Getting Started With Fantasy Football

I am going on my fourth year of Fantasy Football, last year I played in two separate leagues and finished first in one league, second place in the other and in both leagues I auto-drafted my team(let the computer do my drafting for me). I got into fantasy football for multiple reasons, it gave me a chance to further the football season beyond just watching the games; gave me a chance to beat friends and coworkers at fantasy football plus it gave me a chance to win money from them as well. One recurring thing that I hear from a lot of people when I bring up fantasy football is that they do not watch football so they would lose, here I will introduce you to fantasy football and throughout the upcoming season I will make fantasy football posts a weekly occurrence.

First you will either need to join or start a league, if you are just now getting into fantasy football then I would recommend joining an existing league being as nobody wants a new person as their league's commissioner. A commissioner is the person that not only sets up the league, they may also be needed to uphold or deny potential trades based on fairness so you can see how a person that is inexperienced with the sport can not be ideal for this position. ESPN, NFL and Yahoo are all potential sites that you could set up a league, I have experience with all of them though I prefer ESPN. It is also possible to join a public Fantasy Football League with people you do not know, I would ask that it is clearly described how money for the league would be handled before the season even starts, and I personally would not play unless money is involved.

I play in a 10 man league as well as a 12 man league, monetarily speaking, if everyone pays $100 in a 12 man league then you could pay $100 for a chance at up to $1100 though it's rare that the entire prize goes to the first player. In my 12 man league the buy-in is only $50 and the prizes are divided as $375 for first place, $175 for second place while third place earns they $50 buy-in back. In my 10 man league where the buy-in is $100 and I am commissioner, I made it so first place is awarded $600 while second earns $300 and the remaining $100 was issued to the "Aaron Hernandez Award Winner"(the first individual player arrested on the season) for Dwayne Bowe. Again, for me I only play fantasy football because of the fact that I can play against, and win money from my friends and coworkers.

You will need a strong commissioner, one that will enforce full payments are received from the league's participants before the start of the season or else that team is removed from the league. In a former league we had a very new commissioner and when playoffs rolled around half of the league had yet to pay, those that did not make the playoffs refused to pay and payouts suffered because of it. You will of course have people that try to take advantage of newer players, offer you a trade of your Peyton Manning(last years top fantasy player) for 2-3 mediocre players and try to say that you are getting the better end of the deal because you are getting more in return, a good commissioner will veto that trade without hesitation. Fantasy Football, at least the way I play and have described how to play, can be a very fun and rewarding experience that lasts beyond the Fantasy Football season, I like to let the others know what I have spent their money on.

Links of the Week, Roadtrip Edition

I am still en route so this will be a brief update, I will make up for it in the upcoming week.

• An extremely limited release game could be anything but.
• Verizon employees profit from your stolen phones.
• The MPAA targets a subreddit for takedown.
• Net Neutrality Protestors arrested at Google HQ.
• Amazon Drones shot down by FAA.

I will try to update more later, kind of difficult to do without my laptop. This week I try to fill a week of content with Knoxville's Technology scene.

Finding Tech Abroad: Exploring Technology in Knoxville, TN

I will be out of the Miami area for the next week but I will be looking for technology in Knoxville, TN. LOPSA East Tennessee will be hosting their ARM Revolution this coming Tuesday, July 1st which I plan on attending. Taken from their page, the ARM Revolution is described as:

"ARM, as of 2013, is the most widely used 32-bit instruction set
architecture, and is used approximately 95% of all smartphones. After
some brief comments on the history ARM and the differences between ARM
and x86 architecture, I’ll talk about current ARM developments and
some cool projects using ARM-based CPUs.

If you have an ARM project you have built or are working on
(RaspberryPi, Arduino ARM, or any other ARM-based system), bring it
along so we can do a bit of show and tell. I will be bringing a couple
of RaspberryPis as well as the usual mobile platform suspects."

Hopefully I will have a write-up from the event available on Wednesday and I look forward to interviewing a few Raspberry Pi inventor/developers. I will also be interviewing one of the gentlemen behind the 2014 Knoxville 24 Hour Film Festival award winner for Best Comedy, Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Film. En route back to Miami I am hoping to have a chance to explore technology along the way. It looks like I will officially have a logo within the next week, so that puts me even closer to getting the .com running, hopefully within the next two weeks. Again, Thank You to everyone for the continued support worldwide, I am hoping for big things moving forward. 

What Is Hacking?

Despite what teenage girls or mothers on Facebook would have you believe, hacking is not accessing a computer after someone neglected to log out from it. A true hacker would never need you to forget to log out of your account nor would they need to even be at your location. They would get your account information remotely without any assistance from you at all. A hacker would also not need to phish for your information, phishing is a type of scam where a person pretends to be someone they are not to get your information, here is a good example.

The term hack is getting dangerously close to generic use as of late, there are "lifehacks", "kitchenhacks"...typically anything that makes an existing tasks even remotely faster is now considered a hack. The new generalization of hack and hacking takes away from the true hackers, and these are people that know far more about computers than you ever could. Commonly accepted uses of the term hacker taken from Wiki are:

•  People committed to computer security, primarily concerns those who work debugging or fixing security problems (White hats), differentiate from the morally ambiguous Grey hats and the illegal computer criminals, who perform unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication networks such as the Internet (Black hats).
• A community of enthusiast computer programmers and systems designers, originated in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This community is notable for launching the free software movement. The World Wide Web and the Internet itself are also hacker artifacts.The Request for Comments RFC 1392 amplifies this meaning as "[a] person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular."
• The hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s (e.g. the Homebrew Computer Club) and on software (video games, software cracking, the demoscene) in the 1980s/1990s. The community included Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen and created the personal computing industry.

We will focus on the computer security defined hacker here. These hackers will examine and exploit weaknesses in a computer system or network, typically motivated by profit, protest, challenge or personal enjoyment. Hackers are essentially experts in computer or network security. Recent examples of websites actually being hacked are:

• State of Montana notifies 1.3 million patients of breach to Department of Public Health and Human Services server.
• Popular messaging app Yo gets breached.

PC World also recently released an informative map that shows in real time what it looks like when the web is hacked. Despite the bastardization of the term hacker, it is best that you do know what you are dealing with when encountering actually being hacked.

Division in the Dogecoin Community

In the past week the normally fun loving /r/Dogecoin community has been at odds with one another over a trademark dispute. The dispute seems to have mostly settled for now but it clearly will have lasting ramifications that have yet to be determined.

Ultra Pro, a company most widely known for creating protective cases for collectibles, files a trademark application on Doge stating they are doing so to protect themselves from potentially being sued in the future for not having a trademark on merchandise they create utilizing the meme. This leads to immediate and very vocal backlash against Ultra Pro courtesy of the /r/Dogecoin community.

Following the trademark announcement by Ultra Pro, Moolah tweets this, which is then posted onto r/dogecoin. Moolah releases a statement that they are merely filing a notice of opposition and that nobody, including them, should hold a trademark on Doge.

Dogecoin co-creator, and owner of Dogecoin.com, Jackson Palmer expresses his belief that Moolah is intending to take the trademark for themselves as well as his support for Ultra Pro in acquiring the trademark for free public use. Jackson makes a post saying that he was misled by Moolah's ambiguous wording and decides to leave the community.

Ultra Pro makes an AMA on /r/dogecoin. They state that they still have no intention of using the trademark against anyone, and they are open to Moolah's idea of filing the notice of opposition to make sure NO ONE can have the trademark, as (allegedly) the original trademark application was just for Ultra's self-defense. However, until a notice of opposition is completed, Ultra is continuing to wait on the original application to protect themselves.

In the aftermath of this situation, original Dogecoin developer Billy Markus makes a post saying that the entire situation is stupid tells the /r/dogecoin community that it needs to stay silly. Ultra Pro is still awaiting on its trademark while Moolah is still waiting on their notice of opposition. Jackson Palmer tweets that he has left the /r/dogecoin community but not Dogecoin.

Dr. Austin Fowler Explains Quantum Computing

I recently had a request to explain quantum computing is, being as I did not know enough about the subject to answer it myself, I had an opportunity to ask Dr. Austin Fowler. Dr. Fowler is a quantum computing researcher at University of California, Santa Barbara and an honorary researcher at The University of Melbourne who has a background in computer engineering, computer science, mathematics, and physics.

What exactly is quantum computing?

"A different type of computer that given n quantum bits can store any combination of the 2ⁿ possible bitstrings simultaneously."

How new is the technology?

"Arguably the field of quantum computing was born in 1994, with the publication of Shor's efficient factoring algorithm."

What can it be used for?

"Many things, see http://math.nist.gov/quantum/zoo/"

How can I differentiate between a computer, a digital computer and a quantum computer?

"The former is cheap and widely available, you will only find prototypes of the latter in research laboratories. The only exception is the D-Wave machine, which occupies a small room and retails for approximately $15 million."

Would I have to study a particular programming language to develop digital computers?

"A good programmer can easily switch to a new language. You want to be good at programming, and this should not be considered a language specific goal."

Would a person with a basic knowledge of several languages be at a disadvantage against someone that specializes in one?

"More languages should be advantageous. More techniques. More ways of thinking."

You have a quadruple major and PhD, would this field but out of range for a person wanting to break in but they are far from having a doctorate?

"One of my students is 16 and in high school. Primarily you need to be smart and want to do this kind of work. And you need to team up with someone that has sufficiently broad background to guide you to problems that can be sold with your current background."

According to TIME Magazine, granted this was months ago, a D-Wave costs at least $10 Million dollars so who needs/could afford a quantum computer?

"Scientists. Modern classical supercomputers cost hundreds of millions of dollars. People still buy them."

How To Make Money Blogging: With Professional Blogger David Peralty

David Peralty was a full-time blogger for five years and created a lot of content about WordPress. In his own words "During my five year career writing online, I published more than 30,000 blog posts using my own name and various pseudonyms. I was part of over 100 podcast episodes. I felt very fortunate doing it all, and while I experienced some horrible burnout from some of my later projects, I still look back on my time working for Jacob Gower on Blogging Pro as some of the best times of my life." You can follow David at his personal site http://peralty.com.

What got you into blogging, is it something you set out to do or did it fall into your lap?

"Blogging wasn’t what I expected to do with my career, and no one that I knew was blogging at the time, and other than Darren Rowse, I hadn’t heard of anyone making any money doing it.

I went to school for computer networking, and finished as the tech bubble had finished collapsing. When I got online, the idea of journaling my life was super appealing to me as I had always enjoyed writing. I was learning PHP and creating my own online publishing system between using Blogger and being introduced to WordPress.

WordPress changed everything for me. I started following its development, and became part of the WordPress community. When a young man ended up buying a bunch of blogs that I had loved, I contacted him for an interview. He hadn’t planned out what he was going to do regarding the continued content development on those sites and offered me a job."

Would a person have to put a lot of time and energy into turning blogging into a career or could they do it in their spare time?

"Because the barrier for entry is so low now, with hosted software solutions, and more available information and tutorials, I don’t believe that blogging is an easy career option for most people.

There are people that rise to be well known and make some serious money from their content, but content is mostly a commodity these days, and it can be hard to build an audience. I would hazard a guess that unless you are being employed by an already established blog, the odds of earning a livable income from blogging alone is very low, especially in the first two years of publication."

How can a person make money from blogging, let alone enough to turn it into a career?

"This is a complex question and the options aren’t as many or as simple as they once were. I would say that the best way to make money from building your own blog today is to use your blog to build a brand and then convert that brand into a product. Look at people like Chris Garrett (chrisg.com) and his Authority Blogger community or what the Copyblogger team has done as an example.

Of course another way, and the way that I did it, was to find blogs you can write on and get paid. There are many successful blogs out there that need content production and are willing to pay for it. Envato is a great example of that, paying some high rates for quality tutorials in a variety of niches.

At the end of the day, making money from blogging requires a lot of hard work, organization, and the ability to develop and built multiple potential income streams through banner advertising, affiliate programs, creating products and services, or crafting content for others."

I see that you referenced yourself as a former professional blogger, what caused you to no longer do it?

"Two things: burnout and advertising rate drops. When the recession started happening, online advertising rates dropped like a stone, and sites that I worked on started making a small percentage of what they were earning only a few months prior. So then I switched to working on a site for a friend that I didn’t totally enjoy. I put in long, hard hours, and got paid a decent wage, but it caused me to not enjoy blogging as much. I then ended up taking a job doing web development for the local government. I’ve since mostly just stuck to personal blogging as I haven’t been able to find the determination to stick with professional blogging tasks/jobs for any reasonable period of time.

Thankfully, my skills in web development and online marketing have kept me well employed."

If you could give one piece of advice to a potential blogger from you personal experiences in blogging, what would it be?

'Be true to yourself. My blogging career came to a halt because I chased money for the sake of money. I didn’t think about what that would do to my psyche. I didn’t realize that by working on projects I didn’t enjoy that I could ruin my passion and interest in writing professionally. I have also seen others go through this same transition, and I am still trying to help one close friend change paths before he is too far gone and quits blogging as well.

If you aren’t being yourself, doing what you enjoy, writing posts you’d love to read, then no matter how hard you work, it won’t last, and you won’t achieve success."