Footy Skill
11/14/09
I recently wrote a report (pdf) on how to assess skill in video soccer. It contains data from an actual Sensible World of Soccer (SWOS) tournament. Enjoy!
Oooh Girl
4/5/09
The only thing I know about music is what I like. My brother played Sam McBride's Oooh Girl for me, and I thought it was really cool, so I got permission from Sam to post it. It reminds me of some of the music Andy Samberg and his gang have at thelonelyisland.com. It's in mp3 format and can be downloaded for free:
Sam McBride's Oooh Girl mp3 (zipped) - 4.3 MB
Favorite Sites
1/31/08
I spend a decent amount of time online. A broadband connection is the one modern convenience I would miss most if I were stranded on a desert isle. While I spend most of my time at a few sites, there are a number of others that I like.
Google.com and wikipedia.org must be the two websites that I go to most often, but the site that I enjoy most for its content is slashdot.org. Slashdot's tagline is "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." The site layout is like a blog with a summary for each of a number stories each day. Most stories are submitted by readers and are good discussion-starters. A lot of them are computer-related. Technology and science entries are common.
I'm more of a generic nerd than a computer nerd, but it works out because there is a fairly wide range of stuff at slashdot (from open source software issues to the Poincare conjecture to "Teleportation - Fact and Fiction"). Though the site has a lot of interesting aspects, the one I enjoy most is the comment section. Each story has a "Read More..." link that takes you to a moderated forum. The moderation is useful because you can filter out all of the poor comments or let the best comments rise to the top. The conversations can be interesting, informative, or funny. (I did not just intentionally steal common /. moderation labels there.) I have gotten a lot of good tech-related information from slashdot.
I love watching videos online. I go to two sites for this and watch a video or two every day. Neither can be considered 100% safe for work. The first is digg.com. Digg has links to a variety of videos, often with a nerdy slant to them, from science experiments to the latest Star Trek trailer. Digg occasionally has content that is not appropriate for kids. The second video site is milkandcookies.com. A lot of the videos are old commercials or clips from classic television or movies. Recently, there have been a number of videos with Jim Carrey doing standup or talkshows. Themes come and go at Milk and Cookies. Though still sporadic, Milk and Cookies tends to have more adult-themed content than Digg. Both sites have a wide variety of content pulled from various sites that would be tough to comment on in an essay of this magnitude.