Monday, October 29, 2007

Puckrakers - Blue Jackets Blog

If you haven't stuck the Dispatch's Blue Jackets Blog in your favorite feed reader, you should. The coverage has been outstanding. It's timely, unedited (or appears that way) information pretty much as quickly as the two Jackets beat reporters get it.
The downside is, I think the Dispatch may be tracking popularity via actual website hits, which means the Dispatch needs to get with the times and understand the power of the feed reader.

Bill Brownson - Getting Snubbed

Last week, I was minding my own business. Hanging around, expecting the UPS guy to show up. Around 5:30, the doorbell rang. I trotted to the door while our dog barked incessantly, and our children shouted about the door...they get excited about things like that at their age. I opened the door...

But the UPS guy wasn't there. Instead, it was Bill Brownson. I knew nothing about Bill...and originally thought he was selling something...but he was far too appropriately dressed for that. No Bill was running for Columbus City Council. He gave a flyer, told me about himself, and asked if I had any questions.

I probably should have asked him what his stance was on Coleman, but I didn't, since I really didn't think I had a "good" question off the top of my head. This was, after all, the first candidate that had actually shown up at my door in the six years I've been at this address. I didn't even ask him what party he was affiliated with.

So that evening, I peered at his website. Interesting. Good endorsements, but that's not what intrigued me. Fiscal responsibility and the background to potentially know what he's doing. That was good.

Then the Meet Bill page. That was interesting. He's openly gay, formerly high level in the Log Cabin Republicans. I thought it was good that he put that all out there. Then I read that the local gay paper was not endorsing him because he wasn't out enough?!?!

Let's see, meet Bill says "I'm Gay". Pretty out to me. There are quite a few gay folks in the community who are quite publicly in the closet. Bill seems to be pretty far out as far as I'm concerned.

What's troublesome about this, is that the paper isn't basing an endorsement based upon if Bill would be good to have on council based upon his position, it's doing a straight lifestyle snub.
How uncool is that?

Meanwhile, you've got local right wing blogs not supporting Brownson because he's too gay and that he's a "Bush hater". Come on, seriously. If he were to be in the closet about that, I would lose all respect for Brownson. He led the LCR's push against Bush in 2004 because of the Defense of Marriage Act. Well duh! That would seem to be a major principle for the LCRs. In fact, the LCRs would have basically been frauds if they didn't push back on that! If you put yourself in their shoes, of course you're going to be against that.

In the end, Brownson appears to be a guy of principles. Regardless of if you agree with 100% of them (Defense of Marriage), he appears to be on the level with fiscal responsibility and police. And isn't that what you want in city council?

To be honest, I probably wouldn't have known this much about Brownson if he hadn't shown up at my door...but after all of this, I'm making sure to go and cast a vote for him.

Monday, October 22, 2007

YATMGMS - TrExMa Ratings on Squad Page

Yet Another TrophyManager GreaseMonkey Script.

This one generates TrExMa ratings on the Squad page.

Still no real good idea on how to grade GKs.

Friday, October 19, 2007

What's the Deal with FSN-OH HD in Columbus?

On Time Warner at least?

It seems that TW has decided to mesh FSN HD with VS/Golf. When the Jackets are playing, Vs/Golf HD goes away, and FSN HD appears in its place.

It's mighty confusing, since you can't schedule the game to be recorded if you wanted to. Theres nothing on Time Warner's web site regarding this change either.

I don't mind losing VS/Golf HD, except on Saturday nights when a late night Pac-10 game might be shown. It'd just be nice if TWC could tell us what is going on.

UPDATE: Why is it that the game isn't in HD. This makes little sense at all to lose VS/Golf, when the FSN game isn't even in HD

Friday, October 12, 2007

Another TrophyManager.com Greasemonkey Script

Another new script. This one will pull scrape the abilities for the player and calculate the skill of the player as the cool Excel tool TrExMa will.

Provides a handy way to identify the overall skill of a player. Obviously, YMMV, but it should give you a quick estimate on a player's overall ability.

It doesn't work for the Goalkeepers, but TrExMa doesn't have a calculation for them. I'd be interested in any thoughts on computing their skills.

Monday, October 08, 2007

TrophyManager Greasemonkey Script

I started playing TrophyManager in some of the few spare moments I have at work in order to give my brain a reset. You know, one of those things that just gets your brain off of work for a few moments, so you can dive back in with your mind fresh. The game is a soccer management simulation with players from around the world.

So I was checking out the players page with FireBug, when I realized that the training graph provided more information than I expected. The URL for generating the graph contained the ordinal values that make up the training. What I failed to realize at first was that this graph contained the decimal values that make up the training.

So I decided to go ahead and learn some more Javascript by creating a Greasemonkey script to hack the query string of the URL and provide a nice little table to show exact amounts of training. So far people seem to like it. Someone even translated it to Norwegian! Wow, cool!

What else can be hacked in TrophyManager through GM?

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