I got tired whoring my traffic out to NFL.com and CBS sportsline. Anyone bloggers interested can create a league with their own 16 - 32 teams, or can simply join one of ours. Currently I’m selling Commissioner leagues for Fantasy Football (NFL) at $50.00 per league. If you were planning on joining a league or starting a league, PLEASE give my league a shot.

Commissioner Leagues features include:
Complete mobile access - for you ‘tards sending messages from your crackberries.
Real time Transactions
Online Draft War room for each team
Scoring versatility and customization
Live/Daily stat feeds
Commissioner can charge a fee per team(16 teams per league, $2 extra for every team over 16)
Or Commissioner can choose to make it a free league.
Commissioner can choose to charge per trade, or not.
Customizable Scoring, Live Results, Keeper/Dynasty Leagues, Custom Logos & Commentary, Player Ranking, Info & Analysis, League Chat & Messageboard, IDP, Top Players, Average Draft Analysis, YouTube, Betting Lines, Value Rank, Multi-Conferences, Coaching Efficiency Analysis, Coach/Team of the Week, Power Rankings, Sound Files for Team/League, Smack Board, Multiple Layout Choices.
And plenty of tools to customize the crap out of your league.

Remember:  the Commissioner of each league can choose to make his league a free league or a pay per team.  Commissioner of each league can charge per trade, have season end or weekly prizes(I’m trying to avoid comming out and saying that you can gamble, but if you read between the lines…..)

And who knows… if you like the site, sign up for a free sports blog. We offer all the features they got over at wordpress.com plus some they don’t. intrigued? Sign up for a blog or a username.

And at what cost?

Are there any fewer players using performance enhancing drugs because Bonds hasn’t stepped onto the diamond? If Bonds is a threat to “team chemistry”, first define ‘team chemistry’? And whether, in the most individual of sports, it even matters? Have the “Youth of America” stopped playing “Grand Theft Auto” long enough to be corrupted by Bonds?

Shakespeare said it well. “Use every man according to his desert, and who shall escape whipping?” If purity of mind, body, and spirit is the standard, who indeed?

What about Manny Ramirez? He pushed the RedSox traveling secretary down because the slugger didn’t get enough tickets to distribute to family and friends. At least he didn’t take the man’s AARP card. Then, according to a sportscaster close to the team, Side Show Manny intentionally struck out in a game against the Yankees after he was fined over the incident.

Maybe Alex Rodriquez? Admittedly, we’d have to do without a lot of players if the bar was set at cheating on your wife. But who is the bigger jerk? Bonds for trying to keep up with McGwire and Sosa in the steroids arms race or ARod? And give Barry a few points for not making a spectacle of himself with Madonna.

Then you’ve got Brett Myers of the Phillies. Management rallied around him like a fallen flag in battle after he knocked his wife around on the streets of Boston. Last I heard he was still pitching, and recently commented that he was getting his swagger back. Now there is a cheery prospect.

How about the General Managers who watched as not just Bonds, but a good chunk of baseball’s power hitters turned baseball into one big chemistry experiment? Come to think of it, did even one of them get named in the Mitchell Report? And what of Bud Selig who presided over it all? Think he should join the ranks of baseball’s unemployed?

The truth is, baseball made an example of Barry Bonds for three reasons.

One they just don’t like Bonds, who has all the charm of an abandoned Russian chemical weapons lab. Two, he became the public face of a steroid scandal baseball’s executives were trying mightily to ignore. And three, at 44 he has more value utility value to baseball’s leaders as a bad example than as a hitter.

Bonds should have been in uniform from Day 1 this spring. Nobody can tell me he wouldn’t have added value to some American League team’s lineup. Or that, for reasons good and bad, he wouldn’t have put bodies in seats everywhere he played. And there is no doubt he could have been a difference maker to a contending team.

The same guys who told us baseball had no serious problem with steroids now tell us it is mere coincidence Bonds has not been signed. That the collective brain trust that is paying Eric Gagne, Andy Pettite, Jose Guillen, Tom Glavine, and Andruw Jones a total of $65,000,000 this season all spontaneously decided a player with 28 home runs, an OBP of .480, and slugging percentage of .564 was too risky a gamble to take.

Sure, Bonds had a good year they say, but Pedro Feliz was available at a mere $8,500,000 a year.

Baseball embraces its history like no other sports. On May 25, 1935 Babe Ruth hit his last home run. Three of them, in fact, with the last one leaving the park and traveling (based on accounts of where it landed) 600 feet.

The morally superior men who run the game of baseball are depriving fans of one of those moments in time. Nothing is going to be gained by preventing it, and nothing lost by letting Barry Bonds take the field one more time.

The company has an average age of 28 years old, but the designs we have been putting out are so…..90’s.  So, how does such a young company generate such an old facade?  More importantly, how do I tactfully if not delicately convince them that their vision on a few things (though not all) is…ummm….dated?

My first job was as a web developer assistant.  The developer I assisted was one who stayed on top of the latest and greatest technology and, well, developments in the field.  I was used to that type of guidance, so it is difficult for me to understand A) how these brilliant-minded people don’t, and B) how to express to them the importance of using every available time and resource to pursue new information.  They’re Information Experts (as the company name implies), but they put more emphasis on the technology than on the information they are distributing through the technology they build.

I currently don’t have the answers.  However, this is something that I will be researching in the near future.  I also welcome any insight that anyone might have to offer.

Maybe not this time. As much as I detest the Lakers, this could be the year history is made.

Commissioner David Stern, whose credibility as a sports czar is now a rather large notch below that of Vince McMahon of the WWE, got his dream matchup. Celtics and Lakers. Raise the ancient banners, pump up the volume on the hype, pray this is the year the finals TV ratings slide is reversed.

One small problem. The Celtics aren’t the Celtics anymore, and the Lakers are just a West Coast version of the Cleveland Cavaliers. So anything could happen, from LA rolling over and playing dead to the Celtics losing three in a row.

How could it happen?

The Celtics were 12-8 entering their matchup with Los Angeles. Round one they went up 2-0 on Atlanta and needed seven games to take down the mighty Hawks. Round two, they barely escaped a game seven one man attack by LeBron James. Next came the Pistons. Tied up after a 19 point blowout in Detroit, they righted themselves to win in 6.

The team all and sundry want to hand over the NBA title to is 3-8 on the road going into tonight’s game at Los Angeles. If the dysfunctional Lakers can get their act together, and there is no reason they can’t, they will go back to Boston needing only to win two road games against a talented, but not great team.

The Celtics have been held under 80 points four times during the playoffs and are perfectly capable of disappearing for long stretches of game time. When they are good they are very good, and when they are bad they are awfully bad.

What would a Celtic collapse look like? It would see Bryant scoring 40 plus in two of the three games. It would include a serious imbalance in rebounding in favor of Los Angeles. And it would likely include Paul Pierce disappearing in one of the two home games, the way he did in Game 3 in LA.

All of which are possible.

This is the series we learn where Phil Jackson really stands in NBA coaching history next to Auerbach and Holtzman. This is where we discover if the inner demons within Kobe Bryant have voices loud enough to drive him to carry his team on his shoulders three more nights. And it may be when we get solid evidence of how much truth there is to rumors of NBA manipulation of officiating.

Do I think the Lakers will stage a miracle comeback? Probably not, maybe even 80% odds against not. But I do think the series will go back to Boston and that game 6 will be tight. And that a Game 7 battle of two not so great teams would be a coin flip.

Anything can happen. Now we’ll see if it does.

Then I started working with ISE.  A small but growing software consulting company based in Carmel, IN, I work with 40+ guys (currently four other women) who for the most part are strictly programmers.  There is only one other person in the entire company whom I can turn to for any sort of graphical opinion, and he happens to work in the Cincinnati office.  One of the guys I have been working with closely on the Eli Lilly projects is definitely old school.  He still insists on using tables because that is what he is used to and he therefore finds it to be quicker and easier.  I have of course been politely correcting his erroneous track of thought.

Since it has been so long since I’ve done any in-depth CSS work, I of course struggled to remember some of the methods I had developed throughout the past few years.  Since I’ve been surrounded by people who turn to tables to solve all their problems, I could automatically envision how easy it would be with a table.  However, as stubborn as I am especially when it comes to best web practices, I refused to give up.  In the process, though, I had forgotten the solid, tangible reasons I was taught to use divs instead of tables in the first place, other than my former supervisor’s famous “tables are for tabular data” quote.  I of course turned to the web just to get a quick refresher so that I could properly defend my opinion if I were to be confronted about it.

I Googled “divs css vs tables”, and the first few responses which actually compared the two ALL said something to the effect of “there isn’t really any benefit of using divs over tables”.  I was and still am completely shocked and rather repulsed.  The one single reason that I have developed my own opinion about divs being the best practice is because of the long-term benefit.  To change the entire theme AND layout of your site, you could very easily edit one single style sheet in less than an 8-hour time frame.  Has everyone else forgotten about this?  Or am I the only person left in this world looking out for my company’s long-term best interest?

To say that my one and only solid argument is dismissable because it requires so much more time initially to develop than a table-based layout is absurd.  Its just down-right horse shit, especially since there are so many other reasons that I haven’t yet happened upon because I was so incredibly disgusted by the discovery that the first few results in a Google search were wrong.

I’m off to soak my mind in multiple A List Apart articles and Zen Garden themes.

Well, that joy didn’t last long when we realized that it made no economic sense for us. Talking with other small publishing companies around town, we found that the main gripe was the discount at which we were “forced” to sell our books. Our book, which is priced at US$15, was selling for $10.20 within three days. Add to that, or subtract I suppose, the cut for Amazon, then to our LSI, our printer, well, isn’t much left for the writer or for ourselves.

What we decided to do was create a PayPal account and use that to create our own shop page on our website.

Borders, the big book chain that is in a big financial mess, is cutting ties with Amazon, according to this NYT article.

I obviously don’t know what the terms of their long-running relationship had been, but it makes sense, from the perspective of a small press like us, to create your own e-commerce site. Seriously, it is the internet. You can reach our website from anywhere in the world. So why just rely on Amazon to sell your goods?

The Perry Bible Fellowship (PBF for short) is a comic strip published in a number of newspapers and several school papers in the US, a couple of newspapers in Canada, The Guardian (newspaper) in the UK, a few different magazines worldwide, and as a webcomic at dedicated website http://pbfcomics.com/. The PBF has been around since about 2001 in one form or another, but the current official PBF website only started in the later half of 2006 and production of new comic strips is and has been sporadic. There are currently over 200 strips, usually comprising of a short joke in just 3 or 4 panels, with both the type of humour and art style often varying. The PBF’s author is American artist Nicholas Gurewitch, who has won several awards for PBF.

The comic strips themselves as well a small number of other works by the author and information about him and it can be found at the official site linked above. The PBF is an excellent read, it’s extremely well drawn and is often hilarious. Much time can be spent exploring all the comic strips available on the website and I’ve found it a particularly good stop whenever I’ve wanted a quick laugh. Gurewitch stated earlier this year that he’s cutting back on production of new material so readers are unlikely to see more then one new comic strip a month, however this is understandable when you consider it’s just a hobby and he has never considered drawing PBF a career.

Below is a copy of one random comic strip from the PBF:

(There’s also a book available of PBF material called ‘The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories’.)

For those who know nothing about the English football leagues, here’s a brief very basic explanation: There are 20 teams in the Premier League (the top division) and 24 teams in the Championship (the second division). At the end of each football season (once a year) the bottom 3 teams in the Premier League, according to accumulated points, are relegated to the Championship. The top 2 teams in the Championship are automatically promoted to the Premier League and the third promotion place is available for the winner of a small playoff between the teams ranked third to sixth in the Championship.

This year (the 2007/2008 season) West Bromwich Albion FC and Stoke City FC won the top two automatic promotion places in the Championship, while Hull City FC, Bristol City FC, Crystal Palace FC and Watford FC fought it out in the play-offs. After Hull beat Watford and Bristol beat Palace in the play-off semi-finals they meet in the final today.

BBC news broke down the financial gains of promotion in this article, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7378516.stm.

For both sides today, this game represents a chance to play next season in the Premier League (for the first time in either clubs history). For me though, this really raises more questions about top league football being too much about money.

(I support Crystal Palace so don’t have particular allegiances in this game, although based on a better performance this season I’d rather Hull won.)

The AVGN videos are all very funny and if you’re interested in video games they can genuinely be quite informative. However, though it’s all in jest, the videos feature a lot of obscene language, so probably aren’t suitable for younger viewers or anyone who’s offended by such things. And, while it’s not necessarily a must, some knowledge of video games/gaming will help in understanding why particular parts of them are frustrating or ridiculous.

Rolfe is a big film fan and an amateur film-maker and has his own website (CineMassacre) and a couple of YouTube Channels where he discusses and showcases his work (including the AVGN videos). Several of his video game reviews have had a film related theme. His most recent AVGN review is of some old Indiana Jones games to mark the release of the new Indi4 film, here’s a direct link to the review: http://www.gametrailers.com/player/34277.html, it’s longer then most but it’s a good example of why the AVGN videos are so popular.

If you’re interested in video games and don’t happen to know about ScrewAttack or GameTrailers, there are links to each site in their titles in this sentence and both have lots of video-game related news, information, chat and stuff. Also, for anyone interested in films, here are links to James Rolfe’s website and YouTube channels featuring some of his other videos and short films and information about them and himself. Website: http://cinemassacre.com/, YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Cinemassacre, http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesNintendoNerd.

(On a side note: I had and do plan to write more and more frequently on aaoti and other subjects for Infinite Critique, but have been a bit ill over the past couple of weeks and haven’t got round to any writing. So you can thank me being ill for not having to skip my posts to get to the better stuff on Infinite Critique, but I’m feeling fine now so roll on me wasting more seconds of your valuable time.)

……………..

yesterday’s results:

my assumption: she is an architect and puts a lot of work into her thoughts.  she is a hard worker and can be very competitive.  although she is aware of her beauty, nothing about her is flaunting.  she appreciates comfort and loves to wear neutral colors.  she generally operates in neutral, but when challenged to take things to the next level, she often exceeds expectations.  she lives for moments when design and function create a perfect union.

her truth: she is a graphic designer from new york.  she is extremely practical and does honor comfort.  when she guesses what people think about her, she knows that people often assume that she is younger than her actual age.  she also figures that they have more negative thoughts than positive. she generally avoids competition that involves confrontation…”i am a terrible basketball player”.  she is happy, and she is not in love.