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We recently took in another hockey game to see the Caps take on the Rangers. Not a bad game. However the longer I watched it, the more I longed and pined for “the X”, a fine place to watch hockey. It made me think though what was it that I preferred. Was it simply the fact that I’m a Wild fan and more comfortable in more friendly confines added to the fact that I can’t find myself hopping on the Caps fan-base anytime soon? ^[1] Or was it something else, something a little more about the venue itself that I didn’t like. There’s maybe some truth to that fact because we did happen to watch a Hoyas game there once and I really enjoyed it. Still, that doesn’t quite ring true to me though.

Set aside my dislike for the hometown team, what was it about the rink? Like the Xcel Energy Center, it is built in a similar way. I was trying to find anything that linked the two as I thought I remembered construction of the X was loosely based on VZC, but I couldn’t find anything to confirm that fact. But let me point out my pet peeves of VZC.

First of all, the ice is bad. You can tell, even from the second deck, that the ice is chippy, soft and has got to be a pain in the ass for the players (both home and away) to skate upon ^[2]. Bad ice is dangerous to players and really makes for bad hockey. Even the Caps players have difficulty with it for as many times as I’ve seen pucks skip over their sticks.

Secondly, the sound system. If anyone at VZC cruises blogs or whatever and notices this (fat chance though), please tell them to notch down the speakers so your rib cage doesn’t rattle every time there happens to be bass in a song. It’s far too loud, and it’s too loud in proportion to actual noise from the game. What’s exciting in hockey is feeling the energy of the crowd, the noise and the intensity as the game progresses. That illusion is shattered when this jarring, crushing noise blares from the speakers, forcing any conversation you are having with anyone near you to be continued in shouting tones. But when play starts, the music dies and you are left with the silence of the crowd hushed and watching the game. It is deeply anticlimactic. The X has great acoustics so they can play the music, they can do the “fire the home team up” bit but in a way that makes the start of play not as shocking.

Other complaints are ones of arena “attitude”. I’m not really referring to the fans. Some of them are very vocal, very “homerific” and that’s to be expected ^[3]. No, it’s little things that don’t really add up to a hockey atmosphere. How about letting the organ play a bit more instead of the music blaring a bunch of garbage (to give them their due, they do play “Good Ol’ Hockey Game” at every match, so props to them for that song). Apparently, the crowd is also easily influenced by some poor sap with an air horn. Three short honks and the “Let’s go Caps” chants come out. That’s fine. But every seven to fifteen minutes? And every time someone starts an opposing chant for the visitors? Hey, face it, sometimes you’re not the most favored team, even on your own ice. I think the Pens game proved that.

Also, and this is a criticism of a lot of teams and especially in hockey, but can we drop the stupid compilation of inspiring speeches from sports movies crammed and spliced together and played at “pivotal” points at the end of the game? Every team does this and it annoys me a bit whenever I see it. I’ve only seen a couple really clever uses in all the games I’ve seen. But I’ve seen three Caps games, and three times now, there’s this dreadful mashup of these movie clips which is utterly horrible. It’s not clever. I’ve seen much better work on YouTube by people who do it for a lark and not get paid for it. Frankly, I find it a bit embarrassing for the home team. Taking inspiring coach speeches from inspiring sports films, clips from the classic movie “Network” and some God-awful Tom Green clip, thrown into a video food processor and spat out is no way to fire the home crowd up.

I feel good about getting this off my chest. I doubt any change will come to VZC, even if I would’ve typed up my grievances and shot them off to Ted Leonsis himself. But airing something like this is at least cathartic and I will sleep better for doing so.

1. “There’s a lot here also that remind me about watching the Seattle Mariners as well. That city is all about Ichiro and the Caps are all about Ovechkin. They are both team games and their promotions should be about the team, not just these obviously talented players.  But what do you do…these two are getting paid the big bucks.”
2. “There is evidence that some attention is being paid to this, as found in a post from the team owner back in December about the bad ice and injuries on his team. Personally, I’ve always found it a bit too warm in that arena. Lowering the arena temperature by 5° would likely help as well as doing something about the humidity.”
3. “Note that fans here on the East coast just aren’t as friendly. You want to ask about a player and maybe strike up some hockey conversation, hope you brought a friend who’s willing to chat. East-coasters just won’t respond to you, or if they do, grudgingly. At the X, it was easy—in the second deck at least—to chat hockey with knowledgeable fans. I miss that too, but it is a bit biased toward general coastal attitudes.”

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Ah, no sooner than I get back and check things out on the ol’ blog and do some updating and such, it tells me I need to upgrade again.  Typical stuff.

Anyway, some changes on the page are present, though most of them are pretty minor and a few of them involving the blogroll of who and what I find interesting on the net.

First of all, I have the computing blogroll, a new thing for me.  Two things underneath it are recent discoveries but they’re both great.  First there’s xkcd, a webcomic that looks fairly simple, but is really outstanding.  There are some days I just don’t get it, but then again I don’t have an innate understanding of advanced mathematics.  The second is Zero Punctuation, by an British guy transplanted to Australia who does hilarious and often accurate game reviews.

That’s good enough for now.  There are more links to things I find cool as well, but I’ll save those for later.

I also thought about maybe changing the picture on the front of the site to reflect more of where we lived now, but on further consideration, I like the mountain background and looking at it makes me happy.

The bigger change is what’s going on at home.  Right now I am more than just contemplating a complete switch over to Linux from Windows.  Most of what I do does not require Windows or anything really from Microsoft.  I have fluxbuntu on my laptop currently and for when I do want Windows, like I said, increasingly rare, I run Virtual Box which provides a hypervisor so I can run Windows under a Linux OS.  Nice stuff.  And more secure, and faster and a whole host of things I’m leaving out right now.

Anyway, need to get ready for a hockey game.  I don’t really like the Washington Capitals, but we’re going to watch Caps v. Rangers anyway.  Hey, it’s hockey!  More later.

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Yes, that is the question of the day.  Or should I say months.  I dropped off the face of the inter-tubes for months only to come back on and post again.  Surprising?  Possibly, but not really unexpected.

Hey, I’ve had a busy few months.  I got married, I moved across the whole damn country, I had to find a different job…I’ve had a few things on my plate.

But for the time being, things are good.  Life is good.   I’ve been unbelievably blessed in this last year.  Considering all of the things that I’ve done in the last few months, things have gone swimmingly.  The summer was good, we left beautiful Seattle for Washington D.C., which is proving more fun than first thought.  I have a good job that means a lot to me, making some good friends here now.

So there it is.  I’ll try to be a little more active in my presence.  No promises though.  Life sometimes throws you a big fat curve ball and you have to decide what to do with it.

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Perhaps you’ve seen this, Microsoft trotting out a 3+ year old “patent infringement” threat.  In an interview with Forbes, a magazine it should be noted that probably doesn’t like the idea of free software, Microsoft rattles it’s sabers about how they don’t want to hurt open-source, but they’ll do what they have to if necessary, unless of course they enter into favorable licencing with Microsoft itself, much like the poor sucker Novell did.  I mean, how else do you take it, other than corporate bullying.  The open source industry didn’t get rattled about it at all, instead saying “well, show us the infringement then.”

You see, the open-source community has been through this before with SCO claiming it had all of these IP infringements.  When push came to shove and their legal action went to trial rather than being settled out of court, SCO is doing everything in their power to delay the process in hopes that a miracle will show up on their doorstep.  Much debunking is happening over at Groklaw which has much more on the silliness that has ensued.

By the way, for those not in the know, F.U.D. stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.  Precisely what Microsoft would love to happen to Linux.  Here’s a thought of why this is happening.  After much trumpeting of their own horn about how wonderful Vista is and how many people have it, the facts have come to light and it’s looking more like Windows ME rather than the second coming of XP.  Their “innovation” just isn’t selling;  X-Box is a known money sink for the company, the Zune, which is supposed to compete against the iPod but is struggling even for just market recognition.  Most of Microsoft’s innovation has come through the acquisition of smaller companies whose products often directly compete with the beast from Redmond.

It’s almost like this is a company struggling for an identity.  They have near monopoly on the desktop and have had for years, so why is it that for most true technological innovations come from somewhere else and that Microsoft always seem late to the party.  They were late with the explosion of the internet, with security concerns, with web-based apps and who knows what else coming down the pipe.  Plus, they don’t seem to want to play nicely with others they are competing directly.  No Flash product?  They create their own and I bet they give it away.  ODF was agreed upon by a coalition of technology companies and European countries?  They’ll create their own standard and license to go with it, just not for other operating systems.

I could go on, I really could.  Practically write a book on it, but read up a little on this and don’t fear about their noise.  It’s all bluster and no substance.

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...that there are two posts up here.  Mysteriously, one appeared during March even though it might not actually have “appeared” in March.  My apologies on that, but I had that written last month but didn’t release it.  No idea why that happened (I might have cleaned it up a bit too and added other pertinent information, but the essence of the article remains).

So a quick blurb for tonight, because more stuff is coming down the pipe.

If you see movies in the theater, and you should now and then, go see Hot Fuzz.  It was better than I thought it would be.  Funny, funny movie.  Great British humor with a respect for their subjects.  Great cast, too.  Hope they keep doing projects for a long time.

Here’s to the men of the Minnesota Wild for a great season.  It ended too quickly, but thanks for getting us to the playoffs.  Next year I hope we make some noise in the Western Conference.

I didn’t watch a single Vikings game last year (and felt pretty good about it), but still I’m paying attention to their draft day.  Hmmm.

Softball starts soon and it looks like I’ll play shortstop.  Yummy infield goodness.

I need to carry with me a pen and a notebook at all times.  I blog in my head all day but once I get home, nothing.   Empty words in your head don’t translate well on the screen or page.

My new baby is on the way.  HA-HA!  Caught you with that.  I’m actually building another PC and have ordered the parts.  Should be here this week and hopefully the Boerger 3000 be built by Thursday or Friday.  Maybe I’ll put pics up of the little fella.  

Catch ya later, but I have some serious training to do (MCSA tests coming up).

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When Bill Gates came out to introduce the new launch of Vista, they came up with a clever little phrase which was “the wow starts now.” After hanging out with Vista for a few days, the only “wow” I was saying was shortly followed by the also catchy phrase “this really sucks.” I’ve had my problems with Microsoft before and I have to admit that I was naturally skeptical about this new OS. However my complaints aren’t just garden variety bitches, but ones that have to do specifically with usability.

Vista does look nice. It’s a pretty clean interface and I have to admit that I like the sidebar quite a bit. The Aero desktop is okay, a bit flashy and does some cool things. If I were just a business user who does email and a couple of documents, I think I would like it fine as long as I could get to everything just fine. In these respects, Vista does okay. Not great, mind you, just okay. As a tech, this new OS pisses me off more than any other Windows release to date. Let’s run down the specifics here.

First of all, why does every OS release have to be an eff-ing sea change?  For example, we got quite used to the user settings in Documents and Users, they move it to the Users folder.  Not a big thing, certainly.  It still took some hunting around to find it.  Networking seems like a hidden property and not easily reached.  Display properties are not under display, but “personalize”.  And perhaps the thing that pisses me off the most…you used to be able to hit the Windows key and then “u” to get to the shut down sequence.  Not anymore.  It’s all mouse driven…and it prefers hibernation to off.  Miserable.

Also, why do programs that used to work (here it comes, the age-old complaint) no longer work in Vista?  And mind you, this is a question at the heart of the matter.  Same thing with Office 2007.  Why, oh why change and break so many things just to come out with something “new”.  Simple programs now require tweaking to get working and sometimes, even that isn’t enough.  What good is the OS if it doesn’t run your programs?  What happened to any backward compatibility?

Honestly, I’m not all that impressed with Vista.  Beyond the little gadgets and the trinkets they throw around, this is one of the slowest OSes I’ve run into.  Any Office program takes at least 10-15 seconds to open that first initial time.  More of an Office 2007 complaint, Visio seems to set itself up into your processes and hang out, chewing processor cycles like a cow on his cud.  God forbid if you open another Visio session…two process cows can bring your screaming machine into a very large grazing field.  Keep in mind that you have to kill those processes manually to regain those precious cycles.  The boot-up, while fast to the desktop, churns on hidden processes leaving you unable to do anything useful for a minute or so.  I have at work a spanking new IBM, dual-core, top-of-the-line machine that if running XP would leave other machines crying in it’s wake.  With Vista, it occasionally resembles a paperweight.  The control panel menu is now a mash of “suggestions”, trying to be helpful to the average user but maddening to the admins.

Here’s a suggestion.  Why doesn’t Microsoft come out with a product for consumers and for sys-admins?  Seems simple enough.  Every version of their OS trumpets how their system is now more user friendly.  Stop that.  Really, stop that.  If you want to be more friendly to home users, fine.  I’m okay with that.  As an admin, I want to call the shots and leave the “user” out of the loop.  Not that I think they are malicious, not that I don’t think they wouldn’t get it, but business users don’t want to bother learning how and why their PC functions, and why should they.  They’re busy enough without having to learn about their machines.  We have a hard enough time as techies keeping up with new technologies, how does the average user stand a chance of knowing the ins and outs of their systems.  It may seem a little fascist to say so, but we want to protect users from themselves.  The ones who do take the time to learn that stuff are the ones we want to limit their access and lock down their machines, mostly because they’re the ones who are loading up their machines with God knows what and infecting the whole company with spyware or viruses, or maybe killing all our bandwidth with their IM sessions to their girlfriends or old college buddies.

In short, MS released misery once again.  They slapped lipstick on a pig (resource hog) and called it beautiful.  The thing I like about Macs and Linux is that their process seems to be incremental change, often thoroughly tested.  The testing doesn’t catch everything, but enough to make those changes worth it for some…and if you didn’t upgrade, no big deal.  MS has used their financial muscle to force this on consumers, just like their other OSes.  But there is pushback.  Dell announced it will start offering Windows XP (although Vista is your first choice) because their customers demanded it back.  I’m not sure I like what MS is doing with their marketing campaign.  They are claiming historic numbers for their release, but a closer scrutiny of those numbers reveals that Vista is having a slow start and adoption rate.  In fact, take away their upgrade coupons during their pre-release push, and it’s a pretty miserable number.

As I’ve said with many MS products, it might be good, but wait until service pack 2 comes out.

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I was reading this mind-numbing editorial about the state of our relations in the Middle East when Melanie brought over her brand spanking new digital player and Bose headphones and put them on me and played a song.

It was Barber’s Agnus Dei, possibly the most beautiful song I’ve ever known and in my life, certainly the most moving and emotional.  It put the editorial in a bit of perspective and although the song is melancholy in nature, I am always uplifted when hearing it.  It somehow restores my faith in man.

Just thought I’d mention it.

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I love coming home. I never have enough time to see everyone or do everything I want to do. The time is always precious, genuine.

This particular weekend had some mixed blessings. I love the snow and seeing this storm, the snow covering the entire landscape and weighing down the branches of the trees, the fresh tracks left by scrambling animals in turn lightly dusted by new flakes. You just don’t get that in Seattle. You do get rain in Seattle, but I miss the changing of seasons. In those terms, I was fully satisfied with coming home.

It did play havok with what we wanted to get accomplished this weekend. I feared my hockey game was going to be cancelled, but it thankfully wasn’t. I did get to play and this morning I woke up sore from the game, but it was a soreness you love to get, the pain in your muscles and joints are a reminder of the fun of the activity. Poor weather conditions did not help things though and travel was difficult. The upshot of that was I spend an inordinate amount of time in the car yesterday. I conservatively estimate my total car time yesterday was eight hours. That’s a full day.

But overall, we got to see Melanie’s family, I got to play some hockey and hang out with my hockey buddies and we got stuff done. And I’m happy, estatic really, I saw snow falling and the oddly beautiful wind and mounting snow drifts.

I can’t wait until we move back. But these brief pilgrimages home mollify the yearnings for familiar sights. Even though I live further away from home than I ever had before, I’m happier than I’ve ever been and that joy mitigates the occasional homesickness I get for a Midwestern winter.

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I’ve been talking for awhile about podcasting and it still is a huge interest for me. Like this blog, it’s more troublesome because the greater need for a focused product. Here I just ramble on about whatever seems to interest me at the time. I can’t do that with a podcast as it won’t get an audience. I’m not counting on a big audience, but it would be nice if I did something with a level of focus that others could appreciate. I hope that makes sense.

But I found something that helps me get closer to the goal. One of the big put-offs of doing a podcast is the potential for investing a lot of money into something that you don’t use that often or has a lack of multiple applications. It becomes the unused toy in the closet over time, if you don’t do it just right…and it would be an expensive dust-collecting toy if you don’t get what you want.

Part of what was holding me back is that I wanted to do it right. As an intellectual^[1], I had to find out as much about it as I could without actually taking the plunge. Reading about what I would want for podcasting, I was looking at an investment of around $500. I figured that I needed an USB pre-amp, a microphone, a microphone stand, a good set of headphones and the necessary software to put everything together. Continue Reading »

1. I should note that I consider an intellectual as someone who feels they can’t really try anything new without reading about it somewhere, somehow. I’m sure this definition doesn’t apply to everyone

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Say what you will about global warming, believe what you want about climate trends, but it is gotten to the point where I can no longer stay on the sidelines when discussing the assault on scientists and the work they do.

From this article in the Guardian, apparently the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the same “think” tank (and I’m using think in the loosest possible terms) who convinced our government about what a good idea it would be to invade Iraq and now are advocating doing the same in Iran, is offering scientists $10,000 a piece for their criticisms of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The AEI, who by the way got $1.6 million from ExxonMobile and has on their board of trustees Lee Raymond, former head of ExxonMobile, is sponsoring this travesty.

If you get past that point of what a bad idea this is, I think there is a larger problem here, believe it or not. We discuss and try to debate about political issues, moral issues, but we could always go back to science as where we could get some cold, hard facts. Not anymore. Apparently the facts are up for sale, or at least the AEI would like it to be so.

This has been a bad year for scientists (it’s been a bad six years, but I’m just going to concentrate on the last year). Government scientific grants dealing with climate change have been reduced or even eliminated, NASA scientists have been muzzled and the government recently changed NASA’s mission statement to exclude the Earth from their studies, scientists are in challenging times. Even as the US is trying to improve the number of students entering math and sciences, what kind of climate are they walking into? (no pun intended)

It’s not the first time that someone has tried to silence the steady march of science. Perhaps you’ve heard of Galileo? I’m not sure why people try to put off the inevitable. Science wins these battles because it has the luxury of time. The world is out there to discover. It can’t be helped. But small people try to stop things like this and small people are forgotten. The march of science continues.

ht: Crooks and Liars

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