Category Archives: Misc

Miscellaneous content that really has no other category

Fantasy Football 2008

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Last year, my friends and I started an already famous tradition known as “Fantasy Football”.

Kramer got everything started and created our league last year – and I am so glad that he did.  It’s hard for me to understand how I can get so into something like this.  But it’s borderline addiction for me to watch football and constantly check my fantasy team’s stats.  The shame of it is, I am actually more excited about the upcoming fantasy football season than I am about the actual Detroit Lion’s 2008 season.

Last year was a learning experience for me from a fantasy football perspective.  I drafted extremely poorly. With an awful draft, I finished with a record of 3 wins, 11 losses and ended up in dead last place in the WPE league. It was pretty frustrating, but I learned a lot from messing up that draft.

Today, one year later,  was my chance for redemption.

The draft took about an hour, and when it was said and done I was very happy with my team. I didn’t get everyone I wanted, but there were plenty of good players. I had set a stipulation for myself to not draft even one single Detroit lion; since that’s what primarily ruined me last season. (Kitna, Furrey, MacDonald, Jason Hanson).

My strategy this draft was to get one prime running back in round 1, but then concentrate on getting some top shelf receivers and worry about the 2nd running back in a later round. The strategy ended up working pretty well, and in our league I arguably have the best receiving core.

Here’s my whole team as it currently stands:

  • – Derrick Anderson (Quarterback)
    – Terrell Owens (Receiver)
    – Braylon Edwards (Receiver)
    – Chad Johnson (Receiver)
    – Brian Westbrook (Running Back)
    – Reggie Bush (Running Back)
    – Chris Cooley (Tight End)
    – Dallas Cowboys (Defense)
    – Josh Scobee (Kicker)
    – Joey Galloway (Backup WR)
    – Nate Burleson (Backup WR)
    – Ricky Williams (Backup/Maybe starting RB)
    – Ronnie Brown (Backup RB)
    – Rudi Johnson (Last resort RB)
    – Vince Young (Backup QB)

I’ve been looking forward to this ever since my last place finish in 2007, and my team will DEFINITELY be alot more competitive this year.

I took a couple chance picks in the later rounds thinking they  might materialize into something – Mainly Ricky Williams is a big question mark, but I thought he’d be worth a late pick.

I’m looking forward into whooping everyone’s ass!  🙂  Good luck to all opponents in the WPE yahoo fantasy football league.

Wait Staff

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An increasing trend that I’m noticing in this world is that waiters/waitresses have stopped writing down orders. Instead of writing down what you want, they simply acknowledge “ok” or “mmm hhmmm” to every item you request and they try to remember every single thing you order.

I’m not sure why this is a continuing trend, I’m sure it must have something to do with management telling their workers to do so in an attempt to be more efficient or something. But really it has an overall negative effect right from the beginning. For some reason it tends to make the person seem cocky or arrogant to me. And as I’m ordering, I feel like I have to go very slow so that the person getting my food has enough time to commit my order to memory. I also feel like I can’t change the order in any way because it will make it harder for them to remember. On more than one occasion, the waiter/waitress has had to come back to my table and confirm something about our order.

Granted, they don’t very often screw up orders – so I suppose it shouldn’t really bother me as much. But I don’t really understand why this is the common practice now. I would so much rather have the person write down every detail about my order. In my opinion that makes me more comfortable when ordering and decreases the chance of a ‘screw up’ with my order.

Stupid restaurants.

Budget HD Television

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This holiday weekend has basically thrown HD television onto my person.

First – Johnson2 gets a line on a 43 inch rear projection TV. 43 inch HD television. Apparently this person was selling it on the cheap to get a LCD. “How much?” was the obvious next step… “$350 – and an HD tuner for $50 if you want that.”

Yes and Yes.

Is rear projection my first choice? no. Is having a built in HD tuner better than a set top box? sure it is. But this was a chance to leap into big-screen HD television for $400 dollars. The in-laws teamed up with William Clay Ford and helped us move the TV that evening.

After hooking up the television, rearranging the entire living room, watching Neo vs. Smith, and generally basking in all that is man; I began weighing my options for high definition content.

I’ve been a Comcast subscriber for some time now, and through the entirety of that business/customer relationship I have loved and hated this company. I hate comcast when I get the bill. Paying over 100 dollars a month for high speed internet and basic cable is pretty much a deplorable scenario. But, then I do a speakeasy speed test and my download speeds consistently reach upwards of 25 – 30 mbps. This results in near euphoria. Regardless though, the thought of paying even more to these buttholes was really not a pleasant thought.

Enter the “Antenna”.

Apparently when I was sold the HD tuner, it had come with a basic and generic indoor antenna. Not really thinking anything of it at the time; I decided to try hooking it up and see what would happen. The new TV had a cable and antenna input, so I tried that first… Nothing special: 5 or 6 fuzzy local channels. Then I tried hooking that antenna up to my HD tuner. To my exorbitant surprise; I suddenly had several fully high def 1080i channels over the air by way of this ‘useless’ antenna – for free!?

Having never heard of this functionality before – I was sure I had stumbled onto something completely unknown to the rest of the world. I hit google up a little bit and landed at a few different sites talking about how over-the-air HD is actually better than cable or satellite because it is uncompressed. And people just go crazy to get HD this way… People buy and/or build huge outdoor powered antennas in order to pick up HD signals from miles away.

I finally ended up at www.antennaweb.org which allows you to put in your location and then lists all over-the-air HD channels in your area; including how far away, what channel, and even what direction to point your antenna. I punched through the wizard and came back with all sorts of HD channels that were available within 30 miles of my home.

I immediately went out and invested in a nicer indoor antenna (amplified, directional, adjustable gain, etc.). After re-discovering all the channels with my new antenna, I have 15 HD channels including the big ones like Wood TV, WZZM, and FOX.

Basically this is one of the coolest things ever. 25+ year old technology being used to view High Definition televion… Not to mention that I have 15 free HD channels forever just by spending 27 dollars on a decent indoor antenna.

FantasY! Football

8 Replies

I’ve never played fantasy football before – but as I’ve started to get into it and do some research, i’ve become increasingly addicted. My friends and I have a league, thanks to Kramer. And today was our FantasY! draft.

With this being my first time, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I researched a bit, read some strategies, and formulated a basic plan of action prior to the draft. For example: Most strategies recommend picking strong running backs for at least your first 2 picks. Of course the lotterY! selected me to pick last (10/10) so I was immediately off to a bad start.

With my poor start, I changed my strategy on the spot. Once you get to the 10th best running back, you may as well flip a coin – so I decided to take some chances at running back by picking Edgerrin James, Ahman Green, and Tatum Bell (with a 4th of Cedric Benson). I am a little concerned about the running back position, but I think either EJ or AG could have a breakout year despite disappointing 06 seasons. Otherwise though, I guess I faired pretty well. Most notably, I won the ‘Kitna” dual with vanlandw.

Here is the complete roster of “The Master Chiefs“:

  • QB – Jon Kitna (Detroit)
  • RB – Edgerrin James (Arizona)
  • RB – Ahman Green (Houston)
  • WR – Larry Fitzgerald (Arizona)
  • WR – Mike Furrey (Detroit)
  • WR – Devin Hester (Chicago)
  • TE – Jeremy Shockey (NY Giants)
  • K – Jason Hanson (Detroit)
  • DEF – Detroit Lions
  • QB Bkup – Rex Grossman (Chicago)
  • RB Bkup – Tatum Bell (Detroit)
  • RB Bkup – Cedric Benson (Chicago)
  • WR Bkup – Mushin Muhammad (Chicago)
  • TE Bkup – Dan Campbell (Detroit)
  • DEF Bkup – Minnesota Vikings

All in all – I actually feel pretty good about my ‘team’ even though they don’t look that good on paper. Kitna and Furrey could end up driving offense (Furrey was 14th best receiver in the league in 2006, coming out of nowhere). Hopefully at least one of my running backs can have a breakout year.

As for fantasy football, we’ll have to see. It’s another way to have fun with football – which is definitely my favorite fan sport. So far, so good…

Go Kitna!