Last Minute, Automated-ish, Superbowl Pool

It's the Saturday before Superbowl Sunday - and you wish you had created a box pool for you and your friends. Too late, right? Nah... anything is possible... (if you've never been in a superbowl box pool - either stop reading or read on to check it out).

Here's an online way to do it (I know there are "real" sites for this): I created a SuperBowl Box Pool spreadsheet which has an online FORM for people to quickly participate... People fill out the form and they get assigned a random box in the pool - then, when all boxes are taken (there's 100 boxes, so it's ok to take more than one), the score values are randomly assigned and the names are again shuffled...
Then, as I enter the scores at the end of each quarter, the winners are identified automatically (as if that would be too hard to do by hand - sometimes I'm almost pathetic in my need to create useless spreadsheet formulas)

If you want to play in my pool (just for fun... no "points" to be won here!), just FILL OUT MY FORM and then go SEE THE BOX POOL to see which random boxes.

If you want your own - just go to THE SAMPLE and make your own copy (File menu, "create a copy" option... you'll need a Google Docs account).

If I get 100 boxes filled, I'll post the winner here after the Superbowl!

[Update: If you use the sample to run one of these on your own, be careful once the box numbers are generated... as they could easily be re-generated in-advertently if a change is made to the sheet which forces a re-calc - like inserting columns or other things. This shouldn't impact anything until you generate the random score numbers ... Once you take that startup step as per the instructions, don't touch the thing except to enter scores ;) and PRINT IT to be sure... ]

[Update 2/2/2008: And the winner was - Curious George. I would have won the half-time score, which is no wonder since I had to take almost half the boxes between myself and people close enough that they may as well have been me... Well - maybe I'll start collecting players for 2010 ;) ]

Losing a friend is less fun

When I first added Friend Connect to my blog it was fun watching as people (slowly) became "members" of my blog, and how some of them became my "friends". The number of people in both those groups is rather small, but the latter (friends) group is really, really small - so small in fact, that when my favorite blogger "un-friended" me (ouch!), I noticed pretty fast. Was it something I said? Nah - can't be - as I haven't said much of anything here in too long... Aha! That's it! What could be more offensive to a prolific blogger than a blog which sits there in silence? I get it.
Ok - you've made your point. I promise to post more. Can we be friends again? Oh, this is tricky... you have so many Friend Connect members on your site (2858... er... 2859..) that I can't find you to formally ask you back. hmmm... oh wait - there you are! You are still on my blog's easy to browse (read: short) members list... whew... Tricky business this friends 2.0 stuff.

Friend Connect now open

I had many people ask me about Friend Connect when I put it on my blog as part of an early beta, so I figured I should post quickly about it again... While it's been pretty cool up until now, there were only a few blogs which had it - so a bit less "connecting" on my blog. But now, anyone can add it to their site.

If you haven't noticed it, or don't even know what I'm talking about - it's those to little windows (gadgets) on the right side of this blog. The first shows people who "follow" my blog, and the second provides a place to quickly comment on the blog or on a specific post (comments on a specific post page are separate from other comments).

Check out the Friend Connect blog post to get the accurate info.

Spreadsheet visualization of industry-sector political contributions

The Sunlight Foundation posted a great video showing how money has flowed into the Republican and Democratic parties from different industry sectors over time. In normal circumstances, I might have said "(yawn) pass the nuts"... but... they used the Motion Chart in Google spreadsheets to visually show the changes in these flows over time. If you love data, whether you're politically interested or not, you gotta love this visualization... I'm embedding it here for convenienve... full credit to Sunlight for this specific video, to Gapminder team and the Trendalyzer (Motion Chart) team at Google responsible for this great chart type and to Yossi for pointing this example my way ;)

From the Sunlight Foundation Blog:


The gadget gallery has this chart type and others where you can get your own examples to play with...

An unexpected political post with an expected spreadsheet

I never talk or post politics - but on this eve of the first presidential debate, after a semi-wild week of news (semi? huh...), I figured I may as well fix up that electoral vote calculator I've been toying with and let others have a go at it...
If you want your own copy in your Google Docs account - there's a link at the top of the full published version. With your own copy, you can change who you think will win each state to see the impact on the electoral vote.... quite fun.

Summary - according to CNN as of Sept 26, 2008:

See the full version...

The initial data comes from CNN's Political Site - just after this first presidential debate which took place tonight between Barack Obama and John McCain. There, they have an electoral vote map - showing which states are either strong or leaning to one candidate or the other, or undecided. On their map, you can click the state to change the result.

Brainless marketing to parents

Please look at this picture - and imagine if you can being a parent (if you're not) and receiving this amongst the piles of mailed marketing waste that enters your home un-invited. Why do you think this one got my attention? What's wrong with this marketing story and this picture?

In case you can't see it clearly, it's two kids playing with toys in the backseat of a car. "Make Getting there half the fun" is the headline of this little story... What's the other half of the fun - seeing these two kids go flying past their safely restrained parents and through the windshield? The genius who put this little marketing story together forgot to strap these kids in! As a parent, I can tell you that there's a visceral reaction to seeing kids in a car without their seat belt buckled... And, in this case, it's so obvious (again, to a parent) since these kids are likely small enough to require (by law in some states, I think) to be in a childs car seat. And don't tell me the car in this picture is not moving... the door is closed and the sun is shining and it's clearly summer (the kids are in shorts) - so the alternative is that they are playing with toys in a parked, closed car in the summer sun... nah - let's stick with the seatbelt badness...

If you plan to sell toys to me, try to avoid that "we don't care about kids safety" angle... not effective.

Go wide (or narrow) with your Blogger Template

When I created this blog, I couldn't seem to find a blogger template that had both the look I wanted AND full-width (filling the browser window as it re-sizes - both wider and narrower)... So, I took the template I liked the most (thanks Darren) and then fiddled with the template code a bit to make it fill the width of the screen the way I wanted it to and to fill the empty space between the top header, the main content area (the posts) and the right pane (side-bar).

A few people have asked me which template I used (I know, hard to believe), so I am finally posting both a sample blog using that template and instructions on how to use my adjusted template... I figure at least I'll have a place to point the people who have asked for this.

The sample blog shows how the template looks and gives a link to the template file itself... Don't be scared off by the colors, as those can easily be adjusted using the blogger layout tools from the dashboard.