A Scattered Brain

As I do every year, I work to make my NCAA Tournament website a bit better and more streamlined. This year I wanted to focus on providing a bit more functionality for the users, as well as minor updates to design, changing colors as I also do each year. Basically I had three things I wanted to do this year:

• Change color scheme
• Make it so players see and can print their bracket upon submitting it
• Create a new area where a user can look up their bracket(s) prior to the games starting

I get requests nearly every year for people to see their brackets and in the past, I wasn’t able to provide that and really wanted to this year. Players will still need to contact me if they want to make changes to a bracket, but now they have the tools to see what they need to.

While just doing the above was a major undertaking, as I started working, I ended up doing those things as well as a complete reworking of all of the pages and nearly all of the code. Most of these are behind the scenes but here are some new additions that really advance the site into newer techniques.

• All PHP. In the past, I have used a Perl script generated by my pool software to insert entries into the database staging area. This year, I completely wrote that functionality into my own PHP.
• Complete CSS. I replaced nearly all inline style declarations and created solid CSS in two files (one for the pages, and one to specifically define the bracket and location of teams and results).
• 100% Validation. HTML has changed a lot since I was first introduced to it back in 1995. Now pages have important DOCTYPES that follow particular formatting to ensure that all browsers interpret the pages properly. I updated every page to ensure and check for XHTML validation. I can even have the seal of approval on the site to prove validation.

I am very pleased with how the site is turning out and should only have to make very minor changes when the 2012 version of my pool software comes out. I don’t plan on any more changes/enhancements for this year, but am already trying to think of possible changes for next year (perhaps looking into using AJAX instead of iframes to serve up the pages).

I hope you are all planning on joining this year as well. Details will be sent as the time draws near!

It is the beginning of a new year and I can honestly say that I am glad to see 2011 done and over with. In nearly every area of my life, there were challenges this year and difficulties throughout. Rather than looking back, however, I want to use this time and this space to look forward.

In this year (and really the last month of 2011) I am in a new house, in a new state, starting a new job. We picked up the family and moved from Las Vegas to just south of Charlotte in South Carolina. I have taken a new position with one of the largest health systems in the region supporting the oncology service line that is going major growth. It is a position with a lot of potential and I feel like I am making a more direct impact on the care of cancer patients, especially given that I don’t have a clinical background.

Resolutions have been up and down over the last few years. 2 years ago I feel I did pretty well since I used this blog to help keep me on track. Last year, I wasn’t as focused and didn’t hold myself accountable by having specific goals or a plan to implement them. With all the changes going into this year, I want to be specific and dedicated to my resolutions as much as possible. So without any further delay, here are my resolutions for 2012:

• Daily Devotional: In 2010 I set out and successfully read through the Bible in one year. Last year I wanted to keep up with a devotional but was never consistent about it. This year I want to try again.
• Physical Fitness: I have been able to maintain my weight for a couple of years but I still have a long way to go to get in shape. I don’t believe that I will be able to bowl regularly as there are no centers within a decent range of the house. There is, however, an aquatic center very near my office. I will check it out sometime this week, but my thought may be to swim each morning before work. If that doesn’t work to be a good option, I will have to figure out something else.
• Self Improvement: For the most part I believe I am a good person but there are certainly times that I react to situations in a less than ideal manner. The only way to truly change to become better is to acknowledge those times and figure a lesson to learn from that to hopefully not make the same mistake twice. While I may not detail out every aspect, I want to use this space as a personal journal to identify those situations and what I can do to better handle them. This will by far be the hardest resolution I have ever taken on and also the hardest to truly measure.

I believe those three are plenty for this year and hope to be more active on the blog this year as I track these and post about life in general. Take care all and I wish the best 2012 for each of you.

We are in the process of packing and moving out of state…so far things are lining up fairly well. We have the moving truck booked and coming next week, we have our housing lined up in the new location, and we have gotten a good start on packing. It is a lot of work and we are swimming in boxes right now but we are on our way.

Wednesday night was my last night for league this year as we are soon going to move (more posting on that possibly later). I had a very solid night of 224, 212, 217 for a 653 series. It is too bad I can’t build on that as it will probably be a long time before I bowl in a league again. We took 5 out of 7 points as a team so I went out on a high note there as well.

I will miss my team here as well as the league bowlers and wish them all the best going forward.

Last night was a very strange night for our team and for me.

As a team, we were all but one below average and the last was just around average.  Despite that, we won the first game by 80 pins, the second by 3, and lost the last game by 82.  That means we took total by 1 pin… 1 pin difference across 8 bowlers for 3 games; as they say, it just doesn’t get any closer than that.  We took 5 points, and should be in the top 5 going into position round next week I would guess.

Individually, things were even stranger.  I missed a couple of easy spares in the first and second games to wind up with a 170 and 184, respectively.  The last game the wheels came off.  I’m not sure what it was other than maybe being a little tired, but I wasn’t able to get anything to go down and wound up with 3 splits (2 in the first three frames).  I couldn’t ever find a line or speed that would work, and the final score was 138.  That gave me a season low series of 492.  I’d prefer not to see me go below 500 ever again!

As noted, next week is a position round.  I don’t think we’ll be realistically in the hunt to win the quarter, but to finish top 5 would be pretty sweet.

Let me start by apologizing for missing my post last week. It was a bit strange since we didn’t have a team against us as they were going to have to make up so I couldn’t report how we did. Personally that week was my worst of the year, with a 537 series. We were on the left side of the house (lanes 1-32) and I could never find a line that worked for me. That being said, we still ended up taking 4 points and found ourselves in 2nd place!

This week we were back on the right side of the house which plays much differently (not really sure why, but both sides always have played quite differently) and our team bowled quite well; all of us were at or above our average throughout, but the other team bowled lights out so we only one the first game, and that only by 5 pins. They killed us in the team score the other two games, so we were lucky to take the one game, but I don’t expect us to be in 2nd next week.

My League Summary

Take care all and have a great week.

This probably won’t be a very long post at all, but I just found the WordPress app for the iPad and wanted to try it out. So far it looks like a simple interface that could work out fairly well to allow for more short posts from time to time.

Like I said a short one to test the new app. Take care all.

Tonight, once again, we took all 7 points as a team which is always a good feeling.  Additionally, I had a very good night with many firsts of the season for me:

• First 200 game (games 2 and 3 actually)
• First 600 series (632 to be exact)
• First clean game (game 3)

My scores overall were 186, 200, 246.

Now for a little on my goals for this year and the biggest one is actually not score related, but a little more on that in a bit.  Score wise, I have two goals; the first is to have and maintain the elusive 200 average.  My last full season I ended up with a 192 average.  Just one more completed spare each game and I’m right there at 200 so it is achievable.  My second goal, also score related, is to not have any series lower than 550.  A 550 series is still a 183 average so in order to achieve that I have to remain fairly consistent.

That of course leads right into my third goal which isn’t directly score related, but more of a mental goal and mindset: bowl within myself.  I have found that it is fairly easy to do that during practice because there usually isn’t a lot of people around or even when bowling with friends and family as there isn’t any pressure on scoring.  But at league, I see people with much higher velocity and rev rates than myself, and quite frankly, I get a little jealous that I don’t have that tool set.  My ball speed is about average (maybe a touch below) and my rev rate is nothing to shout home about.  So while some others can hook the entire lane and make the pins fly everywhere, I start around center lane and bowl up 2nd arrow.  I still create a reasonable angle into the pocket, but nothing spectacular.  My goal then, for this season, is to just not care about the flash and style.  My game still produces good scores as long as I make my spares, so if I bowl within myself and my abilities instead of trying to ramp it up and impress (not that anyone really cares anyway, the score is all that matters) I believe I will be much happier and will bowl better.

Last night was week 3 (2nd week for me) of league and I’m feeling ok.  My scores this week were 168, 190, and 206.  I was hitting my marks most of the night and when I made a decent move left for the third game, things really started to open up for me.

My biggest area of rust are spares.  If you don’t include splits, I’m losing 20 pins (give or take) due to missed spares.  I’m sure that will get better as the season goes along, or at least I hope so.

Unlike previous years, where I’ve tracked our entire team include scores and recaps; this year I’m only going to track my personal scores and information.  The other bits were taking a bit of time best use elsewhere and the rest of the team didn’t mind my not keeping track.  I have updated the web site for the details of my site and that is located here.

Take care, and potentially soon I’ll start blogging about more than just the bowling but I’ll keep it simple for now.

Wow! It’s been a long time since I’ve posted and there are many contributing factors to that. Not least of which was one of the primary reasons I’ve taken the last year off of bowling, and that was the birth of our second child.

While the year off was great daddy time, it was nice to get back to league this past week. I missed the first week of the season (I tend to do that) because we were on vacation, but upon my return, I was actually able to re-join my old team so it was almost like I hadn’t left.

My scores were also like I hadn’t left… 193, 192, 189 and almost all of the games had a similar flow and all only one or two open frames preventing the 200 each time. I will work on getting the web page back up with details; hopefully for the next week.

Hope all is well for my one or two fans that may still check out the blog… here’s to the surprise to see something new.