Born Weird

Well, week 8 of the NFL season is over and that means we’re roughly halfway through fantasy football. Seems like as good a time as any to review how things have unfolded given my early optimism.

As of now my team has a record of 5-3, putting me in a tie for third place (or second, since the two teams above me are tied at 6-2). While my record is a bit disappointing, I lead the league in scoring by about 50 points, which is pretty significant and gives me high hopes for the remainder of my season. My average weekly score is over 10 points higher than last season’s top-scoring team.

Of the 18 players I drafted, five are no longer still with the team (well, really six, but I don’t count Hasselbeck since I only dropped him due to my need of a kicker during Gostkowski’s bye week and Brees has had his bye). Of those five, the highest-drafted is D’Qwell Jackson, who is on IR — though I dropped him before he got hurt. That’s a pretty high retention rate for fantasy, I think. Read the entire post »

Periodically, interesting hashtag memes pop on Twitter that are mildly amusing and make for brief-but-entertaining diversions. The latest one, “unseen prequels,” has been excellent. My favorites so far, in no particular order:

@Neil_Mawer Thursday the 12th
@SarahGPerry American History W
@drywall A Bunch of Mohicans (yes, I’m tooting my own horn)
@ChrisMacDean The Postman Is About to Ring for the First Time
@novocainekarma The undergraduate
@cwhelton Medical Student Zhivago
@elonjames These Lambs are really making a lot of noise and Im trying to sleep…what to do?
@Idanders The construction site on the river kwai
@1rving Cow
@Rogue_leader the penultimate temptation of Christ
@islandis Sex, Lies, and Kinescope
@DoctorSubmarine February 1
@defconqueso Conceived on the 4th of October

See Deanna Zandt’s post for a longer list.

Note that I’ve tried to give credit to the first to tweet the title, rather than crediting whichever followee happened to tweet it into my stream.

I acquired three books during my birthday weekend. One was about football (the Patriots, to be specific). One was about politics (health care reform). And the third was about web stuff (microformats, written by a friend).

Have to admit, those three books do a pretty nice job of capturing me.

I’ve been meaning to post for a while now on this subject, but haven’t had the time.

And frankly, I still don’t. But given the furor over the FCC’s notice of proposed rulemaking today, I feel the need to quickly dash off a some thoughts. Hopefully at some point I’ll be able to do a more thorough treatise with actual citations and numbers, but this will have to suffice for now. Here goes. Read the entire post »

I used to be a huge college football fan, but over the last 10 years or so my allegiance has shifted to the National Football League. Reasons are myriad and I won’t go into them here. Suffice to say that I think college football is very, very broken.

A recent ESPN.com piece on revamping the NHL led me to ponder how I would go about fixing college football. And I think there are three central changes that need to be made: conference realignment, meritocratic membership, and a new postseason format. Perhaps none of these ideas are new individually, but I think the combination would re-make the college game in a way that would create more excitement (and more fairness). I’ll address each individually.

And before I start: yes, yes, I know this is utterly unrealistic. That’s not the point. Read the entire post »

Got some professional news for everyone. First, a new addition to my portfolio. Working as lead designer/coder in conjunction with my former Free Press coworker Ira as project manager, I’m pleased to announce the launch of the brand-new AustinTheatre.org website.  The site is powered by Convio’s CRM platform, including PageBuilder for the static pages and the events and donations modules for, ahem, events and donations. The coolest part (IMHO) is the Upcoming Events dropdown, which actually utilizes Convio’s Events API and jQuery to populate the menu AJAXically. Note that today was just the soft launch; we’ll be working the kinks out over the next few days before making any big announcements.

Speaking of big announcements, though, it’s high time I expanded upon my tweet from a few weeks ago. Astute readers will have no doubt noticed that several of the portfolio items I’ve posted lately are publicly credited to Firefly Partners and not yours truly, which is because I’ve been working with Firefly as a contractor.

But that will be changing. A month from today, I’ll officially be joining Firefly as a full-time employee. Read the entire post »

Honoring football players by naming them to elite lists isn’t new. There are “teams” out there recognizing players for their talent, toughness, reputation, statistics, performance relative to expectations (both above and below), and more. But no list (as far as I know) honors players for their monikers.

Until now, that is. It’s my pleasure unveil the inaugural “All-Name” NFL team, which recognizes players (and their parents) for the exceptional words by which they are known. To make this team, a player must possess one thing: a name that I like the sound of. No other criteria exist (though preference has been given to starters).

Unlike many other such collections of the NFL’s finest, my all-name squad includes guys in the trenches as well as the oft-recognized skill position players. Without further ado, here are your 2009 honorees (note: this year the all-name team is playing a 3-4): Read the entire post »

When I first learned this morning that the Patriots had traded veteran defensive end Richard Seymour to the Oakland Raiders for a first-round draft pick in 2011, I was shocked. Like many other fans, I’ve conditioned myself to not question Belichick’s roster moves, but this one seemed particularly surprising.

Richard Seymour was one of just three remaining players on the team that had been on the roster for all three of the Patriots’ Super Bowl victories (Brady and Faulk are the others). A consistent player, he was originally drafted in 2001 by the team with the sixth pick and made the Pro Bowl five times. Last year, Seymour started 15 games for the Patriots and recorded 63 total tackles with 34 solo stops, including a team-leading eight sacks.

While many have noted that the Seymour as of late hasn’t been the Seymour of old, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Patriots of 2009 would be better with him than without him. There’s already been a huge amount of roster churn on the defensive side of the ball from last season (completely overhauled secondary, trade of Vrabel, etc). This is not a move that was made to help the team win the Super Bowl this year.

But in terms of the overall picture, it’s clear to see why this was a deal Belichick had to pull the trigger on. Seymour was in the final year of his contract; after this season, the Patriots were either going to have to pony up big bucks, or let him go without getting anything in return. Belichick has long demonstrated an uncanny ability to recognize when a veteran’s production is about to fall off in a way that makes his salary cap hit silly. While such cost/benefit analysis has resulted in the rather unceremonious departure of some beloved players, its clearly always been in the best interest of the team.

In all likelihood, the Patriots wouldn’t have re-signed Seymour at the end of this season. By trading him for a first-round pick in 2011 — by which point a new CBA might include a rookie wage scale, making first-round gambles far more palatable to the New England brass — the team has essentially gotten something for nothing. Sure, we’ll miss Seymour this season a bit, but this move is undoubtedly “in the long-term interest of the club.”

No one knows where in the 2011 draft this pick will fall, and there’s no guarantee of a rookie wage scale, true. And with Belichick, there’s always the possibility this pick will be parlayed into several other later picks. There’s no guarantee whoever’s added to the roster as a result of this trade will be a contributor. But in making the deal, the Patriots have still managed to put themselves in a better position for future seasons than they were before.

As I said earlier, this move doesn’t particularly help the team now, although it does free up money (and a roster spot) for other, more immediate, benefits, such as re-signing NT Vince Wilfork and/or picking up another QB to have behind Brady (Garcia?).

While it’s hard to see such a valuable player go, it’s clearly better for the team in the long run.

So yesterday we held the draft in the fantasy football league I’ve been running for several years now. While I’m quite certain almost no one on earth has interest in reading a writeup of my picks, I’m going to go over all 18 of them anyway. Read the entire post »

What with this being the blog on my professional domain, seems like I ought to occasionally actually post on some work-related topics. Toot my own horn a bit, as it were. So here’s a rundown on a few of the things I’ve been up to in the last nine months or so. (Yes, I realize that’s a pretty broad window of time, but a lot of my work the last six months has been limited to coding, site maintenance and other things that are hard to show off). Read the entire post »