Today I made some decent progress on our basement.  I started the “Electrical” phase of the project and ran cabling for the outlets in the music room and living room.  Nikki's step-father came over to help too, which sped up the process significantly.  This is about as far as I can go with the electrical work for now until Nikki and I decide what we want to do for lighting.  Once we figure that out, there'll be a lot more cable to run. 

I took a few pictures to document the day.  I also added a new subfolder for ductwork in the BasementProject image library.  Nothing too exciting, but it shows all the custom ductwork we've put in so far. 

With luck and a lot of will-power, the basement will be completely wired up by the middle of February.  By March, all of the framing might be complete.  And by mid-March all of the drywall might be up.  And by summer the whole project might be done.  With no luck and my usual procrastination, it'll be done next winter.  :)

Things are going well with VirtualPuck.com, although the progress has slowed due to my renewed motivation to work on my basement.  Most of my time lately has been spent validating the simulation output.  The simulation engine itself works great, but I have to keep tweaking inputs so that it behaves a bit more like real life.  For example, at the end of a season there'll be a player or two with 60+ assists but zero shots on goal.  Tonight I think I finally got player attributes set such that things are pretty realistic.  I'm going to run another complete season simulation overnight and see what it looks like tomorrow.

Otherwise there's a laundry list of stuff to take care of next:

• Fix some fomatting details on stats pages
• Fix some calculation bugs on stats pages
• Pretty up the design of the site a bit
• Scour the site with a fine toothed comb to make sure it plays nice with IE and FF
• Test different user role scenarios
• Guidelines doc for content contributors

Since I don't have an intended release date, I may add a few of these features:

• Bug reporting form
• Enhancement request form
• News/Content subscriptions
• RSS feed

If anything, those features will be slated for “next season”, whenever that is.  With luck, I'll have a release ready for a short season this winter/spring, otherwise it'll be running full steam this Fall/Winter.

Stole this from Jason's site.

How evil are you?

Steelers/Patriots

I'm a little bummed that the Steelers didn't win.  I like to pull for the underdog.  Even though the Steelers were seeded #1, the Patriots have been to the super bowl enough recently that I wanted to see them lose.  I'm not suprised the Pats won though because they are one of the greatest examples of a “team“.  Everyone pulls their weight, and that's how you win.

Eagles/Falcons

No suprise with the outcome of this game, but I have a little rant about this one.  The commentators (Joe Buck, et. al.) mentioned that McNabb said that he would “carry the team on his shoulders” and bring them a win.  I hate crap like that.  It's just the opposite of the Pat's “team”.  It's one guy that thinks he can win it by himself.  Yeah the team is riding a wave and I'm sure McNabb's teamates don't mind right now, but I just really dislike the attitude.  To me he's saying that he doesn't think the rest of his team is good enough to win when in reality he really needs them.  That's one reason why I love hockey so much...  you don't get the “I'm going to carry the team” mentality in hockey.

Super Bowl Prediction

Patriots will win 24-10 and will solidify themselves as the latest sports dynasty.  They will win because of what I've already stated above: they all pull their own weight, give you 60 minutes, and none of them would consider pulling out a Sharpie after a touchdown.  The Eagles have skills, but the Pats are a complete team.

Relatively, it's been a long time since I've changed my site's look & feel.  I think I kept the last design for at least half a year!  So for today, here's a new skin.  It's nicknamed “Soul“ because the inspiration came from the cover of Soulfly's "3" CD (an excellent listen, by the way).

Besides the page background, all design and graphics work was done by yours truly :)

Looks like I can't complain anymore.  See images below.  It snowed like a banshee today, and it's still going.  It's supposed to snow for like another 12 hours.  This totally rules.  The only downside is that Nikki and I missed the home opener for the Minnesota Swarm tonight as a result of the snow and bad driving.  It took me one hour and 45 minutes to get from Chaska to Edina to pick her up to go to the game.  We decided it'd take another 2 or 3 hours just to get to the game and probably miss a bit of it, so we decided to do something else. 

When we got home I took the snowblower out and helped some neighbors with their driveways, then our next-door neighbor Jason brought out a couple of beers and we chatted for a bit.  Great guy.  Thanks Jason!

So Nikki and I were finishing up dinner at the Cheesecake Factory and I noticed that she had left two crusts from the pre-entree bread. So I made a Mobius Strip out of them. It totally rocked. It was like an edible Escher drawing or something.

Sweet!  What a great idea.  You could have a wall for anything you hate.  Racists, terrorists, the NHLPA, reality TV, mainstream music, llamas, pistachios, whatever. 

Pilgrims stone a wall representing 'Satan' in the Mina valley, just outside the Saudi holy city of Mecca. Some 2.5 million Muslims took part in the 'Stoning of Satan' ritual, as the Islamic world marked the Eid al-Adha feast of sacrifice following the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Link

 

Here's a very, very well-produced video exposing glitches in the Halo 2 Burial Mounds map.  A delight to watch in this dark, cold time known as Wednesday night. 

Hi- and Lo-res versions are available at http://halo.bungie.org/oldnews.html?item=11956

There is a deal to be made.  I'm optimistic:

Link

In my opinion this is the best negotiating that has happened since the lockout begin in September.  Bettman and Goodenow had to be removed from the process to make this happen.  With those two out I think something will happen tomorrow. 

After all the forecasts of 80% chance of snow and all the talk about a storm, I could see even more of my lawn this morning than yesterday.  Either the weather patterns are extremely flukey or weather forecasting is further solidifying itself as being guesswork at best.  I have a feeling I won't be breaking out the tire tubes and going to any sledding hills at all this winter. 

If it doesn't snow today I'll be pissed.  Never in my life have I seen so little snow as this winter.  It's depressing.  It's freaking January and I can still see my lawn.  I remember the days when it'd be Thanksgiving weekend and there'd be snow up to your knees.  I haven't even had to take my snow thrower out of the garage yet.  I've only shoveled once this winter.  If I sound a little too hung up on this, it's because I am.  These are the truly important things in life.  Snow.  Music.  Video games.  Pet rocks.  Spam sculptures.  Filling up your tub with jello.  Etc.  Snow is right up there with those things.  And yes, I have made a Spam sculpture and have pictures to prove it.

Bravo.

Link

This time it feels like the talks will be a bit more genuine.  The two biggest factors in the negotiations, Goodenow and Bettman, won't be participating.  Nor will a large number of reps from the players or league sides as in the past.  Since both sides have such differing views to begin with, I'm not optimistic a deal will be reached.  However, I think this is the best chance that they will have to reach an agreement.  Props to Linden.  It's at least good to see that the NHLPA players' rep, symbolically the most important player in the negotiations, wants to see an agreement and has a genuine concern.  I've never gotten that feeling from Goodenow or Bettman. 

Having no NHL hockey is killing me this year. 

So far I have about 75% of the core domain objects done, and I've completed the simulation engine (in 3 hours total) this morning.  The front end for domain administration is complete.  Here's the bulk of what's left:

• Address some database connection pooling issues (connections aren't closing)
• Shorten simulation times
• Connect the simulation engine to the domain objects so that simulated data can be saved
• Complete the user interface for users to browse teams, players, games, and stats
• Add content administration features (team articles, player bios, opinions, etc)
• Add general commenting features
• Add bug reporting/feature request forms
• Develop controls and content for home page

The biggest issue to address right now is the long simulation times.  It takes about 45 seconds to simulate one game, which is acceptable but I'd like it to be better.  The simulation will be executed from a Windows desktop app on my own, so if I can't get it going much faster then I can live with it. 

Unfortunately, I'm falling victim to blog spam.  Some of my posts are becoming infested with comments of no value other than to advertise someone else's site (e.g. online poker).  I haven't been able to find any IP blocking or anti-spam features of my .Text blog, so if this gets any worse I'll have to disable comments until I find some better answers.  In the meantime, if anyone has ideas about how to handle this, I'm all ears.  Just don't advertise yer website with a block full of useless content in your comments, you sneaky geeks. :)

I've been putting some serious coding time into a personal project that I'm working on (www.virtualpuck.com).  I estimate that I've put about 20 hours into the design and development so far.  It feels good to be going to bed after midnight on a regular basis again....

virtualpuck.com will be the heart of a fictitous, simulated hockey league.  This isn't the first time I've attempted to create such a league, but this time around it will succeed because the design will work.  Specifically, the simulation engine is planned and tested, and my experience with ASP.Net web development has become substantial enough (over 3 years) such that I can develop the site more quickly with higher quality (e.g. performance, bugs, appearance, etc).

In the past, the idea has resulted in a static site for people to just look at.  This next design will allow site members (besides myself) to contribute content to help keep the site fresh and interesting.  In the last version, I got really tired of updating static HTML content and eventually the site just became stagnant (except for the low-level game and player stats). 

The other really cool thing about this project is that I'm incorporating serious unit testing with development.  I'm not quite doing true test-driven development, but it's a huge improvement over how I've approached my personal projects in the past.  I'm at least able to run unit tests with NUnit as I make and break stuff.  It's a beautiful thing.

So enough rambling.  Just wanted to give an update since it's been a while.  Ya.