Ramblings of a Geek

I’ve kept this blog up and running on and off for the last several years. It’s been mostly off to be honest and the content wasn’t all that great. Actually, it probably isn’t even good.

As part of being unemployed for a few weeks I’ve started writing some blog posts as it relates to IT and am at least sort of proud of the work. I am in the process of taking a second pass through the first few articles. I plan to start posting these articles next week. My goal is to post three articles per week for the foreseeable future. I’m trying to get at least a week or two ahead immediately as I’m prone to occasional bouts of procrastination.

I hope you find my articles useful. Please let me know if you do, don’t or have other suggestions or comments.

Thanks.

I am an avid Fantasy Football player and have been since I was a kid.  I started back in the days when you used to have to wait for the paper the next day to tally your scores by hand.  No fractional points, no crazy scoring, just basic fairly easy to tally (and hard to dispute) scoring.  It was actually a decent use of basic math, and I normally had my team’s scores tallied up before I finished my cereal in on Monday morning before heading out to school.  Clearly, times have changed in fantasy football, and it’s mostly for the better.

The last couple of years I’ve played primarily on ESPN Leagues and found their live scoring on the web to be decent, and their mobile website live scoring was also done well.  My primary reason for liking the ESPN way of doing things was that they had free live scoring when others charged for live stats.

This year ESPN released an iPhone/iPod Touch application on Apple’s App Store so I thought I’d give it a spin.  The first thing to notice is that the price of the application was pretty steep: $4.99 for something you can get basically for free by using their mobile website.  I figured it was probably worth it so I plunked down my $5 and downloaded it.  After entering my ESPN username and password it brought up my teams as expected (One thing to note is that you must use your ESPN username and password – don’t use your email address as it won’t work).  The interface was pretty intuitive and easy to navigate.  On the home screen in addition to viewing your teams you also have the options of myFantasyCast, NFL Scores and Fantasy News.  The best option here if it’s gametime is to use the myFantasyCast as you can quickly cycle between your teams which is a pretty handy feature.  The NFL Scores is exactly what you’d expect and looks pretty similar to the ESPN ScoreCenter App.  The Fantasy News section is basically an aggregate of the news stories relating to Fantasy Football from ESPN.

Managing Your Team(s)

In contrast to the mobile website managing your rosters in the app is definitely smoother.  You can also view the breaking fantasy news and player cards very quickly and easily.  Overall, managing your team vs the mobile website definitely goes to the app.

Scoreboard/Standings/Players/Schedule

This is another easy win for the App – it’s just more refined than the website though provides the same basic information.

Message Board/League Settings

These are features not even provided on the mobile website.  If your league uses the message board with any frequency this would be a feature that is handy to have.  Also, the ability to see the rules of the league on your device might also prove useful.

Activity Feed

This is a cool feature that you can view Player Updates, Transactions and League Manager actions.  I find that I check this at least a couple of times per week to see quickly what’s going on in my leagues.

The Ads

BY FAR THE WORST THING about the ESPN Fantasy Football app is in addition to the $4.99 they present you with ads in the software. The accepted convention for ads in iPhone software is that if the app is free ads are just fine.  When you charge for the app the ads should go away.  Apparently, ESPN didn’t get the memo. The ads are pretty annoying – they appear in the upper right hand corner with a 1″x1″ square when there isn’t data up there (for example on the front page) and then in the screens like the roster, scoreboard, etc it’s a small banner on the bottom of the screen just above their bottom line crawl.  It’s really REALLY stupid that they have ads at all, it’s the sort of double-dip that you would not expect from the Worldwide Leader.  I hope they fix that soon, but there is no indication that they’ll be removed at this time.  Emails to ESPN’s customer service have gone unreturned and through an exchange via Twitter they were non-commital at best.

The Service

When I tried to check my scores on opening Sunday the service was down on and off for the entire first game.  They were pretty responsive to tweets as far as the status when I asked what was going on.  Once the service returned it worked very well and was a good couch companion. We’ll have to see how week two goes as if it continues to go down when the program is actually most useful it will easily be a deal breaker.

Notifications

While the program has “push” notifications it isn’t really timely – it just updates you hourly based on scores, Injury updates and Start/Bench alerts which pretty  much just tells you if your opponent changed their lineup.  The feature isn’t all that useful to be honest.

Features That Need to be Added

I would love to see detailed stats for players in the scoreboard as it just gives you the total number of points for each player.  Having those stats available even if you just clicked on any specific player would be quite helpful.  As it stands, you have to go to the NFL scores section and into each game to check on the actual stats.

The other thing to add would be a push notification to notify you when your players (and possibly your opponent’s players) do something significant (scores, fumbles, or other noteworthy actions during the game).

Conclusion

The application is pretty useful if you are a ESPN Fantasy Football user – even with the $4.99 + ads.  Either the ads should go away or the cost of the application should be free.  It also seems like they’re going to charge you a yearly fee for this application which seems a bit unreasonable, but that is very much subject to change so we’ll have to wait and see.  I’d also pay attention to see if the service goes down again on Sunday – the service needs to work through the whole weekend without outages.

My suggestion is to check and see if the mobile website gets you the information you want before, during and after the games.  If you find yourself wanting more I’d check out the ESPN app.  Also, if you’re a Yahoo! fantasy football player their app is free and apparently excellent.  Perhaps I’ll go sign up for a Yahoo! fantasy football account and see how that app compares.  Maybe this is the year Yahoo! catches and passes ESPN…

When I purchased my new iPod Touch in February it was love at first boot. From the moment I fired it up it became the device to have with me at all times. It held my songs, videos, podcasts, and audiobooks. There was no shortage of games to pass the time and other utilities that were most useful.

I hate to say it but the honeymoon is over. I now hate the damn thing. No, it’s not because it has become addictive (which it has). It’s not because I wish I had an iPhone (which I do but only a little bit). No, it’s because all it can sucessfully do any longer is crash. It crashes when syncing music, it crashes when playing games, and now it crashes when trying to factory reset the thing.

First of all, I define this crash as the device shuts off and you have to push and hold the home and powe/sleep button. Then you wait about five minutes and normally it comes back up. It has always crashed on occasion while playing games but not enough to make me concerned, though it was easily enough to make me annoyed when I was in the middle of a game or some other super important task.

Then in rapid succession I installed iPhone OS 3 and SimCity and it’s been a rapid decline into iPod Touch hell ever since. My once beloved device stopped being its normal useful and fun self. SimCity crashed with such regularity only procrastination along with me wanting to troubleshoot this out has kept me from requesting a refund. I figured that since I could almost guarantee a crash in SimCity it would be a good tool to see if whatever was causing the crashes was fixed by my troubleshooting.

I performed a full restore from factory settings, installed only SimCity and CRASH. When I tried to uninstall SimCity it didn’t help at all. in fact it started to crash regularily even during syncs. I figured, no problem, do another restore, and I’d be all set; except it started crashing during the restore process. I’m now stuck with an iPod that can’t even make it through a factory reset without crashing. So, I have a $300 paperweight for the moment and am not too happy about it. I resigned myself to making an appointment with the arrogantly named Genius bar.

My guess is that one of the memory modules is having a problem reading, writing or both. Let’s see if Apple lives up to their normally praise worthy support reviews. Ideally they’d just swap out a brand new 16gb iPod in the store but I won’t be holding my breath on this one.

At least I can borrow my wife’s pink Nano for a couple of days. I think I’m comfortable enough in my manhood for that.

********* Update 7/5 *********

Still crashes when I try to sync my music – every time. Podcasts synced okay but I will probably just use the pink nano for audio for a few days until my replacement comes in. Seems odd that it crashes when syncing. I’ve been able to load a few apps but nothing that will tax it’s little malfunctioning brain.

********* Update 7/5 *********

Just got back from the Apple Store and they were able to get the iPod back to a usable state but they’re going to replace it anyway because there’s dust between the screen and glass. I have a feeling that the guy at the GB didn’t think it was going to remain crash free. Just have to wait a couple of days now.

********* Update 7/7 **********

Replacement iPod received.  Seems to work fine.  Extensive testing to commence.

********* Update 8/1 **********

Replacement iPod still working fine, and I was impressed with Apple’s customer service.  Hopefully it doesn’t break again until I’m ready to buy a new one

We were out shopping yesterday and happened across a display of Mountain Dew and Pepsi Throwback. For those of you who haven’t heard of the Throwback products from Pepsi, it’s basically their normal pop but instead of high fructose corn syrup they use sugar. I’ve been looking forward to trying this ever since it was announced.

Mountain Dew

I tried the Mountain Dew first, and it’s pretty good. I drink Dew all the time so I’m pretty familiar with its taste. The first thing I noticed that the taste didn’t ‘bite’ as much as the standard Dew – it was just a little bit muted. This wasn’t a bad thing though, it was just something I noticed.

Overall, the taste was very similar to the standard Mountain Dew which is a good thing.  I suspect that’s what they were going for though and as I have a few more I may revise my impressions of it but overall it’s a worthy replacement.

Pepsi

Let me start off with saying that I’m a Coke guy.  I’ve never been a huge fan of Pepsi at all.  If the choices are Pepsi or water I would almost always choose water.  I was curious to the taste of Pepsi Throwback so I picked up a couple of bottles of it along with the Dew.  I was pretty impressed by the change – it’s not wildly different but it certainly tastes better than standard Pepsi to me.  If this was the regular formula for Pepsi I would probably not switch from Coke but it would make it where I would order a Pepsi from time to time.

Overall

Overall, if the Throwback versions are truly less unhealthy as opposed to the high fructose corn syrup options I would definitely support replacing both the standard versions with the natural sugar versions.  I suspect though, that the health impact is very small and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Throwback versions are more expensive than the standard variety.

I’d say based on taste alone I would support a change to the Throwback for Pepsi wholeheartedly. I’m not as convinced about Mountain Dew, though I have a few bottles left so reserve my right to change my opinion in either direction there.  I think my biggest problem here is that I’ve been drinking Mountain Dew for so long any variance to the flavor takes a bit to fully get used to.

I hear that Coke with sugar is MUCH better than standard Coke.  I hope that they release that at some point as I’d definitely give that a shot.

On a side note, if anyone has any tips on how to stop drinking pop alltogether I’m all ears.

I recently purchased a 16 gb iPod Touch to replace my failing iPod video that I’ve had for several years.  I picked the Touch because of it’s versatility.  I really liked the idea of having a full featured browser as well as a music/video device. 

The device is about as perfect as a mobile device as one could hope for.  It does pretty much everything I could ask for.  The browser is good, the app store is a fun diversion with many fun and interesting apps, the music plays great, and the video quality is second to none in a portable device this small. 

The Battery

I am yet to run the battery all the way down and I’ve used and used and used it.  I routinely listen to podcasts 5-6 hours per day and the battery barely moves.  I’ve watched a couple of hours of video and barely even had power drop to half way.  The closest I got to running the battery down was when I was on a weekend trip.  I listened to music for a couple of hours on the way up, watched a couple of hours of video, surfed the net and checked mail all day, and listened to music all the way home again.  After all that, the battery still had about 40% of juice left. 

The Screen

The screen is beautiful.  It’s amazing how such a small screen can look so nice. The touching isn’t as precise as using a stylus, but it’s a tradeoff that I’m willing to accept. 

The Keyboard

This is where I thought I would grumble extensively though I’ve been pretty pleasantly surprised.  I’ve been thumb typing for pushing 7 years now as I had one of the original Blackberry devices that was the pager style.  I’ve always preferred the tactile feedback. I still prefer the “real” keyboard but as far as a screen keyboard I don’t think I could find much better.  Because you’re tapping the screen with your fingers (or thumbs in my case) you will likely make a ton of mistakes.  The good thing is that for most obvious ones the iPod will fix on the fly.  I try not to write anything long-form on it though as it would get old REAL fast.

The Speaker

The built in speaker (new to the second generation touch’s) is a very welcome addition.  I have wanted a built in speaker for my iPod since my very first one.  While this speaker isn’t  the best it does exactly what I want it to do – play podcasts.  I don’t expect much from it music-wise but for listening to spoken audio it does a pretty decent job.  I listen to podcasts and audiobooks about 75-80% of the time.  It’s great being able to start the day with listening to The Best of Mike and Mike while getting dressed.  It’s also great when I’m working and don’t want to wear headphones.  It’s not going to fill a room with sound but it easily serves my requirements.

The other stuff (Wireless, Audio, etc)

I’m not going to spend much time on the audio over headphones as it’s excellent as always.  I’m not an audiophile and I find the standard iPod headphones to be just fine.

I’m having some wireless issues, though they appear to be just at home as I’ve not had issues while out and about.  Basically, what happens is that my iPod still stays connected to my wireless access point but it won’t pass traffic.  I have a ping utility that when I’m having issues I can’t ping by name or IP address.  It’s annoying, really annoying but I haven’t dug too deeply into it.  If I figure it out I’ll make a follow up post on the off chance anyone has a similar issue.

Gripes

Aside from my keyboard and wireless annoyances I do have a couple of things that bug me about the device.  The biggest thing that bugged me at first was that the headphone jack is on the bottom.  For most users it probably isn’t a big deal, but the mount I use in my car required me to drill a hole in order to get it to work in the mount.  Another car related item – with my old iPod I could easily pause it with just hitting the pause button.  With this iPod I have to hit the home button, slide my finger across the screen and then hit the pause area on the screen.  It requires three times the interaction to pause it.  Those are the main gripes – neither are show stoppers by any stretch.

Overall

I don’t think I could come up with a better portable device for surfing the web, listening to podcasts or music, watching videos and playing causal games on.  It does all very VERY well, and I certainly recommend anyone considering a portable music device to check this thing out.  The price tag could push a few away though – $229 for the 8gb, $299 for the 16gb, and an overpriced $399 for the 32gb.