2020 End of Year Grab Bag

03 Jan 2021 • Miscellaneous

2020 In Review

2020 has been a year. It has had so many ups and downs that I struggle to remember all of them. I’ve been rather busy recently and didn’t get to this post as early as I’d hoped, so it will be a bit disconnected and short. To recap my original goals, I did okay, but not great.

Financial

I did not get a new savings account or credit card, though the drop in interest rates thanks to COVID makes the savings account less important. I made some progress with financial planning, but did not get to the level of detail I had initially hoped.

Technical

Oh boy. I was nowhere near on these, though I did hit a few of them. I am nearly done on v1 of the NBA salary work and can get it done with a solid night of work. My fantasy football tooling took a big step forward and there are clear gains for me to make before next season. Fantasy baseball season will be here soon and while I don’t plan on making projections or anything, I do have an idea sketched out for a tool that should be plenty useful.

I was able to finish the Data Structures and Algorithms course and am about halfway through with Bayesian Methods for Hackers, though my job search interrupted my progress there and I need to get back on track. Learning more languages was a complete bust, though my experience with Advent of Code showed me I have plenty still to learn with Python.

Social / Lifestyle

Some of these were made pretty difficult by COVID, so I’m giving myself a bit of a pass. Can I dunk again? No, because none of the hoops in San Francisco have rims, but I also couldn’t even if they did. I started using a password manager and use Firefox for almost everything, though I still use Chrome for a select few things. My Duolingo usage actually skyrocketed while home for the holidays and I’m sitting on a 45 day streak as I write this post. It’s been pretty fun getting farther with it. I read most of the books I listed at the outset of the year and got to several others that I discovered along the way.

MLB Showdown

I absolutely love playing MLB Showdown and my brother and I still make it a point to play when we’re back home together. We played two games while home this year and split the pair, though his win was by mercy rule (it was like 23 - 4 in the 5th inning) and mine was on a walk-off home run.

It remains a fun but eminently peculiar game at times, primarily in the card construction. Two cards can be nearly identical and yet one will be 30 or 40 points more than the other, with no discernible reason. This has pros and cons to the game because there are some cards that are simply better deals and will appear on a lot of teams, though that means a lot of cards are just filler. We made a set of cards one year and while it’s not easy, removing some of that oddness from the points would help. Honestly, I would love to figure out a way to programmatically make some each year, especially because then I could make random historical cards.

I am thinking about hunting down some of the cards I never had on eBay and there are a few at the top of my list. Pedro Martinez’s super season card. Joe Morgan and Al Kaline. Barry Zito’s 03 card. Some of the Ichiro cards. If I do get any, then I’ll be sure to let y’all know.

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