In a BS post about Google’s TOS for Google Docs, the founder of Writely, the company acquired by Google for web-based office applications responded in the comments. Part of his response:

To be clear, Google will not use your documents beyond the scope that you and you alone control. Your fantasy football spreadsheets are not going to end up shared with the world unless you want them to be.

Maybe he was reading FatMixx?

And, on the subject of the silly post by Joshua Greenbaum, it sure seems like he’s just making a random controversy up to get traffic. Seriously, Greenbaum omits the key phrase “intended to be available to the members of the public” to fabricate a TOS controversy that Google is trying to own your documents. You know you’ve hit on a serious topic when the longest arguments in the comments thread talks about the proper way to parse the statement according to proper rules of grammar. What is the meaning of “is” anyway?

The anniversary just passed, and there’s a lot of coverage about the reconstruction. Hilzoy runs down the state of the reconstruction. It doesn’t look good. BTW, I just found out that Hilzoy is a professor at Johns Hopkins. I knew there was something about her I liked. Beyond the fact that she’s an excellent writer, I mean.

On top of that, Sen. Chris Dodd has proposed legislation to help close some of the funding and federal leadership issues with the reconstruction. Another reason to vote Dodd in 2008.

While our senior senator is showing leadership on this issue, our junior senator, Sen. Joe Lieberman, is, once again, going back on his word and abandoning the people in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Look, I can respect the desire to avoid a partisan blamefest. The problem here is that Lieberman is in charge of the committee that would investigate the matter. He sets the tone of the hearings and he is in a key position to lead the committee away from being a partisan hunt. That would be leadership, though, and that’s something that Joe Lieberman lacks. So, instead of having public hearings where we can shed some light onto what happened over those few days, and perhaps work out a better response system, we’re going to have to trust that FEMA and DHS have fixed things. Those hearings are also a way to learn from our mistakes.

After all, considering the track record of this administration on, well, anything, do you trust them to fix the FEMA issues without external guidance?

I have CNN on in the office this morning and have been watching the coverage of Gonzales’s resignation for the last hour or so. The one thing that strikes me is that the legal correspondent who’s also covering the Vick trial, is simply making stuff up. The White House hasn’t said anything officially and yet this guy is saying that the Bush administration is taking this action to accomplish the important things they have planned for the remaining 17 months. Where is he getting this stuff from?

On top of that, Chertoff is the presumed nominee to replace him. Is it just me, or does this administration promote internally more than any other in recent history.

My sister is in Peru as part of a medical fellowship and, as some of you know, was in country when the earthquake hit. She’s joined a team going down to Pisco, Peru, which was located near the epicenter of the quake. Though communications are limited, she’s been able to blog about what she’s seeing on the ground. Her first post is here, and you can follow her Peru posts here. Of course, her blog is worth reading anyway. Both of my sisters are phenomenal writers, far better than me. As Heidi points out, Sural provides a clear and vivid picture of what’s going on there.

Sural also worked in Louisiana post-Katrina (though months later, rather than days), and I’m curious to see how the experiences compare. I suspect some of the poverty issues she’s running into in Peru are similar and different than what she saw in the U.S.

Stay safe, sis. We’re all proud of you.

I didn’t do so well this year. After the draft last year, I felt like I had mastered the format and figured out a good system for evaluating draft value. This year, I was just shocked at how out of whack my sheet was compared to what people were paying. Looking back at my prep, I realized at least one critical mistake in building out my sheet, but I still am surprised that some of these players went for the point prices they fetched. 150 point cap, and Laurence Maroney went for 50, Willis McGahee for 50, Peyton Manning for 51. Those are higher than last years by a few points a piece at each position.

Ultimately, I forgot to factor in keeper inflation, the bump that comes with the extra money saved by having a cheaper keeper. There were some excellent bargains on the keeper list this year, and that pushed up spending by 5 points or so for the top players, especially running backs not in RBBC situations. That miscalculation kept me from keeping up with bids, and I missed out on the entire first round of players. I got no one out of the first 12 on the board. That’s unlike me.

Also, an in person auction draft is a lot like playing poker… you want to vary your bids, stay in on players you don’t want sometimes, so that people don’t have a clear read on what your intentions are. After all, if they know you want a player, they know they can push you to bid a few extra points on them. This year, I stayed out of players that I wasn’t interested in. I don’t think I bid on one player that I didn’t want. Contrast that to last year, where I was basically happily playing chicken with other owners trying to bid up their players even though I had no interest in them. This year, I got played instead because I was easier to read.

Finally, I definitely wasn’t as prepared. One nice thing about working at ESPN was having the TV on in the background at my desk. I picked up a lot of football passively by listening to NFL Live most days. This year, I have been busy with the startups and haven’t had a chance to do the kind of reading I do most years. There was a point at about the 9th round today that I realized I didn’t know who I would put up for the rest of the draft. That’s how I ended up with Muhsin Muhammad.

I still like my team, even though it didn’t fit the plan I had going in. It’s not as strong as my team last year, nor is it as balanced, but overall I think I recovered well.

As for everyone else’s draft, the best drafted team was the Nukes followed closely by the Pirates. You can take a look at our league at ESPN FFL or our points spreadsheet at Google Docs. Happy to hear what others think. Feel free to leave a comment below.

Today was draft day for the main Fantasy Football league I play in. Unlike most leagues, we do an in-person auction draft with a salary cap to fill rosters rather than the traditional snake draft. This format is great, but the downside is that it eliminates a lot of software out there to help on draft day. Granted, there are commercial packages out there that can help you out, but this year we found a simple, free solution that gets even better if you have an Internet connection and multiple computers where you draft.

One of the owners in the league created a simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing all the teams with all of their roster slots along with a simple set of formulas to record total cap spent and remaining. This way, he just needed to record it as the draft went on and it could be emailed out.

That worked well, but put a lot of pressure on him. Most years, I also ran the big draft board with stickers, which at least meant two people aside from the commish were logging all the picks and points. With my recent departure from ESPN, though, I didn’t have a free source for the board and forgot to order it. My bad! So, to help out this year, I tried taking the spreadsheet and sharing it with Google Docs. Since we had Internet access at the draft location, and three people with laptops, plus 1 remote user, we were able to collaboratively share entry responsibilities among two of us with another 2 verifying the data as we entered it.

This solution worked amazingly well. The other folks that had the spreadsheet open would see the changes as I typed them, within a second or two, and we were able to even invite “spectators” into our draft to watch along. The spectators only had read-only access, which I was able to control as I invited people into the document.

Couple of thoughts: This is literally how simple a day-of-draft tool needs to be. No fancy analysis, no extra features. Just tally up the spending, record the picks, and know the teams and roster layouts. All it needed was a list of players with autocomplete and that would be it. Oh, and did I mention that Google Docs can import Excel and Word documents along with a number of other formats. It also exports the same for those folks who would rather have an offline copy.

You can check out our draft spreadsheet on Google Docs, and see if you can make one for your league.

And a note to the peeps back at ESPN: This is the easiest way to build this! No need for anything fancy, and combined with Google Gears, you’d have a simple offline/online application with just the browser.