My birthday was yesterday so my last couple days have been full of celebration. Thanks to all my friends who came out for it, especially the ones who were willing to drive back from the UGA game in the morning to go out with me that night.
Best birthday present so far has been one I gave myself. I went back to Peachtree City on Friday for a dinner with my mom, brother and sister for a joint birthday dinner (Katie’s was Monday the 25th) and found something in my old room. I’ve had this for longer than my brother has been alive, so yes it’s a little tattered, has been hastily repaired with scotch tape on the back, and desperately needs to get framed to avoid further damage. But it’s still the awesomest poster I’ve ever owned.
Bonus points for no Christian Laettner on the poster.
I’ve got a few friends in law school, but no one has ever told me about this statute. Apparently, the “Three Pony Rule” states that “no child, no matter how wealthy the parents, needs to be provided [with] more than three ponies.” We can all thank the text In re Patterson, 920 P.2d 450 (Kan. App. 1996) for that.
I’m on week 3 now of updating my MLS Elo ratings, which you can always find here: MLS Elo Ratings
As a nice bonus, the rankings are now being included on the Center Holds It collective rankings.
Since this is the first time I’ve been able to watch the ratings evolve over the course of play I’m starting to get a better idea for what the values for some of the factors should be. I’m worrying a little that the 10/20/30 factors for regular season/playoff/championship games are too small since the weekly team movements so far have been less than I expected. Then again, maybe it’s more that I’m just too conditioned to the fact that most people are willing to change their rankings drastically after one game due to emotion, which is what I was trying to avoid.
So anyway, the main reason I bring this up is that a lot of people are moving Columbus to the top spot (or right next to it) after their recent performances and dropping Houston since they lost to NY. I, however, still have Houston at #1, by the widest margin between any two consecutive spots no less, and Columbus in 5th, barely making the top half of the Eastern Conference. How can this be?
Well, thankfully Climbing the Ladder (a great site for random MLS statistics) put a post up today about the remaining strength of schedules for every MLS team (link). The teams are listed by most points of remaining opponents (hardest schedule) to least points of remaining opponents (easiest). What’s the interesting part here?
2. Columbus 278
14 . Houston 234
So, Columbus has the second hardest schedule left while Houston has the easiest. In other words, Houston has already gotten a large portion of their hard games out of the way and is still within 5 points of Columbus. Also, Houston has a home/away breakdown of 5/4 left to Columbus’s 4/5, so they’ve been in fewer situations where they were given the 85 point home bonus. Add to these factors Houston’s continually demonstrated success over the years and that explains most of how they got to be the number 1 team in my ratings.
and it happens right down the street from me, how much will it mess up my day?
Click the pictures for a bigger version
The answer: Not near as much as I’m sure it messed up the shoot for Van Wilder 3, which is happening just down the street from us at Agnes Scott. And who are the stars of this movie? Why, Kristin Cavallari and Russell from Wayne’s World of course.
These are things I’ve thought about while contemplating spending $100 for a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, which I will read rarely at best.
PDF or ebook copies of the full newspaper delivered by e-mail to subscribes who want it.
There are enough people who are trying to reduce their waste that this could easily work. Plus, it’s much better than having to sit in front of a computer to read. There is a growing number of people who are buying devices like Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader so let them use it to read your newspaper.
“Best of” lists/distributions
Every site likes to rank things, even CNN has their “most e-mailed stories.” Put together a site that once a week or so links the 20 most read stories from the previous period. For people like me who don’t have time to go through an entire paper it would be an easy way to get a handle on what’s going on. Combine it with the first idea, and there you go. I know that there are other people like me who don’t really want to pay $100+ per year for a full subscription but would gladly pay half that for this.
Actual good information
Yeah, this one’s a cop out but it needs pointing out. The AJC is going about things all wrong thinking it can fire its best writers, bring in cheap young people and turn itself into a worthwhile paper. All it’s doing is accelerating it’s decline into a printing press for AP stories. Keep the good people, scale down (you’re not a national paper and never will be, sorry) and focus on good local news that will interest people around here. If you actually focus on this niche of people instead of trying to be the end all be all of news for Atlantans you might succeed. You just can’t keep up with the New York Times and CNN for national and world news.
Boy, since I started orientation my posts and the readership have fallen off dramatically. I’ll try to do better since I was updating about once a day for a while there.
Hopefully I can wow you guys with some sweet sports statistics since one of the class projects is about using statistics to find competitive advantages for sports teams. Sounds . . . familiar. Congratulations to whoever gets my group. We’ll be doing soccer and I already have a good bit of data collected.
As an attempted apology (awesome alliteration, and again, and again) for my half-hearted updates, here’s (the first half of) a pretty sweet Oasis song. If anyone finds a full copy of this song on youtube let me know.
I don’t know if it was the best way to spend my last weekend before starting MBA classes, but I certainly enjoyed playing 36 holes of golf.
Saturday I went out with 3 guys from the MBA class. It was supposed to be 6 of us but one guy and the girl who is better than all of us couldn’t make it. We played Wolf Creek, which was a new course for me and a very hard one at that. I put up a painful 110 after completely falling apart on the back 9. It was a beautiful course and very challenging with rolling fairways, blind drives and thick rough, but I don’t like paying $59 to play a round.
Sunday I went out with Pete, Sims and Hogan and we played Georgia National, one of the many new Canongate courses I hadn’t played. And, since Sims works for Canongate, we all got to play for free. Also, I played a whole lot better, still falling apart a bit on the back 9 to end with a 102. A few more times out and I should be back in the mid 90’s hopefully, I’m just getting worn out since I hadn’t played in almost a year until a month ago.
Either way, now it’s time for a life of reading cases, discussing theories I don’t understand, and trying to learn 90% of the accounting undergrads get over 4 years in 16 weeks. Should be interesting.
Here’s my class schedule for the next semester. Click the picture if you can’t read the text.
No classes after Thursday at 11am and 2 classes that end after half of the semester. So, outside of the supposedly ridiculous amount of coursework about to be piled onto me, the schedule looks pretty awesome.
Yes, you read that correctly, this is a Zombie Survival Guide. No, not a fictional telling of a zombie attack and how the main characters held them off and saved the world. This is a well researched and extrememly detailed “How To” explaining exactly what you need to do to survive the inevitable zombie attack. In fact, it even chronicles over 50 recorded zombie attacks during human history.
Here are an example of a few of the more important chapters:
Close Combat Bludgeons . . . Edged Weapons . . . Miscellaneous Hand Weapons . . . Power Tools
The Private Residence (Defending Your Home) Preparation Part I: The Home . . . Preperation Part II: Supplies . . . Surviving an Attack . . . Immediate Defense
So, read up and be well-versed in all important aspects of zombie fighting.
