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Fantasy Football – Week 5

The Seahawks had a bye this week, but I read a couple fun statistics that make me excited about the possibilities for this season:

The Seahawks now have played 77 straight games without losing by more than 10 points. That is now the longest streak in pro football history, as they passed the Decatur Staleys-turned-Chicago Staleys-turned Chicago Bears streak of 74 straight set from 1920 to 1925, per Pro-Football-Reference.com.
Since 2012, the Seahawks have allowed 106 touchdowns. The next closest team is the Bengals, who have allowed 143 during that stretch.

Tim’s undefeated streak was ended in our league in grand fashion. It was kind of reminiscent of the Hindenberg as Logan beat him by so mucch that we wondered about the toppling of the all-time record. Elsewhere in the league, Luke, Jim and Dad are still looking for win number two before their season is flushed like number two. Jim and Dad each other next week so one of them will find the endzone. Kudos to Jim though for starting the perfect roster this week!

With his big game, Logan jumps up to the top of the power rankings this week:

1. Logan (+2)
2. Andy (-1)
3. Austin (-1)
4. Ben

	This Week	Season	All-Time
Highest Team Score	Logan had 170.69	Was Andy had 154.21 (Week 4)	Tim 200.51 (2015)
Lowest Team Score	Tim had 92.19	Jim had 77.82 (Week 2)	Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout	Logan beat Tim by 79.46	Was Austin beat Jim by 41.90 (Week 4)	Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win	Austin beat Dad by 8.19	Tim beat Dad by 0.45 (Week 4)	Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player	Ben Roethlisberger had 37.20 for Andy	Ben Roethlisberger had 43.90 for Andy (Week 4)	Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (2015)
Longest Active Winning Streak	Logan has a 3 game winning streak	Tim had a 4 game winning streak (Week 4)	Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak	Dad has a 4 game losing streak	Weekly streak is season record	Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)

benmartens October 12, 2016 Fantasy Sports

BrickCon 2016

BrickCon is a big Lego convention held in Seattle every year. Tyla and I attended in 2009, but I haven’t been back since. This year I thought that Elijah was old enough to get a kick out of it and Logan was interested too so we headed into Seattle to check it out.

It was busy in 2009 but wow it was PACKED this year. It was pretty difficult to keep Elijah interested when we were two or three people deep just to see the displays. I had to keep him on my shoulders for most of it.

We only lasted an hour before he was done, but we were able to quickly scan most of the displays. It is incredible how much time and detail people can cram into these creations. You have to look so closely to see it all.

I imagine this won’t be the last time we go, but next time I think I might try to go a little later in the event to see if the crowds are a little slower towards the end.

benmartens October 11, 2016 Commentary

Best of YouTube

In this first video, Jimmy Diresta makes a custom key for a very old lock. It’s a pretty cool way to resurrect something that would otherwise be garbage or decoration.

Matthias Wandel is not your typical woodworker. He uses wood to build precision tools and instruments. If you have an engineering mind, you’ll probably enjoy his channel. Here’s a recent example where he builds a small engine out of a solenoid.

I’ve followed Brian Brushwood for a long time but I’m a little late to the party on his Modern Rogue YouTube channel. It’s full of great videos and here’s one great example. I really want to try out this method for making a hologram out of some old CD cases and a phone.

benmartens October 10, 2016 Links

Camelbak Intro

Logan is doing a lot more hiking these days and had asked for my thoughts about hydration packs. Here’s what I came up with:

They’re great! Hydration can make the difference between a good hike and a bad one. Having your water easily accessible makes it a lot easier to stay hydrated.
Camelbak is the most popular but there are other brands of hydration packs.
Just because you decide you want a Camelbak, you don’t need to limit yourself to Camelbak branded backpacks. Lots of packs have a separate pouch designed for hydration packs or you could just throw it into a normal backpack too. It is nice if the spot for your pouch has a little loop to hang the hydration pack from. The straw connects at the bottom of the pouch and without that hanger loop, the pouch can slouch down and cut off the water.
Keep your pouch clean! It can be really tricky to keep mold from growing in the pouches when you’re not using them. Some people just keep them in the freezer between uses but since I only use mine a handful of times each year, I prefer to fully dry them out. I recommend getting a cleaning kit. You can use things from around the house like coat hangers but these kits work really well and aren’t too expensive. I hang and dry my pouches after every hike and then use the cleaning tablets every once in a while.
You can buy new bite valves in case yours gets really dirty, is used by a gross human or if it just wears out.

benmartens October 7, 2016 Outdoors

Reframing The NFL Player Protest

Various NFL players have been protesting police brutality against minorities and it’s getting a lot of press. It seems reasonable that we should take an objective look at the situation and determine if and where it needs adjusting. That’s something we should always be willing to do.

If they would rephrase it slightly, I’d be more on board. Instead of just investigating situations where cops are acting incorrectly, let’s also look how we can keep cops safe. Cops should be able to do their jobs without getting shot and minorities should be able to live their lives without getting harassed (or worse.) Focusing on one side or the other is going to escalate the violence, not reduce it. Maybe it really is a case where only one side is to blame, but that seems pretty unlikely to me. Let’s take a holistic approach to the problem and figure out what really needs to change so we can fix this situation. Even one more body bag is too much regardless of who is inside it.

benmartens October 6, 2016 Sports

Fantasy Football – Week 4

Seahawks! That game felt great. Both the offense and the defense played good games and I didn’t see any major injuries. Jimmy Graham had another big day with some incredible catches. They get a very early bye week this year, but at least it means that Wilson will get a chance to rest… if he ever rests.

The game of the week in our league turned out to be Tim and Dad. They had the two lowest scores in the league by quite a bit and their game was decided by less than half a point thanks to Eli Manning’s poor performance and INT on Monday night. Tim’s undefeated streak continues. Barely.

We are four weeks into the season so that means that our custom power rankings are available. Here’s what we have right now:
1. Andy
2. Austin
3. Logan
4. Ben
I love these early season power rankings because they can vary so much from the current standings. For example, Tim is dominating our league but he is sixth in the power rankings. Is that the because the power ranking formula is wrong or because we just haven’t had enough games in our league for the wins and losses to match up to team strength?

We also broke almost every season record!

	This Week	Season	All-Time
Highest Team Score	Andy had 154.21	Was Logan had 153.13 (Week 1)	Tim 200.51 (2015)
Lowest Team Score	Dad had 82.28	Jim had 77.82 (Week 2)	Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout	Austin beat Jim by 41.90	Was Andy beat Dad by 33.11 (Week 2)	Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win	Tim beat Dad by 0.45	Was Logan beat Andy by 0.78 (Week 3)	Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player	Ben Roethlisberger had 43.90 for Andy	Was Andrew Luck had 43.50 for Jim (Week 1)	Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (2015)
Longest Active Winning Streak	Tim has a 4 game winning streak	Weekly streak is season record	Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak	Dad has a 3 game losing streak	Was Ben and Jim and 2 game losing streaks (Week 2)	Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)

benmartens October 5, 2016 Fantasy Sports

Rattlesnake Ledge

Logan invited us along on a hike and we ended up at Rattlesnake Ledge. I’ve done the hike a few times before but it was the first time for Logan, Tyla and Elijah. The hike provides a great payout for a moderate amount of effort which means that it is usually very crowded and that day was no exception.

I carried Elijah in the pack all the way up and most of the way down. He was happy to walk part of it, but it was really slow going since we had to stop to get passed both by people heading the opposite way but also by people who were going the same way as us. So he just bopped along (heavily) in my backpack.

It really is a beautiful hike and the consistent climb up to the top is nice versus a hike that alternates between flat and steep sections. The crowds get to me after a while though. I prefer the hikes where you only see a couple other people but there are reasons why those trails are more sparsely populated. I’ll have to get used to these easier busier trails for a while as Elijah learns to hike on his own.

benmartens October 4, 2016 Outdoors

YouTube Downloader

I watch a lot of YouTube videos. It has almost completely replaced anything that comes from traditional television in my viewing habits. The YouTube interface isn’t terrible, but I really like the idea of a DVR style interface where new shows automatically appear and then I can delete them when they are done. I want to be able to stream them to whatever device I’m on and remember my playback position in case I stop mid way. In true geek fashion, I have a technical solution (which I’ve partly described before.)

One of my computers runs a custom program that checks all of my YouTube subscriptions for new videos and then downloads them to my local computer. From there I can stream them to any of my devices via Plex. I thought about trying to package up that custom program because it would be useful for people like my parents who get free bandwidth between 12 and 5am but not during the day. This would allow them to schedule YouTube videos to be downloaded. But unfortunately my homegrown solution has gotten pretty complex over the years and it’s not super simple to package it up for re-use. Bad design I guess.

There are various programs and websites that will help you download local copies of YouTube videos, but the key here is getting something that can be scheduled to specifically solve my parents internet constraints. (Basically this is just an email to my Dad that I thought other people might find useful too.)

The good news is that the core of my solution isn’t too difficult to reuse. It’s a program called youtube-dl. It was originally just a python script but it looks like they have packaged it all up into a Windows executable now. You can get all the info along with their source code and the compiled executables on their GitHub site. (Look for the part that says “Windows users can download an .exe file…”)

Once you have that executable, you need to figure out what command line parameters to pass to it. I’m still using the straight Python version, but I’m guessing your command line would look something like this:

youtube-dl.exe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDL2LcKnISU -f 22 -o “C:\kayaking.mp4”

Once you get that figured out, then you could schedule it via the Window Task Scheduler. That would be fine for one time video downloads. If you want to do this more often, then you’ll need to build up some automation around it to make it easier to use. I hooked into the YouTube APIs to get videos from my subscriptions and compare them with a list of videos that I’ve already downloaded, etc. I can provide more info if you want to go that far.

This all sounds crazy but it works really well. My setup has downloaded over 4000 YouTube videos over the years and most of the time I just plop down in front of the TV and watch whatever new videos have been placed there for me. I don’t have to think about the magic happening behind the scenes.

benmartens October 3, 2016 Geek

Hall of Famer

Congratulations are in store for Andy Campbell who was recently inducted into his college’s hall of fame! He holds the career record for hits and runs, but if you look at the career leaders page, you’ll see his name in the top 10 for all of the offensive stats except sacrifices.

It made me wonder who was in the Purdue Hall of Fame so I checked it out and discovered that Travis Dorsch was inducted this year. He was the kicker on our football team while I was there and we had a German class together. I will always remember him for one thing… My Junior year was the year that Brees led Purdue to the Rose Bowl. There was one game that season that ended with Dorsch walking off the field over to the front of the student section and flipping us all off for giving him so much flak about his critical misses in previous games. Classy. Around that same time, someone made a huge chalk sign in the Engineering mall that said “Dorsch is German for wide right.”

I was initially surprised to not see Ryan Newman in the Purdue Hall of Fame, but I guess it’s because racing wasn’t an intercollegiate sport. He was an up and coming ARCA and Busch series racer while I was there and I remember him being on campus at least once with his race car.

But anyway, back to the main point, kudos to Andy! I hope that the induction ceremony is a lot of fun!

benmartens September 30, 2016 Sports

Elijah’s Swimming

Elijah started swim lessons a year ago (or was it two?) and he has been steadily moving up through the levels. Tyla is usually the one to take him to his lessons but I go every few months to see his progress. On this latest trip, I took the camera along and captured some video. This is totally one of those “proud dad” posts, but too bad. I love seeing him be obviously pushed outside of his comfort zone, make it through and then realize that he accomplished something he was hesitant about. It’s also nice to know that if he did fall into water, he’d have a chance at getting himself out.

benmartens September 29, 2016 Family