Steve Shockley's Blog

The All-Topps Era Baseball Mega All-Star Team

I’ve put together a massive spreadsheet of baseball players with some basic statistical analysis. The spreadsheet has four sheets, over 3,500 players, and stats from 1876 through 2024. With it, I can do all sorts of compilations and comparisons between players.

For instance, Topps has been producing their flagship Topps Baseball Cards every year since 1952. I used the spreadsheet to quickly put together an all-star team of the greatest players since 1952.

Of course, to make a true All-S...

Eighteen Days in Taiwan

Last month, I spent eighteen days with my wife and kids in Taiwan. My mother-in-law had passed away in Taiwan in the spring, and we had to visit to lay her ashes to rest and take care of legal and financial matters. However, we made the best of the trip and made it an opportunity for the kids to appreciate one of their ancestral homelands.

I took a little over a thousand photos during the trip, roughly 60 per day. For this blog post, I’m going to choose just one photo for each day of the trip...

Building Relationships and the Abundance of Life

I’m convinced that the key to prosperity is in building relationships and trade with others.

The most recent Sketchplanations post, The Butcher, the Brewer, the Baker, shows the concept intuitively. When the Butcher, the Brewer, and the Baker don’t talk and don’t trade, everyone is poorer. You have the Butcher with her surplus of meat just sitting around having a carnivore diet and never being able to enjoy a good meal with beer and bread. Then you have the Brewer, with his surplus of beer, b...

Greatest Hits: Metallica

Twelve songs is a typical music album length. What if we had to condense the entire career of a venerable band like Metallica into a single album? What would that album look like?

As of 2025, Metallica has released 11 full-length albums over their 44-year history as a band. They also have a number of other, non-album releases that have gained popularity. That makes it relatively easy to come up with 12 songs to represent Metallica’s career—I’ll take the most popular song from each album, and ...

This is How We Fix the United States Postal Service

The United States Postal Service (USPS) was founded at the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775. It was never intended to be a profitable enterprise, but instead as a vital service for correspondence across America in a time without the Internet or telephones.

These days, we do have the Internet with its email and social networks, and practically everyone has a phone. “Snail mail,” as it’s often called, is no longer such a vital service. As a result, the USPS has been losing billions ...

The 2025 Future Hall of Famers Baseball Team

When you go to a Major League Baseball game, chances are, you are watching at least one future Hall of Famer playing. These are the legendary players who will someday have a plaque at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. They are players who will be remembered for as long as baseball is still played.

I took the 25 active players who I think have the best chances at being future Hall of Famers (HoFers) and put them on one team. It’s not an All-Star team, it’s...

Dungeons & Dragons Visual Aids

Some players of tabletop role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (DnD) might not know what a tinderbox or caltrops actually look like. Visual aids can make it easier for players to visualize what’s going on during a game. I make visual aids in the form of 3.5″ x 2.5″ cards (a standard size for poker and baseball cards) so I can hand them out to players when they acquire new items or abilities. They’re also useful so the players can always see what their options are for taking action during th...

Greyhawk-style Name Generators

I’m once again playing with writing web versions of random fantasy name generators. Here is one I wrote using various names I found from the Greyhawk game world of Dungeons & Dragons:

Chinese to English Translator (code only)

Back in 2003, when I was in graduate school getting an MBA in Information Technology, I wrote a Chinese to English translation web app using LAMP architecture (Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL). It worked very well, but I never made it public because I had concerns about its security and efficiency.

I tinkered with it from time to time, mostly just adding words and phrases to the database. Then I completely gave up soon after Google released their own Chinese to English translation with Google T...

Dice Roller

Years ago, I wrote an app that simulates various types of dice rolls common to table-top role-playing games (TTRPGs). I know this is probably not useful to anyone, but I wrote it as an exercise to hone my skills in web programming.

Dice Roller