Tournament Team

My son made it on the KAC Bronco Tournament Team. Yay!!!

The team will be playing in a qualifying tournament next month and if they are in the top 4, they get to play in the state tournament in Kauai. The winner then advances to the mainland to play in other regional tournaments and then the Pony World Series.

I'm not sure how far this team will go, but it's great working with the kids. The coaching staff is really good this year and the kids are learning a lot and getting a feel of what it's like to compete for a position.

My son was the starting second baseman for his regular season team. He also played pretty well in the outfield, blocked the ball really well as catcher, and pitched the closing inning in a lot of games. On the Tournament Team, he is one of the younger players and may not see as much playing time. I've been talking to him all season long about working on his game. Now that he is on a team of really good players, I can finally see it sinking in. He is finally realizing that he needs to practice hard and work on things to get better.

He may or may not get the playing time. But I think the lessons that he is learning is worth more in the long run. Work hard, care about what you are doing, and improve something every day.......KAIZEN

Finding Answers

I've come to realize that the ability to find answers is a skill. I always thought it was something that everyone did about the same, but a couple of recent events have shown me that people have different ability levels when it comes to finding answers. (And when I say finding answers, I'm basically talking about Googling for an answer)
You would think that since everyone has access to the same Google, that answers/solution finding would be about the same, no matter who did the searching. But that is not always the case.

Event 1: A person that I work(ed) with occasionally (often) asks me for help solving a problem. Most of the times, I find the answer with the first Google search. I'm not trying to make myself sound like a Google-savant but it usually isn't that hard. Sometimes it would be a couple of searches, but basically the answer was there. I just chalked it up to that person being lazy.

Event 2: I recently became a ChaCha seach guide. When you research answers to questions, you get to see a log of prior questions and answers. Some of the answers don't seem to have as much substance as others. A lot of times, the client would ask the question again and you can see the different quality levels of the answers.

So then it dawned on me. Maybe the ability to find answers on the web is not the same in all people. I'm not sure what the difference is. It could be different levels of curiosity or persistence. Or maybe the ability to think a bit out of the box and trying different types of search terms when the first, obvious ones, don't give you the answer that seems right.

In any case, I think that as more and more information is available on the Web. Being able to filter through the data to find what you want is a skill that is very valuable.

ChaCha guide: Day 1

I was accepted as a ChaCha guide.
My first task was to complete a set of 15 sample questions, which I passed. These were questions that were fairly straight forward. Things like the score of a baseball game, some simple facts, and some history type questions. These questions were ones that I was thinking that I would be getting when I really started.
So after passing those samples, I was ready to start for real. I was really looking forward to it. I read a couple of comments that mentioned that a lot of the questions were pranks, but I still felt that I would be helping the search community and it would be fun.

My first question: 13 hoopers

?? WTF ?? I actually spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what that was. No luck.....I was a search failure.....this sucks.

My next couple of questions were asking about people. Not famous people...just regular Joes. I found one of them but not the other. At this point I was feeling not to good about this. Finally after 5 more questions, they started to get better. "Who is better Chris Paul or Deron Williams?", "Who is the Seattle Mariners franchise leader in home runs?", "How did they create Alloys back in the old days?"
It got to be fun and I learned a thing or two....and on top of that, I've earned a whopping $2.40.
I'm going to keep going with this. It's a great way to relax between coding and a nice way to end the day.

Human Powered Search

I really think that putting a human in the loop can improve the quality of search results. For example, I think that Mahalo seemed like a really good idea. I even signed up to be a guide on Mahalo. A guide basically compiles the search result page for a particular search query. I was rejected, but that's besides the point. The good thing about Mahalo is that you get results that have up to date information, the bad thing is that if the search string that you input has not been created by a guide, you won't get any results. For example, if you enter Java, you get a nice page with general Java information. If you enter Java String, you get some results on String Theory and some Google search results.
I also have recently found ChaCha, which is not really a search tool but more of an information tool. You send a text message from your phone with a question and a real human does the research and sends you back an answer along with a page link to the information source. I signed up to be guide at ChaCha as well....and I was accepted. Right now I'm in the final phases of getting setup but it should be any day now. If you want to try it out, text to 242242 and send in a question. I think it's free right now. There is also an 800 number where you can verbally submit your question (1-800-2ChaCha).