thing doesn’t become a free for all.
Without going into any detail on possible implementations of this concept, my question is: would this be interesting, helpful, sensible, worth playing around with an implementation?
Even if not, I propose that any interested persons should get into some kind of free league together this year.
I took an hour and a half lunch and didn’t even have a read receipt in my inbox when I got back, let alone an e-mail.
The ceiling lights are actually off in my bank of workstations.
I count only 10 people on my side of the whole floor.
People aren’t screaming through their cell phones.
It’s a relaxed workday after a national holiday…
I’m becoming increasingly aware that I am generally not using my blog as a means of recording events and commentary. This is typically a way for me to work out my internal monologue when the subject matter passes above some self-defined threshold of interest. Given that the density of events is pretty thick right now, I should probably take a slight turn on this one and start writing things down that are actually happening.
London was a blast. I was totally surprised by Westminster Abbey. I didn’t previously realize exactly how much of a historical hub it is for the country. We ate some of the best food we’ve ever had (painstaking restaurant review-reading and a willingness to pay well above our average nice meal saved us from the normal London gourmet experience).
The Tower of London did not capture my heart, on the other hand. A great piece of history, but it just didn’t have the emotion and raw awesomeness of a church/crypt.
I was also surprised exactly how pretty the Parliament building is.
We walked virtually everywhere (only used the Tube back and forth to the airport). This was a great way to take in the city. Not easy on the feet by any means!
Transportation is expensive. I saw some stat saying (as I recall) Londoners spend 15% or so of their income on transportation. Hotels are pricey unless you’ve been shopping Midtown Manhattan hotels for awhile, in which case they are priced quite fairly. Most everything else is big-city-reasonable, which I wasn’t expecting.
It’s funny that the weather was actually kind of sunny and warm while we were in London, then we get back to Istanbul and I haven’t seen the sun yet!
Turns out you can just use a YouTube downloader, since the actual FLVs are sourced from a googlevideo.com domain.
So, apparently AMEX and the likes are paying people to drop their credit card accounts.
Chase, on the opposite side of the financial health landscape, has dropped the Freedom plan’s permanent 3 points/dollar for gas, groceries, and fast food. People with the old cards still get this, but for new offers this is just an introductory bonus.
Citi has a similar card, which doesn’t offer check- or direct deposit-based cash rewards, that also only offers bonus rewards on an introductory basis. Their rewards redemption process (the ThankYou program) is patently ridiculous, with irregular point requirements making redemption values situation-dependent.
Like, you get something like $0.70 on the “dollar” when redeeming for $10 gift cards to stores, while you get a whole dollar on the dollar when redeeming for $100 store gift cards. If you want a vanilla universal gift card you better get ready to give up 20% or so.
This is abusive. The convention is 1 point = $1 spent = $0.01 in rewards. When you start playing these games it becomes crazy to decipher. I was having to use a calculator to figure out effective rebate percentages.
The old Chase Freedom is completely awesome for the patient and careful. Triple rewards on gas and groceries. Plus, if you get to $200 of rewards, they send you a $250 check instead. This makes your groceries and gas work out to 3.75% cash. I believe this is known as a “loss leader.”
Fidelity’s excellent “Investment Rewards” Visa gives you an effective universal 1.5% if you cash into a Fidelity brokerage account.
I did all this research because we just found out Chase will not accommodate any weirdness around renewing credit cards upon their expiration. Our cards will expire deep into the expat time, so it would be great to take care of this while we’re back for a visit.
No better options, though, so here’s to another complicated cross-ocean management.
So, YouTube is completely blocked in Turkey.
I just had an idea, partly stemming from my early work on the libre.fm project (none of which has survived the last hundred or so commits, unfortunately):
Hard-code a hosts file entry mapping the youtube.com domain to my new server’s IP address.
Upon receiving a request to a YouTube URL, my server dispatches an HTTP request to one of those “download YouTube videos” websites that provides a link to download the underlying FLV, using the proper video ID.
Since the server is in Dallas, a screen-scrape of the response to that request would yield a youtube.com URL that would be downloadable by the server.
The VPS caches this downloaded FLV to disk. It then, with some AJAX progress bar or automatic refreshes or whatever, figures out the download is complete and serves up a page with an embedded FLV player (there are some GPL options). The FLV player is pointed to yet another URL on my server, which just parrots back the FLV under the correct content-type. Or, the FLV could be downloaded directly.
All over HTTPS, of course.
The video streams from the VPS to Turkey!
I found this blurb to be a very nice articulation of some things I have said out loud and on this blog. I identify most with the last section of the quote, the close relationship of programming to pure thought.
I remember sitting down to the old Apple IIe one day and learning to type HGR to switch to high-resolution graphics mode. The screen made this sort of green (the only option) fleeting blizzard of static as the primitive video hardware switched to higher precision processing. I didn’t know enough to do anything while in HGR, but getting that strange screen blip felt like I was dealing with something that had power, namely the power of capability.
I was always enamored when a program wrote to disk, because the I/O blocked and the computer got stuck for a while. This was long before multitasking, so this was not a big deal. Delay to me always meant something was actually going on in there according to my direction but not being actuated by me at the time. It separated the computer from the Alfie or Etch-A-Sketch or Talking Battleship or whatever other fancy toys were out there.
I think the reason kids do so well with computers is that they are fundamentally unaware of their capability. They are a gaming system, just like a pile of wood blocks, a fridge box, or an Xbox. Computers just have more rules and are more fragile.
In other words, kids buy the lie that there really are windows that “close” and “open.” And you drag a file to move it from one place to another. Adults see too much of this as encoded action. They don’t let the model tell them what to do intuitively, because they’re working outside the model to start.