Saturday, January 31, 2009

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 ;) ]

Thursday, January 29, 2009

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.