Steven Hodson of WinExtra has an excellent post on his top 10 suggestions for new bloggers, including advice to set goals, narrow your focus, choose the right tools and pick a theme. If done well, he suggests you should have a target number of RSS feed readers, individual site visitors or even advertising dollars, whether for six months or twelve.

While good advice for those with specific goals, does that mean those without goals, and without limits, are inherently unsuccessful? I recently noticed I'd passed through both the Technorati Authority rank of more than 100, as well as a Feedburner subscription base of just over 100. Did I count that as achieving my goals? No, because I hadn't made them a target, but they are good benchmarks nonetheless.

I think there's something to be said for blogging for the sake of blogging, for not always narrowing your focus if you just don't feel like it. While I might get more readers if I stuck to just Apple Macintosh coverage, or Google watching, I enjoy talking about sports, or our dog, or the latest hits on our TiVo or Nintendo Wii. For me, while I've said my blog is my brand, it's not so narrow as to show me in a niche. Instead, while my interests are diverse, so will my blog be.

I don't have specific goals for my blog, except that I keep it up in a timely manner, that my posts maintain interest and quality, and that I keep conversations alive. For me, the blog is an outlet of discourse with people I may never meet, and a clean slate that captures those things I'm thinking about or want to call attention to. The WinExtra guide is fantastic if I were looking to start a blog with a target of being on the B-List or the A-List, and gaining notoriety, or simply covering the yearly hosting bills, but for me, I'd prefer to let fly, so I can communicate at my own pace and not feel as if I'm forever falling behind my own expectations.

Being an early adopter in the tech world has its perks and its drawbacks. So can being a late follower.

For all the times I've sprung early on new Apple products, like iPod, Apple TV, iLife, etc., I've similarly lagged on the hardware side. My first computer I didn't share with the rest of the family was quickly lapped by Apple's 68k to PowerPC chip line transition. Now, I'm sitting here with a G4 laptop, without Intel Inside. While the machine works great, I'm already seeing interesting apps, like VMWare Fusion and Joost, just outside my reach. It can be quite frustrating!

That's the background behind my most recent contributions to The Apple Blog, titled Living One Mac Generation Behind. Per agreement with them, I will not be cross-posting the piece, but instead, have provided a link. Enjoy.

While the Nintendo Wii is still new to me, I'm sure some of its more advanced features are sure to prove me late to the game. Yesterday, while browsing the Wii's Shopping Channel, I found that you can download classic original Nintendo games directly to the Wii's hard drive, without buying a game disc. For the equivalent of $5, I was able to download the original Super Mario Bros. video game, helping me reestablish my dominance over Goombas and gain the opportunity to save The Princess, all for less than the price of a McDonald's Happy Meal.

Like any good NES user back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I played my unfair share of Mario Bros, and know all the hidden tricks. But while it's been a long time since I've played the game on an NES console, I had the game fired up and ready to go on our 42-inch plasma TV last night, a brand new experience.

Engadget posted a story yesterday calling for Nintendo to enable DVD playback on the Wii - a laudable effort, to be sure. But for me, I continue to get geeked out by the fact this slim console has the ability to move beyond DVDs, and can grab new games from the cloud for near-immediate playing. It's a lot like video games on demand. For an extremely small cost basis, I was able to pull down one of the world's classics, a game which doesn't get any less fun with time, and one I likely would have paid ten times as much for the first time around. That's almost as fun as finding a hidden "1 Up" mushroom!

Cross-posted to Athletics Nation...

Being a partial season ticket holder this year, I've endured too many losses seemingly every Friday, Saturday and the occasional Sunday. It got me thinking... am I seeing my unfair share of losses, when compared to other days during the week? And do the A's play better on Saturday night 6:05 starts than 1:05 starts here in Oakland? So I broke out the Excel sheet. Could the results be coincidence, small sample size, or are the numbers telling us something?

-- ALL Stats Current as of Sunday's Win vs. Kansas City --

First Up: Weekdays.

After crunching the numbers, I was right about one thing. The A's do much better during the week than they do on the weekends. In fact, during the relative low-pressure Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the 2007 A's win at a 57.9% and 63.2% clip, respectively. Given the team's sub-.500 record, it's no surprise that's above everything else. In fact, the team only wins 35% of Saturday contests and 40% of Sunday games overall. (See below chart)



Next up: Day games vs. Night games.

It turns out the A's only win just under 49% of day games and just under 49% of night games, so that tells us a whole lot of nothing. But if you drill down on a day by day comparison, some jump out at you, and I'm not talking about the fact that Sunday night games and Monday and Friday day games don't exist. Instead, you can see that on Saturdays, the team wins less than 43% of day games, and only 23% of night games, a total not helped by their woeful 0-7 record away from Oakland on Saturday night. That's right, 0-7. In fact, to my surprise, the team both wins and loses an equal amount of games at home on Saturdays, so I've got little to whine about there.

(Also: Don't get thrown by the fact the team won their only Tuesday day game on the road. 1 for 1 does not a sample size make)



Next up: Home games vs. Road games.

We already talked about how much the A's love playing at home on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, where they've won 14 of 21 contests, good for a 66.7% winning percentage. But did you have any idea that Thursdays on the road were just as nice? Okay, so it's only 4 out of 6 games won, but you're not going to get those numbers anywhere else. (That might also explain why the A's seem to do well mid-week and get us excited, only to then fade on the weekend)



Putting it all together: Home vs. Road vs. Weekdays vs. Day vs. Night

Again, throw out the one Tuesday day game. That's an anomaly. What we see is that on Wednesday, the A's play great at home during the day and great on the road at night. On Friday/Saturday/Sunday, you may as well flip a coin to see if the A's will do well, unless it's Saturday night and they're on the road. That's a guaranteed loss.



If you want to poke holes in the data, love ones and zeroes, or just want to get your inner geek on, please do download the full Excel file and give us some new reports. But until then, I'm going to go to Vegas and put my home mortgage against the A's when they play on the road Saturday nights. And I've GOT to start attending Wednesday day games instead. Dollar Dogs, right?