WANGOSAURUSREX

Last week was an ok week for me. I fared decent which was still better than most. I went 9-5 in picks and called a couple upsets which came true. Currently my overall Espn pickem record is a pretty solid 39-23 which puts me better than 7 of the 8 Espn football experts (the one beating me is 40-22 so not much of a difference).

For this week I am calling a couple upsets. I see the Colts finally losing a game. This loss comes to the Bucs and is the result of the couple injuries the team sustained last week, namely Harrison and Addai. They are still iffy on playing on Sunday but as it stands it seems likely they will both sit out this game to get a couple solid weeks of rest with their bye next week.

I also see the Chargers winning against the Broncos, that is, if they wisen up and actually play LT in not only the first half but also in the second. LT could very well put down a solid 150+ total yards and a TD or 2 this game.

As for my week 5 predictions, check out the following (bold indicating the teams I believe will win this weeks matchup)…

Miami (0-4) at Houston (2-2)
Jacksonville (2-1) at Kansas City (2-2)
New York NYJ (1-3) at New York Giants (2-2)
Carolina (2-2) at New Orleans (0-3)
Cleveland (2-2) at New England (4-0)
Detroit (3-1) at Washington (2-1)
Atlanta (1-3) at Tennessee (2-1)
Arizona (2-2) at St. Louis (0-4)
Seattle (3-1) at Pittsburgh (3-1)
Tampa Bay (3-1) at Indianapolis (4-0)
Baltimore (2-2) at San Francisco (2-2)
San Diego (1-3) at Denver (2-2)
Chicago (1-3) at Green Bay (4-0)
Dallas (4-0) at Buffalo (1-3)

Sadly last week was a poor week for me in fantasy football terms. 2 of my 4 teams took a loss, 1 of which fell to 1-3 overall and the other loser took their first loss of the season. My other 2 teams are doing well though with 1 being undefeated and the other only having lost 1 game this season.

My poor playing 1-3 team looks like they are in for a very rough season and I don’t see them with much of a chance of a win this week either. My key players have been turning in poor to mediocre performances all year with Cedric Benson leading the pack in suckiness. To make matters worse there are no players on the waiver wire to replace him and no one willing to offer up a trade for anyone better. I’m hoping Lee Evans has a big game but has been worthless thus far and with how things have been playing out so far I don’t see it happening unless a something magical happens.

I see myself going 3-4 this week between my fantasy teams which I suppose won’t be too bad. As for my game predictions I see 11-3 being very possible.

Last week was a little crazy. Sadly, my picks didn’t pan out for me and I went 8 of 16 which was by far my worst week this season. Good news? Can’t really do any worse than that, and I see this week panning out much better than the previous one. Currently this season I am sitting at 30 and 18 which is better than most of the “experts”. If you check out NFL - Experts Picks Week 4 you can see that I am actually doing better than all of them but 2 and tied with the Espn Accuscore system.

Another good site to look at is the Madden 2008 forecast system which uses a CPU vs CPU Madden football simulation (with corrected rosters to match the real life teams) to predict which teams win and which players perform well. I was thinking about setting up something like this myself a few years back and now Espn does it for me. Tight. Makes lazy people like me happy.

For week 4 I predict the following games with bold teams being the winners of the matchup. As you can see a few of my predictions are somewhat left field compared to the experts but I like to think positive (especially for my boys the Detroit Lions).

Houston @ Atlanta
New York Jets @ Buffalo
Baltimore @ Cleveland
St. Louis @ Dallas
Chicago @ Detroit
Oakland @ Miami
Green Bay @ Minnesota
Tampa Bay @ Carolina
Seattle @ San Francisco
Pittsburgh @ Arizona
Denver @ Indianapolis
Kansas City @ San Diego
Philadelphia @ New York Giants
New England @ Cincinnati

There you have it. Hopefully we will never ever see the fruity ass Eagles uniforms again. Wow. Go powderpuff girls. I blame their uniforms on the Lions horrible display during week 3. They were mesmorized by the ugliness and were unable to focus on the football. Yeah… that was it, I swear!

They look like shiny ass power rangers or something. Wtf. As for LT… he’s due. KC is shitty. The Chargers plan on using harder to predict run plays this week to help stir things up. This will allow LT to finally go to work and do his thing. He will have a monster game, no doubt about it.

These last couple weeks of football have turned out pretty solid. My boys, the Detroit Lions, have so far started off strong and sit at a solid 2-0 record. Next week they play the Eagles and depending on how McNabb plays the Lions could walk all over the Eagles or they could fall to them. I have a feeling McNabb will play mediocre and the Lions high flying offense will smother the Eagles defense. Result? I’m thinking… 31 to 24, Lions up.

 As for fantasy football, the first week 2 of my teams played poorly and were smoked by a small margin. My other 2 teams blew away the competition but that did not make up for my 2 losing teams poor performances. Week 2 went much better and I went undefeated in all 4 leagues. Week 3 looks challenging but hopefully I can pull off another 4-0.

I’m also doing ESPN’s pigskin pick’em which lets you pick what teams you think will win each week. Week 1 I went 10 of 16 correct selections (started this after the Colts game played so lost points on that game). Week 2 I did a little better and went 12 of 16. For both weeks combined I put together 22 pts versus the average which was only 17.7 pts. Not too shabby. This week I hope to improve on the upward trend of week 2 and get a couple more correct picks. Teams that I chose this week are as follows:

Arizona @ Baltimore
San Diego @ Green Bay
Indianapolis @ Houston
Minnesota @ Kansas City
Buffalo @ New England
Miami @ New York Jets
Detroit @ Philadelphia
San Francisco @ Pittsburgh
St. Louis @ Tampa Bay
Jacksonville @ Denver
Cleveland @ Oakland
Cincinnati @ Seattle
Carolina @ Atlanta
New York Giants @ Washington
Dallas @ Chicago
Tennessee @ New Orleans

Thursday was the first day of the wonderful world of NFL football! The colts took on the saints for what was suppose to be a battle of 2 great teams. Sadly, the epic battle turned into an epic beat down and the colts soared to victory without much, if any, trouble. Peyton Manning seems more like the Terminator than a human being.

With football games come fantasy football glory! Tomorrow will be a great day and will give me a rough idea of how my fantasy football teams will pan out this year. Last year I played in 2 fantasy football leagues, 1 being a head to head type league and the other a total points league. I got pretty unlucky in the head to head league and lost half my team to injuries before game 1. This helped my team flop down to a couple quick ass beatings by my fellow team owners. I pretty much gave up on the head to head league and coasted to a swift 0-14 record. In the total points league, which consisted of a whopping 5 teams, I oddly enough took 1st place but no one cared, not even myself.

This year I plan to turn that all around. I am a team owner in 4 leagues and plan on taking 1st place in at least 1 of them (got to play the odds after all). 2 of my teams are members of the yahoo fantasy football organization and both are head to head leagues. 1 of those 2 leagues is a 12 team league (Donkey Punch League) and the other is an 8 team league (Focus-Illusions Most Wanted). Both use the standard yahoo league rules except for the 8 team league which uses the standard rules slightly modified in allowing kick and punt return yards to transfer to points.

I much prefer the way yahoo.com presents their fantasy football and don’t mind paying the couple bucks required for live stat tracker. The layout is more user friendly orientated and the way they break down stats and offer quick fantasy matchup tips is in my mind superior to any of the other fantasy football sites that I have been to.

The other 2 leagues that I am a member of include The Funky Fresh league on espn.com and my final league known as the Go Hard Nation on nfl.com. Oddly enough, of the 3 different sites that I play fantasy football on, nfl.com is the one that I least prefer. The layout is less user friendly, pages load much slower, and everything is much harder to track (stats, projections, etc). Free live score tracking and optimized roster suggestions are the only real pluses that I can see with nfl.com’s version of fantasy football.

Espn.com’s take on fantasy football is pretty solid, the layout is neat and friendly, and creating your own team logo is a nice touch. I also like the fact that I can click on a player’s name and a small inobtrusive popup box opens up with stat information and the latest news. Overall espn.com offers a pretty solid fantasy football experience which in my opinion only just barely falls short when compared to yahoo.com’s version.

If you are not yet a proud owner of a fantasy football team you better hurry and get on it! If you are already taking part in this extremely popular simulation game then I wish you good luck and many wins!

I started a Linux course last month at school and have been enjoying it quite a lot. In class we are using an old version of Fedora and it isn’t half bad. This being my first time using Linux I was prompted to look into it further and at home above what we covered in class. Looking through a list of popular Linux distributions I bumped into one named Gentoo Linux (named after the Gentoo penguin which are the fastest underwater swimming penguins).

After an epic battle of Gentoo and myself I was finally able to get everything installed on my desktop machine and “somewhat” running. I was unable to get the GUI installer to work so I had to install from command prompt and with a lot of help from the Gentoo community and the Gentoo handbook.

Even though Gentoo Linux is more difficult to get up and running I would very much recommend looking into this distribution versus some of the other ones, especially if you are looking for more power to customize everything to run exactly how you wish it. A brief description of Gentoo can be summed up in the following:

It is designed to be modular, portable, easy to maintain, flexible, and optimized for the user’s machine. All tools and utilities are built from source code. For convenience, however, several large software packages are also available as precompiled binaries for various architectures via the Portage system. - wikipedia

As it stands now I have the generic kernel running fine and KDE loading up and everything working for the most part. Haven’t really tested anything graphic intensive yet but hope to once I have my own kernel compiled and running. My attempts thus far at getting an optimized kernel compiled and running has regrettably met with resistance but I hope to overcome this soon.

For more information into the world of Gentoo Linux feel free to check out the following sites:

gentoo website
gentoo-wiki site
gentoo on wikipedia