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Rumor has it that Reggie Ball is up in Detroit right now trying to make the team as a wide-receiver/kick returner.  Jesus kid, just stop.  Go back to Stone Mountain and never ever ever pretend like you are a real football player again.  The arena league wouldn’t even let you wear a uniform at this point.

The worst part about it is that you just know that Ball is hanging all over Calvin, trying to use him to get in with the coaches.  And the sad thing is that Calvin’s too nice to tell him to go audition for a job on the assembly line over at GM instead.

In a wonderful combination of my lameness and my boredom at work I used Excel to solve for the best possible fantasy soccer team last week.  The site hadn’t updated yet and I wanted to see if I still knew how to use Solver.

I copied the stats from MLS’s page and spent about half an hour writing the cell calculations and setting up the problem.

Rules are:
- 1 Goalie, 4 Defenders, 4 Midfielders and 2 Forwards
- No more than $100M spent (it’s a salary league)
- No more than 3 players from any one team
- One captain whose points are doubled.

MLSnet.com came up with a roster that was $96M and scored 498 points.  Obviously they don’t have a bored engineering student working in Excel all day because I came up with one that was $98.1M and scored 502 points.

Since no one cares about soccer I won’t bore you with 11 names where you might only recognize one.

I haven’t done nearly as well keeping up with the pace I set last month, but I am still running.  In fact, last weekend I went up to Kennesaw Park with Jen and ran 7 miles in just over 70 minutes (70:07 to be exact).  Not bad considering it’s all trails, there’s a lot of jumping over roots, and I’d never run further than 5 miles in my life.  Jen had enough of running with me, so we actually ran separately and she did just over 11 miles in 90 minutes.

My check still hasn’t been cashed by the Peachtree Road Race people, so I don’t think I got a number.  That sucks, but I’ll just go online and buy one either on eBay or craigslist as the time gets closer.  I’m starting to rethink my 60 minute goal and will be training to do a decent bit better.  No new goal yet because I have no idea what kind of times I can expect to run, but we’ll see.

I ran 2 miles today in about 17:50, which is almost certainly a faster pace than I will be able to sustain for the 10k unless I’m severely underestimating what training can do.  I was pretty happy with that time since I was aiming for 18 minutes, but I know that I hurt myself by going out too fast.  I’ll learn to pace myself though and that will make a huge difference.  Of course, the fact that I’d run maybe twice in the past week hurt too I’m sure.

I’ll try to update my running progress more often since it seems like I’m running a lot less when I don’t have the blog to keep me in check.  Hopefully that doesn’t bore the 3 people who actually read it or the 15 or so people per month who manage to find it by searching “brother sister sex” on google.  I don’t still have the screenshot of this stat from my CPanel, but I can tell you that it was this picture that was responsible:

Gilbert Arenas, greatest athlete in history?

I mean, for one he’s running with Obama. For two, I just got a personalized jersey and shoe from him for a $25 donation to his charity this morning at 6am.

Agent 0 Collectors Package: $25 – 2,000 available
• One (1) Personalized Swingman Gilbert Arenas Jersey (size 2XL), valued at $75.00
• One (1) Autographed GilZero Signature Basketball Shoe, valued at $90.00

Holla Gilbert.

Within the past week Gizmodo has highlighted products from 2 customers for the company I work for: Energizer and Toto.  It just so happens these are the two companies I am currently working on projects for (RF conversion for Energizer and storage capacity for Toto).

Let’s start with the Energizer story.  They’ve made a new way to recharge batteries by plugging them into the USB port on your computer.  Seems cool enough.

Not nearly as cool as the battery powered cellphone chargers they have (not for my phone of course) but cool none the less.  Hopefully we start stocking some soon so that some can get damaged and come home with me.

Now Toto.  You’ve probably never heard of Toto unless you already know about this story.  Toto makes toilets, and very expensive toilets at that.  Next time you are in a nice hotel or office building look at the toilet, it’s probably a Toto.

One of Toto’s prides and joys is the Z-series line, which is roughly the overseas equivalent of the MS series that can sell for $5000.  Well, apparently this toilet had a little problem with EXPLODING.

Sitting on something filled with water that has 120V running into it might not be such a good idea afterall.

Ugh.  There is nothing good about this situation.  The only thing that keeps me doing it is that I know not doing it will result in me working 16 hours a day for a few weeks while everyone else tries to learn the system.  I guess it’s one of those suffer a little now to keep from wanting to burn the place down in a month.

 

However, if there is one thing I’ve learned from this it’s how much companies try to cover their asses.  These SOPs hold no practical purpose because no one will ever truly be trained on them.  However, if something goes wrong the company has to be able to hold up this useless document and say “Look at how hard we worked to standardize this process!  It’s not our fault!”  Not saying this is an unimportant part of business or that there is a better way to accomplish the goal, just expressing my growing dissatisfaction with some of the lesser known aspects of this job.

I don’t know if this is due to a week’s worth of an completely awful training class that basically destroyed my will to live, eating like crap the past week on account of this training class, or the cold front that’s threatening to dump about a foot of water on Atlanta in the next 8 hours, but whatever it is makes me want to scoop my eye out and drive a screwdriver into my brain.

On the bright side though, I saw the Aqua Teen movie last night and it was pretty funny. I’m not a huge ATHF fan (ok, I have actually never seen an entire episode) but everyone else was going so I did too. They have an into-song thing like those old movie advertisements that tell you to buy refreshments that is just hilarious. Honestly, the movie might be all down hill from that.

Finally, even though I’m probably the only person in the world who hadn’t seen this, I would like to present to you the ‘Sloths’ SNL song. Last night was the first time I had ever seen it and…Jesus. SNL might actually be getting good?

Wow.  Joey Harrington.  That’s pretty much as low as it can get right?  Well, not really.  Technically he did beat out Jeff George who was rumored the be begging the Falcons’ front office for one last chance to divide and conquer a locker room.

At least this will make Allison happy.  She had managed to transform herself from completely indifferent to huge Lions fan to huge Lions hater all based on heart-throb Joey.  Maybe she can work an interview playing on her previous Creative Loafing experience.  By the way, if you google image search “The Gentry are Coming” Allison’s cover is only the second result.  Still can’t get past that damn country act.

One other thing that comes out of this is that DJ Shockley’s job just got a lot less secure.  That’s sad.  Even though I hated him from high school through his college career at UGA he’s still a hometown guy, and A-OK in my book once he became a Falcon.  I can’t believe that Rich McKay would let Petrino dump a fan favorite like Shockley for Chris Redman, especially since 3rd string QB matters about as much as the fan in row 8, but I guess we’ll see.

This is a great article from the Washington Post about Joshua Bell, one of the premier violinists in the world.

He agreed to play in a DC subway station for 45 minutes with his case open like any other street musician in a test to see if pedestrians would recognize talent or simply ignore him assuming he was just another beggar.  Mind you Bell was planning to play some of the most difficult and intricate solo violin pieces in history, and was doing so on a Stradivarius that cost a reported $3.5 million.

It turns out the latter as Bell made about $40 for his time, and never attracted a crowd.

There are some pretty interesting interpretations in the article about people blocking out their surroundings while we rush to work, or listen to our self-created playlists instead of experiencing what’s going on around us.  I hope that if I ever see a Joshua Bell I can take some time to appreciate it.

Yeah, that’s right.  Soccer.  It’s the start of the MLS season, and I’ve decided to make an effort to pay attention since every game will be broadcast this year.  Also, in an attempt to not be a total bandwagon jumper I’ve decided to root for the newest team, the expansion Toronto FC.

Pros for the Toronto Team:

1. Brand new 20,000 person soccer specific stadium
2. Sold all 14,000 season tickets in a very short period of time
3. All offense baby.  No wasted picks on lame good defenders.  Phoenix Suns of MLS?
4. My grandmother is Canadian, so I’m sticking with family roots
5. Solid red jerseys

So, there it is.  Go TFC.