Price is Right Birthday

After watching this, I have high expectations for Matt's birthday...

How did you sleep?

Yes, there is an App for that.
You put your phone on your bed under the sheets at night.
The accelerometer tracks your movements to determine how well you are sleeping.
Here is how I slept last night:


I set up the phone at 10:30pm.
I read in bed from 11 to 12:10am.
Looks like I fell asleep around 1am, had 4 dreams, and woke up at 5:30am when Benson knocked my iPhone out of the bed. And as it shows I wasn't able to fall back asleep until 7.
Looks like I only had 4.5 hrs of real sleep.

The data alone is worth the $1.
But there is a benefit.
You set a peaceful alarm for the latest you can sleep in.
Then, anytime within 30 mins of that alarm it will wake you up if it senses you are in light sleep. This is because they say you won't feel rested if you wake up from a deep sleep.

For example, I set mine to 7:20am and it went off at 7:14am after I had fallen asleep.

Sir Benson

I have a cat, his name is Benson and he's actually proof reading this blog over my shoulder.
Last month, a lost cat followed Lucy and I home from our walk. He ended up living in the garage for a week while I traveled to Toronto. When I got home, he was gone but 3 other neighborhood cats were using the garage as a late night waffle house.
I had never really thought about having a cat, but I missed that cat after he was gone. I had told Molly that I would like to find an orange cat and she found one that had been rescued. So on the night of our softball party, I bought a cat.
The top picture his him on top of my birthday present from Mike, Jen and the girls. Note his orange mustache.

Benson loves the sink while I brush my teeth in the morning:

He loves to watch Lucy when she goes outside:


He loves to knead everyone including Lucy, and his greatest accomplishment so far is climbing half way up the stone fireplace in front of everyone before falling.
I told you he was proof reading this:

Mental Stimulation

I love to learn and I love numbers.
I hate the NBA and hate to watch NBA basketball, but I love to play Fantasy Basketball which Dale got me into 3 years ago. I love it because of the Moneyball like effect in the statistics that can be optimized.
It's funny that at times I don't even know the players on my team, and get surprised when I see them and think they don't look like guys who could play that well.

1. The graph below shows how you would expect to draft a team vs some chosen rankings system, that rates the top players versus the average players. The goal is to get as many above average players on your team as possible.

2. However, when you look at the player value ratings (a mathmatical calculation I do to rate each player vs an average player) the Yahoo Rankings show a wide spread vs the exact data they used to make those rankings.

3. The top half of that spread are players who are underrated versus the rankings, the players on the bottom half are overrated versus the rankings. I try to use this to my advantage to get as many underrated players as possible.
The Red circles are players I kept from last years team and the Blue circles are the players I drafted this year (mostly underrated).

4. Despite taking over a very bad team, I have slowly improved my team year after year from 10th place in the Regular Season to 1st last year. (Billy Beane and I agree 1 week Playoffs are a little bit of a crap shoot that can't be predicted).
The best compliment I got last year was someone in the league said: "It's surprising how good the team is, when no one on the roster scares you."

5. Those are the basics, but to get to intermediate team management I focus on the leverage plots of each statistical category.

The Blue line is the plot of Points scored. It shows the very best player will only score 2 times as many points as the average player. Therefore, you would need 4 or 5 of the top scorers to be sure you could beat any other team any given week.
The Pink line shows the same plot for Blocks. A less sexy category, but the best players can get 5 times as many blocks as the average player. Therefore, if you have 2 of the top blockers in the league you should be able to win blocks every week.

Sadly, the season just started and my favorite part is already over.
Luckily, I use the same approach for Baseball which is only 6 months away.

Back from Toronto

I returned from spending the week in Toronto.
After not being there for 9 months it was weird for it to be so familiar and for so many people to remember us at the Hotel etc.
Here are some pictures, keep in mind we did get a lot of work done.

Tried some weird Halloween soda:

Found some candy Tom would like:

Settled in for a night of Horse Racing at Woodbine:

3 of the 6 of us bet on this winning Horse with winning ticket shown:

View from dinner at Niagara 775ft up. Mike is the one who suggested this place to me last year, now we all love it. But at over $100 per person I did have to do some prework to get approval for us to go:

Then the 4 of us took the leftovers of our Canadian money to the Niagara Casino. We had $35 in total after pooling all of our change etc together, and after a few hands of blackjack I turned it into $105 and we cashed out. At the cage, they asked if I wanted large or small bills, I said large because I had never seen a Canadian $100. My coworker has a picture of us outside where we talked the doorman into letting us take some pictures with a big limo outside as if we were rolling away in that with our winnings.

We took the winnings to a sports bar where I was able to watch the Red Sox game. They had a good local live band who played everything from the Doors to Stone Temple Pilots.

My First Triathlon!

In June Meghan's family ran in the Little Miami Triathlon.
Tom caught the bug and started training with Molly who was the only returning entrant from the June race.
I was interested but too busy to start training regularly (that's my story).
On Tuesday my divorce became final, and on a whim I decided to just try it for fun. At the time it didn't seem as crazy of a decision as doing 3-2-1-Flight at King's Island. Something else I had never considered doing before.
How hard could a triathlon be without any training?



Without a partner I had to enter the Single Kayak division, which was nice because kayaks have to start before everyone else. So, I got a nice early start time despite my late entry (bib #1205 out of ~1240).
Here I am 10 mins before the start, literally my first time in a single kayak. I say it's never too late to start training. It was also the first time in a kayak for 3 of the 14 people in my start time. It was early enough in the day that I was in the mood to talk to those around me.



Kayaking 6 miles in ~1 hr 10 mins
This was a bit harder than I thought so I did coast a bit in some of the moving currents. I thought the canoes were starting at 9am so my goal was to not get passed by any canoes. A male/female team in a canoe passed me at 4.5 miles out. As they passed I told them I didn't want to get passed, but now that I had I could take a break and drink. Then they told me their start time was 8:44 so I didn't feel bad that it took them 4.5 miles to close 6 minutes on me.

Running 5.5 miles in ~1 hr 15 mins
Since this was all for fun and my goal was just to finish I said I would walk as much as needed on this part. My goal was to feel physically good after each stage. It was a very nice scenic trail with farms etc, really relaxing. I ended up running less than a mile, but am a pretty fast walker.

Biking 18 miles in ~1:25
I did not think this was going to be as bad, I thought maybe even the easiest part. This was the hardest part. It seemed to be uphill a bit which was ok at first but miles 11-14 were terrible. Even when you got a flat stretch there was a lot of head wind that seemed to be always right at me. And any stretch where you could see the road ahead seemed to always have a big hill which is demotivating.
But somehow, I powered through and miles 16-18 were relatively downhill so it made it a lot easier. I have no memory of miles 14-16, so I must have been struggling.

I came in at 3 hr and 53 mins which I thought was great for going in Ice Cold. But really I just wanted to finish and feel good after I did.
It was a lot of fun, and so many people helped me to borrow bikes and come out it support me.
Overall a great day.

2 Good Ones

Clouds over the Neighborhood

Fast Food Ads vs Reality

I found a great blog that I have wanted to do for years.
Show pictures of the fast food you actually get vs the pictures in their ads.

Ads vs Reality

The Big Mac:
Ad

Reality

New Favorite Commercial

Throwback

Quick Background:
After 3 months in Canada, my coworker and I were quickly sick of the high prices at the cafeteria at work, especially $1.49 per 20oz soda. We had free soda in a break room fridge but that was cut with the economy except for free coffee. So we decided to take matters in our own hands and bought a $75 mini fridge from Wal Mart.
I made the purchase and he is slowly repaying me by stocking cases until we are even.

Today he found some Mountain Dew Throwback, the Pepsi line from 20+ years ago using pure sugar.


Literally during my first sip, I had a flashback to when I was young. Growing up, we never really had Mountain Dew. But I remember specifically having it while staying on my Dad's sailboat for the weekend. It was probably left over from a Guy's weekend. But I remember it tasting so good. I had recently been wondering why it doesn't taste as good I had remembered. It must have been changing all of the formulas to Fructose to save money (see Modern Marvels Sugar).
But it reminded me of all the wonderful sights and sounds of staying on the boat.
Certainly a Throwback.
Try it!

UMass

I was able to get back to Boston for the Marathon and to catch a Red Sox game. We spent a day at UMass to meet up with my nieces and show them around campus. I had not been back to UMass for about 5 years so it was good to walk around.

Walking around campus


I showed Josie and Carly my old Chemistry lecture hall for ~400 students, not sure whose idea it was to leave some messages on the chalkboard.

I don't know where Josie got this opinion of Chemistry, but the spelling and handwriting look familiar. I think Monday's Chem 111 class will understand the message.

They found another one...

Britain's Got Talent always has some incredible discoveries, how are people's talent's being hidden for so long?

For some reason You Tube disabled the embed code.
Britain's got talent

Here is Paul Potts if you remember him.

Barnes and Noble

I received $125 in gift cards at work for helping with an audit.
Too bad they arrived in $10's so I had to hand over a stack.

I didn't buy it, but this was the funniest title I saw:

News and Sports

I do not like local news or really any news on TV.
The best conversation I heard about this was from a sportscaster trying to explain the role of sports in our lives.
He said Bad News tends to be immediate things, murder, fires, plane crashes. And outside of Miracles on the Hudson, Good News tends to unfold slowly over time.
In our modern lives where we have instant access to everything, the media tends to gravitate towards the immediate story. Which end up being the most shocking, disturbing, or depressing.
He said that's why we love sports so much. It is an escape from the bad news into a world where you can experience the entire range of emotions. And even find villains to hate who aren't really that bad in the real world (like ARod).

Best Super Bowl Commercial

Power Meter

For Christmas, I got a power cost meter.
It measures how fast your power dial is spinning and turns it into an instantaneous cost and a cumulative total you can reset every month.
It has been a lot of fun to see how much various things around the house cost.
It is also very helpful for someone like me who can have numerical evidence that everything is off before I leave the house.

Here is a table of my early data:
$/hr
$0.06 Baseline (clocks, Fridge, DVRs, etc), everything else off.
$0.20 Heat (just the blowers, we also pay for the gas used)
$0.04 Plasma TV
$0.03 Outdoor flood lights
$0.10 Vacuum
$1.20 Dryer
$2.00 Pre heat oven to 400F
$0.25 Electric Heater for bathroom

My first thoughts were I did not think a baseline of $0.06 per hour seemed too bad. I had heard stories that all the little devices like phone chargers and VCR clocks etc, really waste a lot of energy, but this didn't seem too bad at first.
I was surprised at how much using the oven cost. Next time someone cooks a TDay turkey for you, bring them some wine or something for the hours of expensive cooking.

We spend about $80-$100 per month for electricity which doesn't seem too bad. But if you do the math, that is only $.14/hr so our baseline $0.06 represents ~$40/month or ~40% of our total usage.

Energy saving bulbs are great, but they can't help lower your baseline at all.

The good news is this means even a small amount of solar or wind power, like 1KW could do a lot to save energy even while you are at work which most of us assume would be off peak time versus all of the lights and TVs when we get home at night.

World Market

I can't believe World Market is closing all of their stores in Cincinnati.
I hate shopping, but that is my favorite place to go. We were able to furnish our dinning room, Rachel's study, and our outdoor furniture from World Market. Their stuff is really nice and not too expensive.
Article
They had good wine, blood orange soda, Cadbury Flake etc.

I prefer Best Buy, but it is weird to have Comp USA and Circuit City both go out of business. That may hurt competition and keep some prices higher on TVs etc.

Also, an old shop in Glendale closed as well. It's getting ugly out there.