Chris.Derecola

Five of us played a proper game of Monopoly over the holiday break. I emerged victorious after what was probably three hours of game play. I lucked out and got both Boardwalk and Park Place while no one else was able to obtain a monopoly. I had quite a few properties and was able to prevent most monopolies but those that were possible didn’t happen soon enough. Everyone else mistakenly made deals way too late and it wasn’t until after I had a few houses and collected some serious cash that another monopoly was formed. No one had the money to build anything of significance and therefore no way to keep me from building to hotels. I put the first three players out of business with Boardwalk and the end came not long after that as I built up on my bankruptcy-acquired assets.

This turn of events got me thinking about Monopoly strategies. Surely people have figured out the statistics involved and surely there are countless pages in the internet to document it. I found this article that discusses breakeven probability and cost to own. My method of winning didn’t follow this but it’s interesting to see where the best values are. It’s certainly a good reference when you start trading properties and want to one up your competitor. If you didn’t already know, three houses is the sweet spot.

Today’s “real” post was going to be about my mid-season fantasy update but it got bumped. I guess it will have to wait until next week, when my record has flushed farther down the toilet. Stay tuned for that one!

Instead I’m going to outline just how much of a follower I am when it comes to the internet. Actually, first I’m going to mention that I added a search feature and cleaned up the links at the bottom of right nav bar. The search was long overdue and it wasn’t until I got the code IMed to me that I was motivated to add it. That brings me to today’s real topic.

We were talking about this today so included below is a list of things that I probably wouldn’t be using without Jeff. He reads far, far more tech news/reviews than I do and as a result is way more “in the know” than I am. That’s probably old news for some of the more tech savvy people but a shocker to those who come to me for tech advice. Yes folks, as hard as it is to believe, I’m not as uber-techie as I would seem to the layperson.

• Blogger – This site wouldn’t exist in this format without it.
• YouTube – I’ve bailed for Vimeo but to think I used to host my own, geez. If you head over to my Video page you can see the remnants of that.
• Vimeo – Search my recent posts for details on this.
• Flickr – Visit my Photography page for the details here.
• SHTML instead of Frames – If you don’t know what this means, you won’t care.
• Netvibes – Simply the best website… ever. It organized everything I do online and even things I do offline. Its seamless integration of to-do lists, calendars, bookmarks and pretty much everything else in the world was revolutionary.
• Google Calendar – I’ve used a dry erase calendar for years. I still use them to reference days of the week and whatnot but sharing work and personal dates with other Google Calendar users just makes life easier.
• Pandora – It was AOL Radio at work and Winamp’s Shoutcast at home but now it’s Pandora everywhere. It doesn’t hurt that it’s integrated into my Netvibes via an IFrame so it’s always at my fingertips.
• Gaim – The newest version, Pidgin, sucks but 1.5 is so much better than my old AIM 5.9 coupled with the AIMFrame add-on. Yes, I said it.

There are probably more if we really thought it out. I tried some of these before he recommended them but it was until he demonstrated full functionality that I committed to it. As I said previously, I don’t know how to use the internet properly without him. It’s quite sad, really, and needs to stop. I have provided him with some quality apps to keep the flow of information open but to what extent that compensates, I’m not sure.

This is all the interesting parts to my race Satruday. I’m trying to get more into the “video production” aspect of things and used this one as a test bed for Sony Vegas, my new program. It’s no ubervideo by any means, but I already feel like I’ve accomplished more in 1 video than I had in countless others with WMM. I’m happy with the results and am really looking forward to making some travel video. Check out the screenshot of the project below… looks neat, eh? I think so.

Vimeo deserves another shoutout on this one. To support their includsion of HD video, they’ve upped their limit to 500mb per calendar week until the end of the year. It’s likely you’ll have to pay to get to 500mb from 250mb after the new year but I can see countless artists paying to get their HD productions online. YouTube is great for the masses but I think Vimeo really has the artists figured out. Down with YouTube!