Kris invited me to play in a ProTrade challenge, ProTrade being a fantasy football meets the stock exchange type of website, where people can buy stock in players and receive dividends. A challenge is a group of people who compete amongst themselves. The main difference between regular fantasy football (or any other fantasy sport) and ProTrade is that only one player can own a player in the fantasy sports, where as multiple players can own a part of a player in the ProTrade model.

So, despite my reluctance to participate in any fantasy sports (Me. Sports. Not so much.), I signed up for the challenge. I, of course, used the "pick my players for me" feature, allowing the site to draft me five players to play.

And I rocked!

I was consistently at second place in the challenge last week. Kris squeaked by me on Monday night, his having players who played on Monday night and my not. No problem.

Well, along comes Friday night (last night), and Kris tells me I should trade my players out for players who are playing on Saturday. These players can earn me dividends, so I'd be throwing (admittedly ProTrade fake) money away not trading in and getting some playing players.

Eying him suspiciously, I listen to him, trading away Peyton Manning and Joe Jurevicius for some lame-o players that not only didn't early any dividends, but actually lost money.

Did I mention that Kris was the one who made these new picks for me?

Yeah.

So, I drifted down from third, to fourth, to fifth, to dead last as the buy-sell fees ate away completely ALL of my fake-dividends.

Weak sauce, indeed. Weak sauce for freakin' listening to Kris. Suuuuuuurrrrrre, you're just trying to help me. Suuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrre, there wasn't the slightest ulterior motive on that "you should trade players" comment.

Another argument for buy-and-hold demonstrated, though the fake market of ProTrade. Those fees'll kill ya.

BTW, you can't post "crap" in the ProTrade forums. It's considered "profanity." Go fig.

Too cold to be much other than winter. It's rainy (as many people associate with winter in the Bay Area). It's windy (as I associate with winter in the Bay Area). It's cold (as most people associate with winter in general).

What better time to put up a new theme than winter?

It was long past time to change the theme, anyway. Too many people think I actually like my dogs with the old one. Why else would I have pictures of the at the top of the page?

Hint: the picture of Bella made me laugh, and Kris was annoyed that I didn't put up a picture of Annie up, too.

As if I'm not allowed to have a favorite.

My favorite being, of course, Ariel's cat.

[Background image "flaked" courtesy of chris at absentfocus.com, via kaliber 10k. Use from Chris granted for non-commercial use.]

On the way home today, I decided to stop at the bank and deposit my paycheck. Not a big paycheck, but the payroll services messed up my direct deposit, so I had to go to the bank. Oddly enough, the same company messed up both of Kris' automatic payroll deposits, giving me even less confidence in the company.

So, I dashed into the bank on the way home, check in hand. As I walked up to the center counter with all the deposit slips, I noticed an old woman standing there.

I noticed her about 12 feet away from the counter. With my nose.

She had let out the most amazing fart, managing to stink up a 12' radius around her with a normal but very strong fart smell. I originally walked up to stand next to her to fill out my deposit slip, but managed only about 2 seconds next to her, deciding to walk to the other counter quickly.

I left laughing at the whole experience. Apparently my sense of smell is coming back.

I'm sure to forget this, so I'll write it down here, for when I implement the roster barcode scanner part of the rostering system for college. Via Joel on Software's article on How to Ship Anything:

"I didn't really know which barcode scanner to buy, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find any online reviews of barcode scanners. I did find out that the kind of scanner I wanted was a USB keyboard wedge scanner. That means that it has a USB port, which makes connection simple, and it behaves exactly like a keyboard as far as your computer is concerned. I also found out that I wanted a laser scanner, not a CCD scanner, because it works at a distance. I ended up buying a Wasp WSL-9000 along with the stand which you can see in the picture. So far it's been great.

Setting up the barcode reader was the easiest thing in the world. Plug it in to a USB port, and you're done. It comes with a whole book of barcodes that you can scan to configure it to behave in many interesting ways, which you can throw away. Without any setup, when you scan a barcode, your scanner will type the letters that barcode represents on the keyboard and press Enter."

According to Google, though, that's the only place on the web that refers to that scanner as "Wasp WSL-9000", so search for Wasp WSL 9000" (no dash).

And get the one with the USB cable.

My Treo finally synced and I was able to gather up all my mobile blog posts to post them. This one I wrote a couple weeks ago. Yay, sync!

So, I'm driving behind this car on the way to class tonight. It's a fairly new car, but I'm still thinking, "What a piece of sh*t." when I look at it.

After following it for about half a mile, I realize why I keep having that thought: the license plate was 4POS273, which my mind kept translating into "4 piece of sh*t 2-7-3."