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Fantasy Football 2018-19

Only 79 days left until kickoff of the 2018-19 NFL season. This year we had two managers leave our fantasy league. Thanks to Jim for playing with us the last 10 years and Austin for the last 5! You guys were great additions to the league and you will be missed.

Since we have some new members, I thought I’d introduce everyone:

  • Andy lives near Green Lake and his dog has more Instagram followers than I do.
  • Dad is one of my parental units. He lives in Indiana and has three tractors.
  • Logan is my brother-in-law (Tyla’s brother). He started off pretty bad in the league but somehow seems to be winning too much lately. He lives in Kirkland.
  • Luke is my brother-in-law (my sister’s husband.) He lives in Toledo and just built a fence.
  • Nick currently inhabits half of my office at work. We say that together we make a pretty average software developer. He lives in Woodinville.
  • Tim is my brother-in-law’s (Luke’s) brother. He was also my roommate for a few years.  He lives in Monroe.
  • Tyler lives all the way across the cul-de-sac from me. He has a bigger garden than me and one more MG than I do.

Now that you’ve all been introduced, let’s refresh our memories of the standings for the last 10 seasons.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
2008 Ben Tim Jim Luke Dad Ryan Andy Ed
2009 Luke Dad Kyle Tim Andy Jim Ryan Ben
2010 Luke Time Ben Dad Andy Jim Logan Kyle
2011 Luke Time Ben Dad Andy Jim Logan Kyle
2012 Andy Micah Ben Tim Jim Dad Logan Ryan
2013 Logan Andy Dad Ben Jim Tim Luke Austin
2014 Austin Jim Tim Ben Luke Logan Andy Dad
2015 Austin Logan Ben Dad Luke Andy Tim Jim
2016 Logan Austin Andy Ben Tim Jim Dad Luke
2017 Logan Ben Luke Austin Andy Dad Tim Jim

And if you take that chart and calculate average finish, here’s what you get:

Name Average Finish
Logan 3.2
Ben 3.5
Luke 3.5
Tim 3.8
Andy 4.6
Dad 4.9

The first piece of business is picking a date for our draft. We’ll do a live draft party at my house again, but as always, you’re welcome to autodraft if you prefer. I don’t think there’s much correlation between the people that the draft method you prefer and your finishing position in the league so don’t sweat it. Watch your email for a link to a poll for picking the draft date/time. You don’t want to miss out on your chance to pick Kaepernick. I mean, surely some team will pick him up before the start of the season, right?

benmartens June 18, 2018 Fantasy Sports No Comments

Disneyland Montage

As I was putting together a montage video for Elijah’s 5th birthday (coming Friday!), I realized that we had enough clips from Disneyland to put together a short video. It will be interesting to see how much of this he remembers as he gets older, but I suspect that all the pictures and videos will help trigger the memories. If I was going to make the most awesome family trip video, I would have been a lot more rigorous about the shots we got, but for just winging it, I think this turned out pretty well!

And if you missed it, there’s a (long) post with lots more details about our trip.

benmartens June 12, 2018 Family, Travel 1 Comment

IOT Candy Scale

I’ve been thinking about building an internet enabled scale for years now, and recently, I finally got around to building it. Sure, there are plenty of WiFi scales these days, but I wanted one that automatically took a measurement every few seconds and uploaded it to the internet where a website would display a continuously updating chart. I suppose a product like that exists, but I thought it would be more fun to make it myself.

The electrical components came from SparkFun. They make an OpenScale board that did almost everything I needed when connected to a load cell. The board was already programmed to have all the features I needed for calibration and taring the scale. Originally I had planned to hook that up to a WiFi-enabled Arduino or Raspberry Pi, but I kept it simple and just plugged it into my computer. The computer ran a simple program that I wrote to communicate with the board and get a reading every 30 seconds. Those readings were uploaded to a SQL database in Azure and then I wrote a website that used the Google Chart Library to display the measurements.

There are a lot of technical terms in that last paragraph, but it was mostly just plugging together a bunch of components to make the solution and I had it finished in a couple nights (after a lot of research to find all the components!) I mounted the load scale on a piece of plywood and connected a bowl to the top of the load cell. Voila!

The scale made its debut at work to celebrate my 12th anniversary at the company. You can see the live website at http://candyscale.azurewebsites.net/ It will always show the data from the last time I had the system set up and running. I’m hoping to try it again at Halloween.

benmartens June 5, 2018 Maker No Comments

Ocean Park Condo

Don was nice enough to offer up his timeshare points for us to get some rooms in Ocean Park, WA for Memorial Day. Ocean Park is on a peninsula in the very southwest corner of the state. We headed down there in a few groups, but thankfully, we all avoided the worst of the traffic unlike last year.

The weekend was spent enjoying the beach, swimming in the pool, eating lots of food, playing board games, and enjoying being together. Don has been working in Idaho so it was especially good to spend some time with him.

The condo was right across the parking lot from a 9-hole golf course. Elijah was very interested in it so I squeezed in a quick round with him riding along in the cart (and Logan came too.) I haven’t golfed in over a decade and I was using rented clubs. It wasn’t pretty but we survived and Elijah seemed to enjoy it. It did make me miss the game, but I need a lot of practice before I’d be willing to go out on a busier course.

benmartens June 2, 2018 Family, Travel No Comments