Thoughts. » Blog News http://www.ultimatethoughts.com Ultimate Ramblings Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:36:41 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Happy New Year – What’s in Store for 2012 http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2012/01/happy-new-year-whats-in-store-for-2012.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2012/01/happy-new-year-whats-in-store-for-2012.html#comments Sun, 01 Jan 2012 18:34:17 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/?p=867 This site has been silent for too long, and for that I apologize. Some updates for you:

  • Personally, I’ve had a full year. Finished the study grind (well, one of them) wrapping up year two of medical school and passing Step 1 of my Boards (there are 3 steps total) in July; since then I’ve been busy in the hospital and clinic getting hands-on training and exposure to patients trying to translate my knowledge of how health and disease works into the more functional side of how do we recognize and treat illness in real people. After two years of struggle I finally feel like I’m starting to thrive and get some certainty on my future career path – life is very good.
  • Ultimate-wise, I wound up playing mixed with Ballometrics again this year; we wound up losing at the end of Saturday at Regionals in what is always a tough Northeast region. This year I’m looking to take more of a leadership role still playing coed and am excited and energized by the prospect of helping lead a team to something great.
  • Writing-wise, I’m hoping to do better with updating this blog – short-term plan is to do some reflection on my training this year (with my schedule and travel I’ve had to forsake the weights, which has made for more interesting decisions). I’m also planning to re-work some of my older material on strategy and skills and deliver it to Skyd for republishing, with perhaps the occasional new feature there as well. I haven’t quite figured where I’ll draw the line on what goes where yet, but I’ll certainly link from here to anything that goes up there.

I wish I could say I’ve written enough here to do a retrospective “best of” but that’s simply not the case – but stay tuned for more to come!

Related posts:

  1. Happy New Year.
  2. The New Year, the Season of Hope

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2012/01/happy-new-year-whats-in-store-for-2012.html/feed 1 Links All Over http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2010/12/links-all-over.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2010/12/links-all-over.html#comments Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:39:11 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/?p=763 (Two posts in two days, I know – but don’t get too excited; I’ll settle in to a lower rate soon enough.)

There’s some good new stuff springing up around the ultimate blogosphere and beyond lately – check it out:

  • If you haven’t seen it yet, Skyd Magazine looks to be off to a promising start (they’re looking for writers, for any of you aspiring contributors out there).  There’s a heavy US ultimate tilt for the international readers out there, but you do see some gems coming like a series on training for ultimate, and another on building a championship team.
  • Speaking of training for ultimate, check out Melissa’s training blog and Ultimate Results for some great information and ultimate application. I Like the post on holiday gifts for the ultimate player – the books are gems (I’ve added a few more recommendations in the comments as well).
  • Skyd links up a Breakmark post on off-season training; as the title alludes, it’s a simplistic model and in my opinion focusing just on GPP is missing out on an opportunity to develop along several other modalities as well (I’m thinking primarily of strength here – GPP workouts are a great adjunct for recovery days after a good lift. That said, interval training and speed work can fit in at this point too, depending on your goals).
  • Parinella and others have linked up Lou Burruss’ series on Cheating to Win (Without Cheating).  Codifies a lot of the unspoken agreements that teams make at the highest levels – his point about how it’s ironically a bigger issue in college because of the disparity in what teams expect (whereas in club everyone anticipates their opponent employing such strategies) rings very true to me, and is an issue any rising college squad needs to address.
  • Speaking of the Huddle authors, other news includes the Huddle being absorbed into USA Ultimate‘s infrastructure.  This is a huge boost for USAU and a great opportunity for them to continue to make steps forward from being an amorphous and anonymous governing body to one more actively involved in and contributing to the ultimate community in meaningful ways beyond running the Series’.  I’ve hopped on board the writing staff officially now along with some 40 others who’ve contributed to the Huddle in the past; looking forward to helping continue the site’s massive contribution to developing the sport.

Related posts:

  1. Links: More Food For Thought
  2. Pickup in Himeji (plus links)
  3. More Zone O skills, and a few more links

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2010/12/links-all-over.html/feed 0 A Personal Update http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2010/05/a-personal-update.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2010/05/a-personal-update.html#comments Wed, 26 May 2010 13:53:43 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/?p=709 Apologies on the lack of updates over the past few months.  I’m hoping to be more productive on the blog front soon–certainly by mid-June once finals are over–but some personal updates in the meantime:

  • The Dartmouth Men (my coaching charges for the year) had a rough go of it at Regionals, going down early in quarterfinals to a fired-up UMass on their home turf (down 10-4 at one point) before fighting back to force a universe-point loss.  The boys were more talented than their early exit from the backdoor indicates, but ultimately our lack of big-game experience this year showed, with Brown’s fall-capping tourney, Vegas, and Roll Call, all some of the best chances for the team to get games against great competition on our schedule, getting rained out this year.
    Looking forward to seeing what Harvard and Middlebury (at last! Congrats, Pranksters) can do in Madison–both are worthy teams and quite likely to make some noise.
  • Even as the college season was finishing I’d been gearing up for club tryout season–been working pretty hard since January to get fit–and turned up to Ironside tryouts in great shape (relative to where most people are at this point in the season). I’ve somehow managed to make it through a few rounds of cuts thus far, including heading down to Bell Crack to thrash a bunch of other tryout squads (including Truck Stop, PoNY, and a new Philly open team).  It’s been a lot of fun playing good ultimate again…we’ll see how the process shakes out.
  • Medical school’s been keeping me busy, as you may have gathered from the lack of updates.  There was a nice piece in the latest USA Ultimate Mag* about Josh Ziperstein and several of his elite-level classmates who balance the demands of school and ultimate; I don’t yet have Zip’s balance down, so with finals impending ultimate’s going on the relative back-burner for the next few weeks yet.

*would love to link to those magazine stories, but they’re not online that I know of; take note, newly-rebranded USA Ultimate!

In general I’m going to put these sorts of non-content updates (the “sorry I’ve been busy” short post) on the twitter feed. If you’re eager to know how likely I am to stay on schedule you can start following that or just check the site proper on occasion if you’re an RSS reader; I do keep twitter updates on the sidebar.

I *do* have some post ideas gestating, so worry not–I’m not liable to close shop anytime soon.

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2010/05/a-personal-update.html/feed 2 Ready for Prime Time! http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/12/ready-for-prime-time.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/12/ready-for-prime-time.html#comments Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:57:57 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/?p=547 After a couple days of uploading, tweaking, and tinkering, I think the site–that’s www.ultimatethoughts.com for those of you following along at home–is ready to go.

The RSS feed should have been moved over successfully; additionally, all of the blogspot posts should be forwarding automatically to their corresponding posts here, so hopefully there aren’t any major broken links from the move.

A few of the changes I’ve been able to make with the shift in platform:

  • The popular posts widget now updates automatically. It’ll take some time before it gathers enough data to be really useful, but hopefully not too long.
  • A related posts widget that actually works. I’ve enabled those links to show up in the RSS feed too; hopefully it helps with finding relevant content.
  • Anyone can subscribe to comments now, not just blogger users. You do need to leave a comment to subscribe, however.
  • The Recent comments widget is now a bit more robust, organizing comments by post and then displaying the two most recent comments. Hopefully this gives comment conversations a bit more continuity.
  • I’ve re-instituted a rating system of sorts. Not sure how useful it’ll wind up being, but if you find posts helpful or less helpful, well or poorly written, feel free to rate accordingly just below the title of a given post.
  • This is independent of the move, somewhat, but I’ve finally caved and made a twitter feed. You can follow it for updates (syndicated from feedburner, so it’ll update whenever the RSS feed does), I may eventually use it for other purposes as well.

There are a few minor formatting issues in how the posts are displaying, namely some of the paragraph spacing…all the read more links are lost, too. I might work on either, but at this point I’m more inclined to put some time back into generating some new content.

All in all I’m very pleased with the move, looking forward to working with a bit more control in WordPress going forward. Please let me know if you find anything amiss or have any suggestions to improve the site!

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/12/ready-for-prime-time.html/feed 7 Merry Christmas: Site Redesign in the Works http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/12/merry-christmas-site-redesign-in-the-works.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/12/merry-christmas-site-redesign-in-the-works.html#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:42:00 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/12/merry-christmas-site-redesign-in-the-works.html Hope the holiday season is treating everyone well.

I’ve been working on moving the site over to its own domain (and off of the blogger platform); once I’m able to finalize a new design template and set aside a chunk of time to work out the kinds, I’ll make the official migration (and post).

The move should serve a couple purposes:

  1. It’ll give me more control over all aspects of the blog, and with more ease–wordpress is, by all accounts (and from my initial playing around with it), a much simpler interface.
  2. This is just my feeling, but losing the blogger subdomain association is, in my mind, more legit.  This is also in part a move to hopefully increase exposure.

If you’re subscribed to the RSS feed or receiving e-mail updates you’ve nothing to worry about, as feedburner should manage the swap smoothly.  For browsers, blogger should automatically redirect from here to there when I flip the appropriate switch…I’m less certain if links to specific posts will be forwarded appropriately or not, which is another matter I need to make sure is set before I officially migrate.

All this will ideally be done over the next week, which means the new year will have a new look!

Thanks to all of you for reading.  I started this way back in ’05, and even when I shifted gears from personal writings to more purposed ones, I never would have predicted that I’d ever want/need to make this jump.  Thanks for helping the blog grow!

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/12/merry-christmas-site-redesign-in-the-works.html/feed 1 Good Books, Priority Shifts, and Kaimana http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/12/good-books-priority-shifts-and-kaimana.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/12/good-books-priority-shifts-and-kaimana.html#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:00:00 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/12/good-books-priority-shifts-and-kaimana.html ’tis a great season for reading, as students are about to go/are already on break…here’s what’s been on my tap of late.  Would love to hear your good stuff in the comments.

The Definitive Book of Body Language. Really easy to get in to, broken up into perusable chunks makes it a great bathroom/bedroom read. From the perspective of a neuroscience major, I find it fascinating, and from the perspective of a future physician, I find it a useful tool for reading my patients and evaluating their needs (and how they’re responding to my suggestions).  You never know, it could help make you a more persuasive call-arguer.

Guyland (what I’m currently reading).  Delves into the world of the “Guy” Demographic (ages 16-26+); the author’s main premise hinges on the concept of these years as a sort of prolonged post-adolescent period before “Guys” become “Men” and fully assimilate into the adult world, and a lot of the psychology and consequences of such. Definitely smatters a bit prescriptionist, and tends to be a bit sensationalist at times, but it’s a refreshing flipside to the largely female-focused Gender Studies coin and a decent touchstone for my own life, as I inch closer to my 23rd year. It’s a piece of the developmental education course I always wanted to but never took.

For the fitness-inclined, you can never go wrong with Ross Enamait‘s books. Infinite Intensity continues to be a great resource for me and my training, along with Crossfit as the other main pillar. I’ve found Vern Gambetta’s Athletic Development to be a good resource for big-picture program design, but I’d only recommend that for coaches or others looking to coordinate training on a team level.

Speaking of, I’m devoting more and more of my energy towards this team now that the roster is set and winter training is ramping up, which means this blog is slowly shifting towards the backburner. When I feel confident that I’ll be able to keep a regular schedule again I’ll let you know; for now I’ll shoot to keep dropping new content on Tuesdays (because what else is there to do on a Tuesday?) but can’t make any guarantees.

Lastly, I’m still debating going to Kaimana in February (closer to the going end than the not going end of the spectrum, probably 75% at this point). Don’t even need to bring my passport this time–any readers out there care to endorse the tourney/heckle me for still being on the fence (Dusty)?

Related posts:

  1. Kaimana not-so-Klassic

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/12/good-books-priority-shifts-and-kaimana.html/feed 1 Busy. http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/11/busy.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/11/busy.html#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:16:00 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/11/busy.html Two weeks ’til finals; no guarantees on posting schedule until Thanksgiving.

In the meantime, ultitraining has gotten a spate of new writers, Atlanta‘s blog is still rolling strong, and even Match has a new post up in the blogosphere.

Related posts:

  1. The Future of this Sport

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/11/busy.html/feed 0 In the works: http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/10/in-the-works.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/10/in-the-works.html#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:18:00 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/10/in-the-works.html Some of you might have had trouble getting to the site yesterday; sorry. I’m contemplating moving the site domain to a www instead of a blogger address, and potentially a shift away from blogger as a content manager, though that’s a secondary concern.

In some of my initial testing yesterday I neglected to turn off Blogger’s forwarding service–hence the temporary lack of access. Again, my apologies.

I’m not planning on having any significant down time when the move does happen, and I’ll be sure to make a note of it as it occurs so there aren’t any surprises. Still have a lot of research to do before I go ahead with all of it (most importantly, trying to arrange for link forwarding so old links here aren’t broken and my own internal links aren’t shat on either).

It’ll likely be a project for my Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. I may make some minor adjustments going forward (I’ve been keeping the top 10 sidebar list updated every couple weeks), but that’s the biggie.

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/10/in-the-works.html/feed 0 Swamped. http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/10/swamped.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/10/swamped.html#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:55:00 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/10/swamped.html I’ll try and get some kind of retrospective up before week’s end–we have Friday off from classes for whatever reason (reverse Columbus day?) but a ton of class to make up for it in the first four.

I’ve been limping around since halftime of our backdoor loss to Puppet Saturday. Bursitis of the right knee, methinks. Baller?

More to come later.

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/10/swamped.html/feed 0 No post today. http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/09/no-post-today.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/09/no-post-today.html#comments Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:07:00 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/09/no-post-today.html Sorry. I’ll try and make it up with something good for Thursday (I’ve got a few posts in the works, but haven’t made time to finish them).

In the meantime, I added a few more links to the sidebar. The Idea of the Day blog is my new favorite daily read.

What’ve you been reading lately, ultimate or otherwise?

Related posts:

  1. 101st post! (on tournament prep)
  2. About

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/09/no-post-today.html/feed 2 Chesapeake writeup delayed http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/09/chesapeake-writeup-delayed.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/09/chesapeake-writeup-delayed.html#comments Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/09/chesapeake-writeup-delayed.html I’ll get it out as soon as I can, ideally by this afternoon and pretty definitely by this evening.

In the meantime, I’ll let the results speak for themselves.

Related posts:

  1. Chesapeake (Mixed) Preview

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/09/chesapeake-writeup-delayed.html/feed 0 Posting Schedule Going Forward http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/07/posting-schedule-going-forward.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/07/posting-schedule-going-forward.html#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/07/posting-schedule-going-forward.html The goal will be to have new content every Tuesday at a minimum. This should hopefully give me enough time after weekend tourneys to write up a recap. If I’m doing more than Tuesdays just, Thursday would be another content day, with the rest, likely Mon or Fri, for odds and ends (links about town, blog news posts like this).

Posts will go up at 8AM eastern time when I’m on schedule, as opposed to the prior midnight slot.

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/07/posting-schedule-going-forward.html/feed 0 Changing Gears, plus: Minor Site Updates http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/07/changing-gears-plus-minor-site-updates.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/07/changing-gears-plus-minor-site-updates.html#comments Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:00:00 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/07/changing-gears-plus-minor-site-updates.html As of this posting, I’ve said my final farewells at my schools here (FYI–I’ve been teaching in Japan this past year), and currently it’s a whirlwind until I arrive back home in the US on the 24th (and still a whirlwind after that as I’ve got a wedding to attend and Med School starting within 10 days of my return).

I’ve got a post scheduled for tomorrow, but following that I may need to shift to a more irregular posting pattern. This mind doesn’t stop running though, so no guarantees. I WILL keep updating; if I run out of steam on general ultimate skills posts, I will at least be keeping tabs on the NE college and club scene once I’m back coaching/playing in it, respectively. (Incidentally, anybody looking for a writer to report on the NE open [college] scene should give me a holler).

In other news, I made some more minor changes to the site layout:

  • Changed the code a bit such that the sidebar widgets aren’t collapseable/expandable, save the archive–Seems like it’s not made a difference in site usability, and it should boost load time to have less javascript.
  • Re-worked the links so they’re somewhat categorized. I plan to review and add some more ultimate links and such soon, if I haven’t already as of this posting.
  • Got rid of the “Related Posts” widget at the bottom of posts–being collapsed on page load meant nobody used it, and expanded it took up too much space. I’m in the market for a more compact/appealing solution, ideally one that factors in page relevance beyond categories (ie, post content). Any suggestions?  I’ve considered moving to wordpress just for this, but it’s a huge hassle.
  • Added an e-mail update link to the subscription links at the bottom of the sidebar, courtesy of feedburner (no spam, just my updates); I’ll be updating the very top bar with this link too, as soon as I find a good e-mail icon for it.  Not everyone can be RSS-savvy (or wants to be, rather).
  • Still trying to come up with a good fourth category in the top navbar–fitness, offense, and defense are all broad and have nice sub-categories (check the sidebar when you’re on a given category’s page), but there’s no similarly neat fourth category. I went with “strategy” for a while, but that overlaps with O and D too much, then “mental,” (as in mental aspects of playing), but it doesn’t get a ton of interest in terms of clicks (thank you, google analytics’ site overlay feature). I’ve gone with “inner” which is still “mental” but doesn’t sound as stupid, maybe. What would you put in the navbar out of all the labels I use?  Should I just make an “other” label for stuff that doesn’t fall under the first three and then subdivide within that?

I’d love to hear your ideas on ways to make the site more usable, don’t be afraid to comment or email if you’ve any suggestions.

Related posts:

  1. The UPA In Blog Form, or: Why Their Site Needs An Overhaul

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/07/changing-gears-plus-minor-site-updates.html/feed 2 Touch-ups Have Been Made. http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/05/touch-ups-have-been-made.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/05/touch-ups-have-been-made.html#comments Sun, 24 May 2009 04:00:00 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/05/touch-ups-have-been-made.html
Can’t. Stop. Listening. Also, what follows is a list–marginally relevant!

  • Updated the popular posts widget–I’ll probably re-up the list every couple weeks to month or so. Still trying to figure out an automatic solution there (one method involves ranking by comment count, but not everything that’s well-read is commented on), so if anybody out there has experience with blogger-powered popular post widgets I’d appreciate hearing from you.

  • Updated the label cloud widget; moved it up in the sidebar, set the max text size to be bigger, made it so that fewer labels are displayed. Hopefully this highlights some of the labels that didn’t make the navbar a little better
  • The Recent Posts Widget now displays 10 recent posts instead of 5. I had to swap off the blogger widget to do this though…I’m hoping there isn’t a noticeable slowdown for using an off-site one (there are a few already).
  • RSS Readers should notice a working comment count feature at the bottom of posts now. Hopefully this helps people keep track of discussions a little more easily. It’ll stay current even if you’ve already read the post (so you can check the count again and again in your reader), though I’m not quite sure what the update frequency is–something around once every 30 minutes from what I can tell.
  • I added a few other feedflares too–I’ve noticed a small but significant number of referrals from email apps and facebook, so hopefully those feedflares help expedite that process.


As always, I’m open to feedback.

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/05/touch-ups-have-been-made.html/feed 0 Last set of tweaks for a while. http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/04/last-set-of-tweaks-for-a-while.html http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/04/last-set-of-tweaks-for-a-while.html#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:40:00 +0000 Mackey http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/04/last-set-of-tweaks-for-a-while.html I added another widget to the sidebar pointing towards the 10 pages that have gotten the most hits over the past 8 months or so (looking at aggregate page view totals from google analytics). It doesn’t account for all the RSS readers out there, and it’s not dynamic–just a static link list, but until I find a better solution I’ll just periodically update the list manually.

Also, because sorting categories the way I envisioned (namely, with tabbed categories and sub-categories, e.g., Offense would have Throwing, Catching, etc as sub-categories) is proving tougher at first shake than I anticipated, I’m shelving that for now and settled for re-instituting the label cloud on the sidebar.

Finally, I added an about page (linked at the very top along with the RSS feed). I’ll let that speak for itself.

Likely won’t have time to play around with any more big changes to the template for at least a few weeks, so what’s here now is more or less it. As usual, would love to hear feedback from you.

]]> http://www.ultimatethoughts.com/2009/04/last-set-of-tweaks-for-a-while.html/feed 0