What’s Joe-Ayala.com all about
Feb 28th
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I want to become a blogger yet I’m not sure what is my niche. I would l love to do a whole blog on fantasy baseball yet that market seems flooded with bloggers. I always think, well maybe my blog can compete or maybe I will do well enough and ESPN will buy it out like the did the Talented Mr. Roto. I know, I know, fat chance that will happen.
This blog is a collection of my ideas, hobbies, interests and experience. Hopefully I’ll find an interesting niche and keep thing interesting.
Top 4 ways to enjoy Fantasy Baseball
Feb 27th
1. Play with friends. I don’t play in online leagues any more. I like to know who I’m playing Fantasy Baseball with. It makes the message board more exciting, the draft more intense, and adds a lot more laughs.
2. Do an auction draft. Man, I love auction drafts in Fantasy Baseball (and in Fantasy Football) it adds so much more to the draft. It is a bigger challenge you have to keep up with salaries and filling up your team. In the league I play in we have $260 salary cap and a 25 man roster. You have to have at least $1 per player. You can check out our league constitution here. It is adapted from Corey Schwartz’s old constitution. If you have never done an auction draft before then you really haven’t had fun at a draft. Oh one key note is that when all teams need players equals amount left ($1 per player) we switch back to a normal snake draft.
3. I know some people who like don’t like playing fantasy baseball using the rotisserie system, because the teams that are in the lower third don’t have a chance to catch up to the leader. That’s why some people prefer head to head leagues. Well a way to make things count for those who are losing is make it a keeper league. In a keeper league, teams can trade higher priced players for cheap young prospects so the teams that are currently losing can prepare for the future. This provides a nice way to keep things interesting all season long.
4. The best way to enjoy fantasy baseball is have an offline draft. With all of today’s technology, what is an offline draft? An offline draft is where a bunch of friends, hopefully, get together and have a baseball draft. If you combine all these 4 ideas you should have a great fantasy experience.
Lost Fantasy Game
Feb 27th
I’m huge fan of ABC’s Lost. I’m a late Lost fan, I starting watching from DVDs and now am watching it live on Thursdays. Well I’m a HUGE fantasy baseball fan, but the baseball season doesn’t start until mid March. So I was bored one day and decided to come up with Fantasy Lost.
Here are the parameters:
- Person is involved in Flashback or Flash Forward – 1
- Person jumps in water – 1
- Person dies – 20
- Person come back from the dead – 10 for each time
- Person sees a dead person – 5
- Person gets caught in net or rope – 2
- Person get captured – 2
- Person escapes – 2
- Person gets in a fight – 5
- Person talks about getting off the island – 1
- Person gets off the island – 25
- Person kisses another person – 5
- Person gets shot/stabed – 5
- Person takes off shirt – 5
- Person see an illusion – 7
- Person chases white rabbit – 5
- Person sings a song – 3
- Person holds baby – 2
- Person calls some one by a nick name – 2
- Person sees new character – 2
- Person cries – 2
- Person eats something – 1
- Person gets sick – 1
- Person says sexual innuendo – 1
- Person makes a phone call – 2
- Person helps mend another person – 2
- Person appears on show – 3 (only 3 per show)
- Person gets punched but does not return punch – 2 (per punch)
- Person shoots a gun/flare – 2 (per scene)
- Person drives a car – 2
- Person sees mysterious bad smoke – 2
- Person finds animal – 1
- Person hears weird sounds or whispering – 2
- Person gets drunk – 3
- Person discovers part of plot – 10
- Person asks for an item from another character – 1
Now we had a 5 people interested in playing Fantasy Lost. So we had a snake draft, where the last pick on first round gets the first pick in the second round. We all drafted four players. Every week we keep up with points and can add or drop before and after each show. A little bit later I’ll post the results of the draft and the current point totals.
Check out Pinback
Feb 26th
While I was IMing my cousin over Google chat (gchat) he told me to check out this band called, Pinback. Usually it takes me awhile to like a new band. It seems very rare that I like a band the first time I hear them. Yet this band is amazing. Very clean indie sound. If you have a moment check out their MySpace page and buy their songs.
WordPress mod_rewrite error
Feb 26th
I’m in the process of setting up my blog. I’m trying to become a blogger and try to do everything the SEO way. Well one of my buddies, who knows way more about SEO than I do, suggesting having all your posts showing clean in the address bar.
For example my posts would come up like this:
www.joe-ayala.com/index.php/02/25/08/WordPress-mod_rewrite-error/
As I learned today that is not very clean or SEO friendly. So my friend, Brandon Hopkins suggested that I try to have my posts look like this:
www.joe-ayala.com/WordPress-mod_rewrite-error/
Well easier said than done. I originally installed WordPress using Fantastico through my host. No matter what Brandon or I tried we couldn’t get it to work. So I took the parable that Jesus gave about building your house on sand compared to on rock, so I decided to delete it and reinstall it through regular FTP. So I downloaded from WordPress.org and set up my database manually. This is what Fantastico set up for me automatically.
So I got everything set up and tried to go to Options and Permalinks to set it my path to “/%postname%”. Yet it still didn’t work. Checked the permission of my .htaccess file, still nothing worked. So I did some research and found that their is module called mod_rewrite that needs to be turned on, and some web hosts don’t have it on. So I contacted my web host and they said it was possible and sent me a link that didn’t work. So I started searching again and found this post: mod_rewrite htaccess MYSTERY
The poster posted this script in order to get .htaccess to work:
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wordpress/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /wordpress/index.php [L]
# END WordPress
Now I had to change RewriteBase and RewriteRule to where my WordPress folder is located. Be careful to keep the “.” in the RewriteRule, if you don’t the .htaccess still won’t work.
Well after this my posts finally looked pretty and clean.
I love Safari Books Online
Feb 25th
Well maybe love is too strong of a word. I know, I know us Americans use love too often. Okay well I really enjoy Safari Books Online. Just today another computer tech and I were having a conversation on DNS. He recommended two books to me about DNS. I was immediately able to look up the books using my Safari Books Online account. Now granted Safari Books Online is not always up to date with the latest books, but they have a lot of great books on all areas of computer technology.
Passwords, Themes, Passwords
Feb 24th
Well I went to restart my blog. It was really out of date and so I spent the usual 30 minutes finding the perfect WordPress theme. (WordPress is the blogging engine that powers my web site.) Well I found this one called iWork, I really liked the style of this one. I didn’t design this web template, and I honestly didn’t have any time to make any changes. Yet I might make some changes later.
Well the frustrating part about my blog, was that I couldn’t log into it. Not only couldn’t log into it I couldn’t retrieve my password because I couldn’t remember the email I used to set it up. So I started over and now here is my new site. Stay tuned for more to come.