Swift Fish Net

It has been a while since I’ve posted, so here’s a brief update.

I’ve spent a lot of time on learning Ruby the last couple of weeks. One of my little projects was writing a short script to make some NCAA basketball tournament picks for entry in ESPN’s tournament challenges. My script’s picking is based on the historical records of a seed Vs. seed and the difference between the seed numbers but also includes some randomness. It’s been an interesting experiment. The picks don’t seem to be any better or worse than my own intuitive picks. There are still a couple of things I want to adjust but I ran out of time this year, so it will have to wait for the 2008 Tournament Challenge. The women’s bracket has been particularly interesting. There have been more upsets than usual. For instance, intuitively I would never have picked Rutgers to beat Duke, but one of my three script runs (I call them SwiftPicks) that I entered did.

I’ve also been spending some time on CSS. I have not done any web-site design with CSS before I set up this blog, but now that I have this Swift Fish thing I eventually want to do a design for it on my own rather than rely on slight modifications of someone else’s design (like my current theme being based on MistyLook). I am still a long way from a new site design, though.

I rather like the early daylight savings time that started this year. I prefer running late in the afternoon but only when it is still light out. Now I can run in the late afternoon a few weeks earlier than usual. It has warmed up enough for running in shorts, too.