Thursday, May 10, 2007

I've had two decent (7+ hours) nights of sleep in a row. I'm not sure why. I think it's random. Regardless, the brain fog is lifting a bit.

It was getting pretty dark in there for a while. The world seemed be going faster than I could parse it. I recall Hank buzzing into my office on Tuesday and saying, "Sallycalledandimgoingtogomeetheratthemallthetaquitosareintheovenjusttakethemoutwhenthebuzzergoesoff andthespinachisreadytocookinapanonthestovejustturnitonandcookitlikeusual, ok?

I stared at her uncomprehendingly, blinking slowly while trying to tune in her frequency.

"Can you say that again? Slower?" I mumbled

"Sally called, and I'm going to meet her at the mall. The taquitos are in the oven. Just take them out when the buzzer goes off, and the spinach is ready to cook in a pan on the stove. Just turn it on and cook it like usual, ok?" she repeated.

I blinked a few more times.

"So.... you need me to do something?"

"Yes. The buzzer will go off when the taquitos are ready. Daisy will tell you when that happens. Just take them out of the oven and then cook the spinach. It's all ready to go in a pain on the stove. It's really easy, ok?"

"Oh. Gotcha. Sure."

It was not a productive week.

Meanwhile, I continued to spend every possible spare brain cycle on my baseball gambling software. It's been performing very poorly the last couple weeks, so I decided to write a bunch of code to and figure out what was going wrong.

Here, I'll make an analogy to make this explanation simpler.

Pretend my baseball gambling program is an airplane. Pretend that I've been spending all this time trying to build an airplane so that I could get places fast.

Now, pretend that the airplane does fly ok sometimes, but other times it kind of smashes into the ground. Pretend that the last two weeks were really ground smashy. (Cut me some slack, this is my first airplane)

So, I spent a lot of time the last couple days trying to tune it to be more aerodynamic, so that it would spend more time flying and less time nosediving into cement. I ran wind-tunnel tests, and reduced some weight, and tried to hire a smarter pilot. However, no matter what tests I ran, it still smashed into the ground too often. It's hard to get places quickly when your airplane does that.

One of the tests I ran, however, was to make sure that the plane could taxi well. That test went GREAT. In fact, I found that the airplane really booked along the runway much faster than I expected.

So, today, I came to the absurd conclusion that since my airplane taxis much better than it flies, maybe I should just drive it everywhere. THAT seems to work great.

So, yes, I can successfully make baseball bets, just not in the way I expected. I built an airplane, and now I'm driving it down the road.

(If that doesn't work for you, try this. It's like I spent a couple months trying to build the world's best chocolate chip cookie making machine, but now I'm just gonna eat the dough instead).

4 comments:

DarkWing said...

Don't get to much sleep. A little brain fog is good :) (i'm not sure why)

Mike said...

I'm pretty certain that there are more pleasant ways to fog a brain.

tinyhands said...

I'm still amazed that you haven't figured out how to accurately predict a random, multivariate future phenomenon. What are you, slow?

Mike said...

Random-shmandom. Don't make me bust out my chaos theory!