As a child I was a complete sports stat junkie. I would wrestle with my dad for the sports page first thing in the morning so I could read the box scores in baseball, football, and basketball and then store them Rain Man style. Throw out a name from the 80′s or 90′s and I could have given you a close reciting of his Topp’s baseball card.
Perhaps I was just your typical kid raised by a sports loving dad. But maybe not. Looking back at it now I have to wonder. Did I love reading sport statistics because I loved sports or did I love the numbers because I was drawn to them and my eventual career in chemistry and later software engineering/consulting?
I go with the latter. I never was much of a sports fan; I didn’t and don’t enjoy to watch them on TV or in person. I only talk about sports when used as a small-talk crutch at a developer conferences or a cocktail party. And yet I STILL love box scores and there is still the daily rush to read them and I follow 4 or 5 sport blogs. But get this, they are ALL focused around the statistical analysis of performance. The best, in my opinion, is The Wages of Wins Journal by Dave Berri. Dave presents numbers for basketball junkies to confirm what they have known for years but many NBA general managers still don’t, that there is more than points per game. That guys like Ricky Davis may have scored over 20 a game in 2002 but you may not want him on your team.
The piece in the Sunday NY Times was a great piece about the growing use of deep statistical measures for assessing basketball skill; a lot of fun.
The No-Stats All-Star – NYTimes.com.
Check this out about iPhone Apps. iPhone AppStore Secrets – Pinch Media.
Shares some secrets, some tips, throws out some user usage stats and briefly talks turkey about an ad based revenue model. I’m working on a iPhone app for a little venture I’m working on and this will help.
I’ve been meaning to get this out and give proper thanks to Brent Ozar, aka BrentO on Twitter, for his tutorials on how to start a technical blog. To say that Brent’s tutorials are helpful would be a HUGE understatement as I was essentially stalled before this latest attempt at a personal blog.
For years I have treated blogging like learning a foreign language; something I wanted to do but never got around too. Oh sure, once a year I’d start a blog at Blogger or elsewhere. I’d put honest effort and some semblance of thought into my first post; almost as IF I knew it would be the last. And once a year I’ll also find a new Spanish podcast and relearn how to purchase a train ticket in Barcelona. Both would die a short death filling me with resentment at efforts.
I was near tears with the tragic thought that the few search results for Jacob Hackl were going to be my races (hint: scroll way, way down…maybe a little further). Then along came Brent! I found Brent one day while doing some SQL Server performance improving SAN strategy search (or something like that). Anyway, I found a post he had about something and I’ve always been a dev guy with a data bent (or vice versa) so the content and I got along fine and I added Brent to my blogroll. Brent had a series of five posts about starting a blog and it caught me at the right time and I realized I needed to get off the pot and build something. If you are struggling its an awesome place to start and cover the whys, WordPress, Plugins, Themes, and Etiquette.
And with my first attempt at blogging etiquette I would like to kindly thank Brent Ozar for the help; you done good man.
The news over the weekend that Google had an issue with their Internet search engine shouldn’t be that shocking to those of us in the technology industry. Some of the best beer swapping stories for techies are centered around the whoopsies in production; assuming they weren’t ours of course. I went so far as to TRY to spin my worst mistake (that I know of) into a positive during past job interviews as examples of…well, it’s been a while since I did that but it must have exemplified something and was definitely reframed!
So for 55 minutes, every search result from Google showed a message of “This site may harm your computer…”. Now for those of you excited to bash on Google remember not to live in a glass house. Everyone makes mistakes. A huge market cap, wonderful talent, and great rigor is no match for the inevitability of mistakes. What matters is what you do after wards in response and prevention.
My big mistake feels like a lifetime ago and trivial upon reflection. I was writing a COM+ mass mailer to be licensed to our clients at some ROI inducing prices. Our clients were local state agencies, boat manufacturers, huge multi-nationals; the typical slice you had at web development shops in 2000. My big ‘glitch’ was having allowed a campaign to fire twice via web submission and that’s what I did. I sent two emails to 10,000 people rather than just one. This was a big deal because ALL the recipients had opted-in to the list and that is such a tightrope with email marketing.
After seeing what I did in a .1 microseconds while uttering a slow motioned recital of “oh no” I acted by rushing back to the boss, doing damage control, putting in Jake prevention, and followed it up by working my arse off to add some new wiz bang feature for distraction purposes.
Now its all junk mail anyway! Hey, at least I wasn’t I once worked with who accidentally gave away a John Deere lawn tractor!
