etiquette, “standards” and online social environments…

this posting is based on a response to an email I got asking for advice on a problem on a mail list over what some folks see as “proper” behavior and how to convince others to follow it. The answer is not what I think they were expected, and the more I thought about it, I felt it might make an interesting conversation piece on general issues of “usage standards” and online etiquette issues — and it’s very different than I used to think on these issues, so I wanted to air them more generally and see what folks think…

If you have time, a “sanity check” and answers to a couple of questions on the subject of “included text” would be much appreciated.

Our mailing list etiquette document <http://lists.apple.com/tips.html> does ask that users:

“Edit included messages in replies to minimize the amount of text.”

I suspect that for some reason I happen to be particularly sensitive to failure to abide by this.

Probably.

The key word here is “ask”. there are two classes of things in the list documentation.

They are suggestions, not requirements, for a reason. What you are essentially trying to do is convince everyone to do things YOUR way. think of any social situation, whether it’s top-quoting in email, or cel-phones in restaurants, or talking in movies, or using your stupid turn signals while driving. Even where there is force of law behind it, you have those that wont do it.

Educating folks won’t completely solve the problem, if it is in fact a problem. Some folks don’t know any better. Others, however, have simply decided they prefer it another way, and why should they change for your benefit? How would you react if they came and asked you to change to meet their preferences?

So down this road lies disappointment, madness, anger and in the case of driving, road rage and sometimes, being shot. And even if you avoid most of that, you STILL won’t really solve the problem, because even if you teach everyone who doesn’t know and convince everyone who disagrees, next week, there’ll be new people showing up that simply start the process over for you. So ultimately, the only thing you’re going to do here is frustrate yourself.

I used to be fairly active in trying to educate the community to the “right” way of doing things — and I’ve finally come to the realization there is no one right way. Generational differences (both age based and “how long you’ve been on the internet” generations), and tool differences (which tools you grew up with, where tools like AOL and Outlook encourage a specific style, and other tools tend to encourage one you’re more compatible with) make this really impossible, since many of those folks aren’t in the “don’t know better” class, but in the “this is how I grew up, why don’t YOU change” part instead. And if you think about it, by sheer numbers, AOL and Outlook would win any vote, no?

Think about it from the point of view of a typical user. I’m not typical, by any means, but I have 400ish people in my address book, and a somewhat larger group of people I communicate with, and 15-20 mailing lists I’m involved with in some form or another. Some lists are set reply-to list, some aren’t. Some users hate if you CC them if you mail the lists, others (like me) prefer that you do it. Some top-reply, others don’t. I don’t know about you, but I can’t keep track of who likes what email which way. Even if I could, the most likely response to having to keep track of all the differences in things people prefer. So — I do things the way I’m comfortable with, because the alternative is, basically, silence. Which I know some people might prefer, but we’ll ignore that.

As way of explaining this, imagine I start sending everyone who emails me a note saying “sorry, you MUST email me in 18 point Helvetica text colored red, or I won’t read it” — those are exceptionally arbitrary values, but so are all of these other things (reply-to, cc’s on list mail, top posting replies, etc). Would you actually remember my demand to do email to me MY way? probably not. Would you actually do it? Of course not (unless I was the only person in the universe with the answer to a question and you were desperate, and then, probably not until earlier emails were ignored or rejected). Is it reasonable for me to expect you to contort like that just to send me email? Hell no. (actually, one person I know actually DOES send me email in that format, but he’s just being pedantic and refuses to acknowledge he can’t tell the entire universe to do email his way, and that’s his response to this argument in a previous existence).

And that’s why I’ve come to believe that trying to push personal preferences out to others is the wrong thing to do. You have your preference. But to the other person, you’re one of 100 or so people on one of half a dozen mail lists, and they all have different preferences and standards, and how is that person supposed to keep it straight?

They can’t. And asking them to is unfair. Telling them they HAVE to is arrogant. Neither works, so all it does is create conflict and stress and really doesn’t solve anything useful. So what I tell people today, basically, is to chill. The internet is a diverse universe, and anything that attempts to regulate or limit that diversity is asking for failure — and will get it.

Doesn’t mean education isn’t important. It’s always good to try to set useful standards and get people information they can use to learn — but so is diversity and tolerance and understanding and moving beyond concepts of “one true way”. So what I try to do, and what I encourage people to do now, is not this kind of educational activism (because it won’t work, and actively pisses off some folks), but instead look at what you can control, which is the incoming data stream.

If you have a specific preferences, then you should use what you DO control: your mailbox, your incoming mail stream, your mail client, your computer (and perhaps mail server) to implement those preferences. Instead of telling everyone to send you email in 18 point red helvetica — teach your server or client to display it that way. Anything that really bugs you, the way to fix it successfully is to fix it on your own machine, not attempt to distribute that requirement out to hundreds or thousands of people who might not agree with you and will probably ignore you. It’s a lot more effective to look for technological solutions you CAN control than social solutions you don’t.

And anything you can’t fix technologically, one of the best pieces of advice I ever gave myself was both simple and tough to actually buy into: “get over it”. Learn to relax and just not worry about stuff you can’t fix; I find my life is a lot happier when I’m not tilting at windmills.

For me, it’s a common courtesy — on a list, at least, I appreciate that some people do have different styles in personal communication — to edit out that which isn’t necessary in a response.

But what if we, say, did a survey and found out most people want it the other way? Would YOU change and do it their way? You’re making a basic assumption here that your way is the “right” way, and therefore, everyone else is wrong. it’s a lot more ambiguous in reality, and even if you ARE “right”, it doesn’t matter. Some will disagree, and they’ll just continue being that splinter under your fingernail.

The main issue is to do with space and efficiency: This calendar year’s [list] mailbox is 145MB which

is probably at least twice as large as it need be simply because of those who include 40 lines of quote for a two line reply.

Sorry, I don’t have a lot of support for this any more. Disk is cheap. bandwidth is cheap. it’s just not a REAL issue, it’s a perceived one.

Reading individual messages is slower than it could be simply because of the amount of extra work that Mail has to do. Searching is less efficient. And backing up my system is slower etc.

marginally. I just think you’re rationalizing out what you already believe. it’s no longer a real or persuasive argument

One of the behaviours that irks me most is the inclusion of the personalised list “footer” in replied to the list, e.g.

_______________________________________________

Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.

[list] mailing list ([list])

Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:

http://[list]/mailman/options/[list]/[list]

This email sent to [list]

Which is one sed script away from not being your problem any further. Just modify your archives to fit your preferences.

I have drawn attention to the etiquette document in occasional postings to the list, and in a few cases of particularly egregious transgression mailed individuals off-list. The problem, however, persists, and even some of those I’ve mailed directly continue to “misbehave”.

well, yeah. what if they don’t agree with you? why should your opinion win? You only speak for yourself, not the list, not even the majority of the list, not even necessarily any significant population of the list. Why is there only ONE way this stuff should be done, anyway?

I have three questions for you:

First, am I simply being over-sensitive? This is an irritant for me, but perhaps no-one else is bothered.

I don’t think you’re being over-sensitive. you are what you are. I will, however, phrase it differently, and note that you’re pretty far out on the edge of the bell curve of responses. There’s someone over on the other edge, too, and if you two ever get into an argument, it won’t be pretty… (grin)

Secondly, in especially bad cases, where a user persists in posting short replies with large volumes of quoted text (and where such inclusion isn’t necessary to maintain context) — here I’m thinking of about a 10+:1 ratio, and including the footer — what is a reasonable response? Excluding someone from the list, even on a temporary basis, does seem excessive.

IMHO, none. unless you are the list admin. so if you want to complain to the admin, that’s fine, but it’s up to the admin to ENFORCE things, and frankly, what you want enforced is admitted upfront to be optional (it’s not a rule, it’s a note of etiquette). So — if it were me, I’d probably tell you to relax and learn to deal with the fact that other people do things differently. Hmm. I just did. oh.

Thirdly, might it be possible at least for quoted footers to be automatically excised?

that’s up to the list admin, but I wouldn’t. there are too many other things that really matter that I’d consider higher priorities.

Frankly, I don ‘t see this as the LIST’s problem, but yours. and solving it by telling everyone else to change, instead of changing your local environment, is a failed policy. 20 years of trying to do this on mailing lists and USENET merely proves this to be true, IMHO. So I’d encourage you to look at what you can do to tailor your environment to your own preferences and learn to love (or ignore) the rest, and not try to change the world to match your ideas of what it ought to be. Down that road lies nothing but frustration and anger, and life’s too short for that.

chuq

(thoughts, folks?)

recent reads….

While blogging has been light, I’ve been spending more time away from the computer and catching up some some reading.

Herewith a few of the highlights…

I’ve struggled to find good SF or Fantasy that I find enjoyable. Fortunately, one of the folks I work with recommended Terry Goodkind, and the suggestion was a good one. So far, I’ve made it through “Wizard’s First Rule (Sword of Truth, Book 1)” (Terry Goodkind) and “Stone of Tears (Sword of Truth, Book 2)” (Terry Goodkind), a total of 1800+ pages of type a bit too tiny for these middle-aged eyes, and I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly, and in fact, bought the next two books in the series for holiday reading (people who remember me from my days writing OtherRealms probably remember I am not a huge fan of series books. I’m not — unless they’re well written….)

The storyline is classic fantasy. a dark evil challenges the world, and the good people (magicians and others) must struggle to overcome it and protect life as they know it. You have your wizards, and your sorcerors, your good youth who is not what he seems, a love story where fate guarantees they cannot live happily ever after (but of course, love conquers all, maybe). Dragons, great battles, death, destruction, evil beasts….

In the hands of a lesser writer, what you’d have is 1800 pages of chaos. In the hands of many writers today, you’d have 1800 pages of bloated, sloppy prose that would be much better with another round of editing and a 10% cut in word count (but in today’s fictional reality, thick books sell well, so there’s little incentive to make the book better through good editing, something that’s really hurt authors like Scott Card and George R.R. Martin, IMHO).

Each book stands alone, telling its own story within the larger story arc of the series. I found myself pulled in to each volume, sometimes reading late into the night. The characters are strong and multi-dimensional, not convenient puppets, and all have both positive and negative aspects that keep them from being stereotypes. And unlike many series, you don’t hit the end of the book feeling like it was an unresolved stopping point; each of the first two books is a proper ending, even though the larger story arc is clearly to continue.

Goodkind reminds me very much of an early Ray Feist — not afraid to challenge the reader, but not looking to show off with excessive complexity or storylines that defy your ability to keep track of what’s going on. it’s good entertainment AND good writing, unfortunately a rare combination these days. And it’s a series I’m looking forward to crawl back into….

Also on the fiction side, I’ve finally caught up with Steven Brust again, having finally finished off the Viscount of Adrilankha series (“The Paths of the Dead (The Viscount of Adrilankha, Book 1)” (Steven Brust), “The Lord of Castle Black (The Viscount of Adrilankha, Book 2)” (Steven Brust), and “Sethra Lavode (V of A)” (Steven Brust)). This series is Brust honoring a favorite writer of his, Alexander Dumas, and it’s written in the style and language of Dumas (in all it’s flowery glory). This is both the series greatest strength and it’s biggest weakness — the books are amazingly hard to read to this modern-day reader, who sometimes found his eyes turning sideways trying to keep track of what was going on, especially after a long day at work (So you say? Yes, I shall say it!). It ties into the larger universe Brust plays in, and tells the story of the end of the Interregnum and the return of the Orb to the realm of man, and the fight for control of the Orb and the throne.

If you’ve never read Steven Brust, this probably isn’t a good place to start. it’s well-written, but not necessarily easy reading, and assumes some familiarity with Brust’s universe (if you’re interested, I recommend starting with this: “The Book of Jhereg: Contains the Complete Text of Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla (Vlad Taltos)” (Steven Brust)). But with that one restriction, it’s a series I recommend highly. It’s not, though, a series I’d want to read if I was going to be interrupted or unable to concentrate on it (it’s a series for next to the fire, not for the subway…)

Also in the catching-up-with category is another favorite author, Greg Bear. I loved “Darwin’s Radio : In the next stage of evolution, humans are history…” (GREG BEAR) and the premise that our genes would evolve us into newer, more advanced forms. If you could buy into that, the storyline of fear and hatred in society is scary and gripping. The sequel, “Darwin’s Children” (GREG BEAR), however, wasn’t as successful for me. Carrying the story forward, I found it interesting, but as a sequel, didn’t stand up to the original work. the relationships seemed more awkward, the storyline forced. Here is a series where I think what really needed to be said was said in book 1 — and book 2 didn’t really add to the conversation between author and reader, it just added to the word count. While it’s not a bad book, Darwin’s Children just didn’t click with me the way Darwin’s Radio did. Read the first book, borrow the second from a friend who bought it.

Off into non-fiction land, one of the books I took with me to victoria was “Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead the People Who Deliver Technology” (Paul Glen, David H. Maister, Warren G. Bennis) — which I found terribly disappointing. As a geek, it mostly failed the “well, duh!” test with me. I suppose if you just fell off a desert island and got hired to run a group of geeks, it might help you avoid insanity — but it really read like “how to manage programmers 101 for people who think everyone ought to be interchangeable assembly line workers without having them laugh at you and quit” — and I expect the people most likely to need a book like this are unlikely to think they do.

And as usual, I’ve been off playing in military history and naval warfare…

Starting with “Combined Fleet Decoded: The Secret History of : American Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II” (JOHN PRADOS) — An interesting evaluation of the intelligence services on both sides of the Pacific war, and how both sides benefitted and were hurt by what they knew and what they didn’t. While the intelligence operations of the US are farily well-known by now, the japanese intelligence organizations and how their navy used them (or didn’t) hasn’t been extensively studied, and this book opens the door to that side of the conflict. What I found most interesting was the look at the politics and personalities of intelligence, with the infighting and turfing that seems to happen among the various organizations. it’s a case, I think, where history can show us things we should strive to avoid, an important lesson today in a time where after 9/11 we saw similar problems between the FBI and CIA, and where we’re still seeing the government try to figure out how to resolve them…

“Battle Ready” (Tom Clancy, Tony Zinni, Tony Koltz), is another book from the Tom Clancy factory, and is primarily an interview (told, intermittently and somewhat chaotically, in both first person and third person for no reason i can figure out) with Retired General Tony Zinni. Zinni was on the ground in Iraq, involved in the Middle East peace process, Afghanistan, Somalia, a former Commandant of the Marines, and carried on a 40 year career that started as an advisor in Vietnam (where he sustained serious injuries). Zinni also has strong opinions on many things, some of which got him in deep trouble with the Bush administration, and in this book, he’s not afraid to share them with you. It’s a fascinating read — his view of the reality of Vietnam is fascinating and likely to change your view of that war. After his involvement with Arafat and Israel, he came away with strong beliefs on why that process has failed, and during his time in the MIddle East, he pushed hard to prepare the military for the need to support the occupation after the war in Iraq was won — and was roundly ignored by the administration and his military peers. As we can see today, there are likely some people who wish they’d paid more attention. An interesting book that’s critical of many people (Clinton as well as Bush), likely to piss off both sides of the political spectrum, but a fascinating look into a number of areas of America’s foreign policy that have been relegated to five-paragraph explanations by the American media, simplifying them to the point of not explaining what’s really going on. Zinni does, and whether you agree with his opinons or not, he’ll give you the background and data that nobody else seems to be making easily available….

“Big Red: The Three-Month Voyage of a Trident Nuclear Submarine” (Douglas C. Waller) — ever wonder what it’s like to serve on a submarine? Times have changed since the days of the U-boats (so wonderfully described in the movie “Das Boot) — but it’s still no luxury cruise. Author Waller was given full access to the USS Nebraska, going on cruise with them and living with the crew. The Nebraska is one of the subs designed to act as a deterrent — it carries nuclear missles, and it’s primary purpose is to not be found (and sunk). it’s a fascinating look at the committment and sacrifices our military (and their spouses) make to protect us, as well as how the sub operates. An interesting perspective into the military life, and an area of the Navy that to date hasn’t been dicussed much.

If you’re curioius about military (and naval) history, a good introductory piece on World War II is “War at Sea: A Naval History of World War II” (Nathan Miller) — it would make a good first book to explore this area of our past. I doesn’t go into excessive detail or get bogged down in analysis, making it accessible but still interesting and educational. For those of you (like me) who hated history classes in school, this might be a good first book if you’re curious about WW II, because frankly, history is fascinating — it’s how it’s taught that made us hate it. Make a good christmas gift for someone you know who’s curious about the past but not sure how to get started.

Finally, I happened to run into this book by accident: “Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II” (Robert Kurson) is the story of a group of wreck divers, scuba divers who explore shipwrecks. One of my programmers has recently gotten into scuba, and I’m interested in WW II Naval history and submarines, so a book on both scuba and a lost U-boat off the New Jersey Coast seemed a natural. It was — well written, it’s an account of a group of divers who discover a previously unknown sunken submarine and their search for its identification, and the changes in their lives that this search (an obsession, and not always a healthy one) caused. An interesting read on any number of levels — a non-fiction book that reads like a good thriller, it ought to be a must-read both for submarine geeks and for scuba geeks.

Hockey? remember that?

Like most teams, the San Jose Sharks have scheduled their minor league to come into town and has given away tickets to season ticket holders as a way to apologize for the lack of a season, and give us all a bit of a hockey fix. I know some folks are in a “the hell with everyone” mood, but Laurie and I will be there.

I’m not boycotting hockey by any means (looking forward to seeing the Salsa in a few weeks, too) — but I’ve put hockey in the background, and I refuse to plan the spinster maiden waiting for the call that never comes. Once they settle, then I’ll pay attention. until then, I intend to have a life and not waste it on the NHL. It won’t do any good, it won’t speed up the process, and it sends the wrong message. I want them worrying we won’t come back, maybe it’ll hurry things up a bit.

but probably not. Until then, I’m enjoying life ) and spending money we probably would have spent on hockey on other things ). I find I kinda like having my evenings right now, both not having to worry about getting to the arena for a game, and not always having a game on the TV — Laurie and I are catching up on lots of delayed movie watching, thanks to Netflix, and generally not missing the NHL much at all right now.

I highly recommend doing that, too. it’s a lot more fun, and it should scare the crap out of both sides knowing the people who pay their salaries are getting used to not having them around… I don’t really understand the folks who get worked up about this as if they’re a junkie and the NHL is their dealer — all that does is encourage them to think you can’t live without them. Really want this solved? convince them you can.

But with fans, it’ll never happen. And they know it. That’s why fans are ultimately powerless and ignored here.

my latest project…

Here’s one of the reasons why I’ve been kind of missing from the blog recently…

Our master bedroom is tiny — 10 feet by 11.5. Our bedroom set has been around for a while — like, oh, 30 years or so. And it’s large, the proverbial “wall of oak”:

We’ve talked about a new set, but we’ve always decided there are other priorities. More and more, though, I was ready to do something. With Laurie headed up to Seattle on another trip, it seemed a good time to try to surprise her.

I didn’t quite make it — because of work and some other time issues, when she got back, it wasn’t quite done, but it was close. Over the last week, I finished it up, and today, with laurie’s help, we redid the bedroom, pulling out the old headboard, shampooing the (oh god, I shouldn’t have looked at what that pulled up) carpets, re-arranging things and putting in the new headboard I’ve built:

>

The headboard is made of African zebrawood, finished in danish out, framed in black-painted poplar, and upholstered in a hunter green upholstery. Total cost for building the headboard was between $600-700, and with the new side tables and lamps, the total project cost was about $900.

My first project that involved upholstering stuff, and I think it worked our pretty well. The new headboard only sits about 4″ out from the wall, which allowed us to rotate the bed 90 degrees, and relocate the chests together on one wall. The end result: a room that feels much roomier, there’s more room to walk around the bed (less kicking it as I try to crawl into bed without waking laurie up), and the wall that’s going to be the new closet is now unencumbered with furniture. Oh, and instead of two 50 watt heat lamps pointing straight down at your face, we have more lighting, and independently controllable lamps, so I can read while Laurie crashes. and if we want, we can

and — laurie likes it. And so do I. And it’s definitely not something you’re going to find at Levitz, that’s for sure.

Unlike Laurie’s new office secret project a couple of months ago, she knew something was going on, just not what (who else do you think I was asking where to find things like upholstery fabric? — for the record, the folks at Calico Corners rock. Very helpful with a relative newbie to all of this.

The fabric panels are plywood, backed with 2″ of high density foam and a layer of batting, and then everything was put together using pocket screws and my new kreg jig. Still to come: new chests (we have a set tentatively picked out), drapes on the window to replace the mini-blinds (or perhaps roman blinds, or something. anything but the “dorm” look), new carpets, and then paint. None of the interior has been painted since we moved in here (has it really been ten years?) and some of it needed it then — but we’ve been working more on the exterior and “bones” of the house (which is the smart thing to do, but it’s damn nice to see stuff being made nice again that you can see….)

Interesting project, with a number of new techniques. It also gives me some confidence both in the skills I’ll need for some upcoming projects (one reason I did this now was if I screwed it up, I could tear it apart and not worry about it — my next project modifed the house itself as I get going on the new fireplace facade), and that my workshop finally allows me to, well, work.

I’ve also spent the last month of weekends shutting down the front yard for the fall, cutting down all of the irises, trimming back the roses, and pulling all of the weeds (well, first round of weeds. In a couple of weeks, I’ll go out and roundup the stuff that comes up to try to slow down the damned bermuda grass) — and dropped 20 sacks of redwood bark as mulch. finished just in time for this first rain storm of the season. here’s hoping it stops again and gives me a couple of weeks to clean up the back and get the spring bulbs into containers… but even if not, it’s great doing my fall cleanup in, well, fall instead of February like I have the last couple of years.

Up front, the fall daisies are still going at it, the rhodie is doing a little blooming for some reason, the irises are in for one final round of blooms, and we still have some roses going at it, and the Dahlias haven’t given up, although they’re slowing down and getting ready for their winter sleep. So we will have some color, and will into November. And then it’ll all start up again sometime in January…. (those of you in snow country, just grimace quietly…)

nice to finally finish something up, and have it come out as planned, and really look good.

(yes, I’m an admitted HGTV Geek. And the inspiration for the headboard came from an episode of The Designer Guys, out of Toronto and HGTV Canada, and found on Discovery Home here in the States. And I have to admit — their new series, Design Rivals, simply isn’t as good. the original series was about design, and the two had a good, interesting chemistry because they didn’t see eye to eye on things. Design Rivals is more oriented towards playing up the rivalry, which many episodes comes across as false and forced, and the design aspects are stuck in as an afterthought; I can see why they did it, since the disagreements created the spark that made the first series interesting, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired for me….)

avoiding blood diamonds…

If you’re going to buy diamonds, I’d recommend you do what you can to avoid buying “blood diamonds”, diamonds that come from African areas where they’re being sold ot finance various wars. This is, however, easier said than done, since while De Beers has recently been trying (under pressure from customers) to better track and account for the source of its gems, many “clean” diamonds coming from Africa are laundered.

A growing option are Canadian diamonds — in fact, Tiffany has just cut a deal to work with the Canadian mines and to expand their cutting center in Yellowknife. There are currently two live diamond mines in Canada, and diamonds are now a $1.7 billion (CDN) business, with a significant benefit to the Inuit and other natives.

There are three or four more mines under development in Canada that I know of, and in the last couple of weeks, I’ve heard of one being developed outside of Anchorage (they’ve already discovered microdiamonds in there and are going to be doing more extensive tests), and now, they’ve found kimberlite in Montana that contains microdiamonds (kimberlite is the rock formation where diamonds can be found).

If you’re buying gems, ask your jeweler. Specify diamonds that are certified to not be tainted — or better yet, specify canadian diamonds. If your jeweler claims to not be able to tell or won’t cooperate, get a better jeweler.

The gem you buy might pay for someone’s education — or their death. Choose carefully, there’s more to diamonds than color, clarity and price.

an unkind community…

Anil talks about problems within the blogosphere as it grows up…

And more or less asks the question “can’t we all get along?”

And the answer is, unfortunately, no. It wasn’t true for USENET way back when. Or mailing lists. or e-mail. or the Internet in general. And it’s not true for blogging, either, because, whether you like it or not, blogging, like all of that other stuff, is attached to real life, and physics wins.

When a technology is new, it’s generally used by a small group of people who generally have a like-minded attitude. But if a technology succeeds, its usage grows, and it starts attracting new users. This is good. But as the group of users grows, it loses that intimacy and cohesiveness, and people start using it who have their own ideas and agendas different than the originators.

It’s a genie you can’t put back n the bottle, nor should we try. The simple fact that “we are bloggers” doesn’t make us immune to the factors that affect us in real life — because we still live in the real world, too.

I look at it this way: it’s the difference between having a cup of coffee in your house with a few close friends and driving down to the local coffee shop (which may or may not be full of people you like or don’t like), or grabbing a cup at a baseball game in a stadium full of fans. We don’t expect the same kind of control over our environment at the coffee shop or the stadium that we have in our living room — so why do we keep expect that we can open up our virtual living room to strangers by making our technologies available, and assume somehow we’ll only attract those we are compatible with?

It wasn’t true 20 years ago on USENET, although we tried our damndest. And it’s not true now, and never will be true. So technologies and communities need to accept that up front and plan for it (and design for it), or else make a conscious choice to stay in that virtual living room. Because we’ve all seen what happens when a stadium full of people push into the living room demanding coffee now, dammit, and all we have is a single Mr. Coffee.

As you grow and reach out, you lose the ability to dictate the character of the community. This can be distressing at times, and stressful to the community, but it’s also a godsend, because it adds vitality and diversity and prevents the kind of inward/exclusionist mindset that communities that strongly dictate attitudes tend to get. And I dunno about you, but I’d rather put up with a little chaos than an environment that refuses to accept any…

opening night….

Last week was going to be Opening night in San Jose. Except there’s no season.

I admit that I had forgotten it was opening night, until the local paper wrote an article on the lockout and how it’s impacting people.

I know some of my hockey friends are going crazy over the lockout. My attitude is different: life is busy, life is full. I refuse to sit at home like someone waiting for that last minute invite to the senior prom I know isn’t going to happen. Let the NHL and the players solve their problem, and then when they’re ready, I’ll decide if I care.

Until then, there’s our trip to Victoria (go Salsa!) in a few weeks, and perhaps we’ll wander up to Duncan and catch the Cowichan Valley team, too. And there’s AHL/CHL hockey popping up on various channels – but to be honest, I’m just not that motivated right now. And college hockey is gearing up, which is moer interesting. But Laurie and I are spending time getting stuff done, and catching up on our NetFlix backlog, and actually watching a few movies and things..

And I’m finding that right now, I don’t miss the NHL. Maybe if more fans felt like that, owners and players would pay more attention to the fans. But don’t hold your breath.

Collecting Northwest Art.

I’ve mentioned this in the past, but not recently — I’m a collector of Northwest native art. Visiting the dealers and checking out what’s available isof the things Laurie and I do when we visit the great wet north.

One of the dealers I buy from occasionally (Rob Austin, aka Saltglaze on eBay) passed on an interesting piece on the totem pole from the Seattle times.

I do own one small totem, but in general, I’ve avoided buying them because so many of them are pretty badly done and aimed at tourists and the, um, “cruise ship” trade. But I’ve also always found the larger poles to have immense power and meaning.

Laurie and I have gotten more involved in collecting Inuit carvings the last few years, but I’m still always on the looking for quality additions to the collection, especially if I can find pieces by some of the younger artists that I think are going to become better known, not (just) for the investment value, but to help encourage the younger artists.

One of these years, I’ll get the collection online — all I need do is dig out frmo the time crunch (sigh)

problems in referee-land…

Eric Duhatschek has a great piece on some of the problems in NHL-referee-land.

I was, and continue to be, a supporter of the two referee system in the NHL. But the last year or two, since Van Hellemond came on board, it seemed to be in failing. Beyond that, referees I always felt were quality refs were getting crap assignments, missing the playoffs, etc, while others (Marc Joanette, for instance) that didn’t impress me seemed to be well regarded (I’ll give Joanette credit — he’s really improved since his early games, which were painful to watch).

I just finally wrote it off to not really watching the refs as critically as I used to. But maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t as wrong as it seemed.

This is going to be a tough nut to fix. the referees have a thankless job, and it’s been worse because of the general lack of backbone in supporting them by the league office. As tough as the ref’s job is, the job of their boss is worse, because he has to be that backbone. Van Hellemond could have been, but wasn’t — and it seems like there may have been other things going on as well, what with the “lend me $10 today for a hamburger” thing, and now the implications of favoritism to canadians over americans?

Just what the NHL needs. Of course, if they’re really looking for someone who’s sympathetic to both the issues the refs face and what the league needs as well, who has a decent feel for what a well-reffed game is, and is willing to both call refs on the carpet and stand up for them as needed, I’d stand for the job. But – I’d have two requirements to take it. First, referee disciplinary actions need to be made public, just like player ones are. and second, I need permission to publicize every time a coach or GM calls me to bitch about a call, and be able to post video showing why they were right (or mostly, wrong), so fans have more of a feel just what kind of pressure is applied to these guys.

Because really, coaches and GMs are united in only one thing, I think: they all want the reffing improved and the game cleaned up and obstruction and etc called — on all of the other teams.

their teams, of course, don’t DO that. all those calls are wrong.

Hockey notes…

Via Stan Fischler: NHL owners are outpointing players in the public relations aspect of the CBA war. Calgary Herald columnist Don Martin TKO’s the NHLPA with this embarrassing item: Buffalo’s Chris Taylor — the league’s lowest-paid player ($455,000 Canadian) earns more than Canada’s Prime Minister, Paul Martin.

“Something’s out of whack when the most unappreciated player (Taylor) in a financially troubled sport doubles the compensation of a G-8 leader.”

The problem with this is that it completely ignores the financial realities of both jobs.

Taylor is making a few hundred thousand for a few years, then his career is over. he has to play 4 or 5 years or he gets no pension. His work in hockey doesn’t exactly qualify him for lots of other high paying jobs for his second career.

Martin (and, in the states, Bush), not only gets a salary (low by design, I’ll note, originally to discourage “career” politicians), but has room and board paid for, all of his travel, most of his incidentals, etc. When he leaves office, he’ll get a very generous pension. He’ll be in a position to get hired by any number of companies who want to take advantage of his name, skills, and influence. he can write a book, he can go on the speaking tour, or he can wander into the real cash cows for ex-politicians and get appointed to commissions or become a lobbyist.

It’s a cute bit of rhetoric, but it isn’t an accurate one — it compares salaries, not income, and it doesn’t look at the rreality of the earning power of both players. When Taylor is done with hockey, he’s done. Maybe a pension, maybe not. Maybe an announcer job or a coarching jjob, or somethingg like that, but those aren’t exactly high paying careers (or common).

Martin (and Bush) leave office, and into a situation where their prime earning is just beginning. Whether it’s a book contract or groups willing to pay them $50K a speech or a high paid job for an influential legal firm that uses ttheir influence as much as their skills — they have a high (and unregulated) leevel of living ahead of them. Does Taylor? who’s gonna pay him $50K for a 90 minute speech?

Salary is only a small part of Martin’s income, and Bush’s, especially over the long haul. Don Martin is comparing Apple’s and Chivas here.

NHL Players: wakee up and smell their demise

Bob Sanevere of the St. Paul press, saying things the players won’t like, but really should listen to.

The real problem with NHL salaries…

Tim Panaccio of the Philly Inquirer weighs in on how the NHL got into this problem. He makes an interesting point: it’s not the star making a lot of money that’s killing you, it’s the utliity players.

Running Community Websites

Kasia: I cannot imagine anyone would do this for pure satisfaction of creating something useful.

Well, Laurie and I have been doing just that for a decade or so (or, more correctly, before there were web sites, it was mailing lists). If you include our use and involvement in various USENET communities and my time on other systems like Delphi and CompuServe, our experience with this goes back about 20 years (sigh. where’s my walker?)

Why do we do it? there are, honestly, days when we ask ourselves that question and don’t have an answer. The turkeys and trolls exact a toll, and some days, you feel it’s just not worth it.

But it is — we get to build things that encourage people to gather, and more specifically, people we enjoy being around. When it works, it’s a lot like an extended party full of people you enjoy being around and talking to. But when the turkeys get under your skin, it’s easy to forget the dozens of good people because of the one or two bad.

There’s a long tradition of this that predates the net — most fan groups have a sub-group that enjoys putting on conventions or conferences. In science fiction fandom, they’re SMOFs (Secret Masters of Fandom), and they actually have their own convention on running conventions.

For me, it’s a rewarding hobby that introduces me to really interesting and fun people, with short interludes of absolute agony. And I think most folks who do this eventually find that the trolls win, because there are always new trolls and you eventually run out of the energy to fight them. Laurie and I have come close, and occasionally “taken vacations” (announced or not) to get our batteries charged up again or regain our perspective on all of this. And as we’ve gotten older and wanted more of this weird thing some folks call “a life”, we’ve backed off on how many things we do, and how many folks we support, to reduce our workload; I think it was a smart move to focus on the groups we felt were most important to us than continue trying to work on all of them when some were simply not getting enough of our time.

But the bottom line is — you do it because you enjoy it, or you’ll do it badly. and doing it badly is worse than not doing it at all, because if you don’t do it, someone else will likely step in and do it instead. And because of that — it’s always my belief that when it stops being fun, you should stop. If it’s useful, someone else with more time and energy will pick up the reins and carry it forward. the world doesn’t begin and end with one person, nor should it.

today’s “birds as tool-users” link

as the owner of an umbrella cockatoo, I had to post this link on tool using with burrowing owls: owls use dung to “fish” for beetles. Anyone who’s spent time around birds is not surprised. it is only a matter of time before my bird invents the lock pick.

Amateur vs. Professional boxing…

Kevin Schofield: I ask you: how can you keep a straight face when protesting the judging in a so-called “sport” where the main goal is to beat your opponent unconscious?

The problem with Kevin’s comment is that this isn’t what amateur boxing is about. Amateur boxing is about technique and dominance. Do knockouts happen? Yes. But the rules are designed to protect boxers as much as possible. It’s about being better than your opponent, not hurting them.

It’s when they turn pro that the bread and circuses come out. Pro boxing is an abomination, but one with a long history.

But don’t think that they’re the same, just because they use the same equipment.

it’s legalized assault, and it’s glorified violence

so is wrestling, judo, american football, the way the NBA plays basketball, ice hockey, field hockey, water polo (watch the under water cameras, or try playing it yourself)… And pretty much any sport where you’re competing against others directly instead of against other performances.

Put two people in a ring against one another, and guess what? conflict happens. that’s human nature. Been that way since two bored cavemen picked up sticks next to the fire and beat on each other to see who was sleeping with the sheep that night.

This just in: dolphin pods maintained by socialites…

Dolphin groups, or “pods” rely on socialites to keep them together, scientists have claimed

This has significant implications for the human race. It implies that there’s a genetic basis for the cruise director, and that those people can’t help themselves.

product marketing people have senses of humor, too…

Jason ran into a candle named “smell my nuts” — and can’t believe they didn’t know what they were doing.

well, maybe they did.

product managers have senses of humor. Many times, they aren’t allowed to use them, but it sneaks out here and there. I’ll bet they know exactly what they were doing.

I have sitting proudly on my desk at work a can of cat food from a major manufacturer. It’s a generic/house brand, and the flavor is — Kitty Stew. On the label, a picture of — a cat.

It’s that same kind of disbelief as the candle. On one level, it’s a straight forward, generic can of cat food. But when you stop and look at it, and compare it to how other cans labels are designed, it’s clear the product manager meant to imply that inside is a stew made of kitties.

the marketing folks who wander through my cube love the thing. most wish they could get away with that kind of subtle put on, too.

Rising Tide

New submarine book: Rising Tide, the Untold Story of the Russian Submarines that Fought the Cold War by Gary Weir and Walter Boyne. Weir is a historian at the US Naval Historical center, and Boyne is a former director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

The book is an attempt to chronicle Soviet military strategy for submarine warfare from about the end of World War II through the end of the Cold War and how it affected both Soviet and US policies during that time. There is some interesting material based on interviews with retired Soviet submariners, but overall, I felt the book was average — not a lot of depth, and it couldn’t quite figure out what story it wanted to tell, so it kept moving back and forth from technical to personal to political, and never really doing any of them true justice.

One of the stronger aspects of the book is discussing the problems inherent in working within the Soviet system, where quality control was many times questionable (and attempting to work in an environment that was, at best, unforgiving to flaws). A detailed discussion of the Kursk disaster also is intereting, but didn’t shed any real new information to me, and I don’t claim to have studied the incident seriously.

I useful and readable book, but it could have been much better. Not up to the quality of, say, Blind Man’s Bluff, which covers much of the same material from the American standpoint. But definitely readable. give it 3 out of 5.

eric clapton in concert….

As we were leaving the Clapton Concert (July 30, HP Pavillion), a woman exiting at the same time turned to her partner and said “I’m disappointed. he didn’t interact with the audience at all!”

that may have been the biggest complaint about the concert. And it was wrong — Clapton did interact with the concert; he just did it with his guitar and his voice. I can’t imagine Eric Clapton staring out at the crowd and yelling “hey, Detroit! clap your hands!” with false enthusiasm — can you?

San jose was stop 56 on Clapton’s 57 city tour. If any band had an excuse to show up tired and go through the motions, this one did. But from start to finish, it was an energetic, intense, artistic performance, starting with Robert Randolph and the Family band’s 45 minute opening act. Randolph and his steel pedal guitar pumped up the energy in the building from the first bars (Laurie is currently lusting for one. I keep pointing out that the instruments in the hands of a white person would turn out hawaiian music… snicker).

After about a half hour break, Clapton’s crew came out, and played for almost 2 hours. A good overview of the concert is here. I can’t add a lot to it. All of the artists were in good form (Branham seemed under the weather, and I never saw him sing — but he played a hell of a set, even if he seemed in pain at times. Or perhaps, that’s his zone, but it seemed maybe a bit of both); most impressive to me were (other than Clapton, of course), billy preston and chris stainton on the two keyboards, but everyone kicked.

I like to judge a concert by how the crowd reacts. If the crowd is into it, the concert’s working. If it’s lifeless, or milling or distracted (like at Fleetwood Mac), then the group isn’t doing it’s job. Not only was this crowd electric the whole evening — when Clapton went into wonderful tonight, you saw couples all over the arena stand up and sort of dance together in place…

Awesome evening. I’ve seen clapton once before, when he was touring songs of his blues roots (another awesome concert….) — first time I’ve seen him do his own material — and it more than lived up to expectations.

Study: bigger rinks reduce concussions

new study attempts to compare injury rates, and tie it to rink size. it seems to completely ignore differences in playing styles between the various leagues, or the different size of players, or game intensity.

Hey, if you studied injury rates in pre-season games vs. playoff games, you’d see a big difference, too. So I guess all hockey games should be pre-season games. Safer that way…

(this is not a well-controlled or thought-out study, IMHO. Much as I wish we could find some answers to the concussion problems in the league…)

fleetwood mac in concert…

I need to admit this up front — I have a love/hate relationship with Fleetwood mac. I love Stevie Nicks’ voice, and Lindsey buckingham as a guitar player, and when she was with the group, Christy McVie’s vocals. But there’s another aspect of the group, when buckingham starts singing, where I just want to scream. When buckingham is doing his material, I just want to yell “Stonehenge” and go find something else to do.

So when it was announced that Fleetwood Mac would be playing San Jose, Laurie and I talked about it and gave it a miss. And then the Sharks made us an offer we couldn’t refuse — free floor seats, since we’re long-time sharks season ticket holders. At the price, how could you go wrong? So that’s how we ended up at the concert. And normally, with HP Pavilion’s wonky acoustics, I’d rather stay off the floor, anyway.

I’ve seen the group a couple of times before — the previous time in 82 or 83 in Oakland, when they were originally going to play with the Cars, and had to reschedule because Nicks lost her voice (so we ended up with Glen Frey as the opener, trying to prove he didn’t need the Eagles)

Prior to that, I saw them (sharing a bill with War) in Las Vegas, way back about 1973. And, in fact, I did walk out on them that night, thinking that the girl on the piano was pretty good, but man, I wish that guy would shut up… (some things never change….)

So back to HP Pavilion. Mick Fleetwood has grown up to look like Peter Boyle in Young Frankentstein. John McVie looks like, well, my dad, which always freaks me when I see my parents playing in a rock band (the joys of middle age). Lindsey seems to be channelling John Mcenroe. Stevie Nicks looked like if she did any more botox, she’d be immobile…

but, you know? what matters is the music…

Touring with the core members were a keyboardist (who’s name I’ve lost), two female singers (immediately nicknamed “high” and “note”), who were stuck as far to the edge of the stage as possible without having to buy tickets (their job: christy McVie’s parts, and covering Nicks’ lost range), a spare guitarist, a spare keyboardist/synth, a spare bassist, a kick-ass percussionist, and hidden way, way in the back a third drummer.

In other words, Fleetwood Mac is touring with a Fleetwood Mac cover band, on stage at the same time. Which came in handy a lot.

It was, in a word, a weird concert. Nicks started out struggling with her voice, but it finally kicked in. Buckingham seemed completely unable to match her in harmony for the first couple of songs (which had Laurie and I doing the ‘oh, oh” look at each other), but it finally more or less clicked in, although he struggled to stay in harmony all night. Nicks never had a huge range (9 notes? 10?), and it’s narrowed over the years, but who cares? it’s how she uses it, not how far it wanders….

but we (and the crowd could never quite figure out whether the group really wanted to be there or not.

You know, if buckingham wants to do the “dance the guitar riff tango” thing, that’s fine. It’s not a rock concert, I guess, unless you have someone doing the air guitar thing (while your cover is actually playing the music in the back…), threatening to trash the guitar, and overall, acting like a 14 year old in the garage pretending to be Jimi — but Buckingham did it four times during the concert. Hate to tell you this, Lindsey, but that act gets really tired. fast. (a quiet voice whispers “stonehenge”)

And that’s mostly how the concert went: when the band was doing Stevie Nicks stuff, the quality and energy ranged from “contractual obligation professional” to “pretty darn good”. When buckingham took lead (and let Nicks rest her voice), it got very, well, Spinal Tap. the band never really tried to connect with the audience, and the audience repaid the favor; lots of rustling and talking and cel phones and wandering around, and looking at watches was going on. Most of the band seemed going through the motions, except for Buckingham and Fleetwood; buckingham seemed intent on playing “look at me, I’m so great” all night (four smash the guitar ballets? sheesh), but have I noted I’m not really a Buckingham fan? (except when he shuts up and plays…)

Fleetwood and the percussion was, well, Fleetwood. kicked butt. animated. having fun. a bit scary at times, given how much he looked like Boyle… (grin). He and his fellow drummers were the best of the show most of the time (and I have to be honest, I kept hearing more drums than two guys could do, and I was wondering what was going on — it wasn’t until the end of concert intros were done that I realized there was a third drummer hiding in the back of the stage, which explained all of the sweeetening…

One of the great frustrations of the night was the percussion solo by Fleetwood. It didn’t show up until almost the end of the show, but when it did, it electrified the audience. Just turned them on and plugged them into the show — just as it was ending. And then Fleetwood carried it on, and on, and on; something like 20 minutes of watching him drum and prance (with drum machines on a vest) all over the stage. What started as a high energy, electric and great drumming turned into a painful, “how long will he carry this on?” torture; it wasn’t just me, either — I watched as increasing clumps of the audience started streaming to the exits rather than wait for the finale. my guess is between 5-10% of the audience left during his drum piece.

and that’s too bad — if he’d put that drum piece 20 minutes into the concert, and kept it to reasonable levels, they’d ahve owned that audience all night. As it was, much of the show was “going through the paces” with no real connect or energy, and when they finally did ramp it up and get the crowd going, it was way too late, and then they screwed it up again by carrying it on, and on, until we wanted to scream.

So ultimately, it was an occasionally good, mostly frustrating show. Most of the band coasted, except for Buckingham and Fleetwood, and they seemed more interested in showing off than entertaining. Maybe you like like kind of excess — but I sure didn’t, and from the number of folks fiddlign with stuff or just sitting there passive (or, later on, leaving), I wasn’t alone.

Next time, even if the tickets are free, I think I’ll pass.

A few notes of a musical nature…

Since I’m in a musing mood and relecting on the Clapton concert the other night, perhaps a few semi-related notes on me and music might be fun…

As a kid, I never had much of a formal introduction to music; my family’s taste was oriented towards 50′s crooners (think Ed Ames). I successfully avoided piano lessons, but instead, took up clarinet. Also, early on, it was drama, which means, of course, musical theater. Hello, Dolly!, South Pacific, and Oklahoma! are all still guaranteed to generate hives…

The early days, if you think about it, didn’t lend itself well to improvisation. Technically, I was a rather good musician (by 7th grade, I was 1st chair 2nd clarinet all county, and mid-chair first clarinet) — give me a score and I could master it. Put me in a group and I could play to it. stick me on a stage and tell me to just wing it, watch me freak. The perfect kind of orchestra drone, if that’s what you want… (and that’s not a complaint, either).

After 7th grade, orthodontia started, and woodwinds stopped. I was encouraged to switch (I wanted oboe, but was vetoed again — I still, honestly, don’t have a clue if the orthodontist had a clue or not about this), so I tried trumpet, then tuba; frankly, I found the brass family cold and uninteresting, so I more or less dropped out, and worried more about the drama side of life.

In high school, I discovered rock and roll — Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Three Dog Night, Deep Purple. (it wasn’t rock unless it was heavy…). One of the joys of iTunes is going back into my youth and rediscovering my old favorites, and seeing what holds up over time. I’m now a happy owner of all of the above, except for the Black Sabbath, which I now write off as youthful naivete or something.

After high school, I went to work at Disneyland for a few years. Not only did that reinforce my inherent disney-geekness (“in the tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki room”), it gave me access to something I hadn’t known about. At that time, Disney did a continuing summer series of swing at Carnation Gardens — I fell in love with a musical style for the first time (who cares that it belonged to my parent’s teen years, not mine). Basie played there at the time, Glenn Miller’s orchestra, others. Of course, I fell in love with Benny Goodman, but also Buddy Rich — and louis. It also exposed me to Honkytonk (just go sit in Coke Corner; it’s the same piano player as it was when I was working there, and he’s still amazing), and dixieland. I tried guitar once or twice, never stuck with it, but got fairly good at ukelele, for a while. but it just wasn’t high on the priority list of life.

But over time, music faded from the scene, pushed out by other aspects of life. I wasn’t playing, and I just wasn’t that interested in listening. It stayed at best a casual interest, after I also dropped out of the drama scene as well.

And that’s more or less where it sat for a long time. Some things grabbed my attention — theatrically, I became a fan of Webber (for his theatrics) and Fosse (now, can you name two styles so diametrically opposed?) and Gilbert and Sullivan; Laurie and I started attending Scottish festivals, which introduced me to bagpipes; somewhere along the line discovered steel drums .

Suffice it to say my musical background is, well, eclectic. And about four years ago, after years of mostly hibernation, it started waking up again (it’s not alone, a number of things from early in my life that I’d put aside have come back and rejoined me, such as my woodworking). and then came iTunes.

I’m in deep trouble. Although — dammit — I keep complaining because Rhino Records isn’t on the store. they’re tired of hearing it from me, too. (grin) (what’s on Rhino? how about Emerson, Lake and Palmer? I”m a huge analog synth fan…)

How eclectic? here are the concerts Laurie and I have gone to in the last year: Paul McCartney (twice), Eric clapton, Fleetwood mac, and Bette Midler. I also seriously considered Sarah McLachlan but the timing didn’t work (I’m also going to try to see Lion King before it leaves town, and I wanted to see Starlight Express, but it also didn’t work out). thanks to iTunes, I’ve finally started exploring classical music (especially baroque strings) and opera (Wagner’s Ring, in german. no kidding). And other stuff. It makes it so easy. Anbd everything I run into points to something else new, something else to explore. how wonderfully scary. I’ll probably wander off after Bach soon, then Brahms.

For me, concerts are fascinating events. Since I did so much tech crew (and at one point, I was theater/tech major, and dabbling in set design, before computers took over), concerts exist on many levels — I not only lose myself to the music, I find myself dissecting it, isolating the parts, critiquing the artists, and watching the crew and the results. Studying technique, studying the tech. But not too much; I’m there for the music.

If my first musical life was as technician, this musical life is one of exploration and examination. I’ve come to appreciate the subtle beauty of a bagpipe, the high energy clarity of steel drums; a good guitarist makes my day, an artist like clapton leaves me stunned, raptourous in tears. I’ve always been fascinated by the drummers — that’s beyond my ability, pure and simple, and the only thing that would come out of putting me behind a drum set is a call to 911 asking for the jaws of life to get me back out. And synths. Blame Keith emerson and rick wakeman, and blame Three Dog Night.

Back in high school, mid-70′s, they played a concert in Anaheim. Opening act was Neil Sedaka, of which less said the better. But that tour, they were touring with a guy called “the wizard”, owner of this huge, fascinating thing called a Moog. entranced, but I had no access to one, and it remained a “gee, wow” kind of thing. One can only wonder if I had gotten my hands on one, how things might have been different.

Just look at the technology today, though — for christmas, Laurie bought me a synth (yamaha PSR225-GM), which I love, but work, life and lack of time has limited how much time I’ve had to learn and practice, but I keep hoping that’ll change. and apple’s brought garage band, which is amazing to hack with (but see “time, lack of”).

And I’ve told myself after I get decent at keyboard — I’m buying myself a bass. or two. Laurie has her Dean spanish acoustic (but no time….), but after the Clapton concert, is lusting after a slide guitar (as played by robert Randolph and the Family Band, an awesome opener, but more on that later)… (as I put it — put that baby in the hands of a white guy, and you get hawaiian music!)

What’s in my iTunes right now? Here’s a highlight: 78th Fraser Highlanders, Alice Cooper, Artie shaw, PDQ Bach, Bare Naked Ladies, Bela Fleck, Billy Joel, Buddy Rich, Duke ellington, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, Guess who, Ian Anderson, Police, Quarterflash, Richard Wagner, Royal Scots Dragoon Guard, Queen, the Tubes, Warren Zevon, the who, and Mozart.

Beware of party shuffle, it will fry your mind.

And, you know? I keep thinking about buying a clarinet again. But I don’t want to split my time and make it even harder to get my keyboarding going… But — I have plenty of time, the rest of my life.

you know? If I work at it, I could probably do a decent Benny Goodman cover.

compare and contrast: eric clapton and lindsay buckingham

in the last few weeks, laurie and I have gone to two concerts at HP Pavillion: fleetwood mac, and last night, Eric Clapton (opened by Robert Randolph and the Family band).

I’ll talk about both in more detail when I have a few spare moments (soon, soon), but coming home from the concert, laurie and I were talking about the differences in the two concerts…

Now, I admit I really like Buckingham as a guitar player (I just wish he wouldn’t sing, which explains a good part of my love/hate relationship with Fleetwood Mac).

But to explain how I feel about Buckingham vs. Clapton, here’s the best I can come up with. I believe, if I put the time and energy really trying to get good at guitar, I could become a decent cover for Buckingham.

But Clapton? I could practice every minute of my life for the rest of my life, and I’d never be qualified to carry his gear. But I’d love to get my hands on a couple of those guitars, just for a few minutes…

diamonds are forever… Not

interesting piece at Marginal Revolution on Diamonds, and the state of the market — and the growing loss of dominance by the De beer’s cartel.

I’m a bit of a jewel geek, and as it turns out, one of the books I listened to on the trip to LA this last week was Diamonds: a journey to heart of an obsession by Matthew Hart.

On the same subject, with a lot more background info (like, why is it the De Beers cartel, when there are no de Beers involved?) and even more info on how the market is changing, and some interesting background on blood diamonds (diamonds funding various insurgencies in africa), and the growth of the canadian sources (which I’m very interested in, and try to use when I can)

there’s an added issue in the diamond market: tehre are now labs that are claiming (and I’ve heard some in the business say they’re correct) that they can create lab diamonds that are indistinguishable from natural ones without expensive equipment; loupes and scopes won’t do. Where this is likely to nail the diamond market is the low end: people like myself and laurie won’t buy lab stones or enhanced stones (knowingly) — but if the typical customer at Zales can buy a 50 point natural diamond or a 2 carat lab diamond for the same price, what do you think they’ll do?

of course. and once the GOOD lab stones start rolling into the low end of the market, it’ll drop prices and affect everything. There are already places where non-treated stones are limited to collectors and geeks, where irradiation or heat treating is common — when that hits the diamond market, watch out…

collector-caliber stones will still see their value maintained; if you expect your average stones or low-end or moderate jewelry class stuff to maintain value or go up, you’re crazy… (if I were investing in diamonds, which I think only idiots would anyway, I’d be investing in high quality certified canadian stones, where the provenance away from the blood diamonds and their natural status would make them less risky…but if I were investing in this stuff at all, it’d be in other gems, not diamonds, or jewelry with high-quality stones in it…)

update: here’s a link to the original piece in the economist. and now Adam Curry chimes in.

And just like that…

And just like that, the hockey season comes to an end.

Congratulations to the Tampa Bay Lightning for a well-earned game 7 victory. The regular season made it clear that Tampa was the more-talented team — but it took until game 7 for Tampa to decide to want it more, too. And it showed tonight — when both teams want it that badly, the better team will move forward, and did.

Congrats also to the Flames coming that close, and making this a truly fun and entertaining hockey playoffs.

Summer may now begin. And, in about two weeks, so will the CFL season (go eskimos!)

I now return to my dungeon and get back to geeking…. see ya’ll in a day or two, I hope. Maybe before.

On memorial day…

I just want to remember and say thanks to a couple of people:

My grandfather, who was in the Rainbow Division in WW I, where he was chlorine gassed in while driving an ambulance evacuating wounded. He survived, although his lungs were twitchy the rest of his life. He returned to a career with the LA Police Department and was active in Civil Defense in WW II.

My father, who drove a tank in the campaign that liberated the Phillipines in WW II, and who was in the troops expected to make the landings on Japan that were expected to cost millions of lives, landings that didn’t have to happen because of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, he went to Europe for the reconstruction, worked with Stars and Stripes, and was in Berlin for the airlift.

At least once a year, we should remember to thank those that do the dirty work for us, that allows us to sit back here in our comfy chairs in our safe houses, and have the right to complain about what a rotten country this is…

To everyone who is or has worn the uniforms that protect us, thanks for a mostly thankless job.

Stanley Cup predictions..

4 of 8 in the first round
3 of 4 in the 2nd
1 of 2 in the conference finals

(8 of 14. I wouldn’t use me to bet in Vegas…)

I picked San Jose originally, but they couldn’t quite beat Calgary, exhaustion and injuries.

I really like both tampa and calgary. Similar teams, should be very up-tempo. good goaltending, too.

I like Calgary’s goaltending better.

I’ll choose Calgary in 6. But I won’t be heart broken if Tampa takes it. Both are good, worthy teams with reasons to cheer for them.

The Sharks come up five wins short….

five wins short of perfection.

Before the loss — anything less isn’t good enough. But after, I find I can relax and appreciate what we had, how far we went. Especially given the previous season, and how quickly and unexpectedly this happened.

I haven’t had this much fun in years. Just watching this team is fun.

So thanks, Sharks, for helping me re-find the joy of just sitting back and being a fan again.

Watching them last night, I saw a team that desperately wanted the win — and didn’t have enough left in the gas tank to drive the car. Calgary wasn’t much better off. Ultimately, I think going through Colorado took us out; that series and the altitude, I think, is what drained us just enough that we couldn’t keep up with Calgary for four wins.

that and injuries. I haven’t heard an injury list yet, but think about it: No Marco Sturm. Alyn McCauley is hurt. Scott Thornton is hurt. Haven’t heard about Ricci, but if he’s NOT hurt I’ll be astounded. Rathje’s hurt. McLaren’s hurt. The only question really is HOW BADLY? What were they playing through?

Who else? But just look at those names — and we still were a goal short in game 6 of the conference finals.

There will be changes, some players won’t be back, some new players will cycle in. the Sharks have to get better yet, and we see that opportunity. But that analysis is for later. Now, I’m going to just sit back, relax, enjoy the season for what it was (wonderful! damn good! beat all possible expectations. lots of fun) and wait to see who takes up Lord Stanley. Four wins left in the season, and we’ll have all summer to worry about next season. It can wait.

And so, it will.

Thanks, guys. relax. you didn’t fail, much as it feels like it today. Be proud — and build from today next year.

But worry about that later. Now is time for sleep and healing and reintroducing yourself to wives and children and girlfriends and dogs, and golf and hunting and whatever. Especially the whatever part. Hockey will return soon enough…

NHL conference final predictions…

let’s see. 4 of 8 in the first round.

2nd round? sharks, flames, tampa, toronto (grump). 3 of 4.

7 of 12 for the playoffs.

Third round?

San Jose/calgary: should be a huge goaltender battle. I’ll be amazed if either team scores 3 goals in any one game. I don’t expect many games with three goals combined — but it’s going to be high tempo, fun, in your face hockey. possibly lots of overtime. Very closely matched, but I’ll take the Sharks in 6.

Tampa/Philly: the strategy for every team facing the bolts is “they’re small. hit them and make them pay”. And the Lightning are in the conference finals because, basically, you can’t hit what you can’t catch, and teams have generally ended up running around and out of position trying to catch them, and when they do, Lecavalier and St. Louis bury them. I see no reason why Philly will be any different. Esche will make it easy, but I don’t see the Flyers advancing. Tampa in 5.

One octopus down. One octopus to go. Eight wins, guys.

Go sharks!

Sharks/Avs game 1

Surprisingly easy win against an Avs team that looks unready and undisciplined.

The quote you didn’t see in the papers after that game from tony granato:

We’re gonna need a bigger boat!

Now, having said that, nobody should expect future games to be easy, but if the Avs can’t figure out the sharks speed, this series is over. Ron wilson did a strange thing — he put the team’s fourth line (Todd harvey and Mark Smith) to the task of checking the Forsberg line, and they made Forsberg absolutely miserable all night. Not something I would have expected.

Frankly, I think splitting Sakic and Forsberg and putting Selanne up with Sakic only makes the Sharks job easier, since Selanne will drag Sakic down with him. given a choice between one solid scoring line and two mediocre ones, Granato chose two. We thank him.

The nasty, undisciplined play by the Avs late was onacceptable. I hope Steve Moore called Boughner on the phone after the game to ask “what the hell weree you thinking”, but I guess it’s okay if it happens to the other team….

How time flies when you’re having fun…

I was doing some research for a project today, and came to realize — the first “company owned” mailing list I ran (MAE-Users, for the trivially oriented) was created in May, 1994. That means that I’m a couple of weeks short of having done this for a living for ten years now. How time flies when you’re having fun.

Early on, I worked in a marketing organization. In January of 1997, though, I moved into the IS/IT world of Apple, and became a corporate resource, which is where I’ve lived happily (mostly) ever since.

And in even better news, I heard yesterday that the candidate we had for our lists.apple.com position has accepted, and starts in May, so we can finally get that project moving forward again. His first job, though, will be to upgrade our long-neglected USENET boxes and take those off my hands, and get those two ancient E-450′s retired.. But it means we’ll finally get a dedicated resource to get that server box upgraded…

2nd round playoff predictions

So, how’d I do?

1st round:

Tampa/NY Isles – me: Tampa/5 real: tampa/5
Boston/Montreal – me: Boston/6 real: Montreal/7
Philly/NJ – Me: NJ/6 real: Philly/5
Toronto/Ottawa – Me: Toronto/6 real: Toronto/7

Detroit/Nashville – Me: Detroit/5 real: Detroit/6
San Jose/St. Louis – Me: SJ/6 real: SJ/5
Vancouver/Calgary – Me: Van/5 real: Cal/7
Colorado/Dallas – Me: Dallas/6 real: Col/5

4 of 8. The only two I missed badly on were Philly/NJ (Brodeur just wasn’t sharp) and Colorado/Dallas (Dallas wasn’t as good as I expected)

On to the 2nd round…

SJ/Colorado: two guarantees: if the Avs lose a series in the playoffs, aeberscher will get blamed by a lot of fans and pundits; also, if the Avs do lose — it won’t be his fault. He’s not Roy, but he’s pretty darn good. Dangerous team, but I’m just not that worried. The Sharks match up well, and if they can contain Forsberg and Sakic (easier said than done), it’s a fairly easy victory. I don’t expect it to be quite that easy, but I still expect the sharks to get it done: Sharks in 6.

Detroit/Calgary: I think Detroit is beatable here. Older and slower, and Legace/Joseph just isn’t making me think they’ll stone teams. On the other side, Calgary is young, fast, Iginla has shown up and taken control, Kiprusoff is showing an ability to play up to pressure, and the Flames may well just skate the Wings into the offseason; you can’t hit what you can’t catch (ask Dallas Drake…). Flames in 6

Tampa/Montreal: Theodore? Or Khabibulin? St. Louis? or Koivu. May be the most fun of the 2nd round. The Lightning have been pretty much ignored by both ESPN/ABC and CBC, so most fans don’t have a clue what they’re bringing to this series. I think Theodore is the better goalie — but I’m not sure it’s enough to win the series. Tampa in 6

Philly/Toronto: My heart says Toronto, my head says Philly. But my head says Philly every year, and every year, they find a way to screw it up and go out earlier than they should. This year, it’s Belfour/Esche — and Esche is impressive, but Belfour is unconscious — Ottawa wins that series handily if it wasn’t the Eagle stoning (and Lalime showing his true colors in that game 7 implosion. The earlier games was the illusion, folks, time to try something else, and it’s not Prusek). I’ll go with Belfour here, and expect Philly to find some way to lose again. Leafs in 5.

And I sure would love to see a Sharks/Flames western final. Wouldn’t that be fun? Nabokov/Kiprusoff for the west?

The Nebula Awards…

Frank Catalano went to the Nebula Awards in Seattle, and talks about some of the things that happened.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about decisions past, present and future recently. A couple of those major decisions were quitting my writing not-quite-a-career, and later, deciding to resign from SFWA after years of involvement. Between Frank and Teresa’s post on Avenue Victor Hugoand the closing of Other Change of Hobbit, it’s really stirred up a bunch of memories.

The decision to stop writing was really pretty simple, actually — I felt I was a mid-list type of writer, working in a field where the mid-list was starting to be decimated, both by centralized chain buying that didn’t have room for the non-blockbuster writer, and by the encroachment of the sharecrop
environments such as Star Trek and Star Wars. Both of those worries have come true to a good degree, I think, and I don’t think the kind of writing I was interested in doing matches well with the market as it stands today, and I just wasn’t interested writing other people’s stories. What made the decision really easy were two other factors: first, I had another option (computers) that I enjoyed at least as much as writing, and which paid a hell of a lot better, and I’m all for having fun AND making money; second, it turns out that I wasn’t nearly as interested in being a writer as proving I could be a writer, so once I got the full SFWA membership, I lost a lot of motivation (object lesson: set your goals appropriately, just in case you reach them…).

I honestly don’t miss writing; I was always someone who enjoyed having written more than the act of writing, and my other things in my life keep me happy. Deciding to simplify and focus was easy.

Leaving SFWA was more problematic, even having decided to stop writing. It’s not something I’ve talked about to many folks, but I guess it’s time. I managed the Nebula Awards for a good number of years for SFWA, and it’s something I take pride in how well it ran — when I picked it up, the awards were in the latest in an continuing series of crises and political fights, and interest within the organization was low. My main goal was stability, to simply make the damned things work and work in a way that people would be willing to get back involved in the process — what I think I’m most proud of is that every year I managed the awards, membership participation went up. To me, that means I was doing something right.

Even when I gave up the awards, and I’d cut back on my writing, i still felt that I wanted to be a part of the organization, to find ways to pay forward into the author community that’d given me so much. But SFWA has had problems trying to decide what it wanted to be, a social organization, a support organization, or a professional organization (SFWA, for reasons I’ve never quite figured out, decided it couldn’t be more than one type of organization, and perhaps it was right…).

So eventually I got involved in some of the arguments, and over time, I decided that SFWA was headed in the wrong direction, so (being someone who believes in doing, not whining), I declared candidacy for office for an upcoming election, with a platform of trying to drive to conclusion some of the continuing fights going on within SFWA, and to try to move it in directions I felt it needed to go.

Some members supported me, some didn’t. One who didn’t was Damon Knight, who happened to be founder of SFWA. I found it troubling to be in conflict with him over future directions of SFWA (although to be honest, Damon and I didn’t always see eye to eye (I got the impression I rubbed him the wrong way at times — that, of course, was unprecedented, given my quiet, docile personality); but even when I disagreed with him, I strongly respected his opinion. Now, I was on the wrong side of that opinion, and it bothered me.

But it also made me think, and realize that, given I’d already chosen to retire from active writing, that maybe I shouldn’t be actively driving the future direction of SFWA; II was, after all, a self-described passenger now. I also realized that as long as I was a member of SFWA, I’d be unable to not get involved in the fights over what SFWA wanted to be when it grew up — that’s just not me.

So I cancelled my candidacy and resigned from SFWA. It’s all Damon’s fault — and I wish I’d been able to thank him for making the decision necessary. Because in retrospect, he was right; SFWA moved on without me and is doing pretty well from what I see from the outside, I got out of the way, and most important, I got to pull a lot of conflict (even if the arguing and fighting was mostly done with interesting people in interesting ways) and time committments out of my life, and realize that SFWA was part of my past, not my future. So everyone ended up winning.

It was hard to convince myself it was time to move on — but once I did, I realized it was the right thing to do, and I haven’t regretted it. Except, on a social level, where I ended up losing coontact with a bunch of really great people, folks who’d helped me get my writing career started, and were a great help and resource as I was figuring all that stuff out.

So I don’t miss SFWA, and SFWA doesn’t miss me, but I sometimes miss the people that made SFWA SFWA, even if they were ones I tended to fight with. It is, for the most part, a great bunch of folks, and very open to people that could, potentially, take their jobs — but they made you welcome anyway. I’m proud of my time there, and the work I did supporting the organization; and in a funny way, I’m just as proud to realize in retrospect that I also served SFWA as well as myself by choosing to resign.

I’ve heard some of the rumors about my resignation, some were rather amusing, in fact. At the time, I mostly wanted it all to move on and both myself and SFWA to focus on other things, I didn’t want to become more of a distraction than I’d become with my candidacy. But now, I think, it’s safe to talk about, and I’m comfortable with my decisions — Damon and I didn’t agree on what SFWA ought to be, and given he founded it, I wouldn’t go against his vision, even if I disagreed with it. And perhaps he was right; SFWA certainly went in a different direction than I wanted it to — and I can’t complain about the results. It’s a time when I’m happy to be proven wrong, because it doesn’t matter who’s right, as long as the organization moves forward in productive ways…

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen…

The latest NetFlix movie worth talking about is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, starring, among others, Sean Connery as Sean Connery playing Alan Quartermain, Peta Wilson as Mina Harker, Stuart Townsend as Johhny Depp, um, Dorian Gray, and some really killer special effects.

When it first came out, it got fairly weak to negative reviews.

Honestly? I’m not sure why. It’s a stirring good yarn, and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Now that he’s too old to play the dashing romantic lead, Connery’s set up a nice second career as the aging hero. Some of the characters were inspired — Mina Harker and Dorian Gray and their interactions especially. Good action, the plot moves along crisply, and if it is a bit fanciful (well, Vernsian), heck — it’s got a vampire, an immortal (almost), and a submarine the size of Rhode Island in it. Don’t over-analyze the script, just enjoy.

Weakest spots? I found The Bad Guy (aka Fantom, aka other stuff that’d ruin the plot) wooden and the nazi overtones laid on him overdone. And I’m still trying to figure out what Tom Sawyer’s doing in the movie, other than being invisible most of the time. Clearly, they wanted someone that Quartermain would interact with as if he were his son — but they never really bothered to develop that relationship. So Sawyer wanders around looking like he got on the wrong set and was too polite to ask for the exit…

But all in all — a fun evening, better than the reviews led us to expect.

I’ll take it…

some thoughts on the Sharks-Blues series (…And I Guess That’s Why They Call Them “The Blues”)

some thoughts after the Sharks/Blues series:

Overall, I think the better team won. The Sharks don’t necessarily have the most talented players — but in aggregate, it’s a very talented team. Chris Osgood continues to show that his Stanley Cup ring was because he played behind a team so dominant that all it needed was pretty good goaltending, and that more or less sums up Chris Osgood: he’s pretty good, but not a franchise goalie.

Chris Pronger can be a dominant force, but — much of the time, he’s at best a mixed blessing. I felt he played very conservatively much of the time, where he was very slow to enter the offensive zone, very quick to back out and defend — he wasn’t so much playing defense as free safety, and that seriously limited his effectiveness. Since the Blues were depending on him to eat so many minutes — he focussed mostly on eating minutes, not on impacting the game. If the team wants to use Pronger properly, he needs his minutes cut so he can be more active and dominating — I don’t think he was all that well used in this series, because he couldn’t waste energy on significant plays or physical work, he acted like he was tired and had to save his energy for staying on the ice.

In that case, the lack of depth on the Blues is a serious weakness. I’ll take the Sharks top four in a minute over the Blues top four, and this is, as much as anything, a great example that hockey is a game of teams, where individuals can’t win games without a solid support crew with them.

Here’s what I saw in St. Louis — I give them credit for really trying — but I didn’t see a team that was selling out to win. If you use the “Spinal Tap” scale, they played at 10.25 tonight, not 11. There were a couple of exceptions (Mellanby, Sillinger), but from watching them, I saw a team (especially in the early part of the third, before they rallied for one last try) that looked tired, and seemed to be thinking that even if they won tonight, they weren’t going to win three.

If you’re wondering what I think was missing — think about every shift Todd Harvey and Mark Smith got tonight. Now, ask yourself who on the Blues played like that. It’s a short list.

That said, I think the sharks brought their A- game, and the blues their A game. And it wasn’t enough. But I think it ties back into my thoughts on attitudes and excuses. If the fortunes were reversed, do you for a minute doubt that everyone in teal would be on the ice blocking things with any body part necessary? So why weren’t the blues? The Blues were serious and desperate tonihgt, but could have been even more desperate; but they weren’t.

major credit to the blues: they knew how to beat the sharks, forcing them out of their gameplan and making them grind and dump instead of fly and wheel — but they couldn’t sustain that kind of play, and the sharks were able to at least hold their own playing the Blue’s game, until they won momentum back; as long as the Sharks could skate, they skated around the Blues. Dallas Drake and his line were mostly ineffectual, except in game 3, mostly, I think, because you can’t hit what you can’t catch, and Drake was having trouble catching anything.

I was most impressed with Sillinger and Mellanby; they both played like there was no tomorrow, every game. Without them, this would have been a shorter and more embarassing series. If I’m the Blues GM, I worry a lot the next few weeks if I want to build a team around a 30 minute a night defenseman with such a short fuse and an inability to avoid stupid retaliation/temper penalties; I’ve never been a fan of Tkachuk, and I wonder where Dougie Weight was most of the time. And I have to find a goaltender, the one they have isn’t the answer.

This, by the way, is the difference between the high-priced player and the star, and the star and the legend. A lot of it comes down to coaching and the attitudes brought from above, too.

Think about the Blues: been in the playoffs for 25+ years straight, and what have they accomplished? Could it perhaps be because, at the core of their attitude, they and their coaches have accepted excuses for losing? If the ref is “out to get you”, it’s out of your control, right?

Those tiny, subtle aspects of motivation and attitude are the difference between teams that win and teams that are winners. And where that separates out is at crunch time.

my favorite example of this is the SF. giants. Remember back when they really, really sucked, and were playing in Candlestick? And everyone hated it, and whined and moaned and talked about how terrible the place was? Then they hired a guy named Roger Craig to manage, and he forbid the players from talking about how they hated the park, and pointed out that opposing teams hated coming and playing there MORE THAN THE GIANTS did — and that the Giants ought to use that advantage. And under Craig, they did. Instead of “god, it’s cold, it’s windy, this place sucks”, it became “you have to beat us AND our ballpark. Bring a parka!”

From discussions on TSN, Joel Quenneville got fired because, ultimately, he didn’t hold his elite players responsible for stupid penalties and bad attitudes (but he did his 2nd tier and depth players). You see that in the team now: guys like Weight and Tkachuk and especially Pronger eating huge minutes, but taking stupid penalties at key times and whining about things instead of rising to the challenge and finding ways to win.

Unfortunately — if you depend on Pronger to play 28 minutes a game, and your replacement is Eric Weinrich (no offense to Weinrich), it’d take a really strong, self-confident coach to tell whineyboy to sit on the bench and watch the rest of the game. But do you think for a second that Wilson would hesitate? I don’t. If ANY shark pulled the kind of stunts pronger’s pulled this series, they’d be watching Todd Harvey skate their shifts; every shark knows that, too — so it doesn’t cross their mind to try.

With the Sharks, it doesn’t matter what happens in a game, it’s just part of the challenge that’s needed to win. With the Blues, if things don’t go their way, the frustration and excuses start, and as a team, they’ve already explained the loss as out of their control, and once you start excusing losses instead of challenging yourself to win, you allow losing to be an option. Elite teams never let it be an option. If you listen to the Blues, when they lose, that’s, well, it happens. When you listen to the Sharks, when they lose, it’s — hey, this is the playoffs. you just suck it up and find a way.

that’s why these teams, which are actually fairly closely matched (IMHO) are 3-1 sharks, and 2 and 7 seeds.

That is, ultimately, what makes Mark messier Mark Messier: there are no excuses. There are only barriers to be knocked down. And winners knock them down, they don’t complain about their existance.

One of the things I’ve been watching all season is how the blues team chemistry would work out. If you look at Keith Tkachuk’s history, wherever he’s gone, teams have had a tendency to be underperform expectations. He’s a hugely talented, powerful and important player — but he’s also a loose cannon on the ice, and there are always questions of team chemistry in the locker room (especially in Phoenix, where he and roenick were, well, always in competition for first to the hydrant). On the other hand, I’ve always been impressed with Dougie Weight, both as a huge talent and as a good chemistry guy and a postive team player. Then you have Pronger, a million dollar talent with a nickel brain — and Al MacInnis, one of the true class players. So I was curious from pre-season how the chemistry would go here, whether MacInnis and Weight would override the chaos and negative aspects and control the outbursts of guys like Tkachuk and Pronger.

and once MacInnis went down — it was all over. he was, I think, the only guy on the team, including the coach (previous and current) that could (and would) tell Pronger to sit down, shut up, and play hockey. And the chaos of Tkachuk and Pronger ended up winning the fight here — and as you see from the results from this series, costing them the playoffs. A good argument could be made that if Tkachuk and Pronger weren’t taking penalties that were completely unnecessary, this series could well be 3-1 Blues. Just think about the key goals scored JUST on (or after) Pronger penalties.

And even Weight has bought into the “we can’t win when the refs are against us”, which shows you how insidious these attitudes are and why coaches like Sutter and Wilson are such bastards about any hint of them in their players. If you allow for any doubt — these attitudes will kill you.

And that’s why the Blues are going down, and why I was convinced from game 2 it’d happen. Because it was clear in game 2 that they were letting outside factors give them excuses, not challenges. And the Sharks take on challenges, they don’t make excuses. And even when the Sharks lost game 3, it was clear to me the Blues couldn’t sustain the kind of play needed to beat the sharks. They had *A* game in them; but not a series. They were already making excuses for a series loss in game 2, and once you convince yourself you can’t win — you’ve lost.

This series could well be a 7 game, pick-em series. But it’s not even close, because the Blues early on they wouldn’t win it. And if you asked each athlete in the blues locker room, they’d all deny that and believe what they say — but listen to what they say and think about what it implies about their attitudes underneath, and you hear a team that’s accepting of losses. And a team that WANTs to win will never win out against a team that HAS TO.

The overall attitude of that locker room is one writing the exit speech, not one denying they might exit.

And with the attitude the Sharks have — they won’t be beaten until they meet a better team that also has the same tough-nosed attitude about winning. So they have a chance to dance for a while…

How about Marcel Goc? first NHL game, and I thought he handled himself really well. Very good ice and peripheral vision, good speed, not afraid to wheel a bit, seemed very mature for the situation. I’m impressed.

I want Scott Parker in a game, though. he’s earned it.

As to our second round opponent: I don’t care. Bring whoever on.

(from the St. Louis view, see Jeff Gordon

And the winner will be..

I’ll go on record and take San Jose. I’d love to see either San Jose and Ottawa or Tampa in the final.

the safe pick is detroit/NJ, but while I won’t be at all suprised to see the Devils come out of the east, I just can’t see Detroit making it out alive. Any of six teams could make the finals and not suprise me in the west…

Underworld

So the NetFlix subscription has kicked in, and we’re slowly starting to catch up on all of the movies we haven’t gotten around to for the last few years…

One of the movie’s this week was Underworld, which can best be described as Romeo and Juliet starring in the Matrix, only badly acted. Bad script, muddied plot (plot mostly left as an exercise to the reader to figure out on their own, which, unfortunately, was trivially easy to do), made-for-TV acting… Best thing about it was the special effects, which frankly weren’t all that interesting; the best effects were the lycan’s shifting to a wolf — and that was ripped right out of An American Werewolf in London, not exactly a state of the art movie for effects.

All in all, the trailers had potential, and it’s too bad they had nothing really to do with the movie, which we unplugged about an hour in when we got tired of doing the Misty-3K thing to the poor beast. That was about what it deserved, though.

Laurie’s playoff predictions

Laurie chimes in on the first round of the NHL playoffs.

Team and league awards

A few quick notes on team and league awards, here at the end of the season.

San Jose Sharks:

MVP: Patrick Marleau. No, CAPTAIN Patrick Marleau. While this year’s team was really an ensemble piece, if you have to choose one guy, it’s an easy choice. Mike Rathje is my second choice.

Rookie of the year: Tom Preissing. rookie defenseman. Undrafted, free agent rookie defenseman; and he made it look easy. Very impressive.

Most improved: you could consider Marleau, actually. But going into the season, most of us were hoping for an improvement from Jonathan Cheechoo — to maybe 15 goals or so. yeah, right. Cheechoo almost singlehandledly replaced Owen Nolan in production AND in the physical factor. And I think he still has a noticable upside. Second choice: Alexander Korolyuk, who had a lot to prove (starting with “is he really an NHL-caliber top six forward?”), and who did so after a rough start. But once he started believing in himself, it was fun to watch.

Top defenseman: Mike Rathje: 28 minutes a night, against the other team’s top offensive lines every night, every shift, every game — and go look at his +-. He may not be flashy, but he gets the job done wonderfully.

League honors:

MVP: Kiprusoff in Calgary, St. Louis in Tampa, Klatt in LA, Turco in Dallas. Tough call; I’ll take Kiprusoff. Without him, calgary isn’t in the playoffs.

Rookie of the year: Raycroft in Boston or Michael Ryder in Montreal. Trent Hunter a distant third. This one is easy: Raycroft, both for his contribution to the success of the Bruins, and to the difficulty of the position he’s doing it in; if he takes the Bruins deep, it’ll be the first rookie goalie to do that since some guy named, um, Dryden.

Best Defenseman: Mike Rathje, Zdeno Chara in Ottawa, Nik Lidstrom in Detroit. I’m partial: I’ll give it to Rathje, not that he’ll win it.

Coach of the year: lots of candidates: my three favorites: Ron wilson in san jose, darryl sutter in calgary, andy murray in LA. and I’ll choose Murray, because he had a team where his first line started the season injured and stayed injured, and his team racked up more days lost to injuries than some divisions — and he held it together and kept them in the playoff race until the very end, when I think most people wouldn’t have blinked if the team called it early and mentally packed it in. His job was maybe the toughest.

Best goaltender: Kiprusoff, Marty Turco, Martin Brodeur, Ed Belfour. And I’ll give the nod to Marty Turco, and hope he doesn’t prove it in a playoff round against the sharks this year…

Playoff predictions: eastern conference

I love Tampa, I’m rooting to see St. Louis in the finals. But I’m not convinced it’ll happen. the East is a conference of question marks. How badly hurt is Joe Thornton? What’s up with Lalime’s knee and Belfour’s back?

If everyone is healthy, I’d call this a four team race: New Jersey, Toronto, Ottawa and Boston, with Tampa as the dark horse. With Brodeur healthy and questions on the other teams, you have to see the Devils as the favorites here — if Philly doesn’t take them our or wear them out. But I don’t think it’ll happen.

Tampa/NY Islanders: we see if Tampa is for real, but the Islanders can’t go deep into these playoffs. Tampa in 5.

Boston/Montreal: this series I’m going to watch, it ought to be mucho fun. If Thornton can play and be close to 100%, it’ll be Boston in 5. If not, I’ll choose Boston in 7. But Montreal should make it interesting.

Philadelphia/New Jersey: I just don’t think Philly can do it. they keep finding ways to not win playoff series, and I still don’t really trust their goaltending (again/still). the devils have some issues (paging Scott Stevens…) — but they have Martin Brodeur. I’ll take Brodeur for 200, please: Devils in 6.

Toronto/Ottawa: the best series in the first round not involving the sharks and us having tickets. These teams are well-matched, playing for bragging rights in canada, and plain and simple, don’t like each other. Both have significant injuries to contend with — but unless Belfour’s back causes problems, I think the Leafs will prevail here. Toronto in 6.

Playoff predictions: western conference

I think any of six teams can make it to the cup finals this year — the West is that strong and well-matched. Should be some great hockey.

As a san jose fan, the teams that worry me most are Dallas (which has had the sharks number all year) and Detroit (because they are, well, detroit). I think all of the playoff teams are capable — but also vulnerable. No team is a lock this year, which makes life interesting.

My predictions:

Detroit/Nashville: Detroit has looked old and tired to me. that makes them only moderately dangerous. They run the risks of injuries and long series. If they can’t knock off Nashville in 4 or 5 games, it’s possible Nashville could take them out, but more likely, they’ll leave enough on the ice in the first round to not survive late into the playoffs. What Detroit needs for success more than anything else is rest. Any teams that deny them that with long, tough games and long, tough series puts Detroit into trouble in later rounds. But Detroit is also capable of handling that and going all the way, too. Detroit in 5.

San Jose/St. Louis: Rather evenly matched. I much prefer Nabokov to Osgood, and I don’t think the blues are as strong a team as they have been (especially without MacInnis). I don’t think it’ll be easy; but I think the blues go out again in the first round, as tradition demands. Sharks in 6.

Vancouver/Calgary: Vancouver should win this series, but without Bertuzzi, it’s been an interesting run. I like Cloutier, but Kiprusoff can simply make the other team irrelevant. If he gets on a roll, watch out. Vancouver in 5, it Kiprusoff doesn’t take the series away from them.

Colorado/Dallas: I’m just not impressed with Colorado, the team chemistry is off. But like Detroit, that only makes them seriously dangerous. Aeberscher is for real, but Turco is a much better goalie, and has something to prove to his teammates to make up for the suspension. I’ll take turco over Sakic and Forsberg. Dallas in 6.

As to who goes out of the West to the finals: my heart say San jose, my head says Detroit, and my thoughts say Dallas will have some serious say in it somewhere.

The second season begins…

The regular season for the NHL ends with a bang, not a whimper, as Brad Stuart scores twice late to tie the game, and Vinnie Damphousse scores in overtime for a great win to close the season. It’d be a shorter list of who didn’t set personal/career bests, what wasn’t a new team record, or what isn’t a new standard for this team to build on.

And if I’m LA, losing even the moral victory aspect of today’s game (we aren’t in the playoffs, but at least we beat San Jose), has to hurt. they’re going to be telling themselves it was a meaningless game all off-season, but not really believing it.

One thing I noticed in the arena: at the end of the game, a number of players came over to wish Randy Mitton a fond farewell, as he closed a wonderful career today; but also, I noticed Luc Robattaile doing the same — is Luc planning on hanging it up? He sure acted like it today, quietly. And kudos to the referees (Dennis LaRue and Mick McGeough) for showing Mitton the respect of letting him lead them off the ice after the game — which Mitton didn’t want to do.

And now off to the second season, another two months or so of hockey, but this stuff counts!

Today, however, showed the ultimate failure of the two ref system: Mick McGeough was calling a very “let them play, let’s go home!” kind of game, which suited us just fine — but in a couple of cases, after McGeough let it go in the offensive zone, LaRue called penalties in center ice that didn’t seem in character iwth the action in the hot zones. And that’s where the two referee system falls apart: different refs having different ideas of what to call during a game; the league tried for a while to teach all of the refs to call the same, and that didn’t work. but now,instead, you sometimes have different games in the opposite ends of the ice.

I’m not sure how to best resolve this. I’ve generally been supportive of the two ref system, I think in many ways it fixes problems that aren’t obvious to many fans (stuff that wasn’t called because the one ref didn’t see it — and isn’t called now because players stopped pulling it), but it has its own set of problems the league hasn’t been able to fix, and can’t really blame on there being a large influx of new players — adn the key one is consistency within a game. I’m more and more convinced we should move the 2nd ref to the video booth, and let them ref from off-ice, with the job to get the call done right.

But I don’t think it’ll happen. and problems or no, I think we’re better with two refs instead of one, unless you want to let one of the linesman call some penalties. which might be an alternative…

To my Princess….

What we do out of love, we do because we want to do it. Love is, indeed, one kind of desire; but it is a kind that takes us out of ourselves and carries us beyond ourselves, in contrast to the kind that is self-seeking—a kind that includes the desire for the “extinguishedness” of Nirvana. Love is freedom; conscience is constraint; yet, in two points, our relation to love is the same as our relation to conscience. We are free to reject love’s appeal, as we are free to reject conscience’s command; yet love, like conscience, cannot be rebuffed with impunity. Rebuffed, love will continue to importune us; and this for the reason for which a violated conscience does. Love’s authority, like conscience’s, is absolute. Like conscience, too, love needs no authentication or validation by any authority outside itself.
(A.J. Toynbee)

Ken Dryden: Hockey at risk of becoming an extreme sport.

Another voice kicks in — Ken Dryden, hall of fame goalie and executive of the Maple Leafs, steps into the fray and says its time for the NHL to stop explaining the violence, and start taking the public complaints seriously.

Unfortunately, Dryden, his current position notwithstanding, is in the eyes of many still a hockey outsider, because in his day, he chose his education over his hockey career. In the eyes of some, he’s not a real hockey person because of that. And that’s why the game listens to people like Don Cherry and Bobby Clark instead, because those are real hockey people, who live and breathe the game.

Reality is — Dryden does, too. he just hasn’t lose his perspective or connection with reality the way some of the more hard-core boys will be boys types. Unfortunately, the voices of reason are drowned out by the those who think that being the loudest (or last one standing) means you win…

Let’s hope the league pays attention to Dryden as a voice of reason against those who want to explain to us that the game isn’t broken, that it’s somehow our fault for not accepting that this has to happen in the sport. but I’m not hopeful.

What’s wrong with Hockey: Bertuzzi is just a small part…

If you haven’t been watching the comments on this posting, you should take a few minutes to read them. A fascinating cross-section of hockey fandom weighing in on Todd Bertuzzi’s mugging of Steve Moore.

As it turns out, Moore has a broken neck, a severe concussion, and facial lacerations. On the plus side, he’s still breathing, which, with a fracture at C3, is far from a given. When (or if) he’ll return to hockey is unknown. In return, Bertuzzi loses about $500,000 (US), is a spectator for the rest of the season and playoffs (and potentially longer, depending on Gary Bettman’s moods), and has issues a tearful and heartfelt apology (which I fully believe was honest).

But it’s too damn bad Bertuzzi didn’t feel a bit bad BEFORE he almost killed Moore — and make no mistake, he came very close.

It’s worse, though, that the NHL has created an environment that allows these kind of, um, mistakes to happen. Ultimately, Bertuzzi and his temper pulled this particular trigger — but the NHL is driving the getaway car, and planned the job. Worse, right now, any number of people involved in the NHL are making public statements about Bertuzzi, condemning the action and supporting the suspension, but then quietly looking over their shoulder and wondering what it’ll take to allow Bertuzzi to play in the World Cup, or World Championships. Just exactly what kind of message does that send, anyway?

The answer to that is simple: if you win, if you’re good, if you can change a game or make a difference — then we’ll find a way to work it out. Winning, ultimately, is more important than rules, than ethics, than setting limits, than makeing a statement, than Steve Moore’s neck — or Steve Moore’s life.

There’s another name that comes to my mind when I think about how the league responded to Bertuzzi. It’s not Marty McSorley, and it’s not Eddie Shore, and it’s not Maurice Richard, or Bryan Marchment, or any of the other excitable boys who play NHL hockey on the edge.

It’s Graham James. A serial sexual predator who preyed on young boys who dreamed of hockey careers. Who was put into positions of power over these boys, because he won, by management who either turned a blind eye to things that they should have seen, or who quietly allowed James to move on before the problems became too noticable. It wasn’t until a player finally had the courage to go public that he was convicted and jailed — and many defended James to the very end, and still defend him — because he’s a great coach that wins hockey games. (last I heard, James was coaching in spain — coaching boys, “under supervision”. Hopefully better supervision than his bosses gave him in Swift Current and Calgary).

Currently, some people around Vancouver are rallying support around Bertuzzi. There are “free todd” web sites, there’s a lot of rationalization of the hit. Very scary, very disappointing, not surprising. After all, Bertuzzi is very important to the Canucks (and as someone who watches the Canucks a lot, he’s a very good and interesting-to-watch player).

But why is all that dialog surrounded by “Bertuzzi shouldn’t have done that, but…” (followed by bitching at the league for the length of suspension, bitching at Moore for, as far as I can tell, not willingly submitting to being a victim earlier in the game, or, in the words of Don “please, retire before you embarass yourself further” Cherry, it was the coaches fault for not putting Todd Worrell out there, presumably to beat up anyone who wanted to exact havoc on Moore, as if that solves anything here.

Why is nobody in these camps saying “Bertuzzi shouldn’t have done it — and it’s his fault for doing it because he should have known better”? It’s as if a player that good can’t actually be guilty of doing something this bad (unlike McSorley, who was old, washed up, and easily tossed to the puritans for cleansing) — so someone else has to be to blame? Bertuzzi chased him down, Bertuzzi sucker punched him from behind, Bertuzzi fell on him.

Bertuzzi broke his neck. And Bertuzzi was the one player who could have prevented that, simply by not doing what he did. Everything else is a horrible rationalization that shows what’s really flawed about our love of (and attachment to) sports — and I include myself in that as a hockey fan. Apologies, no matter how heartfelt, won’t unbreak Moore’s neck. Self-control would have. Bertuzzi, the NHL, and far too many of the league’s power brokers — and fans — seem to have forgotten that.

The NHL is honestly aghast when players are injured in this way; yet they do nothing to prevent it. Sure, they get righteous and suspend players for significant periods after the injury happens; what has the league done to keep these injuries from occurring?

Nothing. Call it the code, that unwritten set of rules players use to justify things the rules don’t. Or boys will be boys, or let them play.

I find it very hard to be a hockey fan today, given what the league finds acceptable behavior, and how the people in charge of hockey are rationalizing away allowing this kind of behavior while pretending to condemn it (um, are you sure we can’t get Bertuzzi eligible for the World Championships? It’d really help Team Canada).

The league, ultimately, is responsible for this injury — because the league sets acceptable levels of behavior within the game. And because the league has chosen to allow the code, to buy into the fallacy of boys will be boys, the rock’em’sock’em mentality. By handcuffing referees with fraudulent ideas like don’t decide the game (which, by causing referees to not call penalties at key moments, merely biases the results to those that push the limits and stretch the rules — it still decides the game).

The league could have prevented this injury, simply by choosing to draw a line in the sand that says your behavior is unacceptable at a point before tempers flare so far that people get so angry and so stupid that bad things happen. But they don’t. They wait until someone gets hurt — then draw a line and say you went too far. If the league would get serious about shutting down tempers before they get out of hand, if they get serious about suspensions and penalties that players and teams can’t ignore — this will stop. Stop quickly, too. The league finally got tired of bench clearing brawls and instituted mandatory, long, suspensions — and when was the last time you saw one? Players aren’t stupid. the league sets the tone, and the players follow it.

And frankly, the league is saying “it’s okay, until someone gets hurt”. And unfortunately, by doing so, people get hurt. The lines need to be drawn and enforced such that tempers never get that far out of control. But, well, boys will be boys. But boys have learned not to clear the bench, right?

No, the reality is, those who run the league support the kind of play that leads to what happened here. they may say they don’t — but don’t listen to their words, listen to their actions. I’m not saying they want people to get hurt; but they’re clearly unwilling to fix the problems that lead to it.

A couple of days ago, the Sharks and Kings played. There are major playoff implications here, both teams are hungry, and they don’t like each other. It started out early very physical, very intense, fast, banging. The referees (led by veteran Rob Shick) got involved early and called a number of penalties.

The end result? both sides played some damn good hockey, no brawling, not a lot of stupid play. it was a great game to watch — and on the Sharks list, Shick was bitched at by a couple of users for calling ticky-tack penalties. Those penalties, though, kept the game calmed down and under control, kept tempers from flaring, and forced the players to play hockey. I thought he and the crew did a fine job of keeping the game focussed on hockey, not on thuggery or tempers; but few refs seem to have the guts to do that, and the league doesn’t demand it, or support them when they do — because the fans scream about ticky-tacky penalties, and the coaches and GMs whine about the referees deciding the game.

The league will never become a serious presence in the US market until it figures this out. it’s one of the things killing the NBA, slowly, one uncalled travelling after another (I’ve tried to watch a couple of NBA games recently. Is that what they think is good basketball today? jesus).

Can you imagine the NFL where holding wasn’t called in the fourth quarter because a penalty might decide the game? No, in the NFL, if it’s a penalty in the first quarter, they do a pretty good job of making it a penalty in the fourth, and when they miss it, it’s human error, not judgment or letting the boys play. But that is not only a tolerated attitude in the NHL — it’s the primary one.

It’s a big reason the push into the US by the NHL has stalled and failed. Fighting is another key issue here (but another argument — fighting and gooning/thuggery are separate problems), but you could leave fighting in the game and still take this kind of crap out of it.

Anthony Wilson-Smith is editor of Macleans , Canada’s newsweekly. In the March 22 issue, he summed it up wonderfully:

The NHL is unwilling to see itself as others see it. Under Bettman, it’s tried desperately to be perceived as a major sport in the U.S. — and failed, in part because its reputation for gratuitous violence leads to the NHL being seen as a toy sport — live pinball, with real blood.

Later on, he nails fighting to the wall: A step to changing that would be a crackdown on fighting — something that other fast-moving contact sports like rugby, basketball and football long ago implemented. A clean bodycheck on open ice is like a good midfield hit in football: the violence is controlled, and there’s a balletic choreography to the collision. That’s not the case with the fighting, the slashing, hacking and holding that the NHL effectively condones through it’s mild punishments.

Personally, I could leave fighting in hockey (or have it removed — I understand the strategic aspects of it, but I feel the game can live without it, but I admit I enjoy watching Scott Parker ply his trade as much as I enjoy watching Bertuzzi, Naslund, Marleau, Forsberg and the other stars of the game) but the rest of the boys will be boys attitude leaves the NHL as a spectacle in search of respect; respect is withheld, because it’s unearned and not deserved.

And unfortunately, those who run hockey grew up in the boys will be boys, let ‘em play game, and they don’t see how much damage they’re causing the game with that attitude. Don Cherry is its most visible component, but it’s GMs like Bobby Clarke, who epitomized that attitude when he was a player, and other “traditional” power brokers in the game that are the real problem. Until they change their attitude and allow the game to clean itself up, these incidents will continue, and hockey will continue to live under the bemused eye of a media that only talks about it when something bad happens. And hockey will give those pundits continuing fodder, as players continue to get thugged into the hospital, until the NHL decides to get serious about stopping the violence before people get hurt, not complain after it happens.

Given we can’t even get the league to get serious about high sticks, I’m not holding my breath.

I’m merely hoping it won’t take someone dying on the ice to get the league to wake up and get serious. but given the current power structure and the attitudes they bring to the league, it’s probably more realistic to merely hope I’m not watching when it happens.

Don’t agree with me? Listen to Mike Bossy. Do I need to introduce him? No, I guess not.

Or tell me why I’m wrong. but keep the elbows down in the corners, okay?

the NHL trade deadline and the CBA.

We’re about 5 hours from the NHL trade deadline — and this is one of the strangest trade deadlines I’ve seen in years. certain teams are stocking up massively (especially the avs) and even teams that traditionally haven’t bought at the deadline are doing so (the flames). Very few teams with playoff aspirations are standing pat.

And other teams are unloading everyone they can. It’s somewhat understandable for the Penguins to cut costs, and for the Rangers to finally clear house.

But what’s notable to me is what’s going back in return. I’m not the greatest expert on the legions of prospects out there, but I usually have some idea of who’s who. And this year, the names flying back in return for these rentaplayer deals are names I’ve never heard of before, and draft picks. Lots and lots of picks.

And the more I look at what’s going on here at the deadline, the more is scares me, because I think it indicates what the GMs and the teams think is going to happen next fall when the CBA expires. they don’t think there’s going to be hockey.

Teams with a chance to run now are stocking up madly, not worrying about the long-term affect of those contracts. Teams who know they’re not in the running now are not only dumping that talent, but bringing back really, really, really young players and draft picks.

What I see is some teams running for this season without worrying about tomorrow, because they don’t believe there is one. It’s either this year — or some time out in the future. And other teams are selling, but taking back in return stuff that won’t benefit them for three, four, or five years. nobody is building to next season, nobody is taking advantage of this to position themselves for a run soon. You’re either running, or you’re reloading way into the future.

And that tells me the GMs are convinced that once the CBA expired, there won’t be hockey for a while. They’re trading in a way that makes sense only if they believe there won’t be hockey next season.

If you want to know what someone thinks, don’t listen to what they say, look at what they do. and right now, what the GMs are doing is preparing for a long dark time. Taht’s not PR rhetoric, this is financial restructuring in a way that wouldn’t happen if they didn’t think it was likely.

Scares me. Scare you? It should.

Todd Bertuzzi and Steve Moore.

It is a difficult day to be a hockey fan today. I just happened to be watching (on and off) the Colorado/Vancouver game last night; I was priviledged to see Bertuzzi’s mugging of Steve Moore.

He who lives by the testosterone occasionaly dies by it, and last night, Bertuzzi, who’s game always has an edge to it, fell off the cliff and did something really stupid. I’ll bet he feels horrible about the results; players intend to send messages, not that. But it’s too late for remorse, it doesn’t change the act. Echos of McSorley’s hit on Donald Brashear, or perhaps even moreso Owen Nolan’s hit on Hurricane Grant Marshall in 2001 (which led to an 11 game, well earned, suspension).

Todd Bertuzzi shouldn’t skate the rest of the season. If it were up to me, he wouldn’t skate the first round of the playoffs, either — you not only have to punish Bertuzzi for this, you have to send a message to ALL teams in the NHL that this kind of behavior won’t be tolerated. They way you do that is not taking away the instigator penalty as some experts propose, that solution only leads to this kind of violence, not away from it.

No, you do it by reacting to these events in ways that hurt the team — and it’s too late in the season to impact the Canuck’s playoff situation significantly, so you have to suspend Bertuzzi in a way that impacts the Canuck’s ability to succeed in the playoffs. If you suspend him for ten games, or the rest of the season, all you do is give Vancouvre a rested, healthy Bertuzzi (one looking for redemption) to start the playoffs. If I’m Bryan Burke, I take that suspension and giggle all the way to the conference finals.

How do we get to these situations? Referees are told to not decide the game. which still decides the game, since choosing to not call a penalty still affects the game — but slants the result to those that are willing and able to push beyond the rules, because they know they’ll get away with it.

The real culprit here is a lack of responsibility by the league office to police play in the league. They under-enforce the game during normal gameplay, allowing tempers to flare and emotions to rise beyond acceptable levels. Then they clamp down heavily, which merely increases the frustration. And eventually, it leaks out sideways.

The reason hockey experts are calling for the removal of the instigator rule is not because that’s the solution to these problems: it’s because they’re convinced the league (through the referees and all that way to the top of the league office) won’t accept the responsibility to police the game, so teams feel they have to police it themselves. And they’re probably right, too. And that sucks.

Teams should not feel the need to police the game, or have policemen on their roster to protect their stars. That they do is an indictment of the league at the highest levels — and it leads to things like what happened last night.

And real hockey fans should be disgusted at this, because this is the death of the game, not the essence.

For a view from Vancouver, here is the reasoned voice of some friends of ours who are today, very sad to call themselves Canucks fans.

update: Off Wing chimes in.

high-volume email…

some interesting thoughts on managing a high-volume e-mail box.

Mine clearly qualifies, since I do e-mail for a living and have to monitor a lot of mailing lists and other things. good advice if you follow the links.

here’s the key to handling volumes of email: learn to use your mail client’s filtering tools, and use them to do triage. the most important hint: figure out the things you don’t need to deal with right now, and get them out fo the way so you can find the stuff you do need to look at.

For instance, I have to follow a bunch of mail lists — but not in real time. So anything that comes from a mailing list gets filtered off to folders, so they’re out of my main mailboxes. I don’t even have to think about them until I have free time, and I don’t have to plow through them (or evaluate them, or be tempted to read them) while I’m busy. Most lists send a “List-ID” header now, and if they don’t, they probably have a “sender” header that you can filter on (except of course for yahoogroups, which invented its own header), so this kind of filtering is fairly easy.

a second thing you can do is take certain things you know you need to look at immediately and colorize or flag them, so you know to check them first. things like (ahem) your boss, your co-workers. I sometimes create temporary filters to flag topics or projects.

It doesn’t have to be complex (and in fact, I’d argue you’re better off with fewer folders and filters than more — if you’re constantly plowing through 30 folders, you get just as lost as if you plow through one). I ahve two main mailboxes, one for home, one for work. My work mail-lists, my home mail-lists each go in their own folder. I keep a work TODO and a home TODO for mail that need to be handled but I can’t handle immediately. and then I keep a work DONE and a home DONE for email that I’m done with but I want to archive. I also create task or project folders at times, and the DONE and task folders get burnt to CDR every so often.

Part of this is to keep the inbox empty — read it, then delete it, file it, or schedule it for later handling. leave nothing in your inbox, anything you can’t handle right away goes in TODO or a project folder. that way, you know the stuff in your inbox is new, and needs to be looked at. saves you looking at stuff to find the new stuff.

If you set it up, you can avoid wasting time trying to decide what to do — because your worklow will naturally fall out from the organization. I know some folks who can survive with the “I put it all in the pile and I can find it when I need it” mode, but for most of us mortals, that fails just as badly with paper materials as it does with email: but while most folks have figured out file folders for paper, they still seem to handle their email box as a single large gulp.

and then wonder why they feel overloaded with email.. divide and conquer. Learn what you can defer, and then defer it.

A public service announcement from the alpha list mom

This is a public service announcement from your friendly neighborhood list mom.

Speaking for all list moms everywhere, I want to announce that those of us who run mailing lists are sick and tired of cleaning up after your stupidly built and managed e-mail systems.

it was bad enough when all you did was send vacation messages, as if anyone on the mailing list really cares you’re out at a conference for the week. Or worse, the admin of the mailing list.

But now, you’re sending us warnings that our mailing lists are infected with viruses. or that we’re sending spam. Or that we’re sending icky stuff.

Today, I had a site reject a whole bunch of email for content violations.

From: esafe@xxxxxx.xx.xxx
Date: February 17, 2004 9:31:52 AM PST
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: This is an alert from eSafe

*** eSafe detected a hostile content in this email. ***

Time: 11:56:38 2/17/2004
Scan result: Mail rejected
Protocol: SMTP in
File Name / Mail Subject: /opt/eSafe/eSafeCR/SPOOL/1077005984
Source: xxxxxx
Destination: xxxxx@xxxxx.xx.xxx
Details: Subject contains the following forbidden word(s): won

So, the word “won” never comes up in normal conversation?

Oh, give me a freaking break. Have you told your users how you’re protecting them from awful, nasty emails like the ones sent from a mailing list they signed up for?

I’m picking this out as an extreme case of an admin who ought to be shot before they inflict more help on their users, but unfortunately, this kind of rampant stupidity is increasingly common.

And I’ve had it. So here’s the deal. If you sign up to a mailing list, and your system starts sending back return messages — and I don’t care if they’re “message received”, “blocked, you damn spammer”, or “hey, I’m in aruba and you’re not: neener” — they are going to be treated as bounces. And bounces get you unsubscribed from the list.

And usually, when someone suddenly gets unsubscribed from a list, they complain to me, of course. And I’ll happily explain why their system is broken, but you know what the problem is? Lots of time, those email messages get blocked. So from the end-user point of view, they get unsubscribed, and then silence. And they call me nasty names, never realizing the idiot they want to kill is right down the hall.

hey, do you know what your mail system is doing to protect you from, say, email you asked for? Maybe you ought to go ask. it might surprise you. Or scare you.

Maybe I’m being too harsh here, but if someone signs up for a mailing list, there’s usually an expectation they want to get the email that list sends to them. So why do so many sites and admins actively get in the way of that? It might be understandable if I was running a list on alternative music and we were talking about the The New Pornographers, but who in the heck decided that the word “won” qualified as an acceptable term to block email on?

How did we get from first, do no harm to shoot everyone, and let god sort them out?

It’s not the spammers killing email — that can be managed. it’s stupid admins doing stupid things in the name of stopping the spammers that needs to be stopped.

sheesh. Maybe shooting a few of their users will convince the users to go shoot the admins… or something.

 

The horrors! the horrors!

It’s 6:30 in the morning, here on the left coast. I’ve caught up with my e-mail, I’m going through my aggregator items, and I’m about to witness another sunrise.

Somehow, I’ve become a morning person. I’ve seen more sunrises the last ten days than I have in the decade before that.

And I’m enjoying it. I’m now much more in sync with laurie’s sleep cycle, which is never a bad thing. This seems to be tied up somehow to dealing with some of the issues of funk I’ve been working through, but to be honest, I have no clue why.

And of the funk, I’ll only say this. Every so often, we all need to sit down and think about what’s most important to us — do you know what your priority list is? And once you do, does it match up to how you’re actually allocating your time and energies?

No, I didn’t think so. Me, neither. At least, if you’re being honest with yourself (don’t lie to me, I don’t care either way). I can only say have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?

But I think I’ve come to the realization that the idea of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is not only false, but dangerously wrong — because if you think about it, it implies that “not broken” == perfect, and precludes improvements. And it’s stupid to preclude “making it even better”, right? right.

So now I’m getting used to sunrises and productive mornings, side effects of other stuff. It seems to be making me more productive overall, too. But it feels weird, for now.

Happy Valentines day. (yes, thank you, it was…)

the NHL and the Levitt report

Do you feel a chill in the air? You should.

The Levitt report is a financial analysis of the NHL. It’s bottom line: the league lost $272 million (US), that a number of teams are financially insolvent, and that, if anything, that number implies that things are actually better than they are in reality. If you want to go and read the report yourself, you can get a copy of it here on the San Jose Sharks web site.

I made some preliminary comments on it here.

The NHL Player’s Association response is here.

The Sporting News reads the report and calls for a six team contraction.

Erik Duhatschek reads the report and does a great job explaining his view of all of this.

Pat Hickey of the Montreal Gazette chimes in.

A little background: Arthur Levitt is a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. he, Lynn Turner (former Chief Accountant of the SEC) and the Eisner LLP accounting firm spent ten months investigating the NHL’s finances. None of these people have any involvement with the NHL beyond this study, they were paid up front, they were given unlimited access to all data from all teams without restriction.

The NHLPA has, not surprisingly, rejected the report out of hand. They aren’t refuting the numbers, they are telling everyone to ignore them. This is a significant thing to keep in mind — the NHLPA is making no attempt to prove the numbers wrong; they want you to pretend they don’t exist.

That should be a big clue in how you decide who’s right or wrong here.

For years, the NHLPA has been calling for the NHL to open its books and prove the state of its finances. So the NHL did — it handed all of the books over to Leavitt and his group. The result is this report.

The NHLPA’s response, to quote Bob Goodenow: The owners and their commissioner Gary Bettman have obviously found it necessary to retain a new spokesman/consultant to provide general conclusions about League finances while still not disclosing any individual team information or providing an opportunity to examine the actual records upon which the conclusions are allegedly base.

That, folks, is bull. The NHL did. they just didn’t disclose them to the player’s union. And there is no need to disclose them to the player’s union. What the NHLPA wants is not an independent review of the NHL’s numbers, but access to those numbers so they can be spun to the NHLPA’s benefit. The NHLPA isn’t refuting any of the data in the report, because they can’t. Because those numbers reflect what seems to be a very clear and painful reality.

Rather than deal with that reality — the NHLPA wants you to listen to them instead, but has no factual basis for you to do so. So they’re using smoke and mirrors to get you to ignore the facts that are here.

Now, I’m not an accountant (but at one point in my life, I was married to one), but I can read a financial analysis. For those of you who get hives with this stuff, here’s my bottom line:

Arthur Levitt and his group had unlimited access to the league’s financials. Levitt used a standard and well-accepted auditing technique, which is fully documented in the report. They’ve written a financial analysis that would hold up in court, that banks and wall street investors would use to evalaute financial options for the league, that would hold up muster to an SEC investigation and that any financial auditing operation would accept.

Despite that, the NHLPA wants you to ignore its findings. The NHLPA is on very thin ice here; basically, if the NHL can get general acceptance of these numbers, the NHLPA is in a very weak bargaining position.

In my mind, the NHLPA’s position here is simple: we want to be able to continue taking as much money as we can from the league until it does in fact collapse, because we refuse to believe it will.

I’ll admit up front that in the last labor fight in hockey, my leanings were to the players, and I wore my NHLPA jersey much of that ‘season’ in response. This time, the NHLPA is coming across as the greedy side, and I had little sympathy for their position before, and none given their response to the Levitt report. They are, at best, being disingenuous here. Their position that since the league paid for this report, it is biased is unsupportable: companies pay for financial audits all of the time, and part of the process of the audit is to allow people reading the report to understand and accept that the data is acceptable. That’s why the audit process exists, and the underpinnings of SEC regulations and GAAP (Generally Acceptable Accounting Principles).

This is not a league of owners making huge amounts of money and not wanting to share. To think the league is hiding rafts of cash somewhere is ludicrous.

Let’s take a step back and look at the state of the league:

• Two teams (Ottawa and Buffalo) have been through bankruptcy court.
• In Ottawa’s case, the former owner kept trying increasingly innovative funding strategies to try to refinance the team and maintain control. Each one fell apart, finally leading to the team being sold to a new owner who self-admittedly says he’s willing to lose money on it (for now).
• in Buffalo’s case, the now former owner kept the team alive by using funds from his other businesses, which has led to felony charges.
• in the interest of history, the league has a bit of a history of this; let’s not forget Bruce McNall’s conviction in LA, and Peter Pocklington’s tax problems in Edmonton
• here’s a scary bit (page 10, bullet 12): Of the 26 teams audited financial statements received, 23 were unqualified, and three had “going concern opinions” — in other words, there are three NHL teams who’s own accountants are saying that their finances are unstable to the point the auditors are worried the team may fail.

That last one should slap you in the forehead. Auditors don’t do that trivially.

If you’re trying to see who to believe here, think of it this way: the NHLPA is saying the current system isn’t broken, and yet two teams have been forced into bankruptcy, and three more have been flagged by their own accountants as candidates to join them.

That should scare you, if you care about the league.

The NHLPA’s position is that the free market should be allowed to solve these issues. it is clear from the Levitt report that the free market is broken. The Duhatschek link above has a nice explanation of some of those problems.

But what the NHLPA is conveniently ignoring is that the NHL’s labor market isn’t really a free market. There are significant restrictions on that market, in terms of free agency and arbitration. The market is biased towards inflation by these restrictions, especially arbitration, and the restrictions on free agency limit the talent pool, leaving those that do qualify with more demand than supply, in other words, a sellers market. The market prices are also set by the richest teams that can afford to spend. It’s easy to say “if you don’t have the money, don’t spend it”, but if you’re a hockey team that has to compete with the Maple Leafs, unless you want no chance to win, you have to find some way to compete for talent. Everyone points to the Oakland A’s and moneyball to show that a smart and savvy team can compete on limited funds, without acknowledging the reality that this only works for a few teams who can figure out how to beat the system — once everyone adopts those strategys, they become the system and the team loses its advantage. So those type of exceptions are limited and temporary.

These ‘successes’ don’t prove the system works, it only proves that you can avoid the reality of the system for a while, if you’re really really good, if you’re also lucky, and if the other teams don’t learn from you and take away your advantage. That is not a sustainable financial or performance model for a league to adopt.

To return to Goodenow for a minute, here’s another quote from his press release: We have consistently stated that one critical issue of disagreement between the NHLPA and the League on finances is how to define the complete business of owning an NHL franchise, and how to address the significant inconsistencies contained in the NHL’s voluntary and unaudited URO reporting process. At the outset it is clear the Levitt report, commissioned by the League, is fundamentally flawed when the author “elects” to define hockey revenues on the same basis as used in the NBA and NFL for defining revenues in their salary cap systems.

Here’s another place where the NHLPA is being disingenuous. A common criticism of sport finances is that they really “hide” revenues. This is a legitimate worry, and sports like baseball have turned this into an art form. A large part of the Levitt report is an attempt to identify and validate those revenues and make sure revenue and expenses that are generated as part of operating the hockey club are represented in the NHL’s numbers. If, for instance, a hockey team plays in an arena that is operated by an affiliated company (which is true of the San Jose Sharks), you can ‘hide’ money by paying rent to the arena company beyond reasonable values, effectively transferring those funds from the hockey team to the arena company. Levitt identifies these relationships (which can also happen in the broadcasting area, in concessions and food services, and a few other limited places) and attempts to factor in and validate that they are properly accounted for.

In looking over his analysis, I find his strategy to be well-thought out and on solid financial ground. Is there room for interpretation? Yes. But remember, just to get to “break even” here, we’d have to find $272 million dollars, or $9 million dollars of hidden revenue per team, on average.

Even that understates the real problem, because with teams already profitable, we don’t need to find missing money. those teams already are telling us they have some to spare. The real problem are the teams showing losses: 19 teams with a combined $342 million in losses — that’s an average $18 million per team. Do you think those teams are hiding $20 million a piece somewhere under a mattress? that’s what the NHLPA wants you to believe.

again from Goodenow: We were given access to the UROs for 30 clubs, but were only able to conduct a thorough review of four NHL clubs. On those four clubs alone we found just over $52 million in hockey related revenues and benefits not reported in the League’s voluntary and unaudited URO process. As I understand it that $52 million is in dispute; the NHLPA evidently thinks that if San Jose has a concert and that concert is profitable, that those revenues should be used to fund the hockey team. That’s a nice tactic, if you’re a hockey player wanting a higher strategy. But also, if you read the Levitt report, he did go in and audit the URO’s (Unified Report of Operations), and where he found problems or inaccuracies in them, he worked with the league to improve their reports and accounting and bring them into line so they were consistent frmo team to team and accurate to the league’s specifications. So the UROs that the NHLPA evaluated were unaudited; the UROs the Levitt report uses are in fact audited. Goodenow is using smoke and mirrors here again. And he in fact wants you to think that in those 19 teams reporting losses, you’ll magically find that missing $18 million per team (allowing a team owner a profit, or any sort of return on their investment, doesn’t seem to worry Goodenow much, but I digress). Goodenow’s response, of course, would be to tell the league to have the rich teams subsidize the poor teams through revenue sharing.

While I’m sympathetic to the need to better manage intra-team league revenues, that’s also a false argument: the union wants it set up so that no owner can have a profit until the money has shifted around to guarantee that every player makes the maximum salary they can. That, in effect, is the bottom line of revenue sharing in the view of the union. keep that in mind when you hear them use phrases like “free market”.

So here’s my bottom line on all of this: I was moderately sympathetic with the owners before reading the Levitt report. Now, I’m honestly worried about whether the league as it stands is viable. I’m pretty much convinced that some contraction is going to be necessary (or forced upon the league), and we haven’t even figured in the upcoming end of the ABC/ESPN US contract where it’s expected both the rights fees and the number of games broadcast will drop significantly (and hockey will leave ABC completely). So on top of everything else, revenue is headed in the wrong direction.

Contrasted to that, the NHLPA’s attitude is that of the guests on the Titanic who demand the crew chip ice cubes for their drinks, because until the water actually reaches the deck, you have no proof the ship will actually sink. When you look at the two bankruptcies and the three other teams under their auditor’s “death watch” audit letters, this isn’t seeing the iceberg off on the horizon, this league hit it some time ago and is taking on water.

Is some of this the owners fault?

Hell, yes. The things we can blame the owners for are legion. After all, the bottom line is that no player has ever forced a team to make an offer or sign a contract. There has been a huge increase in revenues in the NHL, thanks to improved media contracts, new markets, higher ticket prices, more sponsorship and new buildings — and the owners have gone out and found ways to spend all of that money and more. Nobody stopped to think that maybe the revenue streams weren’t sustainable, that the economy might tank, or that interest might wane.

In that, the owners acted like many of our elected officials (they’re clearly qualified to be governor of California or a member of Congress), but that catty remark doesn’t solve the problem. Neither does the NHLPA’s insistence that the owners don’t really have a problem, and if they did, the players don’t need to help solve it — the numbers make it clear that except for maybe a few major teams, the owners haven’t benefitted from all that extra revenue, the players did. And the players want even more. What’s wrong with that picture?

The players are the show — they deserve to make a good living for doing what they do. But it’s just as important that the players exist in a league they can depend on to reliably give them a good living. It serves nobody to wait until teams fail and collapse and jobs are lost due to failure of a franchise, not when it can be solved now and the worst pain avoided.

So here’s my (not so) humble suggestion on how to fix the league and make it profitable for both players AND ownership, and not do it on the backs of the fan who’s already paying excessively high ticket prices that are increasingly hard to justify.

Revenue sharing: all league revenues are shared evently. Unfortunately, the NHL is heavily dependent on gate (ticket) revenues, which are not equitably shared. On the one hand, a well-run team deserves to be rewarded and a badly-run team shouldn’t expect to make money for mediocrity, but the owners have to get their act together and even out the worst of the revenue imbalances, without turning small markets into subsidized profit centers. My suggestion: all gate receipts split 60-40 between home and away teams. That recognizes that without the away team, the game wouldn’t happen, leaving the home team a big fat zero. It allows some revenue sharing from the large, successful venues to the smaller, struggling teams, but it doesn’t shift enough revenue that the better run and more successful teams lose their edge or their profit. But it would mean that the smaller markets could field a competitive team reliably, but it’s not guaranteed anything close to a free ride.

Salary caps (minimum and maximum): Franchises will be required to spend at least a minimum salary number based on the value of the typical revenues shared from gate receipts — to guarantee an owner doesn’t just take that revenue and run. And there will be a soft cap on the high end: teams can exceed that, but will be handed a luxury tax ($1 tax for every $1 beyond the cap for the first 10% beyond the cap, increase that by 1% for every dollar every 10% beyond that). In my plan, teams will be mandated to spend at least 55% of average-per-team league revenue (not team revenues) on salary, with a salary cap and luxury tax being mandated starting at 60% of that value. The ‘appropriate’ target for salaries is 58% of average-per-team based on total league revenues. If you look at the levitt report the NHL showed net revenues of just under $2 billion (US), or an average of about $66.5 million per team, an average for player costs of 49 million per team, and a net loss of $272 million. Under my plan, the salary range will move to between $36 million and $40 million, with a target of about $38.5 million. That means that we’re calling for almost a 25% paycut on average, a net savings of (on average) 11 million in payroll per team, or 330 million league-wide.

Note that this $330 million number is higher than the league-wide loss of $272 million, but if you look at the teams losing money, the combined losses were $342 million. If you combine the revenue sharing proposal with the salary range and the proposed pay cut to get into that range — the currently profitable teams will still be profitable, but shifting revenue into revenue sharing, so they won’t become significantly more profitable by dropping salaries into the range; the money-losing clubs will see revenues increased by revenue sharing, their expenses cut by the salary cap, but they’re not guaranteed profitability by this plan; it evens out the inequities, and removes the expenses that can’t be made up in any way short of magic; if the money’s not there, the money’s not there.

I also would like to see the league make some fundamental changes in the way it does business, to try to prevent some of the worst mistakes that has gotten it into this situation. For instance:

limit contract lengths: I would recommend limiting all contracts to 3 years or less for players under age 27, and 2 years for players over 27. Contracts may have only a one year option, that option may not be automatic (or so trivial as to be the same as automatic), and may not be automatically extended for any reason.

contract renegotiation: contracts may not be torn up and renegotiated until after game 40 of the expiration year. There is no longer any concept of “contract extension”. You can sign a new contract to come into effect after the current one ends, but you can’t tear up the existing contract and “rewrite the past” by changing existing contract terms.

bonuses: all bonuses count against salary caps. all of them. So don’t offer bonuses unless you know they won’t be met, or unless you budget for them. I’d love to write a clause limiting bonuses so that only 50% of them may be for personal performance (vs. team performance) but everything I can think of has fatal flaws. I do suggest contracts have automatic performance bonus clauses for division championship, conference championship, and for series wins in each round of the playoffs, so that well-performing teams get rewarded for that performance, and those bonuses are not counted against the cap, but should be league-standard numbers.

arbitration: salary arbitration is a horrible concept on so many levels it’s crazy. It forces players to fight the owner, and both sides to argue their position in a false and hostile way. I do away with arbitration completely, and move the age of unrestricted free agency to age 27.

restricted free agency: Those players that would have been eligible for arbitration under the current deal need some other lever to force teams to negotiate fairly. My solution is this: if a player and team can’t come to contract agreement, the player typically holds out and refuses his service to the team. In effect, he’s giving up a current salary in hopes of forcing a better deal (and salary). Other times, a player plays without a contract while negotiating. To prevent owners from refusing to negotiate, as of opening night of the NHL season, any unsigned player becomes a restricted free agent and may negotiate with any team. If he comes to terms, he can sign with that team with no compensation to his old team — but his old team has matching privileges. As of the trade deadline, an unsigned player becomes an unrestricted free agency until he signs his next contract, and may negotiate and sign with any team without compensation to his former team.

deferred income: contracts with any kind of deferred compensation are outlawed. Teams can not pay for this year’s team on a “credit card”. The one exception: a team can buy an annuity for a player as part of a contract, but the annuity must be bought in the contract year and the cost of the annuity counts against the salary cap that season. these annuities must be managed by an independent entity and not controlled by either party (in accounting terms, think of a blind trust).

These changes, I think, would make revenues across the league more equitable and limit the ability for a rich team to simply out-spend a poor team, but not without some penalty. It helps guarantee some reasonable revenue level for all teams, but doesn’t guarantee profitability or success, so it protects the small markets without overly penalizing the big, allows the better managed teams to prosper without sudsidizing mediocrity.

For the players, no matter how you look at it, they’re going to make less money. I’ve strived to find a way to minimize that pain, and reward their willingness to take it with the removal of arbitration and the relaxation of free agency — both of which I also feel are salary inflators as well. More players will have the ability to become unrestricted free agents, but will be less likely to be overpaid simply because they hung around to age 32 and because a team needs someone and they’re the only free agent available (think the Luke Richardson contract a few years ago)

I’ve also tried to change a few contract habits that I think encourage teams to mis-spend their revneue, and try to force them into ways of “living within their means”. No credit cards, and I think we’ll be fine. Note this does not mean a team with a down year in revenue can’t run a deficit or finance through debt: it means the teams can’t finance those debts by hiding them in the player contracts through deferred compensation clauses. If a team wants to run a deficit, it can, but it has to handle those debts through visible forms.

One reasonable criticism of this plan is that it takes almost all of the expense reduction out of player salary. That is by design. My justification for this is simple: hockey teams have already cut much of their other operations as far as they possibly can, so there’s very little “fat” in the budgets, and things like scouting and player development can’t be stopped without damaging the future of the game. If you know what people who work for a hockey team make, you know they aren’t paid huge wages (unlike those who play for hockey teams), so I don’t see a lot of available spare cash other than in player salaries. And frankly, the players can afford the cut better than the receptionist.

Now, if it were up to me, I’d take this further.

For one thing, nowhere in here do we solve the financial burden that’s been placed on the fans who buy the tickets. Tickets have escalated well beyond inflation the last few years as teams have tried to keep up with escalating salaries. The fans need a break, too. And to help insure more, quality hockey, we need to reduce the schedule. So I want to see a 10% rollback on ticket prices, and reducing the schedule to three pre-season games (from about five) and by eight games (4 home and 4 away). That will reduce the number of games a season ticket holder pays for by about 10%, and reduces the per-ticket price by 10%. that will, one would hope, spur an improvement in attendance to offset some of the losses, but again, something like this would require further cuts in average player salary.

I would also restructure free agency. Teams deserve a return on their investment in player development, to ensure they’ll invest in it (we do not, repeat, not, want the kind of player development disaster that football and basketball have using Div 1 NCAA instead of funding their own. the NCAA is not our friend. My preference is that a team owns the rights to a player for five years after draft, or for 150 games from the day a player is first activated onto the roster. After that, when a player’s contract is up, they are unrestricted — there is zero restricted free agency.

Contracts are limited to two years with one option year, non-renewable. As above, there are no renegotiated contracts, no deferred pay, limited bonuses and the majority of bonus should be team performance oriented. Players get to have the “open market” the NHLPA says it wants (but really doesn’t), but in return, with a good supply of players on that market, salaries won’t escalate. And when a player stops performing, their contracts stop. The union will hate this kind of proposal, because they want all of the freedom to choose the best deals — but want long-term, guaranteed contracts so that teams don’t have the same option to say “no”.

But like baseball, I want all contracts to be guaranteed. If you sign it, you pay it. That forces teams to think long and hard (or should) about exactly what they’re offering and what the risks are of what they’re doing. With insurance and buyout offerings and non-guaranteed contracts, teams can get a lot sloppier about this. Teams should pay for their mistakes, so they learn to minimize them.

I’m tempted to outlaw insurance on contracts (on the thought of the “live within your means” principle), but I haven’t decided yet. there is a legitimate worry about losing and having to replace a key player due to injury. I think insurance makes sense here, as long as the cost against the salary cap is the entire salary, including those parts the insurer pays to an injured player.

I also believe the league has over-expanded. Reducing the league to 26 teams would make all teams better, and create larger shares of pooled resources. On top of that, I’d look seriously at reducing the roster size by two, to 21, and the game roster by one. Teams could choose whether to go with four full lines or 6 defensemen, and instead of having three non-skaters, would be limited to two. But that would reduce some of the pains that come from the salary reductions — and in general, the players being cut are 6-8 minute a game types. with the reduced schedule, are they still all that necessary?

This will never happen, of course. But it’s interesting to think about…

NHL finances: it ain’t pretty.

Light blogging tonight, partially because I’ve been plowing through the just-released financial analysis by Arthur Leavitt on the state of the NHL. The bottom line — the NHL claims a $273 million financial loss, and after a first reading, the player’s union is going to have a hard time shooting big holes into the results.

A scary note in the document: ignoring the two teams that have spent time in Bankruptcy proceedings (Buffalo and Ottawa), of the 28 other teams in the NHL, it looks like three of them have been given qualified approval letters by their auditors. In somewhat plain english, that means those three businesses have financial issues that prevent the auditors from blessing the results, and in these three cases, it looks like there are financial problems where the auditors are questioning the financial viability of those teams.

that’s really bad stuff, folks. Auditors just don’t do that trivially.

I’ll talk more about the details in the report later, when I have some time to write it up properly. But my early reading indicates that there seems to be very little wiggle room here. The leavitt group took great pains to try to identify and document the various places teams have traditionall hidden (or been accused of hiding) revenues and have documented the financial aspects involved there. It also goes into some details about what’s NOT in those financial statements, and most of what’s missing makes things worse for the NHL, not better. If anything, the official numbers of the NHL understate the problem, and that’s not good for the union.

It’ll be interesting to see how the union reacts to this. So far, it’s been with snide “holding of nose and fake body sound” things, which doesn’t do anything productive for the process, and certainly doesn’t invalidate anything in the report. If they can’t do better than that, they’re in a very weak position moving forward. I’ll be curious to see how they interpret this data. if they attempt to blow off the report, folks, that should be your cue to side with the owners here. Let’s see them respond with details and their own alternative analysis. The less detail from the players union in teh rebuttal, the more the owners have the truth here. you heard that here first.

And you’ll hear more, in all of is glassy-eyed stare glory, in a day or so. It’s 85 pages of accounting-speak. yawn, I think I need a nap…

Happy anniversary to me….

So friday was February 6, and February 6 is a rather notable day in my life. On February 6, 1989, I was handed a badge and a copy of John Sculley’s Oddysey, and told to go make useful things as a new employee at Apple.

And here I am, 15 years later, still with Apple, still going strong, still doing interesting things and working to change the world.

John Sculley is gone, so is Mike Spindler (thank god), and Jean-Louis. Steve is back, and OS X rocks. Been an interesting 15 years — and if you think about where we (as a company and as society, and as technology people) have come in that time, from the Mac II to the xServe, from Multifinder to Panther, from macPaint to the iPod and Final Cut and iDVD — man it’s been a hell of a ride, no?

Makes you wonder what the next fifteen will be like. I’m looking forward to being part of it. How about you?

The Divine Miss M

Saturday was a bit of a special day, as Laurie and I wandered down to San Jose Arena (aka HP Pavilion, aka Compaq Place, aka, well, oh, never mind) for Bette Midler’s Kiss My Brass tour concert.

I’ve seen Midler in concert before, a long time ago in a galaxy far away (in a previous life, when I was small and green and really wrinkled), and she’s a great show. I’ve been a fan of hers for a long time. You might be familiar with her for her portrayal of a character much like Janis Joplin in The Rose, and if you haven’t seen that movie, go find it and watch it (but be prepared to be depressed as hell). Her new album honors Rosemary Clooney, a wonderful reflection of her roots in the field.

But if that’s how you know Bette, you simply won’t understand the kind of show she takes on tour. Her early start was here in the Bay Area, doing, effectively, the gay bathhouse circuit. Her shows have a strong attachment back to classic theater works like the Broadway reviews of the 30′s and 40′s. Combine the two, and you have an evening of serious music and not so serious, rather bawdy and topical humor. For instance, at one point, she digressed into her views about the current political climate, and trust me, she’s not voting for Bush in the next election (and neither, clearly, is her audience). Janet’s boob, J’lo’s love life, and the war in Iraq all got put in the crossfires. As did Bette herself — always willing to throw herself on a joke to save her audience, she did a wonderful send up of herself, and her flop of a TV series, in a piece with (I kid you not) Judge Judy (on vidoe) and a guy in a CBS eye costume, which ends with her punching out the eye and being sentenced to having to apologize to every person who ever watched her TV show personally.

And then she comes out on stage to sing I’m sorry, i devil’s horns and a tail. Only she can’t finish the song, not straight. Of course.

The best way to define the Divine Miss M is a line she used during the show. She looked out at the audience and said something like:

You know, these days, it seems you can’t become a singing star unless you dress up like a whore!
And do they call me up and thank me? Nooooo!

She also did a duet with Mr. Rogers (yes, that Mr. Rogers), and opened up after the intermission with her latest Delores Del Lagos piece. This is a continuing theme with her, Delores being one of her characters, the epitomy of everything you could hate about Las Vegas Lounge lizards in all their glory. Delores does a nautical act, complete with mermaid’s tail, navigating around the stage in an electric wheel chair. blissfully tacky, wonderful stuff.

In this show, Bette revisits Delores in Fishtails above Broadway, in which Delores takes on the Broadway stage (and flops miserably), and given one last chance, re-invents herself (did you see the Julie Andrews movie SOB? No, pretty much nobody did, but it ties back to Janet’s boobie…), and goes on to do a Broadway review.

Which has to be seen to be believed, if you’ll believe it by seeing it. Bette goes way over the top as she and her Harlettes strap on the garter belts and bowler hats for a quick riff of Fosse (actually, they take on Fosse and Busby Berkeley at the same time; god help me, they do), then a quick snip of Chorus Line, and for the grand finale, you have Delores herself just completely demolish Carol Channing doing the Hello, Dolly entrance down the grand staircase.

Now remember, during this entire time, Bette and the Harletts are in full mermaid fins, either in wheelchairs, or madly hopping about the stage.

I swear to god the woman sitting next to me was laughing so hard she wet herself. Or came awful close.

Great entertainment, great energy, her backup band was awesome, and Bette really put a lot of herself into the concert; no opening act (who’s you get to do that?), about 2 and a half hours of concert, and it starts in high gear and ramps up from there.

If you get a chance, see it. It may not be guns & roses, but, you know? that’s another reason to recommend it…

The NHL All-star weekend.

I’m with Jeff and Alanah on this one: Could the hockey world just shut up about the CBA for five minutes this weekend?. (by the way, their Vancouver Canucks Op Ed is one of the best hockey blogs out there, and one of the few that seems to remember the Western Conference exists…)

Unfortunately, the answer is no. the upcoming labor stuff is the 500 pound gorilla at center ice, telling everyone to skate around it won’t work.

The basic problem: the media needs controversy (good news doesn’t sell newspapers, radio minutes, or clickthroughs), and both sides need the media to try to push their side of the agenda. And the All-star game is a time when people are looking to (and at) the sport, so there’s no way to avoid that vision being hijacked by the politics.

Other than to get the politics put behind you. As I’ve said before, this is all posturing,a nd we shoudl all ignore it to the best we can. Neither side will get serious about negotiation until the last minute, because if either side does, it’ll be accused of giving in before it got the best possible deal.

So skate around the gorilla.

All-star weekend is also time for looking at the game and how it can be improved. ESPN has a couple of good articles, 10 things we’d change about the game and 10 things we like about hockey. I agree with the things they like completely, and their ten things they’d change mostly.

Their list:

• Call the rule book
• Bring back the tag up rule
• no limit on curvature of sticks
• stop protecting the goalie
• serve two full minutes
• move the goal line back
• amend the instigator rule
• better schedule
• fix the standings
• shootouts

is a great starting point. But first, throw out shootouts. I’m against home run derbies instead of extra innings, and I’m against shootouts for the same reason: it ain’t hockey. You might as well have the goalies meet at center ice in mortal combat.

Instead? ten minutes of four on four overtime. If it’s not decided then — it’s a tie. Which leads to

fix the standings: how to encourage teams to play for wins? zero points for a tie. don’t reward a tie — reward wins. And I say that knowing full well that ties have really helped the sharks this year; but if you win, you get two points. If you don’t win, you get zero. Games are 60 minutes, with 10 minutes of 4-4 if needed added. Watch teams stop playing for ties…

Better schedules: definitely. Cut the schedule by 8 games: 4 home, 4 away. cut paychecks by 10% to compensate — for every player making more than 40% of the league average. Reduce intra-conference play to cut some of the travel, but let’s still find a way so that every team plays in every arena over a two or four year cycle.

dump the instigator rule: although to put it bluntly, if the referees did their job, teams wouldn’t need to police things for them. but the instigator rule needs to go.

move the goal line back: seemed like a good idea at the time. wrong. bring back the tag-up rule: ditto.

stick curvature: here’s one I disagree with. It’s solving the wrong problem. You won’t get scoring up with banana sticks, you’ll get scoring up by getting goaltending equipment under control. My argument is that while goalies need (and deserve) protection from the pucks, much of today’s equipment isn’t for protection. Reduce the size of the blocker, reduce the size of the catching glove, reduce the size of the leg pads, and you reduce the ability of goalies to do the sumo goalie schtick. I don’t want to take away a goalie’s ability to be good — I want to take away a goalie’s ability to use technology to be better than they are. Oversized pads are an advantage they don’t need in today’s game.

And finally, call the rule book: on which I agree completely, but first, fix the rule book. One problem with this thought is that the rulebook has no discretion, and referees need it. infractions that affect the game (especially scoring chances) need to be called; things that are done away from the play and don’t affect play many times shouldn’t be called; referees can’t win here, because if they do call it “by the book” they get ripped for calling too many penalties, or for calling “too many” penalties against one team (as if magically, both teams are supposed to commit the same # of penalties in each game). So make the calling priorities clear, and what isn’t a priority.

I’m also increasingly convinced the two referee system isn’t working. The NHL attempted to get everyone to call the same things the same way, and the reality is, referees are like players, they have strengths, weaknesses and preferences and tendencies. So this “objective calling” failed, and the clash of personalities and styles on ice create problems.

My current belief is that the 2nd (junior) ref should move upstairs, replacing the video replay official. He has the ability to call penalties from the eye in the sky, solving the issue he was put on the ice to solve — behind the play penalties. But by putting him in the video replay booth, video replay’s powers can be expanded beyond the very limited powers. By having a fully qualified ref up there, their job can become “make sure the right call gets made”, which is what it ought to be. The upstairs ref can call a delayed penalty through adding another light to the christmas tree over the goals — a blue light indicates a pending penalty from upstairs; the upstairs ref also has an electronic whistle to call play. Their primary focus is behind the play issues, but they should also call all major penalties and high sticks. The upstairs ref can also use video replay and confer with the on-ice ref to un-call a penalty that shouldn’t be called — and faceoff at center ice instead. Let’s get the call right. Proper use of technology can do that, non-intrusively.

Other things people have suggested:

do away with the red line: people who suggest this don’t watch much hockey where it’s done. it isn’t the solution to the problem they’re suggesting it for.

wider blue lines: a minor yes from me; anything to open up space I’m for.

bigger ice surfaces: I’m against — because that’s something the league should ahve done before all the new buildings were built. Now, it’s too late. Now, if the league wants to require that any new building or significant retrofit moves to a bigger ice surface, I wouldn’t mind. But it’s like the red line, it’s not the solution some people claim it is. More space leads to less hitting, and makes it easier to play “keep away”. If you think the trap is boring, watch a game on international ice where a team simply avoids the other team for a period and the other team can’t catch them.

bigger goals: first, try smaller goalie gear.

Parrot Oratory stuns scientists

British Scientists are in a dither because of N’Kisi, an African Grey with a vocabulary of almost 1,000 words, and the ability to use them in complex sentences in with proper tense.

Um, why are the british so surprised? They evidently don’t read Science magazine, have never read this book, haven’t followed the research of Dr. Irene Pepperberg and her african grey, Alex (which reaches back to 1985), and don’t read my blog and have never met my cockatoo.

there’s very little N’Kisi is doing Alex didn’t do a decade ago. It’s a little disingenuous to be declaring this as new or revolutionary when it’s a rehash of stuff others have been showing for a long time. At best, more sloppy, lazy journalism.

As someone who’s lived with large birds for almost 20 years now, and who’s currently involved with an exceptionally intelligent female cockatoo going through her sullen teenager years (her current tactic uses self-invented passive-aggressive control techniques. it’s been — fun. At least she hasn’t gone off and gotten a tattoo… yet….), none of this is surprising. My bird’s the intellectual equal of a four year old, at least. Very expressive in language, not in number of words, but through inflection and tonality. She’s a toolsmith, she’s self-aware, she has a fairly good understanding of time, she is stubborn as hell (just like her dad), and she’s smart enough and aware enough to know that a given behavior will get herself in trouble and to decide that it’s worth doing anyway. it’s one thing to be unaware of the implications of something, and quite another to decide to do it anyway, and then haul your little white feathered butt off to your cage and put yourself into a time-out, just to prove a point.

Trust me. If these folks really want to understand this stuff, go talk to Dr. Pepperberg. or stop by some night about bed time. Tatiana has decided that she’s a big girl now, and she’ll put herself to bed, thank you.

N’Kisi is a fascinating bird — but he’s not new, or original. or, so those of us who share their lives with these birds, particularly surprising.

Insurance coverage in the NHL

great piece going into how the NHL uses insurance for financial and risk management, with some details on who is and isn’t insured among the injured around the league, and what the issues are surrounding insurance in hockey. When is a salary not a salary? Well, some of the time, it’s when it’s an insurance payout: by waiting until he did to get surgery, Mario Lemieux shifted some $2 million of his paycheck from the Penguins pocket to the insurance company.

well worth checking out if you care to look under the hood of the game into the workings that make it go.

Time to get serious about high-sticking…

If you watch a lot of hockey, it’ll be clear that players have completely lost respect for each other and no longer worry about where their sticks land. think about the number of players injured just this season with sticks to the face in some way.

Adding a second referee hasn’t helped this problem; now we have four eyes missing calls instead of two. Linesmen used to be able to go to the referee and recommend a call in the case of a major, but that’s not being done any more.

And now that we have an entire league full of players who’s never had to play with guys not wearing helmets since they first strapped on skates, any sense of worry about doing damage seems to have disappeared. But since visors and shields aren’t mandated (or allowed, except for medical necessity), bad habits created in the pre-pro days when faces were protected carry on into the pros, and then players get hurt.

The Leafs are already missing Owen Nolan to a torn retina — and last night, Tucker went down with a similar injury. Watching that game, there were two other uncalled, serious sticks to the face of Leaf players, too. it’s clear players simply don’t care, because chances are, all it’s going to be is two minutes.

So it’s time to give the players reason to care again. If two minutes for careless use of the stick isn’t significant enough, let’s make the penalty something worth noticing.

My suggestion?

1) A hockey stick should never get above a player’s elbows. Period. Any contact of a stick to the shoulder pads or above: double minor, four minutes in the box.

2) If the stick makes any contact at all neck or above, it’s a five minute major.

3) If blood is drawn, it’s five minutes and a game misconduct. The escalating suspension track for major penalties would apply to this, too, so with the third, it’s a game off, then two, then…

Beyond that, enable linesman to cal high sticking penalties. Not wait for a whistle and talk to a ref, blow the play dead and skate the guy off. And if all eight eyes miss it, give the video replay judge the power to call a penalty down at the next stoppage. let the “eye in the sky” take positioning out of the problem. Once players know they won’t get away with it, and when it happens, the penalties are severe for the team. And that’ll get the coaches involved in reminding players to get their STUPID STICKS DOWN ON THE ICE WHERE THEY BELONG.

High sticking should be called immediately and with no discretion. If you touch a player with your stick above their elbows, you take a penalty. Period. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time before we have another Bryan Berard problem caused by a stick, or an Al MacInnis. In some ways, Owen Nolan got off lucky, at least, we think so. As Al MacInnis’s injury showed, once you mess up the integrity of the eye, problems can come back again later. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t have an easy supply of replacement eyeballs handy, and neither does the NHL.

Scott Stevens: Post-concussion syndrome.

New Jersey Devil Scott Stevens has missed five games, one of the longest injury outages of his career, and now, he’s admitted he’s suffering from post-concussion syndrome.

This sucks, but given his style of play, it can’t be too surprising, either.

This problem is getting worse and worse in hockey, which is, fortunately, further along in understanding and dealing with the problem than other leagues — but so much just isn’t well-known. Sometimes, you get a concussion and it simply doesn’t get better.

I’ve talked about this before: here, here, and here. The problem isn’t going away, either.

And unfortunately, there are no easy answers, but the league can’t afford to lose players like Scott Stevens and Adam Deadmarsh (currently out indefinitely in LA, and who’s increasingly looking like he’ll never play again).

This just sucks, unfortunately.

NHL ice age is coming.

Another end of the world as we know it article about the upcoming labor fight in the NHL.

This one is from the owner’s side, conspicuously timed to come out after the player’s griped about the league.

The league has serious issues, but please, don’t let Capitals owner Ted Leonsis talk about them: “I’m nervous,” said Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis, whose club expects losses of $30 million this season and routinely plays before thousands of empty seats at MCI Center. “The league is in trouble.” Remember, this is the Ted Leonsis that signed known whiner and malcontent Jaromir Jagr to a hugely excessive contract and is now stuck with the underperforming, unhappy Czech for another $50 million dollars of disappointment or so. Ted, look in a mirror, okay?

Pronouncements of doom are going to continue until the bargaining agreement actually does expire, and expect both players and owners to try to spin this to their advantage between now and next fall, when Armageddon occurs (or doesn’t).

Fans need to remember a few things about the ongoing war of words:

First, all of this is aimed at getting fans to lean towards supporting one side over the other. It’s propoganda. It should be treated as such, meaning we should all pay zero attention to either side, and trust nobody in the discussion. The only talk that matters is the talk that goes on over the negotiating table, the rest of this stuff is PR.

Second, nothing is going on around the negotiating table. This worries some people — and it shouldn’t. In labor/union negotiations, nothing happens until the last minute. There is no incentive for anyone to settle early, because anyone who does will be criticized by people saying if they’d held out a little longer, they could have gotten a better deal (and they might well be right!). So don’t expect it to be solved until after the agreement actually expires, and don’t be upset that it’s not being solved.

Third, you’ll do yourself and this whole situation a favor if you just ignore it completely. Until they actually strike, or lock out the players, or agree on a new deal, everything is PR and propoganda, and has no useful value other than stressing fans out unnecessarily. And fans ought to be letting the players and owners stress out over this. It’s not our problem to solve.

We should just enjoy hockey while we have hockey, and if the two sides are stupid enough next fall to screw it up badly, go find something else to do while they argue over how to split up our money. Right now? all we do by paying attention to this garbage is give it more power than it deserves. Fans should just tell both sides to shut up and talk to us when it’s solved, and quite wasting our time with this kind of stuff…

NHL’s playing style sucks..

Teemu Selanne takes a page out of Brett Hull’s book to tell the press how the NHL playing style sucks, and if it doesn’t fix it soon, he’s going home.

Given how Teemu contributed to the league’s style of play the last couple of seasons in San Jose, there’ll be surprisingly few Sharks fans sorry if he leaves.

I find it interesting (but not suprising) taht this article appeared shortly after Selanne admired a pass, and got a serious (but legal) body check as a result, as well as what the Avs called a neck injury.

So just what is it that Teemu thinks sucks? That superstars like him get bodychecked? The refs already are more than willing to call a different game for players like him than power forwards like Owen Nolan or third and fourth line grinders — should the rules be modified so that this goes even further, and if you make more than $5 million a year, nobody can block your shots?

To be honest — Teemu is correct, and so is Brett Hull. The emperor does have no clothes, and the league does need some tweaking to increase scoring, improve the quality of play, and make the game more fun for fans and players alike (although, watching San Jose this year, it seems you can do wonders if you have a team like the Sharks and a coach like Ron Wilson, even within the current rules and referee mindset)

What bothers me is when players say things like: The NHL should take a big responsibility — hey, how about the players taking a big responsibility? Instead of whining to the press, go to the union, get together as players, and take proposals to the league and ask them to be partners in the solution. This sitting back and saying “hey, this sucks, it’s their fault” — it, well, sucks. Especially since the guys actually out on the ice doing the job are the players. Look in a mirror.

So what should the players suggest? Teemu didn’t say, he was too busy complaining to suggest improvements. So I will for him:

1) move the goal line back. A few years ago, the goals were moved further away from the back boards, hoping to improve player’s ability to create plays from back there. Wrong — it merely made it easier for defensemen to catch them. Move it back.

2) Goalie gear. cut the maximum size of the blocker and catching glove by 30%, so it is only moderately larger than it was 20 years ago. Have you seen Martin Brodeur’s catching glove? What’s he doing with that, pulling marlin onto the boat?

3) Restrict goalie movement: I have argued more than once on the sharks list that restricting goalies so they can’t touch the puck behind the goal line would improve offense, because you don’t have that untouchable 3rd defenseman wandering around getting in the way (yet safe from checking) and breaking up dump-ins. And let’s get back to enforcing the rule on goalies dropping on the puck outside of the crease: that’s not a face-off, that’s delay of game. If no part of the goalie is in the crease when he freezes the puck — two minutes. If the goalies skates are behind the goalie line when he plays the puck, face-off in the offensive zone.

4) Most people feel overtime four-on-four is the best hockey many nights. So let’s see the player’s union agree to a phase-in over four years to 100% four-on-four action. This will mean teams need fewer players, of course, so it’ll require a cut in roster size over that time, also, from 23 to 21. Which means more ice time and money for the franchise players, no? Practically speaking, larger (international) ice surfaces aren’t going to happen; that should have been done ten years ago before everyone (but Pittsburgh) built new arenas. Now, it’s too late. So open the ice with fewer people. there is a precedent; the league cut a sixth player in the 40′s, ostensibly because of the war, mostly to save money. Remember the rover?

5) And as long a we’re making fundamental changes, a big issue is the grinding schedule. Fewer games would mean more rest, more injury recovery time, fresher players, and in theory, better hockey, especially in the doggy times of January and February. So — 74 game schedule in the same calendar time. 10% fewer games; of course, all players take a 10% cut to all contract payouts, salary and bonuses. Each team gives up 4 home and 4 away games, and everyone takes equal pain here.

6) No red line? I’m not convinced. I’ve seen plenty of college and international hockey with no red line that’s just as stultifying and boring as bad NHL hockey, and played on international-sized rinks, where if a team wants to play “come and catch me” hockey or dump and change hockey, you’ll never stop them.

7) instead, minor penalties count a full two minutes. Love that four-on-three action!

touch ups on offsides. Once you leave the zone, you can go back in and play the puck. Don’t let the other team sit back and relax on the breakout, let them be challenged.

9) on the other hand, automatic icing. I’m tired of guys getting hurt.

10) speaking of guys getting hurt, when will the union choose to protect its members from themselves and stop fighting the league over visors? Owen Nolan came this to being Bryan Berard recently, but the union continues to insist it’s a personal choice issue. When a player like Berard or Nolan is lost to a team, it has a significant impact — yet the team can’t protect those assets properly, because the union insists it’s up to the players. and frankly, the players have shown they shouldn’t be given control of that.

I know — let’s mandate that you can go without a visor, if you also agree to not wear a cup. notice how few players in the league go without one? Shows you where they have their priorities, right? going blind is okay; getting kicked in the nuts isn’t. That’s setting priorities for you…

So, what chances do you think we have of the union getting serious about fixing hockey and allowing for changes that might require (a) pay cuts, (b) fewer roster spots, or (c) giving up any power at all to the league on any issue, like, say, safety gear? or which might affect members like (1) goalies, or (2) journeymen third and fourth liners?

I thought so. So see why I get mad at players when they spout off about the league being screwed up? it’s players playing the game, not the owners, and it’s the union refusing to take a leadership position on needed changes, and standing in the way of changes that might, gasp, cost players a few bucks. so please, Teemu, don’t talk to reporters about how the league has to fix things, tell your union to get out of the way, stop resisting changes, and get involved in making sure the changes are the right ones.

Until the players start being part of the solution, and they and the union stop being part of the problem, I wish these guys would just shut up. It’s not the league’s fault — it’s everyone’s fault, starting with Teemu and the players with enough pull to effect change within the player and their union.

We’re home!

Hard to believe that only a couple of days ago, we were in Vancouver. We arrived back in San Jose this morning about 11, a few days early.

One of the joys of winter travel — weather changes plans. On the other hand, in all of the years we’ve driven into the northwest on off-season trips, this is the first time we’ve significantly changed an itinerary or cut a trip short. But as we left Vancouver for Portland (border crossing: 18 minutes), we knew the weather was degenerating badly. Long before we got to our hotel in Portland, we’d decided it was a good time to cut and run. So we cut our reservation there to one day (to the encouragement of the hotel staff, I’ll note).

And as the portland blog entries show, that night, it snowed. I have to admit I was impressed watching Portland dig into action with the snow — for a city that sees it intermittently, they sure seemed to have their act together. we got up early on New Years Eve morning, trudged through the slush to pack the van, and ran for the border.

South on I-5 to eugene, where we stopped for coffee’s (near our portland hotel was a coffee place advertising the Mordor Moka: ‘one cup to rule them all’, but our wish to get the hell out of there overrode our desire to figure out what they were doing), then south to the 38, and out we squirted to the coast. the 38 hugs the river; there’s no pass to cross, so it’s a nice getaway to know about if you are trying to avoid I5 south.

It worked, too. Popped out at Reedsport and kept driving. Finally gave up about 8PM last night in Ukiah, after we got out of the 101 mountains. Pretty much rained most of the trip south, but rarely heavily. Once we hit Ukiah, I decided that was enough — it was tempting to head for home, but I felt discretion was the better part of valor, so we found a motel, crawled in and crashed. We we’re both out by 10:30.

I do have to give special thanks to our temporary neighbors who felt it necessary to have their kids celebrate news years at midnight in the parking lot of the motel. I can’t tell you how much fun it was to be awakened by this. Oh, and I sure hope that our turning on the TV at 6:30 this morning and dragging all of our luggage out to the car didn’t wake you up. damn, I was clumsy this morning, kept whacking the door with bags and all that.

I’m very glad we hauled to Ukiah, given the driving today. Lots (lots!) of rain, very wet roads, and lots and lots (lots!) of nasty wind. In a van. crosswinds are not my best friend. We saw four or five accidents on the way in, fortunately, none of them involved us or came close to it. The advantage of being middle-aged, a slow driver, and in no bloody hurry. Still, we made it in before noon.

And boy, am I glad we bailed. According to news stories, from the Northwest media, if we’d tried to get out today, we wouldn’t have — chain requirements from Portland to Ashland on I-5 (300 miles of chain requirements), and the only reason it stopped there was because they closed the passes. Basically, I-5 was closed from Ashland to Redding, at best, with limited travel and chain requirements.

This is why we’ve always planned to bug out via the coast. It’s slower, but it works. If you try to sneak out the pass and guess wrong, you can spend two or three days in beautiful downtown Weed or Yreka or some other garden spot (hint: the best restaurant in Yreka is the deli counter in the Raleys. honest)

With the chain requirements, even getting to the coast today would have been problematic. Many of the coastal routes were closed; the 38 that we used was closed today by downed trees. Portland itself basically shut down, and they were telling everyone to not leave their houses.

Not fun. At some level, I’m sad we missed our time in Portland, but hell, our time in Portland was going to be spent in a hotel room watching the news people say things like “don’t drive! whatever you do, don’t drive!”. That — we can do here in the comfort of our place…

So I don’t regret it a bit, although it was a long, fairly technical drive for both of us. and we’ve already agreed to re-celebrate new years this weekend at something other than a taco bell (only thing open) and a noisy motel…