Category: Uncategorized

Ways To Look at the Standings

If you looked at the current USHL Standing in the West (prior to games played tonight) you’d see this:

TEAM GP W L OL TP
Sioux Falls 34 25 8 1 51
Fargo 36 21 10 5 47
Waterloo 35 22 13 0 44
Lincoln 33 20 10 3 43
Omaha 35 19 16 0 38
Des Moines 37 18 18 1 37
Tri-Town 35 15 16 4 34
Sioux City 34 6 20 8 20

And you’d see Lincoln sits in fourth place, on the cusp of elimination from post season play. But that really doesn’t paint an accurate picture of the season so far. For whatever reason, Lincoln has a game in hand against the division leader, two against the team immediately above them in the standings, and a whopping three games in hand against Fargo.

I, for one, prefer the baseball way of ranking teams in the midst of a season, taking games in hand into consideration instead of just throwing out the points totals. If we modify hockey standings to score as follows:

  • Loss: -1 game in the standings
  • Overtime Loss: -0.5 games in the standings
  • Win–overtime or otherwise: +1 game in the standings

and apply it to the current USHL West we get a much more appealing picture (because, hey, Stars fan!).

TEAM GP W L OL GB Playoffs
Sioux Falls 34 25 8 1    
Fargo 36 21 10 5 -3  
Lincoln 33 20 10 3 -3  
Waterloo 35 22 13 0 -4  
Omaha 35 19 16 0 -7 -3
Des Moines 37 18 18 1 -8.5 -4.5
Tri-Town 35 15 16 4 -9.5 -5.5
Sioux City 34 6 20 8 -15.5 -12.5

See, games in hand are actually important! In one view Lincoln is on the verge of not making the playoffs. In the other they’re tied for having home ice advantage in the first round. It is kind of a big deal.

Now, if Lincoln fritters them away, well…that’s just not going to happen. Go Stars!

Another thing to do

Also, because I lack a comprehensive bookmark management system these days: http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_long_con/print.

I don’t expect many of my right-leaning acquaintances will enjoy reading this so you have been forewarned.

The project? A wiki that documents the web of connections between movement conservatives and their dealings in the marketplace. There would also have to be some faceted navigation to that data dump lest one get bogged down in the fog.

The marketing angle presented in the link is something I’ve often mulled when listening to local AM talk radio during its interminable run of commercials. Things like how most answers to your economic woes are investment opportunities in numismatics presented as investment in their underlying metals. Other things like as you get later into the evening, the likelihood that the particular personality will be pimping their most recent book will increase geometrically. I used to think that Colbert doing the latter was distasteful until I recently realized it is another satirical bit.

I’d go on, but then I’d be getting preachy. And I’ll save that for the wiki project.

A fun little thing

The Romney campaign’s web site is coded with a bit of an open loop. It makes sense from a dynamically generated website perspective I guess. However, it’s also the sort of thing that lazy RESTful programming gets you. The idea being that you have a template that is populated by values from a data store based on parsing the URL that lands you there. The lazy was of doing things is to just assume that every value passed is valid. The smart way of doing this is to check to see if you have something useful for that value and to redirect to some kind of error if not.

For example, the good way of doing this is this very blog. Let’s say you want to see every blog entry published in 2012. You’d use the address http://blackfez.com/2012. Let’s say you’re on to the trick and want to see every blog entry published in 1948. You’d type http://blackfez.com/1948. Notice how the second link redirects to an error page? This is smart. And relatively simple. You just check your input before going off to render stuff.

Enough of the theory, why is this fun? Because with lazy RESTful programming you can do stuff like this:

Anyway. It’s fun. At least to me. It’s also a bit of lazy programming and leaves the Romney campaign open to some needling. And it seems like the last thing the guy needs is another exposure to ridicule.

Moar swotting

Since I finally switched web hosts a year ago, I’m no longer plagued by the cramped 5GB server space issue. Gone are the days where I had to monkey around Cox’s pesky port 80 blocking and upload throttling to serve this content from a server sitting in my basement.

Took me almost a year, but I’ve fixed all of the audio links in the Millionaire’s Holiday sub-site. It’s nothing all that exciting, just a few broadcasts of The Millionaire’s Holiday, my show on WFHB that ran back in 2005 – 2006.

Anyway, if’n you’d been pining to see what I was up to six-plus years ago, you can finally get that itch scratched.

Not Safe For Working

I’ve been listening to a lot of People Like Us because, well, Vicki has been publishing to the podcast again. Hooray!

Anyway, this has been laying around for a bit so I thought I’d pepper it with a few more samples and finally get it out there for someone to listen to.

Not Safe For:

  • Work
  • Parents
  • Parties
  • …or much of anything else

Needless to say, contains bad words and sexual language. Hooray!

And so, finally, The Millionaire’s Not Safe For Working Holiday [24.7MB mp3].