Fantasy Dork

My AL-only fantasy baseball auction is tomorrow. I'm, sadly, incredibly excited. Auction leagues are so much more fun than straight drafts because you can go in with very different strategies than the normal "pick the best player at a position I need" strategy.

Strategies include:

• "Suggest the hometown players early so people over pay"
• "Suggest young, intriguing players early so people over pay"
• "Bid up the last good shortstop/second baseman/catcher so that someone wastes a bunch of money on Ian Kinsler/Derek Jeter/Jason Varitek"
• "Save all your money to the end of the draft and clean up on the guys everyone forgot about"

Basically, it's open season to be a dick. For my "keepers," I'm keeping 5 guys from last year who I got cheaply and save me money versus what they would cost me this season (Jered Weaver and Clay Buchholz are probably 2 of the top 10 or 12 pitchers available and I've got them for a combined $20 auction dollars).

Giddy up. Baseball season is here (just in time for the Celtics to go into their normal end of season hibernation).

--Ryan

Anybody who can't make money off of Sports Night ... →

Hacking NetFlix: "Reuters reports that the new Netflix deal with Showtime withdraws current Showtime originals like Dexter and Californication from streaming, but leaves older shows like Tudors and Sleeper Cell. 

The change, part of a new arrangement, means no 'Dexter' or 'Californication' episodes from previous seasons will be available on Netflix, as had been the case under the current arrangement which covered the first two seasons of the shows. Episodes of current originals will be on Showtime's authenticated broadband service, Showtime Anytime.

Instead of introducing the 20+ million Netflix subscribers to past seasons of hit shows to drive interest in subscribing to Showtime, it looks like Showtime joins HBO in realizing that Netflix just might be a competitor."

Someday, television networks will get it, right? Why would you not want to expose as many people to your show as possible, to get them to then signup for your network (or, for the broadcast networks, to record/watch your network) to stay up-to-date with the latest episodes.

The biggest obstacle to picking up a new television show is fearing you will not understand what is going on. With shows like Lost, Friday Night Lights, etc., the ability to catch up on everything before a new season airs is a godsend. That's how the girlfriend got caught up on Lost and was able to watch the last couple of season with me, live as they happened. Any TV network that wouldn't want to take advantage of the opportunity to mint new viewers is destined to end up picking up the scraps left behind by Netflix, Amazon, and Apple.

Or, to paraphrase Sports Night:

Anybody who can't make money off of television on Netflix should get out of the money-making business

Radiation →

With everything that is going on in Japan, and the American media's inability to actually report on a story without sensationalizing it, leave it to xkcd to actually drop some knowledge on radiation exposure, and what it means.

The short version: it's ok to not freak out.

Stupid DNS

I'm beginning to despise DNS, despise massive tables, and despise MySQL.

Eff you, dns. Seriously.

Open Source Douchebags

From messiah to pariah: The death of open source on mobile • The Register: "Open source has gone from pariah to messiah in the past decade, but it has yet to find a place at the mobile table, and risks being rendered obsolete."

Interesting. Tell me more.

Part of this comes from open-source licenses clashing with app store policies. It's perhaps not surprising that Microsoft isn't a big fan of GPL software within its Windows Phone Marketplace, but given its still-small market share, it may also not be a big deal. Of far more concern is the fact that Apple has started pulling GPL software from its virtual shelves.

This is partially true. In reality, both Microsoft and Apple rely very heavily on open source software. But that's not the reason GPL'd software doesn't end up in the various app stores.

No, the real problem is that there's a bunch of open source zealots (read: douchebags) who want to hold their software hostage to prove a point. Rather than proselytizing the value of open source software (and that you can get high quality, not crappy software inexpensively) these douches just ensure that they'll continue have a forum to yell at folks while the world passes them by.

I love open source software. By and large, it's how I make my living (Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Ruby/etc). Folks who are developing open source for the joy of developing would be smart to choose BSD or MIT-like licenses rather than GPL'd licenses. Those licenses were developed sanely for the purpose of pushing technology forward, not holding it hostage.

(Note: this isn't legal advice. While I've watched a bunch of law shows on TV, I am not a law-talking guy. I'm just a caveman, unfrozen by your scientists ...)

Twitter Updates for 2011-03-05

• Is there anything honey can't solve? #
• Bringing back playing foos and drinking beer at work. Slowly but surely. #
• @wintermatt 10-0. That is what Addison brings to the table. in reply to wintermatt #
• I'm no journalist, but I'm sorta sure "CBS Acquires TV Guide For Online Video Clicker" is a pretty misleading headline http://tcrn.ch/gbRkTy #
• @ponddesign You're a non-Texan in Texas. You're lucky they consider you a human and haven't locked you up. in reply to ponddesign #
• @fraggle22 @wintermatt and Eric R got kicked. In the ass. in reply to fraggle22 #

Twitter Updates for 2011-03-04

• Restoring my iPhone to clear out the 2.5GB of "Other" space that has accumulated. #
• @fraggle22 Turn around. We sent your kid to Mexico to find you. in reply to fraggle22 #

Twitter Updates for 2011-03-03

• I love nearing spring. The sun and melting, the girl in front of me weaving around trying to put earbuds in and making me want to punch her. #
• We just sent out a big customer notification so that it would get lost in the iPad 2 press. Sneaky. (Ok, we didn't really.) #
• @wintermatt Brilliant. We needy steal that. in reply to wintermatt #

Twitter Updates for 2011-03-02

• @danielpunkass They have some special storage you can use for backups specifically - I think it's like 50GB. in reply to danielpunkass #
• @danielpunkass I don't think it's additional cost (at least not on my acct), but agreed that threatening at 200MB is capricious. in reply to danielpunkass #

Twitter Updates for 2011-03-01

• If you're not listening to @thisamerlife, you're just being silly. They've been killing it lately. #

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