Another Attempt at Finding Something that Sticks

One last idea is a running diary and breakdown of one of my fantasy football leagues. Keeping tabs on the draft, free agency/waiver wire/trade transactions, seeing who the best manager is, etc. 

I am in two leagues, like an awful lot of you I'm sure. One is a league I've been in every year since 2005 or 2006, I can never remember, with a bunch of buddies from college. I like being in touch with them, but I'm not sure how much football they watch. That said, it took me until last season to win the championship.

The other league is with a group of guys from high school--most of them went to the same state college, and they invited me into the league one year. Well, I fucked up. Two leagues at a time was too much for me then, or I was just plain lazy, and they asked me to resign my position as that season wound down (2007 I believe). I got back in a few years ago, and managed to win that league last year too! 2/2 ain't bad, and these guys do seem to know their sport and are more into the league in general, which increases interest and/or fun for pretty much everyone.

It's an awful lot of data, but I might try to pull that off. Could be a handy dandy tool. And if I can keep it up during the 2020 season that might not even make it, I should be able to do it once things calm down in a year or two, right?

Formula 1derwall

 Or some other play on words that is equally terrible...

Another idea I had recently was putting my results down in a spreadsheet (it's always another spreadsheet with me) of a driver career in a Formula 1 racing game. I've done this a million times, it seems, with various games, but with the F1 series I thought I had a solution to make the data more concrete, in depth and accessible.

Someone had built a utility tool for the program that can import/receive car telemetry for your car and the AI cars in these games, with enough foresight to be able to really show the information for the whole race and get a virtual picture of what happened. If you're unfamiliar with telemetry, it looks like this:

Where the various lines might indicate speed, throttle pressure, brake pressure, gear, steering input, etc. for a lap or a collection of laps. In this case either the red or the blues lines are a "reference" lap that serves as a control, and the other color is a recent lap that they are analyzing it next to.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to make the program receive all my telemetry, only bits and pieces of it, which makes it virtually useless. Another idea down the drain.

Foot Notes

I think of this blog regularly, but I've had problems with self-confidence for most of my life and as a result can't think of any idea to write about here without immediately thinking "that's no good, no one will want to read that" or "that's not funny enough" (and damnit, none of it is very funny, though I think I can be funny in conversation). So you see almost nothing here, over a year after starting this up.

As someone who turned 33 earlier this summer, I am not proud of the fact that I still spend too much time playing video games. Well, shit, my job is only 40 hours a week (though I just clawed back the ability to work 5 hours of OT/week, which will help the wallet). I don't enjoy work enough to take on a second job. I have no children. I live with my girlfriend and love her dearly, and I really like her cat that is with us too...but I just don't have any other friends in this town I've been in for three and a half years. I want to get into woodworking, and have been building my tool collection, but it can be an expensive hobby and I have to do it on the back patio, as we have no garage/shop/basement. This makes every project a pain in the ass that has to be moved inside and outside a dozen times. So video games remain a great distraction and timesink.

One idea that I got off the ground very briefly a year or two ago (has it been that long?) was playing an old copy of Madden on the PC and simulating the results. On PC you could export the statistics, which would enable me (a novice Excel nerd) the opportunity to fiddle with the exported data and try to make it presentable. I enlisted a buddy to control a second team, so that it wouldn't just be me me tinkering away, and we could discuss strategy and talk trash and share desktop video of the Super Bowl when it was played every season.

The theoretical product of much of this was intended to be a hard copy newsletter entitled Foot Notes that I would mail to him, like gaming zines of old, and if it went well I could always enlist more people to increase my readership. It would include statistics of the current season, historic data, parodies or comparisons to what really happened back then, news reporting of the goings-on of the feaux-league, and so on. In reality, I got one issue out, and some sort of Windows Update made the game unplayable (it was the 2004 version of the game, running on a Windows 7 machine). The project was quickly tabled. Seems to be about how most of my other interests die.

Four months is long enough to provide an update, isn't it? Just some quick hits, I think:

• The diet? Stopped a couple months ago. Pretty sure I've put it all back on. Just in time to go to a wedding, too.
• The replacement for the Bug? Had to take it in to have the exhaust remounted and a new resonator installed.
• Still finding new things to play and waste my time with. The current thing I'm trying to sort out is how to run Madden 2004 on a Windows 7 machine. If I can do that (and I'm thinking I can't, but I'm still trying) I would like to run an online league as commissioner and have lots of people in it. But it seems like such a pipe dream.
• Still haven't painted again, but I did start watching Bob again. I really would like to make a hobby out of painting but Lord knows if I'll ever be any good at it.

One thing that changed in the past four months is that I am taking advantage of my employer's tuition reimbursement plan to get an Associate's Degree. I should actually be doing my homework right now, but it can wait until tomorrow.

Another thing possibly in my future is a podcast. A buddy of mine and I have kicked the idea around for years, and he was recently a guest on another podcast. He has been diligent about his own writing lately, and I'm hoping to be roughly as diligent as he is. We shall see.

Greetings

This will be a new experience for me. In a slowly burning frustration of many things in my life over the past couple years--my work (and my earnings), my weight, my car, and my attitudes toward others, to name a few--I've finally started up a blog to vent and get some thoughts out into the open. Only about 20 years too late, by my calculations.

I've kicked around the idea of starting a website in my head for years, something I could have formatted a little more the way I want it, and something that could handle longer pieces and additional mediums more easily. But the cost of it surprised me, and the way I try out new things and attempt to make hobbies out of them never seems to go that well for me these days:

• Working out and dieting? It only lasts a few days or weeks at a time. 
• Bought a VW Bug because I admire the old air-cooled vehicles. Never wanted to work on it, even though it was my daily driver.
• Look into new board games and video games all the time, buying a few. Rarely play them.
• Really enjoy watching Bob Ross and constantly remarking to myself how easy it seems. I made myself an easel and used it all of one time before realizing how much harder it was than he made it look (as was certain to happen).

It became clear one spring evening that paying a years' subscription for website hosting, security, a domain and everything else that goes into it was a bad idea when I wasn't even sure how much writing I could really do. If I make three posts and don't get any hits or comments, maybe it wasn't something I was meant to do. 

So here we are.

I'm not sure still what I want this to be. With the website idea, as mentioned, I wanted to pursue a number of different interests and hobbies. Sports, TV, society, and other random observations all seemed like options and things that would be convenient for me to put in one place. The combination of topics might be a turn-off to most people, though. Really, how many people are there who will be interested to read successive posts about, say, any 3 of the following: my paternal grandfather, Necco Wafers, Formula 1, a hatred of D20s, fantasy football, health insurance ("That's SO 2009!"), Washington State, patterns in morning commutes on state highways, etc.?

And so it may still be up to you, gentle reader, where we go and what we learn about ourselves and each other. It will be a minor shock if I connect with even one person. Perhaps you will surprise me, and perhaps Blogger will show me things I didn't expect as well.

Happy Thursday!