Monthly Archives: March 2011

2011 Fantasy Baseball preparation

This year marks 9 years in a fantasy baseball league run by an old college friend of mine. I have decided to prepare differently this year.

Usually, I go into the draft with lots of pages of paperwork, highlighters, pens, etc. I then sit on a cramped couch in a cramped room and frantically try to keep up with the draft, who has taken which players, and inevitably fall behind. Or worse, pick a player that is already taken. What should be fun becomes stressful at times. I am not naturally an organized person.

This year, I’m going paperless. It is just going to be my laptop with me. I made a spreadsheet in Numbers that lists the top 300 players in order, top players by position, etc. I can then just search through the spreadsheet when a player is picked, quickly highlight the player red (unless I picked the player, who then ends up being highlighted green), and move on. I can also quickly look up players to make sure they aren’t an injury risk or were just knocked out for the season.

I also normally have to deal with flakey wifi or worse, hosts who forget their wifi password. This year, I am bringing my MiFi device as a backup.

I don’t have any stats to back this up, but I already feel vastly more productive, organized, and less stress using this method. This is just when doing pre-draft preparation too!

I will post what my team ends up being once I get back later today.

Removing the search bar in Firefox

I like Chrome’s unified search/address bar, but Chrome otherwise just doesn’t fit how I use a web browser. Luckily there is an easy way to make Firefox’s awesome bar do something similar. In fact, it is even more powerful.

  1. Customize your Firefox toolbar and remove the search box.
  2. Go to your favorite search engine
  3. Right-click the search text field on the search engine page and add a keyword. For example, for Google you can simply call the keyword google.
  4. Now in the awesome bar, type ‘google searchterm’ and hit enter. The search is automatically done on Google.

The best part about this trick is that you can do it on just about any site on the Internet that has a search field. You can create many keywords to search your favorite sites, such as Amazon, Newegg, Twitter, etc.

Enjoying vacation

Those of you who know me realize that I work a lot and that is probably an understatement. I rarely leave my desk at work for breaks, I am constantly thinking about it (especially since I am on-call 4 days a week), and it is really hard to hit the off switch. The reason why it is hard to hit that off switch is simple: because myself (and the rest of my colleagues) love what we do so much.

On Friday, I finished up my day and officially entered vacation mode for a week.

I don’t think I have ever looked forward to a vacation more than this one. The mental relaxation you get simply from turning off my work e-mail (and Boxcar notifications for our status page) is quite amazing. My aim is to totally recharge the batteries this week.

Saturday my wife and I visited my brother Justin in Burlington and helped him purchase his first new car. Wonderful time, although very sick of driving (three hours each way).

Sunday our nephews and my sister-in-law visited in the morning. My wife and I then went out and did some scouting of possible houses in the Manchester area that we are interested in.

Today my dad and I are going hiking somewhere in the White Mountains. First time we have done something like this together in a long time, maybe years. All I know is that it is supposedly an “easy” hike. His definition of easy is quite different from mine. We will see!

The rest of the week, I am most likely doing lots of genealogy research and working on fixing some things in our condo so we can put it on the market.