Steven Rubio's Online Life

the 2013 rubio begonias

I’m in one league this year, and here is my team (10 owners, AL/NL, 25-man rosters):

•   C: Joe Mauer, Jonathan Lucroy
• 1B: Adrian Gonzalez, Brandon Belt
• 2B: Jose Altuve
• 3B: Todd Frazier, Trevor Plouffe
• SS: Erick Aybar, J.J. Hardy, Everth Cabrera
• OF: Mike Trout, Ryan Braun, Shin-Soo Choo, Angel Pagan
• SP: Kris Medlen, Jake Peavy, Jeremy Hellickson, Brett Myers
• RP: Jonathan Papelbon, Rafael Soriano, Addison Reed, Steve Cishek, Casey Janssen, Jonathan Broxton, Santiago Casilla

what's in his pants, or, pork WHAT?

Last night, my wife told me I needed new hobbies. She quickly amended that statement, probably realizing I have more hobbies than most people. So she added, “hobbies that aren’t on your computer … or your phone … or your Nexus.”

I’m not sure why the source of a hobby is important. But the large majority of my hobbies are admittedly time-wasters. Heck, writing a blog for eleven years is both a hobby and a time-waster, although at least there’s something concrete at the end.

What prompted her declaration was a confession I made. I didn’t actually think of it as a confession, which sounds like I did something to feel guilty about. As I’ve said many times, I don’t believe in the concept of guilty pleasures … if you like it, why feel guilty? … but believing something and feeling immune from the process aren’t the same thing, which is another way of saying, yes, I do know what a guilty pleasure is. A lot of people I talk to would include as one of their guilty pleasures checking something out on YouTube and then spending half an hour watching videos before you look at the clock and see how much time you wasted.

So, as you might guess, my confession last night was that I’d been watching YouTube videos. I don’t know that she would have admonished me if I’d stopped there. But I added that the hook that reeled me in for a longer-than-expected video-watching session was: Family Feud with Steve Harvey.

Look, I know how it sounds. But I have a feeling that if they watched one Feud w/Harvey video, a lot of people would end up watching a few more. It seems to matter than I don’t actually watch the show on TV … couldn’t even tell you when it was on, or on what channel. YouTube is the perfect place to watch, because you get highlights. It is similar to Saturday Night Live in that respect … I know if there was a particularly good sketch, it’ll be on the web the next day.

The folks at Family Feud are well aware of this. They have their own YouTube channel, and many of the questions asked on the game show are clearly intended to elicit a “YouTube” response. This is nothing new … game shows have been fishing for double entendre answers since the dawn of time, which explains why you can still watch lots of old Match Game videos on YouTube.

Here we see Steve Harvey acknowledging that a particular answer will soon show up on YouTube:

And here’s the video I was thinking of when I stupidly confessed to my wife:

scoresheet baseball

I rarely write about fantasy baseball on this blog, following the time-honored truism that “no one cares about your fantasy team”. I'm breaking the rule for a bit here, because I am embarking on a new-to-me experience: my first season of Scoresheet Baseball. This game is highly-regarded by people I trust, but it also more pricey than standard fantasy games, so I’ve avoided it until now. A bargain-priced introductory offer convinced me to try it out.

The biggest difference between Scoresheet and standard fantasy games is that Scoresheet takes the players’ efforts of the previous week and, instead of just adding up all the numbers, plays out games. You have to set rotations and lineups, and make decisions on bullpen usage, pinch-hitters, and defensive substitutions (yes, defense counts), and the like. I don’t fully understand it all, but the differences from what I’ve been playing for 25 years are intriguing, so I’m giving it a try.

One other difference with Scoresheet is that drafting is done over a period of about five weeks, rather than two hours. There are roughly 2 1/2 hours between each pick. Obviously, you don’t have to sit around your computer for five weeks; you compose an ordered list, which can be changed at any time, and the draft works off of everyone’s list. I have the 7th pick in the opening round of a 10-team, AL-only league. The first six picks were Albert Pujols, Miguel Cabrera, Adrian Gonzalez, Justin Verlander, Jose Bautista, and CC Sabathia. I’ve gone back and forth over my first pick, but I’ve finally decided, and so, in about 45 minutes from the time I write this, I will make Felix Hernandez my first-ever Scoresheet pick. (For comparison purposes, the first player I ever picked in a fantasy baseball draft was Joe Carter in 1987.)

Now I’ll go back to shutting up about my team that no one cares about.

when i was young

This picture was taken on October 17, 1986. It showed up as a random wallpaper on my computer, and I started thinking about all the details in the photo, and thought to post the picture here and look at them more closely.

OK, upper left. I don’t remember where I got the DANGER sign … probably from the factory I had quit two years earlier. I’m guessing Robin made me the valentine. Next to the valentine is a Gandalf figurine from/by/? Royal Daulton. My mom gave this to me; she mistakenly thought I was a big Tolkien fan. I don’t know where this thing is today, but I see it sells for around $175 online. Oops, guess I should find it.

Underneath those items, left to right, I see a turntable atop a receiver, then a dual cassette player with a few tapes on top, a cabinet that held vinyl records, and a calendar from Major League Baseball (I think).

There’s Robin, obviously … she had just turned 33, which is how old Sara is now (when this picture was taken, Sara was 8). Then me, also 33, still with hair, and the remnants of the physique I had after ten years of hard labor as a steelworker. I’m not sure from this picture who the person is in the bottom right, but I have another picture from a different angle that would answer that question, if I felt like finding it.

On the wall, upper right, there are a couple of collector’s plates, a collector’s doll, a bare light bulb, and three mementos from my Spanish grandmother: a mixer, a washer, and a dryer (I believe the latter two were salt and pepper shakers). On the wall beneath those items is a San Francisco Giants calendar.

On to the desk. The monitor is a color one made by Commodore. There is a calendar on top of it, probably word-of-the-day, since that’s what Robin usually got me in those days. She still gets them for me every year, although the theme is different at times (this year it’s the Word Origin Calendar, and today’s “word” is “monkey wrench”). There’s a spray bottle of something … I’m guessing screen cleaner.

Ah, the screen. I am pointing at a trivia game. CompuServe had a nationwide trivia contest, and somehow, I made the finals. The event commemorated in this picture is the finals, me against some other guy I didn’t know. The match went into overtime; I lost on a Beatles question, as I recall. I wasn’t working for CompuServe yet, so I was paying to play in this tournament.

You can see floppy discs underneath the Giants calendar. On the bottom right is the printer, dot matrix I’m sure, sitting on a box with paper hidden inside it. I love the “I’M A WRITER” sign. At that time, I was in the second semester of my junior year at Cal, and had probably finally quit taking writing classes from the invaluable Marcy Alancraig. Not sure why I thought I needed the sign … I’ll leave it to you to decide if I ended up being a writer or not.

The books in front of the printer box are a baseball stat book (no Internet stat sites yet), a one-volume encyclopedia (no Wikipedia yet), and an atlas (no Google maps yet). I assume I had them to help with trivia questions, just as I had my friends with me to help, as well.

Finally, there is the gawdawful computer setup. Start with a basic Commodore 64. In the back of the C-64 on the left is the modem … might have been 1200 baud. That white line stretching from the modem to the bottom of the screen is the phone cord … the phone was on the wall on the other side of the room.

The cream-colored rectangular thing behind the C-64 on the right was the floppy disc drive. It wasn’t the right model … for some time after the C-64 came out, there was no disc drive for it, so we bought a drive made for the PET, a Commodore computer that preceded the VIC-20 and C-64. This particular drive wasn’t totally compatible with the C-64. Copy protection didn’t like it (not that we had many protected programs), and it had some trouble communicating with the computer. The flat thing lying between the C-64 and the hard drive was a circuit board (is that the word?) that contained software which allowed us to use the “wrong” drive. The white stripe underneath the board is probably a couple of books of checks … the board had a tendency to sag, which made it work kinda crappy, so we always had to stick something underneath it to prop it up, and checkbooks were just about the right size and shape.

One last note: doesn’t Robin look lovely?

kindle fire, first thoughts

The Kindle Fire is a piece of ideological machinery.

I suppose I should explain what a Kindle Fire is, for those who don’t know. The Kindle is an e-reader from Amazon that is very popular. There are now many models of the Kindle for you to read your books and newspapers on. The Kindle Fire is something like a tablet: it reads books and newspapers, and magazines, and plays music, and shows movies, and plays games, and … well, you get the idea.

I said “something like a tablet” because it’s nonsense to compare it to “real” tablets like the iPad. It doesn’t have a camera, or a microphone, or GPS. This, among other things, is why the Kindle Fire only costs $199, while the iPad 2 goes for $499.

That is the magic number, 199. If it was $299, I wouldn’t have bought it. I don’t really need a tablet, even a crippled one like the Kindle Fire. But $199 makes it an impulse buy.

And so I pre-ordered one, and it arrived Tuesday, which was pretty quick considering Tuesday was originally the release date. I turned it on straight out of the box … it knew my name, it knew what books I had bought for previous Kindles, it knew what songs I’d bought through Amazon along with all the songs I uploaded into the Amazon cloud, it knew what apps I had gotten for my smartphone via the Amazon Market. There is something cool about turning on a machine straight out of the box, and it already knows who you are.

I signed up for a three-month free trial subscription to Wired. When I opened it, there was an animation of curtains opening, and then the cover gradually “drew itself” until it was complete.

I listened to a song, “Alcohol” by Brad Paisley.

I read a chapter from a book, A Woman of Heart by my friend Marcy Alancraig.

I downloaded the Amazon free app of the day, Bejeweled 2, and played it for a bit.

I checked my email, played around a bit on Facebook, looked at my blog.

I watched a movie, Vengeance with Johnny Hallyday. The movie was free as part of my one-month free trial of Amazon Prime.

I probably did some other stuff. Then I went to bed.

So, why is the Kindle Fire an ideological machine? Because, while it allows you to do all of the above, it exists for only one purpose: to get you to spend money at Amazon. The magazine came from the Amazon newsstand. The song was uploaded by me to my Amazon cloud storage, but if I wanted more Brad Paisley, I could buy it from Amazon. The book was from Amazon. The game was from Amazon. The movie was from Amazon.

It took less than a day for hackers to start breaking down the Kindle Fire so it could be used for extra functions, but I’m not much for that (too lazy). Without those hacks, you have a machine that resembles a tablet, except you can’t play outside of the yard Amazon has created for you. It’s like a prison with invisible walls. You think you are free, but you are only free to buy from Amazon.

This isn’t a bad thing for a person like me, who already buys stuff from Amazon. I don’t need most of the things a real tablet offers. I use my computer for most things (I am on it a lot), and I use my smartphone when I’m out of the house. To say that the Kindle Fire is like a crippled iPad misses the point … you know the old line, “you say that as if it was a bad thing.” The Kindle Fire is simple, it does what I want it to do, and does it easily. There are things it doesn’t do, and if I cared about them, I wouldn’t have a Kindle Fire. If you decide to stick a Kindle Fire in a loved one’s xmas stocking because they want a tablet, that loved one will be disappointed.

It’s not a tablet. The Kindle Fire is a media machine that locks you largely into the Amazon world. The ideology of the Kindle Fire is that Amazon will give you what they think you want/need, and you won’t ask for anything Amazon doesn’t give you. (Unless you’re a hacker, or you know how to get the fruits of the hacker’s labor.)

In case it’s not clear, BTW, after two days, I love my Kindle Fire. I could complain … the glare on the screen is bothersome, the screen itself is only 7” (although I’ve gotten used to reading and watching movies on my little smartphone, so the Kindle Fire seems huge to me), and, of course, it is nowhere near being a functional computer on the level of a real tablet like the iPad. But, like real tablet owners, I now have this little machine that lets me read books, listen to music, watch movies, play games, check my email, hang out on Facebook, read magazines and newspapers … you know, the stuff you do on a real tablet … and it cost $199.

One last note: it took me less than 24 hours to start treating the Kindle Fire like just another tool lying around the house. The thrill wore off by the time I woke up Wednesday morning. It’s fun to have around, though.

random hackers, rubio begonias

I trot this out every once in awhile. It’s from 1988:

It’s hard to read, I know. It’s a list of the “Champion of Champions” standings from fantasy baseball leagues running on CompuServe. The team with the highest percentage of their league’s possible points was the Champ of Champs. I came in second. More importantly, I won my league, the first time I’d done that.

I also bring this up because I’ve started reading Steven Levy’s fascinating new book about Google, In the Plex. And I was reminded that back in the day, Levy used to play fantasy baseball on CompuServe. That’s him near the bottom of the list of leaders … his team was called the Random Hackers (his invaluable book, Hackers, was written in 1984).

annual boring fantasy baseball post

I know these bore most people, so I don’t bother with much text. I just list my team. This is the 25th year I’ve played fantasy baseball. There were times when I helped run dozens of leagues. Those days are thankfully gone, and the main remnant, outside of some continuing friendships, is that I don’t have the energy for much more than one online league a year. This year, though, I ended up in two, because my daughter called a few hours ago and asked me to be in her league. So I have two teams.

The first was an automated draft. My biggest mistake was that I didn’t set an upper limit for how many outfielders to draft, so I ended up with 9 of them. Only 6 can play at any one time, so I have some trading to do. Here is that team:

• C:   Jorge Posada
• 1B: Ryan Howard
• 2B: Tsuyoshi Nishioka, Mike Aviles
• 3B: Edwin Encarnacion, Chris Johnson
• SS: Yunel Escobar
• OF: Ryan Braun, Carlos Gonzalez, Jayson Werth, Jay Bruce, Chris Young, Nick Markakis, Rajai Davis, Dexter Fowler, Ryan Raburn
• SP: Dan Haren, Jered Weaver, Javier Vazquez, Jake Peavy
• RP: Joe Nathan, Jonathan Broxton, Chris Perez, Matt Thornton, Brandon Lyon

Honestly, I don’t think much of this team.

The second team was a live draft. I had about an hour to prepare … maybe that was for the best. They don’t tell you the draft order until the beginning of the draft, and I was placed in the #2 slot. The first guy picked … well, I can’t remember who he picked, but the player’s name wasn’t “Albert Pujols” so my first choice was an easy one. My daughter picked next and grabbed Tim Lincecum. Here is my final roster for that league:

• C:   Victor Martinez
• 1B: Albert Pujols
• 2B: Martin Prado, Brian Roberts
• 3B: Alex Rodriguez, Mark Reynolds
• SS: Rafael Furcal, Miguel Tejada
• OF: Matt Holliday, Jayson Werth, Andre Ethier, Delmon Young, Torii Hunter, Marlon Byrd
• UT: Omar Infante
• SP: Josh Johnson, Jered Weaver, Max Scherzer, Ted Lilly, Shaun Marcum
• RP: Francisco Rodriguez, Matt Thornton, Craig Kimbrel, Joel Hanrahan, Hong-Chih Kuo

I suspect this is a better team than my “real” one.

football manager, the greatest video game ever created

Brian Phillips explains to the rest of the world:

It's clearly the greatest video game ever created. On every page, at every moment, there's something odd or wrong, and yet the hours melt away like you're in an anesthetic sleep. The different phases of the game each seem to light up a different part of your brain, only it's as if the developers realized at some point that the entire human brain can be broken down into Shopping, Name Recognition, and Chess. What makes it feel real is that, within its insanely wide scope, it generates a weird, squabbly, unpredictable world, a world which — unlike in most video games — you have only a limited power to control. You tried pushing your wingers forward to steal a late goal, and the opposing left back shattered your guy's femur? See him in seven months. You want to sign a player, but his agent hates your personality? You are out of luck, forever. The story keeps unspooling and unspooling, and because none of it's scripted, and a lot of it doesn't even involve you, it seems to have its own rules and not to care very much how you feel about them. It's a database, but it wants you to think it's a millionaire.

just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water

The World Cup blog is back in hibernation, which, unfortunately for those of you who hate soccer, means my soccer posts will end up here again.

Many years ago, my sister Chris and I came up with a little friendly competition. We took a player at each position on a baseball team, tossed in a few pitchers, and looked at them after five years to see which of us had done the best job of predicting the future. After five years, we did it again … after five more years, we did it again (that’s the one we’re in the middle of now). I should add that Chris always wins.

Well, Sean, the masterful commenter of the World Cup blog, and I decided to do this for soccer. The format is a bit different, and the rules we concocted were so complicated I won’t bother repeating them here. Suffice to say, we both picked teams in nine separate soccer competitions, and will check back in five years to see who had the best prediction skills.

Here are the competitions, and our choices:

Competition	Sean	Steven
England	Man City	Arsenal
Spain	Atlético Madrid	Sevilla
Italy	Roma	Fiorentina
Germany	Werder Bremen	Hamburg
Champions League	Bayern Munich	Real Madrid
MLS	Seattle	New York
Mexico	Cruz Azul	Toluca
World Cup 2014	Brazil	Argentina
Wild Card	Copenhagen	Celtic

2010 rubio begonias

A tough team to create, since I had the last pick in the draft, which meant things like not getting a pick until 9 others had chosen, and getting only 2 picks out of the first 29.

C: Mike Napoli, Buster Posey
1B: Derrick Lee
2B: Ian Kinsler, Howie Kendrick
3B: Ryan Zimmerman, Mark Reynolds, Alex Gordon
SS: Jose Reyes
OF: Grady Sizemore, Jason Heyward, Alfonso Soriano, Nolan Reimold, Conor Jackson, J.D. Drew, Josh Willingham
SP: Tim Lincecum, Ubaldo Jimenez, Clayton Kershaw, Chad Billingsley, Gavin Floyd
RP: Jonathan Broxton, Carlos Marmol, Chris Perez, Jeremy Affeldt