Matt Holthe's Fleeting Thoughts

Today is the Monday before Thanksgiving. This is the first year in a long time that I'm actually in an office for this week. There have been a couple of years where I had trips - once to Mexico where I flew home Thanksgiving morning and six years ago when we moved from Colorado to Illinois over Thanksgiving week. But that's been it for the last 15 years I think. So normally I have a chance to stay at home and watch some of the college basketball during this week - the Maui Invitational is one of my favorite tournaments. This year I won't be able to watch much if any because of working in an office and other stuff I have going on this week. Oh, well, maybe next year.

Today is the first day of the 2015-2016 college basketball season. College basketball is my favorite sport to watch, and has been for many years. I think I like it so much because games are usually right around 2 hours long, so there isn't a huge time commitment (pro football is a little over 3 hours and college football is more like 4 hours any more). And I like the unpredictability that comes with college age kids playing a sport - there's clearly talent, but sometimes the decision making process isn't as crisp, which leads to unpredictability. And although I don't make bets with real money on games, I do follow point spreads and over/unders in college and pro basketball and football, which does add a different spin to watching the games. Team A is favored by 26 points in basketball? You can still be interested in watching that game, not for whether they will win or not, but whether they will cover the spread or not. It's kind of like playing with a handicap in ...

I did a walk around my entire neighborhood yesterday. It's about a 2 mile walk to get up and down every street. I made note of lots that were empty to see just how close the neighborhood is to being complete. There are two parts to the neighborhood - east and west of a four lane road that eventually (maybe 20 years down the road) will be a major street. Today that street is just a way to get in the neighborhood and nothing more. There's plans to build further north, which will increase traffic on that road, but that hasn't even been started yet. Anyway, in the "east" part of the neighborhood, there are 6 empty lots. One of them is being built on right now (has a basement). On the "west" part of the neighborhood, there are 4 empty lots with 2 of them having "sold" signs on it. By knowing what sides of the street the empty lots are on, it is possible to walk entirely around the neighborhood on sidewalks. (In other words, there isn't a str...

A couple of days ago the Cubs finished their season by getting swept in the National League Championship Series by the New York Mets. It was nice that the Cubs were able to win the division series against St Louis. They won the division series at home, which is the first time EVER that a post season series was clinched at Wrigley Field. That was nice for the city of Chicago. Hopefully this is the start of a good run for the Cubs where they can continue to compete year after year and eventually get to and win a World Series.

This is the kind of record that I'm excited about. Since I started in my current job in March of 2007, here's how many actual miles I've flown each year (all airlines combined): 2007 - 76,442 2008 - 81,865 2009 - 50,020 2010 - 33,270 2011 - 36,594 2012 - 36,543 2013 - 45,309 2014 - 9,425 2015 - 8,033 The year 2014 was a down year (not very much business) and 2015 I was assigned to a contract that was local to me. I was renewed on that contract for 2016, so next year will be another down year for miles. In fact, this year there were only 2 trips for business and 2 trips for personal where I took an airplane. 4 trips to the airport the entire year. At the end of next year I'll have to figure out something. I like not being on the road - I did it for 7 years and am now pretty sick of it. But once this contract runs out, I might be forced back on the road to keep employed. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Last Saturday I (most likely) played my last golf round of the year. It was the annual tournament with 3 other friends from High School. I played just well enough to win the tournament this year by 1 stroke. Had to make a curvy 3 foot putt on the last hole to win, which was a good feeling. I played in a few scramble tournaments this year and a few rounds of 9 holes with some friends that have a standing weekly tee time. Golf just isn't as much of a priority right now in my life, but it's better than a few years ago when I played at most twice per year. My friends who are members at a country club keep trying to get me to join. That would be a complete waste of money for me to join - there is no way I would play enough to justify the cost. They also bring up the pool at the country club, but we wouldn't make much use of that, either - it's not like we're going to pack up and drive out there to spend 45 minutes on a weeknight, so we would only use it on certain week...

My family and I just got back from a trip to Great Wolf Lodge in Wisconsin Dells. It was a short trip, but very enjoyable. We've been to Wisconsin Dells several times, but never stayed here. The size was smaller than Wilderness (where we've stayed a few times) but I think that helped. The water parks weren't as crowded, but we don't know if that was because of the weekend we chose or if they would always be that way. I slept horribly both nights, though - the floor above us creaked when those people walked around (thanks for getting up at 6 AM, by the way...) and I just couldn't get comfortable for some reason. One thing that was fun and unique was MagiQuest . It's an interactive role playing game. You buy a wand (which can be reused on future trips) and go on quests to find things and solve riddles. We had a lot of fun doing that. But we weren't able to defeat the dragon or the goblin. After doing a little looking around today, I think I know how to beat ...

Another year for the golf majors is complete. I've been comparing Tiger Woods to Jack Nicklaus for several years now (ever since it was a "foregone conclusion" that Tiger would break Jack's record of 18 major titles). Tiger has now competed in 70 majors as a professional. Here's how they stand after 70 major starts: Tiger - 14 wins, 6 second place finishes, 24 top 3 finishes (14+6+4 others), 31 top 5 finishes, and 38 top 10 finishes. Jack (and here is where it's hard to believe just how good he was) - 15 wins, 14 second place finishes, 38 top 3 finishes, 45 top 5 finishes, and 54 top 10 finishes. 77% of the time, Jack was in the top 10. Tiger's been in the top 10 54% of the time. And very close to winning (top 3)? Jack 54%, Tiger 34%. More than half the time, Jack was in the top 3 of a major. That's amazing. At this same point in their careers, Tiger is 1 major win behind Jack. And it doesn't get any easier. For Tiger next year (and, by the...

Even though the football season hasn't started yet, I'm getting ready for the NCAA basketball season. There's a blog that I follow that went through several NCAA early season tournaments. I was able to take the information and create the neutral court information for those games. This is done so that when the games do get played, my system will know if the game was played on a neutral court and where it was played. Sometimes I miss some games and have to back track after the fact, but hopefully this preparation gets most of the games. The NCAA football games and NFL games (London) are much easier to handle - there's only a handle of games on neutral fields until the bowl season at the end of the football year. I did those in an afternoon a few weeks ago.

We recently got back from a trip to the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas. Since it's a trip we might do again in the future, I decided I'd write up some "what I'd do different next time" items here. First off, Atlantis is EXPENSIVE. Just get it in your head to start out with. We rented a place with a kitchen and planned on eating meals in the room which helped offset the total cost. We would do a kitchen again, though. We ordered from Food Store 2 Go and would do that again. Having groceries delivered to your room was well worth it. Our flight got in too late Friday for them to deliver, so we had to stick around in the room Saturday morning instead of being able to go out right away, but it wasn't too bad. We should have ordered more bottled water from the grocery store. I'm the only one in the family that drinks soda, so we had twelve 12-oz cans of Coke Zero delivered. But it would have been just fine ordering more water and less soda. (We ordered 24 16...

I was trying to do some reading of Excel inside a Java agent in Domino the other day. It was my first attempt at it (I have done it in LotusScript, but not Java), so it was quite a bit of trial and error. The first thing I saw said you need so-and-so JAR to do it. So I download that and add it to my agent. Then I get some error message. A quick search on that results in "you need so-and-so JAR to get rid of that error". Another download and add. Triggers a different error. Repeat. And so on. Pretty soon, I end up with an agent design element that, by itself, is 10,854,717 bytes in size. That's nearly 11 MB for just that one design element. I have a pretty complex Java library that is just under 50 KB in size in the same application. That's KB... the design element that was just created was 218 times bigger. And that was without much of my own code inside it. Naturally, I get an "out of heap space" error whenever I try to use it. Guess I'll have to fi...

I have been working on an application for the past several weeks. It's an application that I thought of but will be used by myself and others. I keep using it and finding little ways to improve it. I am up to the 4th major release of it now. Each major release has turned up some things in the documentation that need to be changed (more tweaking) and some things that no longer work (more tweaking) or have been replaced with newer features (delete the old stuff; more tweaking). If I would be tracking minor version numbers, I have no idea where I'd be - 4.45.23 or something stupid like that. Version 4 has been out for a couple weeks now and I think every day I have made about 10 changes (some very minor, some a little more major, but none enough to go to "version 5"). Ah, the life of a software developer....

The Illinois golf team finished their season yesterday. The NCAA golf tournament sounds like it is really grueling. It is 4 days of stroke play, then the top 8 teams get seeded based on the stroke play results and play a match play tournament. Illinois after day 1 of stroke play was in first, then 2nd after the 2nd day, then 5th after the 3rd day, and moved back up to 1st after the last day of stroke play. In the quarterfinals of the match play event, they had to come from behind to beat #8 UCLA. The seeding doesn't really mean much as #3, #5, and #7 were the other seeds that one quarterfinal matches. The same day they played the semifinals and lost to #5 USC while #7 LSU beat #3 Georgia. Today is the finals and they are about half way through with LSU leading. That's 7 rounds of golf in 6 days if you make it to the finals. Meanwhile, the baseball team has set a record for wins with 50 and is in the super regionals for the first time ever. If they can win 2 out of 3 again...

I'll actually give credit for the original site where I took and manipulated this image from... The Las Vegas blog run by Total Rewards (Caesars properties) posted this image. It was a bit too big to print, so I took it and manipulated it a bit to get what you see below. The original post was on their blog .

We booked our summer vacation this week. We're going to be going to Atlantis in the Bahamas this summer. It will be the first time our daughter (who is almost 6) will be out of the country. We're looking forward to it, but it's also going to be nerve-wracking going through customs and multiple flights with our daughter. She's flown several times before, but always direct. Even when we went out to California, we flew from St Louis to Los Angeles direct. Hopefully she does all right.

This is probably a big copyright, no-no, but I'm doing it anyway because I don't want to keep the magazine around until next March when I can just look it up on my phone.... I subscribe to Casino Player, and the March 2015 issue had a "best ____" section listed. They listed the "best" in all kinds of different gambling areas. Because I have a trip to Las Vegas coming up next March (and I'd forget all this by then), I thought I'd post some of the more relevant (to me) entries for both Las Vegas Downtown and the Las Vegas Strip. We won't have a car, so I'm not posting the "Las Vegas Locals" entries unless they are close enough (like The Palms hotel or the Rio). I put the Downtown entry first, then the strip entry, and then (if it's there) the "locals" entry. Best Steakhouse: Andiamo Steakhouse, The D Las Vegas; Gordon Ramsay Steak, Planet Hollywood Casino with the best variety of restaurants: Downtown Grand; Cae...

Congratulations to Duke beating Wisconsin last night to with their 5th NCAA Men's Basketball Championship. Wisconsin was up 9 mid-way through the second half and Duke came roaring back to win by 5. I, again, picked the lines and totals for every single game of the tournament. And I, again, proved to be a punter in the eye of Las Vegas. I was 66-66-2, exactly 50%, for the whole tournament. Totals I was a little better than 50% at 34-31-2. For the lines, when I picked the favorite I went 15-20. When I picked the underdog I went 17-15.

I just this week found a formula to compute the parlay payout when money lines are involved. Obviously, if you pick two 10-point favorites to win in a parlay, you shouldn't get as much of a payout as if you picked two 10-point underdogs to win. Picking favorites to win outright isn't as profitable as picking underdogs to win. But, here's an example that might be compelling. Let's say that you have two 5 or 6 point favorites in college basketball. The money line on those favorites should be around -250 or so. If you pick those favorites to cover in separate bets and win both bets ($50 each game - $100 total), you'll win $95.45 total. If you put those two teams in a money line parlay for $100, they don't have to cover (just win), and you will win $96. Obviously, they both have to win to win the parlay. But you get the cushion of "just win" instead of covering the spread.

A couple of the bets from the first round of the NCAA tournament had some crazy finishes. Trailing favored Notre Dame by five in overtime, Butler's Kameron Woods dunked with two seconds left to make the final score 67-64. The Irish were 4.5-point favorites. "Last night was nuts with the ending to the Notre Dame game. Heartbreaker for the [betting] players," Jay Rood (vice president of race and sports for MGM) said Sunday. "That was a seven-figure swing." That means that the betting public (more often going with the favorite, in this case, Notre Dame) could have won $1 million plus more than the sports book won. The sports book doesn't always want a 50-50 split on the games. Sometimes they get these outcomes and pocket more money. As another example, Georgetown's Jabril Trawick dunked with one second left to polish off the Hoyas' 84-74 win over Eastern Washington. Georgetown was an 8-point favorite. Jason Simbal (CG Technology vice president of ...

Illinois lost in the first round of the NIT last night. That makes 3 losses in their last 3 games. They lost by 5 at Purdue to end the regular season. Then they lost by 18 in the first round of the Big Ten tournament. And the kicker was losing by 21 to Alabama in the first round of the NIT. Illinois was a 3 seed and Alabama was a 6 seed, but the game was played at Alabama because of construction going on at Illinois' stadium. They have a pretty good recruiting class coming in next year. Here's hoping they can make it back to the NCAA tournament and do better than a 19-14 record.