eightface

Idiots guide to the NHL lockout

This entry is about hockey — if you don’t like it, I can’t blame you. The lockout mess definitely didn’t do anything to assuage public opinion of the sport.

I grew up watching hockey, then again I’m a Canadian male, so it’s almost a given. I was an Oilers fan until they sold Gretzky in 1998 (another commercial mess), although I still followed the 1990 Messier era Stanley Cup and then jumped ship to the Maple Leafs. Remember that 92-93 conference championship? Yeah, the one with Gretzky’s “shot-on-net” that looked kind of like a high-stick in his own zone. But we’re not bitter.

The point is, there are some fond memories of the sport rattling around in my brain but I stopped following it awhile ago — sometime after the last lockout. Rapid expansion, dilution of talent and the exodus of Canadian teams probably had something to do with it. Now, you’re still reading this, so you’re probably mildly interested in hockey (that or you’re bored), so I’ll recommend reading the Idiots guide to the NHL lockout by Bill Simmons. It’s a good read, even if you’re not a hockey fan. This excerpt is the kicker:

For instance, let’s say you have a favorite diner near your house. What do we love about diners? They’re inexpensive. The food comes out fast. The coffee is always good. The chef in the kitchen has an “I hope these customers didn’t see me on ‘America’s Most Wanted’ look on his face. The gum-snapping waitress is in her 50’s, but there’s still something sexy about her, despite the smoking wrinkles and the missing left index finger. And you can kick back, read your newspaper, enjoy a decent omelet, home fries and some buttered toast, and flirt with a 53-year-old woman who was probably Patient X for Hepatitis B back in 1971. What’s better than that?

Well, imagine if they quadrupled the price at the diner, the food took three times as long, you couldn’t see the chef, all the waitresses looked like Kathy Bates, and they added so many breakfast items to the menu that you almost needed a translator to read the menu? Would you ever go there again? Of course not. And that’s what the NHL never realized until it was too late. It was the breakfast diner of professional sports leagues, nothing more. Unfortunately, it took a 301-day lockout — as well as every cable channel basically saying, “Thanks, but no thanks” — for everyone to realize this.

Simmons also does a pretty good job outlining the rule changes and blah-de-blah that have come in to effect as a result of the NHL’s new deal: salary caps, shootouts, and some trapezoid rule relating to goaltenders.

Will all of the changes improve the game and make a difference? Doubtful. The best thing they could do for the fans and the sport is dropping the ticket price. But it’s not really about the fans is it? It’s about the bottom line. That’s why I’ll probably watch a few games and why I’ll probably follow the Leafs through the playoffs (until they bow out in typical fashion) but the magic won’t be there. I’ll come back eventually, probably when I have kids and when the league decides it can operate for a few years without a lockout.

Yahoo stupidity

I don’t use Yahoo’s search and the reasons are mostly personal. The company is the wunderkid in the internet hipster community’s new “omg wtf ajax!!1!” approach to web-design. I’m all for it; flickr may actually be the best thing since sliced bread and MyWeb is pretty cool, but their classic old search is balls.

My benchmarks for this search-engine test are the phrases “dave kellam” and “eightface”. Yeah, it’s personal. Here are links to the relevant searches, although they are subject to change over time.

• Google: dave kellam, eightface
• Yahoo: dave kellam, eightface
• Google vs. Yahoo: dave kellam, eightface

Now as far as the results go, there isn’t too big a problem with “dave kellam” not producing my site as the first hit. There are others around with the same name and I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that I won’t become the number one hit for “dave”. But “eightface” isn’t really a common word and I’d expect it to come out on top.

Drumroll… eightface.com is the first result for both searches on Google. But the site doesn’t even crack the top 100 for either search on Yahoo. Photo set for the two search results and their visual comparison. It’s not that Yahoo’s results are wrong, they will people to information related to me and the website, but in a bit of a round-about fashion. Not a big deal but it has an impact on my use of Yahoo for casual every-day search. I don’t mind digging for information, but it really shouldn’t be hard for the search engine to connect my feedburner feed or my flickr stream to the actual website.

Amp monitor stand

Earlier this year, I replaced by old desk with one of those triangle-shaped Ikea tables that fits nicely into the corner of the room. It has served me well, but it’s not exactly ergonomically sound. I’ve been meaning to raise the monitor up a few more inches for awhile now.

Enter our old amplifier, we blew it out this year and were planning on tossing it at some point. I was looking at it and figured that it would probably be the perfect height for a monitor stand. The problems were that the thing weighed a ton and it was filled with useless electronic guts. That said, it was pretty easy to get rid of insides.

Old electronics were a lot more serviceable than they are now, so it only took a few mintues to get the amplifier apart. I had to remove five screws from the bottom and the whole thing slid out from the wooden case. The last step was to remove all the knobs, and unscrew the faceplate from the rest of the inside rack.

I glued all of the knobs back onto the faceplate with super-glue and punched two holes into the top of the amp, so I could put nails in to secure the front. It would probably be a lot cooler if the faceplate was hinged, but I didn’t have anything usable lying around. The empty space where the electronics used be is a good spot to store cds, spindles, monitor cleaner or whatever other crap you have lying around. Unfortunately, I had to sacrifice the functionality of the switches and the knobs.

Here’s the full photoset on flickr, although it was a rather poorly documented process.

Copy protection is dumb

For lack of a more eloquent argument we’ll leave it at that. Copy protection is a waste of time for all those involved. As far as tech arguments, people seem to like making analogies between whatever issue they’re debating and the car industry. It’s worth a shot:

Car Dealer: This is the fastest, nicest car we have.
Me: Wow, it sure is. I like the gold-plated-orphan-catcher on the front.
Car Dealer: Ah yes, that particular model was designed by William Morris.
Me: And the stereo, man…
Car Dealer: Yes, the Linn…
Me: I can’t wait to get this out on the open-road, blast some tunes and hit some orphans at high speed.
Car Dealer: Sir, I’m afraid that the noise-pollution laws have locked the volume knob at 3.
Me: And the high spe…
Car Dealer: The 80km limit.
Me: But, you don’t get the spatter at 80.
Car Dealer: Sir, we all miss the old days.

So, that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. But what if I said that I’d been playing GTA: San Andreas? It probably explains the splatter anyway.

Now that you’re thinking about the poor little children, it would be a good moment to mention the game’s copy protection. That’s right — the game with the punching and the shooting and the stealing of cars doesn’t want you to play on a modded xbox.

Seriously, Rockstar paid someone at least a few hour’s wages to make sure the game had copy protection. Now, let’s sit back and think about this: I have a game about the criminal element and I have an xbox that I’ve gone to the effort of soldering an extra chip on to. Do they really think copy protection will do anything other than annoy me? I don’t really want to buy any Rockstar products right now.

A few minor things

Wasn’t a big fan of the brick header, so I switched it over to the new “bunch of lines” header. Body font has been change to Lucida Grande, was sick of Verdana.

I was having some database problems earlier. I’m not sure if it was WordPress related or Dreamhost related, but the database seemed to stop cold at 10mb, I couldn’t post anything. I had been using the ShortStat plugin for WordPress and had amassed a tidy 7mb worth of stats, so I cleaned them out and everything seems to be back in working order.

Dreamhost Awesomeness

I’ve been with Dreamhost for almost five years now and the service has been continualy improving the entire time. Up to their usual trick, they’ve gone and done a few new things this week. The first big on is installing the new version of Ruby and Ruby on Rails for everyone. That’s gotta make the Rails people happy. It also means I can start playing and don’t have to spend time installing.

The second thing I found was a Gmail-esque announcement in my admin panel:

This is a big one. Starting today, we’re the only web host in the world
(as far as we know, and we didn’t check) that automatically GROWS every
shared customer’s disk and bandwidth quotas every week!

That’s right, every week from now on your quotas will be increased by
this much per active shared hosting plan:

• L1: 20MB disk and 1GB bandwidth each week!
• L2: 40MB disk and 1.5GB bandwidth each week!
• L3: 60MB disk and 2GB bandwidth each week!
• L4: 80MB disk and 2.5GB bandwidth each week!

Now, that’s a pretty solid announcement — it raises the bar for other hosts and means lots of space for me to play with. They also found the time to update to PHP 5 and MYSQL 4.1. And add CPU usage tracking.

London Bombing

Al-qaeda has once-again proven that they are a force to be reckoned with by testing their mettle against tin-cans full of people. Bombs were detonated on the Underground and a bus earlier today in London, with the terrorist network claiming responsibility.

A spokesman for Al-queda put the attacks into perspective for western viewers:

Fighting trained soldiers was starting to get a little ‘old-hat’, you know? We had heard whisperings of the great mechanical dragons and their riches living beneath the Misty City. The stories of sneaking weapons into such a tightly guarded and private sanctuary will live on forever.

Anyway, weblogs seem to be the way that people are getting information. They can usually be trusted:

• Wikipedia entry
• Wikinews entry
• CNN Timeline
• Flickr photo pool
• Google News
• Technorati: london bomb
• Al Jazeera

Bombing mass-transit is absolutely despicable. You see photos roll in from Jerusalem, Tokyo, Baghdad and Madrid and you have to wonder what people are thinking when they do these things. They’re only hurting people like themselves.

Sudoku Primer

People seem to be searching for information related to the puzzle game called Sodoku, so here we go. The game (officially known as Sudoku) was first popularised by Japan in 1986, but in the past few months it’s been appearing in many newspapers around the globe. The Sodoku surge is primarily the responsibility of Wayne Gould, who wrote a computer program that allows for the easy creation of puzzle boards.

The puzzle itself is relatively simple; the common format consists of a 9×9 grid, that’s further sub-divided into nine 3×3 grids. The object is to fill each column, row and 3×3 grid with the numbers one through nine (other characters or symbols can be used) without any repeats. The game’s difficulty lies in the initial board configuration — both the quantity and frequency of the given numbers. True Sodoku puzzles have only one unique solution per puzzle.

Further Links & Reading:

• Sudoku.com - official website of Wayne Gould, populariser of the game
• Wikipedia Entry - has pretty much anything you want to know about the game
• Frazer Jarvis’s page - contains info on the enumeration of Sodoku grids
• Sodoku Grandmaster - a Sodoku humour site
• Puzzles Online - list of online puzzles
• Dashboard Widget - play sodoku on your mac
• Websodoku - play online
• Sodoku.org.uk - fairly comprehensive Sodoku site

That’s about it for now. The next thing up will be cryptic crosswords — I’ve been figuring out how to do them over the last week or two. Alanah, Will and I managed to finish off the Globe’s Canada Day cryptic puzzle (it was a little on the intense side of things).

Updates:

• CNN article on Sudoku - September 19th, 2005
• The Times has an extensive Sudoku section - November 5th, 2005

Cottage-time

I’m heading up to Will’s cottage for a couple days, I’ll probably be back Tuesday night, so there likely won’t be any updates around here for a few days. Hopefully you can find something else to occupy your time. If you can’t, spend some time on the July Contest. There should be pictures when I get back, the camera still kind of works, it just doesn’t have the lcd anymore.