Notable searches included a big spike for Denny’s and Dockers, both giving away free stuff (hint-hint, future advertisers). My favorite was an upsurge in searches for pigs in a blanket, a party appetizer that I didn’t even think of bringing for our party.

Maybe I should have searched for that before the party.

Tick-tock

I recently ran across a post on Slashdot about how to best estimate programming time, and it led me to ponder the effectiveness of my current estimation practices.

My process usually involves utilizing my experience with similar projects as benchmarks to judge how much time a future project might take. The components of most online development projects tend to be remarkably similar: an example that I often run into involves building a site with several front-end HTML and CSS pages, a few dynamic back-end pages, and some database tables. A simple example like this is pretty easy to estimate if you’ve done them a few times.

But the devil is in the details. The real difficulties with this type of estimation are all of the unknown aspects of the project that you have no comparison against. Maybe the client wants the site administration integrated with an unknown CMS. Or maybe they want to implement the newest social-media-craze-of-the-week. There’s usually a wrench in every project that lands squarely on your estimation plans.

Thankfully, this is where experience comes into play again. Although I might not be familiar with the specific CMS or social media API in question, a history with these types of projects will usually be a good yardstick against which to measure.

2009 Buffalo Bills Team Photo Flyer

A friend of mine just returned from the Bills – Miami game and showed me this flyer he got, featuring a huge photo of the 2009 Buffalo Bills.

We were joking about how we should cross off all the players that ended up waived or on IR, so I started to comb through the players in the photo and noticed that Dick Jauron wasn’t there. That’s weird. Don’t they take these team photos at the beginning of the year? There’s no way they got everyone together AGAIN just because Dick was released. Or would they?

Then we slowly pieced together more and more evidence leading us to believe this photo has been altered:

1. Xavier Oman (#44) is in the photo. He was waived on 11/11. Jauron wasn’t fired until 11/17. This photo couldn’t have been taken after his firing.

2. Ralph and Brandon seem to be a little off-center. It seems that the logical place for Dick to be standing is right next to Ralph, where the three would be perfectly centered in the photo.

3. Who is in that spot? Jairus Byrd. And he seems larger than normal. In the photo he looks slightly taller than #29 next to him (Drayton Florence). Except Byrd is listed at 5′ 10″ and Florence is 6′ 0″. See a zoomed-in photo

4. Take a look at #29′s right ear. He seems to have some extra pixel’s… either that, or Kawika Mitchell has a seriously weird forearm.

Conclusion: The players were digitally shifted over to cover up Jauron’s image.

Not a big deal, but we thought it was amusing. If only we could erase his legacy so easily…

Click here for a high-resolution version of the flyer

Update

More evidence rolls in (thanks to the detective work at TwoBillsDrive)

#24 and #25 have EXACTLY the same body. I put together a GIF to prove it. I copied #24 and paste it on #25 they are pixel for pixel duplicates, except for the altered numbers.

And what might be the nail in the coffin – you can still see Dick Jauron’s shoe and khaki pants!