This is part 4 of a 4 part series – you can read the rest here: Recycling A Broken Surfboard – Part 1 Recycling A Broken Surfboard – Part 2 Recycling A Broken Surfboard – Part 3 After I finished painting the board I dropped it off at Sunset Shapers in San Francisco to get glassed. It was winter, the busy season in those parts, when big winter waves broke boards and drove demand for new ones, so I figured it would be a while until I eventually got it back. I wasn’t in much of a hurry anyhow. A few weeks later while browsing Surfline I noticed my surfboard had made the weekly social media roundup. It was sitting next to a Tomo creation, nonetheless, which made it even cooler. Daniel Thomson, founder of Tomo surfboards, is a (much, much, much better than me) shaper that I really respect
This is the third post in a series about my fantasy football auction strategy. I first wrote about the strategy here. Then after the season I started with part 1 of the retrospective. In this final post I have a few other thoughts that I’ll share. The Importance of the Draft Below are the positions each team ended in and the difference between their expected and actual results. We can see that in general, teams that predicted well on draft day performed well in the season. The r squared for the linear trend line here is .63 which means that for my seasons we can contribute about 63% of the final results to draft performance. What accounts for the other 37%? I would simplify the decision types in fantasy football by describing three. Draft day – who you predict will perform well In-season transactions; waiver wire, free agency & trades
Last August, before fantasy football season started, I came up with a strategy to approach the auction draft my work league was having. My season is now over, I didn’t make the playoffs, so I want to take a look back at that strategy to see what I can learn. The important part of this analysis is figuring out how much of my poor performance I should attribute to my draft strategy and how much to other factors. Streaming Defenses & Kickers The first thing I want to evaluate is my decision to ignore defenses & kickers in the draft. I instead focused my draft strategy around skill players; QB, RB, WR & TE. I did this because I planned to employ a method called streaming. This involves picking up and playing people based on their match-up each week instead of relying on one team. Over the 13 week season
This is part 3 of a 4 part series – you can read the rest here: Recycling A Broken Surfboard – Part 1 Recycling A Broken Surfboard – Part 2 Recycling A Broken Surfboard – Part 4 Continuing where I left off. Previously I stripped down the old broken board, shaped the foam into something new & now I’m ready to put the finishing touches on my recycled surfboard. Surfboard artwork has always been a place for expression an individuality. From back when islanders would carve artwork into their giant wooden plans, to the pre-war era surfboards with paint to contemporary sticks graffitid with spray paint and Sharpie. How a board looks shouldn’t affect how it rides – but I defend that it does. So much of how a session goes is built on momentum that the good vibes from the parking lot compliment to a paddle out conversation can all
This is part 2 of a 4 part series – you can read the rest here: Recycling A Broken Surfboard – Part 1 Recycling A Broken Surfboard – Part 3 Recycling A Broken Surfboard – Part 4 Picking up where I left off about a month ago – this weekend I continued to work on recycling my old broken longboard. The next step of the process was shaping the board. The foam was still pretty rough as you can see from the picture below. The top had a lot of soft spots and divots, both of which can ruin the long term resilience of the board. The Shaping Room Shaping a board is a messy job. As layers of foam are carved away using planers, files & sand paper, sticky foam dust escapes. The easiest way to have it all contained is to do it in a shaping room –
I made a few tweaks today that I thought were needed before setting the ad campaigns live. The first was to add a logo up top. It is just a new font & icon but I think it adds a bit of legitimacy to the whole thing. The second was to add a ‘How It Works’ section. I thought that would help set expectations & further increase trust. With that done I created Google & Facebook ad campaigns using ad credits I had sitting around. Tomorrow I’ll drive $100 of traffic to the site to see how it does. I’ll make some adjustments next week and spend another $100. Friction The one thing I know is going to create friction is the form. Normally I want as few fields as possible. Heck, I’d be ok with name & email to litmus interest. But I’m going to wait to see how
The idea is simple. My wife enjoys fresh flowers. I like my wife and thus want her to be able to enjoy fresh flowers. But I never think about flowers apart from anniversary’s, valentine’s day & her birthday. Surprise Flower Club solves this. The service will deliver flowers on a somewhat random basis to the specified receive. Getting Started I think this is a great idea and I would sign up myself. There are a ton of questions surrounding the whole thing though: Does anyone else have this problem? Would anyone else use a solution like this? Will they value it enough to pay me for it? What does a streamlined process look like? What is the cost of acquiring a customer? What is my churn rate? What price point does it need to be at to be viable? What are the margins? How do people solve this now/ who
As a hobbyist developer, I have always been grateful for help from others. Whether from friends, co-workers or strangers. A few weeks ago Mike Bostock helped me figure out why my chart wasn’t rendering by answering my question on stack overflow. Mike is, for those of you that aren’t data visualization nerds, the creator and lead developer of D3, the javascript library I’m using to create this chart. Super cool. It turns out when I had re-written the code I had accidentally let two lines slip to the bottom. Those two lines defined the scope of the graph and without them running fist, the whole thing broke. I knew it was going to be something small like that, it always is. Except for when it is something big. I now have all of the data loaded and rendering. It is quite a mess and not labelled. Check it out for
This is my second year playing fantasy football and first year doing an auction draft. Being new to the format, I figured this was a perfect chance to study up and walk away with a dominant team. Here is how I prepared for and executed my fantasy football auction draft. My League First off lets talk league scoring so those of you that know what I’m talking about have context. 12 teams. QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, RB/WR/TE, TE, K, D, BN, BN, BN, BN. 13 players each including the 4 bench spots. Touchdowns are 6 points, missed FGs are -1, .1 pt per yard returning, no PPR. The small bench means we’re going to have an active waiver wire so I wasn’t concerned with grabbing a bunch of sleepers. Here is the team I ended up with. Strategy I did a few practice drafts and a bit of reading
Her name was Cecilia. I bought her used from Stewart’s boardshop in San Clemente, CA on March 29th, 2010. A 10’6″ Regal model, custom shaped by the legendary Bill Stewart for another surfer. Ding repairs and yellowing spots showed the board’s age. It had clearly been well used by it’s previous owner. A good surfboard deserves no less. A diamond in the rough when I found it, there were a few dings on the rails, but nothing I couldn’t fix. She ended up being a great board and together we enjoyed many of Southern California’s best longboarding spots. In 2011, while surfing Huntington Cliffs, I stayed on the nose a bit too long and had to bail in the shore break. I dove off at the last second as the wave closed around me. When I rose to the surface I was staring at the rear half of my favorite longboard.