2011 Fantasy Baseball preparation

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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

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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

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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.

Cutting what you don’t need

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Recently I received my AAA membership renewal bill. I’ve been a member for over 10 years and quite used to these renewal letters. Looking the renewal letter over, I suddenly remembered that this is of no use to me now.

My wife and I currently have AAA Plus, which costs $121 to renew according to the letter. This was important when we had used cars that weren’t the most reliable. Generally we would use the towing coverage once or twice a year, which would just about pay for the membership. They always have been fast in response times and very helpful. Yet, we don’t have used cars anymore. In July 2009 we bought a  2009 Hyundai Elantra. In October 2010, we bought a 2011 Subaru Legacy.

This renewal letter reminded me of something that had been mentioned in passing when we bought both of our cars new. Both manufacturers included roadside assistance with the cars. In the case of Subaru, roadside assistance is included in the 3-years/36,000 limited warranty. For Hyundai, their roadside assistance is 5-years/unlimited miles.

That reminder is going to save me $120 per year for at least 3 years. Maybe once the Subaru’s coverage expires we will revisit getting AAA coverage. Since the Subaru’s coverage runs out first, maybe I would then get just a single membership for my wife (since she drives that car the most). I could never remember to use the AAA discounts or other perks of the membership, so we weren’t earning back the money for this membership.

This is a good reminder to keep track of what perks you get when you purchase certain items. Because I remembered that we have roadside assistance via the car manufacturers, we are saving at least $360 over the next 3 years not renewing our AAA membership.

Would we switch to Verizon for the iPhone?

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With the recent announcement that the iPhone is going to be available on Verizon Wireless in less than a month, I thought about whether it would make sense to leave AT&T. At this time, I think no, although not by choice.

First reason is simple: we are under contract until June 2012, because we bought the iPhone 4 when it it came out. Thus to break our contract now would cost over $250 per phone.

Verizon’s reliability is going to be interesting to see. They have long been the best wireless provider in New Hampshire, but with thousands of new iPhones being activated in the next month on their network, it will be interesting to see how it holds up. I rather wait to see how happy the early adopters are.

That said, the following is why I would switch from AT&T if it were an option:

  • AT&T sucks in New Hampshire. Once you get out of the major cities in the south eastern part of the state, you are lucky to get EDGE coverage, nevermind 3G. Verizon 3G is so much faster compared to EDGE. Pretty much everywhere in NH you can get Verizon 3G coverage.
  • Everyone in NH that doesn’t have an iPhone already is on Verizon. Thus new Verizon iPhone users would get unlimited mobile to mobile minutes for the vast majority of people they call in NH.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out the next few months. My mother is getting an iPhone on Verizon and one of my brothers might as well.

Moving away from cable…slowly

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The cable companies must be deathly afraid of what people like myself are trying to do…slowly moving away from subscribing to Cable TV. While I cannot completely kill that bill (not until there is a reasonable option for live sports), I have begun to take baby steps in that direction.

The bedroom TV is literally used for two things: morning news and movies. That is it. In fact, even saying movies was kind of inaccurate since there wasn’t any DVD player in there. In the past, if I really wanted to watch a movie in there, I had to lug my PS3 into there and hook it up.

Not anymore. The HD Cable Box is unplugged and will be dropped off at Comcast shortly. The AppleTV plugged in, configured, and in use. Cable TV cord plugged directly into the TV so we can access the Clear QAM channels such as our local TV stations (all still in HD). Took less then 20 minutes to pull this off (plus the time to do a channel scan on the TV).

The setup is vastly easier to use. My wife always had trouble getting the cable box and TV to be turned on at the same time. That issue is gone. The AppleTV is always on or in standby, a simple button press on the spartan Apple Remote away from being active. Using just the TV remote for switching channels, inputs, and volume is much better.

Test streaming of Netflix and content from our laptop worked flawlessly without issues. Watched two Firefly episodes and really enjoyed it. Ripped DVD’s from our collection work perfectly and look remarkably good. Still have to get all of our movies ripped and encoded, but we are getting there.

Curious to see if we ever miss the cable box in there (based on our usage the past few months, I am almost certain we won’t miss it). I am also going to see how often in the living room we really watch a TV channel not available on Clear QAM. I suspect only when it comes to live sports.

Once Apple allows apps on AppleTV (it is a matter of time before that happens) and if the major sports remove blackout restrictions for local sports viewing, we will easily have enough content to officially cut out the TV part of our cable bill.

Taking advantage of New Hampshire

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Living in the small state of New Hampshire all 28 years of my life, I just realized how little of the state I really have visited.

Outside of a couple of youth hockey games when I was 7 or 8 in Berlin, I never been north of the White Mountains. Never been in the Great North Woods, never been to Pittsburg, NH. Along the same lines, outside of visiting Keene every year or two, I have no idea what towns are around that city and what is in them. I don’t recall ever being in the Rochester area either.

Until four years ago, I had never been at the top of Mount Washington. Tomorrow, I am returning via a trip on the Cog Railroad, which once again I have never been on before. Afterwards we are going to the Mount Washington Hotel to have a late lunch. Only a few weeks ago did I see the hotel for the first time.

Updates

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A few updates since I last wrote a couple of months ago:

  • Been extremely busy at work.
  • Site is now running on Dreamhost again (but of course still using DynDNS Custom for DNS) after about a year and a half on my own server. This site should be much faster now and have fewer quirks. I have learned that maintaining an web server is a lot tougher than it looks. Time to leave the server and backend stuff to the experts. I will stick with what I know now, which is running WordPress and configuring my own DNS.
  • Reloading my server so it can be a test instance of BIND for me.

Finally, no distractions

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It is rather odd to say that it is now July and this is probably my worst season of watching the Red Sox. It isn’t even close. Between the Bruins having a nice run in the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Celtics making it to Game 7 of the NBA finals, and the World Cup, it feels like I am completely worn out watching sports. There were days I just did not feel like watching the Red Sox or just couldn’t due to too many other important games on.

That is going to change for the rest of the year. I am looking forwarded to having the game on and being interested again. I feel like I have missed out on enjoying a team that has really fought hard despite a huge amount of injuries to key players. Let’s hope they can continue to play well as reinforcements arrive back from the DL.

In search of the perfect bank

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Something I have been seriously giving thought to this year has been to switch to a different bank (or credit union). Currently I dislike the fact that I am with Bank of America, but they are getting the job done at the bare minimum. I have yet found the perfect replacement though.

Bank of America has one thing going for it: tons of ATM’s. I am pretty sure to find an ATM anywhere I travel in the United States. It also has a basic iPhone application that allows me to do banking on the go if I need to, which has come in handy.

My requirements to switch from Bank of America are quite simple (so I thought):

  • Free checking and savings accounts (willing to take a minor interest rate drop for this).
  • Lets me write paper checks. I have to pay condo fees with paper checks, so this is a requirement.
  • Either entirely free ATM access or willing to cover for a certain amount of ATM fees.
  • Easy to use web site and an mobile application.
  • Scan checks for deposit. Bonus points if you can do this with an iPhone. It is the 21st century and we have the technology to do it.
  • Great customer service. Doing customer service myself as my day job, this is a major requirement if I am going to have my finances with you.

So far, I haven’t found any bank that can do all of these tasks.

  • Local credit unions: Two of them, Granite State Credit Union and St. Mary’s Bank, are on the same street as my work, which makes deposits easy and have that local friendly presence that gives you that warm fuzzy feeling. They have a large ATM network shared with other credit unions with free access. Mobile efforts are either non-existant or very limited. Only GSCU offers ability to scan checks at your home computer. Closest to what I am looking for in the sense of a traditional bank/credit union, but so year 2000 in online technology.
  • ING Direct – I have a savings account with them and they seem to be a very solid online bank. Decent ATM network available. Biggest knocks for me: lack of a good mobile application, no ability to have an actual checkbook (you can only mail paper checks via their site), and no check scanning for deposits.
  • Ally Bank – Web site looks fantastic, at least the front page. Free accounts, free checks, free ATM’s after reimbursement, reports are that they offer great customer service. Utter lack of actually taking the next logical step and offering a mobile app and scanning checks for deposit prevents me from going there today.
  • USAA – There has been lots of great reports about how USAA is awesome. I even opened an account with them just for kicks to see how it is and I have to agree, looks like a great bank. Refunds up to $15 in ATM fees, free checking, savings, web site has a good design, great iPhone app. However, unless your parent(s) were in the military or you are/were in the military, you do not have access to the best feature: check scanning with your iPhone or computer.

Banksimple looks promising, but it is clear vaporware at this point. I would need to see what they actually launch with to see if it matches my criteria.

So far, no bank offers what I want. Still searching for a way to leave Bank of America.