August 2007

Well, it’s about that time of year again…time for fantasy football madness!  The draft in the league I’m in is this Thursday and a good way I’ve found to prepare is to use some of the various fantasy football mock draft sites that are out there.  Here are some that I have tried…

ESPN Fantasy Football Mock Drafts - This is probably the most professional looking mock draft site.  It requires a simple free registration and there are tons of people drafting.  The only down side is that you can’t pick your draft order - it randomly selects a slot for you.  If you could pick a slot that matched your real draft, it would be a winner.  I’m surprised ESPN doesn’t fix this.  With the deep pockets they have, why would they skimp out on this feature?  The only other gripe is people tend to leave the mock drafts at least 50% of the time…which will screw up the draft.  Overall ESPN’s fantasy football mock draft site is good for quickie draft practice, but that’s about it.

Fantasy Football Calculator - This mock draft site is promising, but since the site doesn’t require user registration, it has been plagued with losers that come in at 2 a.m. and screw up the draft.  Why?  Nobody knows… the only motivation I can see is that a competing mock draft site is trying to undermine them.  Or, they are just losers.  Otherwise, this site is nearly perfect.  I emailed them and suggested that they charge a small fee to help get rid of the losers.  The good news is you can pick your draft slot that matches your real draft so you can have a realistic idea of how it might go.  Keep drafting and every now and then you will have a good, realistic draft.

Mock Draft Central - This seems to be the most realistic mock draft site, but I will admit I have only tried the free version which only lets you do one draft per day.  You have to pay to become a premium member (currently only $3.99/month) which gives you unlimited drafts.  The site has what is called Coach Karma to help keep idiots out of the drafts.  You can also pick your draft slot.  The interface is a bit clunky - it’s hard to figure out who has drafted who, and what your resulting team looks like.  They need to clean it up a bit and make it look more like ESPN’s.

Overall, considering it is the year 2007 and technology is everywhere you look, the fantasy football mock draft sites need more work.  All that is needed is for ESPN to add the capability to let you pick your slot and use a karma system like Mock Draft Central uses….then you would have a near perfect service.

Do you know of a good fantasy football mock draft site?  Please post a comment and let me know.

Just ran across this video of a SUPER crowded wave pool at Tokyo Summerland in Japan and have to say…. WTF?!?!  This is just wrong!   I think if I lived in Tokyo, I’d just swim in my bathtub… that is assuming they have bathtubs.  Maybe, just maybe this video is fake… we can only hope.

I just found this video which supposably proves that Discovery’s TV show, Man vs. Wild is fake.  Volcanochaser says “The phony bear faked it in Kilauea Volcano also. He taped most of the show a few hundred feet from the highway. Most of the scenes in the show don’t exist in the area he was supposed to be in: avocado trees, lava tube, tropical forest are all in different parts of the island. I have hiked this area hundreds of times. I can understand how people who have not been to the area may think it’s legitimate, but I was surprised how easy it was to dupe the Discovery Channel. It would be suicidal to follow the advice given by this show. ”

Ok, so perhaps Bear Grylls and Man vs. Wild is phony.  WHO CARES?  First, the show is HIGHLY ENTERTAINING… second, Bear Grylls is very cool, entertaining and could more than likely kick volcanochaser’s ass anytime, anywhere.  Third, at least the show does give you some tips and techniques to help you out in case you ever do get stuck in a survival situation.

And enough about Survivorman and how he tapes everything himself..yadda yadda.  Who cares?  Survivorman isn’t nearly as entertaining… and is pretty much boring.  So to all of you out there wanting to crucify Bear Grylls and the Discovery Channel, please… get a life!  Long live Bear Grylls!  Woo hoooo! 

Found this weird video today…. and wondered if anyone else has seen it?  Says something about Mahalo, but not sure what it means?  Click the video above to play it…

I was reading through my favorite blogs this morning when I stumbled upon this article by John Chow on the Million Dollar Wiki, which is similar to Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage, except you get a full page for $100 instead of a tiny 10×10 pixel.

When I read his article this morning, 158 pages had been sold giving this 21 year old college student an extra $15,800 in the bank.  As I write this he is now up to 220 pages sold bringing his total up to $22,000!  WTF?!

Honestly I’m a little peeved, but can only be peeved at myself for not thinking of this first.  Just goes to show you it pays off to take some time off and do some creative thinking/brainstorming from time to time.  If you can’t be first, create a new category.  It is too late to do pixels…it’s been done.  You have to put a new twist on an existing idea to have a chance.

I put a twist on the Million Dollar Homepage by selling pixels for a penny instead of a dollar.  The Million Penny Homepage was born and worked very well… I even sold over a million pixels, somewhere in the range of $12K- $13K.

I wonder what new twist can be put on the Million Dollar _______ idea?  Million Penny Wiki?  What will be next?  I have one idea in mind, but will not tell.  One thing for sure, I’m going to spend a full day every now and then to do nothing but brainstorm a way to create and cash in on an internet fad like this.

It will be interesting to see how well this does.  I have a feeling he will make a million or at least make $100K.  It may be pretty hard to get the press that Alex Tew did, as his idea was PURE GENIUS!  The Million Dollar Wiki is a good idea, but is not truly original.  But, who cares… a few thousand bucks is still a few thousand bucks!  To be continued…

Looks like TechTV’s Morgan Webb has started a new show viewable on the web called WebbAlert starring Morgan Webb of course! I think by now everyone from Tech TV is back on the web with some sort of podcast or videocast by now…making TechTV obsolete. I actually think it is much more interesting for all of the peeps from TechTV doing their own independent thing…without all of the corporate gobbledygook (and a million Dell commercials).

WebbAlert will likely be a daily M-F show (unless she’s too busy), similar to Rocketboom complete with story links below each episode. My only suggestion right now is I think they should set up a link page for people that donate to WebbAlert.

Don’t just take their donations… give them an incentive to donate! Otherwise, I give the show two thumbs up!

Watch the latest episode:

I heard about this Chocolate Rain video a week or so ago, but didn’t want to watch it because of the thumbnail.  I finally gave in and have to say the song is strangely addictive in a very weird way.  I don’t think Tay Zonday could have scripted this any better… this has viral video written all over it!  In case you REALLY like this song, you can download it for free!

Download the Chocolate Rain MP3

This video has inspired a few parodies including - Vanilla Snow, Chocolate Rain Remix, Chocolate Rain (real voice mix) and more…

For the last few months, one of my blogs has been the target of a splog attack, or whatever you want to call it when an idiot steals every blog post you make. Of course, his splog (combination of spam and blog) has no contact information and if you look it up in the whois, the contact info is anonymous.

Today I came up with an idea to hopefully make this idiot scrape someone else’s RSS feed instead of mine. Basically, I make a degrading post that will make his splog look really ridiculous. An example is above. The splog in question is using a WordPress plugin called Auto-Blogster that checks RSS feeds of other blogs every so often with cron and automatically posts those posts to his blog.

I don’t want to keep the crazy post on my blog very long, so what I do is post the degrading article on my blog and click on the script located in the plugin folders on the splog site. If you have the same problem, look on their site… it should be somewhere like: theirsplog.com/wp-content/plugins/auto-blogster

Look for a script in that folder called: ajax_auto_blogster.php and click it.

This should then post the embarrassing post to their splog - and now you can delete it from your real blog. Good times, eh? I don’t expect splogs to go away any time soon. Email spam is still around. Comment spam is here to stay. There will probably be more and more splog problems like this - so be sure to bookmark this article in case it happens to you! If anyone out there knows a better way to combat splogs (with WordPress), please leave a comment!

UPDATE!  Check out this article… this technique seems to work.