New Fiction — The Princess and the Dragon

Here’s another one of my early fiction shorts. This one was sold at one point to Pulphouse but never published. Once again I take a fairly straightforward fantasy idea and see if I can turn it on its ear. It’s similar in some ways to Fnord and Gord. And yes, I really did name the sword PligStüche. If you can’t figure that one out, sorry.

The Princess and the Dragon

Once upon a time, many years ago in the kingdom of Nog there lived the Princess Mirabelle. Her father, the King, was quite proud of her, for Mirabelle was a beautiful, intelligent, and obedient girl. All was well in the kingdom until one day when the kingdom was attacked by an dragon. It burnt the fields, slew the sheep, and did all of the things dragons do. The King gathered his soldiers and rode to vanquish the dragon, but while he was gone the dragon flew to the castle, and as normally happens in Fairy Tales, stole the royal treasury and kidnapped Mirabelle, flying off with both to his lair hidden high in a cave in the Cragmont mountains.

The King, heartbroken over the loss of his daughter, not to mention his gold, called out for all his knights to rescue his daughter. He declared that the man who returned Mirabelle would be rewarded with the hand of Mirabelle. One by one they pledged to return his daughter. One by one they climbed the Cragmont in search of the dragon. One by one they disappeared, never to be seen again. First went the tall knights in shining armor mounted on fearsome white steeds. Then went the shorter knights in slightly tarnished armor mounted on ponies. Then went those-who-would-be-knights, with their leather breeches and rusty swords. One by one, all those who were strong enough, brave enough, or stupid enough to try their wits against the dragon climbed the Cragmont, never to be seen again.

One morning, as king Nog sat on his throne, grieving for his daughter and trying to pay his bills , into the throne room came a knight. He wore armor that shined in a way that the King hadn’t seen since knight number thirteen, and he carried a sword whose edge gleamed in a way he hadn’t seen since knight number eight, and his horse, which didn’t belong in the throne room, was a white stallion the likes of which the King hadn’t seen since knight number five.

“Your Majesty,” said the knight. “I have traveled many days to answer your call for a champion to return the Princess Mirabelle to your side. Give me your leave and I shall dispatch that noisome worm and rescue your daughter!”

“Welcome, sir knight!” boomed the King. “Before I give me leave, you are aware that many before you have tried, and not a one has returned?”

“86 as of last Wednesday, but none were as strong nor as brave as I. Most importantly, none had this!” And the knight held his sword high over his head.

“Very nice sword. Sharp, too.”

“This, my Liege, is not just a sword, but the legendary PligStüche, forged by the god Nïvun and used by the hero Andrew the Giant to dispatch the dragon Högge on the island of Delft. No dragon can meet PligStüche in battle and survive!”

“With PligStüche at your side, brave knight, you can not possibly fail. Go with my blessings! And don’t forget to rescue the treasury.”

With that, the brave knight left the castle and began his trek for the Cragmont. It was an uneventful trip, except for the bears and the landslide that killed his stallion. Rather than bore the reader, we will join our knight many days later as he passes the final barrier and stands, finally, at the opening of the cave in which rests the dragon and the Princess Mirabelle.

“Dragon! Your doom has arrived! I am here to return the Princess Mirabelle to her father, the King! Exit that hole and prepare to die!”

From inside the cave came the noise of metal being dropped. A female voice whined, “Oh, bother! He made my soufflé collapse.”

“Princess Mirabelle! Your rescue is at hand!” said the brave knight. At the thought, the great knight shivered in anticipation. “Dragon! Your doom awaits! PligStüche demands your soul! Come out and take it like a reptile!”

From inside the cave came the sound of a large mass shifting. A few seconds later, the head of a huge dragon, steam wafting from one nostril, came into view. The eyes, the color of banked coals, evaluated this new threat as the dragon slowly exited the cave.

<<If you have any brains you’ll leave before it’s too late.>> There was no sound, but the knight heard the dragon as if it spoke within his head.

“Stupid worm! I carry PligStüche! I do not fear you! Meet your doom!”

<<PligStüche won’t protect you, knight. Leave while you can.>>

There was a rustle at the mouth of the cave, and from behind the dragon stepped a girl. She was tall and beautiful and carried herself with a grace that is only taught to girls whose fathers can afford Princess school.

<<Too late. Don’t say I didn’t I warn you.>>

“Princess Mirabelle, I have come to rescue you from this worm and restore you to your rightful place. Your father grieves for you. I shall deal with your captor, and then you shall be my bride.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” The Princess Mirabelle spoke, with a voice of the nightingale. “And you can’t make me.” Perhaps a slightly petulant nightingale.

“What magic is this? Princess, what has this dragon done to you?”

<<She’s all yours. I don’t want her. Take her, and good riddance.>>

The knight pulled PligStüche from its scabbard and held it high. “Dragon, enough lies! Mirabelle, stand aside while I dispatch this evil being!”

“I said I’m not going and that’s final. He wants Cindernose here dead so he can get his gold back. To my father, I’m a property to be sold like his sheep and farmland. I like it here. I don’t have to wear those horrible clothes and chatter endlessly with people too stupid to dress themselves. Ovenbreath here makes sure I’m warm and safe. What more could I want?”

<<If you take her, I’ll give you the treasury. I’ll never eat another sheep in the Kingdom.>>

“Evil worm! Prepare to die!”

<<Have fun, you two. I’m going to go take a nap. I warned you, knight.>> At that, the dragon disappeared into the cave.

The knight stared at the empty cave-mouth and blinked. Slowly, he lowered PligStüche and returned it to its scabbard.

“Princess Mirabelle, you are rescued!” The knight stepped towards the Princess. “Let us return to your glub — “

The knight stopped, then reached up to grasp the handle of the dagger lodged in his throat. He turned and looked at Mirabelle, then collapsed in a heap and died.

Mirabelle stepped over and removed the dagger. Cleaning it on the knight’s shirt, she replaced it into the hidden place in her sleeve. “Hey, Embereyes! Dinner’s ready when you want it.”

The dragon shuffled out of the cave. <<I can feed myself.>>

“If I let you hunt, you’d have my father and a hundred knights up here rescuing me in an instant, dear. Now, we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

<<I do wish you hadn’t thrown that love potion on me while I was kidnapping you. It makes things so inconvenient.>>

“We’ve been over this before. It was the only thing within reach. How was I to know you’d fall in love with me? Besides, I think things have turned out quite nicely. We’re going to be happy together forever..”

The dragon snorted, puffing smoke rings at the girl. <<Well, perhaps the potion will wear off some day. I promise, love of my life, that we’ll stay together as long as we both live>>. It snorted again and smacked his lips.

She pulled PligStüche free from the body. “It had a lifetime guarantee. Tell you what, lover. Tonight we’ll snuggle up together in front of the fire and you can tell me everything you know about this new sword. It sounds like it might come in handy some day. Now let’s go try to save that soufflé.” With that, she turned and disappeared into the mouth of the cave.

A sound somewhere between a choke and a snort came from the dragon. It turned, and tail drooping just a bit, started for the cave. <<Yes, dear.>>

# End #

Today’s Shared Links for January 30, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for January 29, 2011

D&D Banned in Wisconsin Prisons

Today’s Shared Links for January 28, 2011

some thoughts and stats on chuqui.com

Over the last couple of days I’ve been tweaking the editorial content on the site, refining some of it and changing the focus in a few ways, based on studying some of the analytics and thinking about some feedback that’s come in along with my view of what I want this site to represent. None of the changes are major, but I thought I’d talk about them a bit to give people some things to think about when they’re writing the boilerplate for their own sites.

One relatively big change I made was that I made each piece independent; before, I had a few rather generic sections (like “about”), and I felt some of the material simply got lost because nothing was making it visible, so people weren’t seeing it. Now, each content area has its own header. If you think about a typical user, I’ve decided this is important because they aren’t familiar with the site and need some help finding the pieces of information. this is why I use menus and drop-down menu items very sparingly and make sure there are other paths into that material — not only do drop-downs hide stuff from search engines, studying the analytics of them shows me users simply don’t use them often, so I limit them to things that are “optional” for site visitors, not for information I want them to find and access easily.

I wanted to do two main things in refining this content — make the Creative Commons licensing a lot more visible, and rethink the affiliate link area.

On my site, there’s now an explanation of the Creative Commons license. I’ve seen that among many users, CC is seen as being equivalent to public domain, which is incorrect. Since Creative Commons is still a new concept, I’ve come to think that those of us who are using it and promoting it need to help educate users and explain the concept and proper usage, and so I’ve added some language to the site to do that. I’ve also modified the standard boilerplate I put on my flickr uploads to do the same. I don’t expect this to stop people who don’t pay attention to the CC licensing overnight — but I do hope this helps spread the word about CC and help educate people about what it is and what appropriate usage is (and that appropriate usage is what the photographer says, not what the user wants…). It’s a small step in education, and I’d like to encourage others using creative commons to do the same (hence the reason for this post…)

I also re-did my affiliate. The site doesn’t generate much affiliate income, and honestly, I’m not trying to make that happen, so that’s fine. I felt, however, that I was dedicated too much space to it and it was cluttered. Since almost all affiliate income was coming through the Amazon links, I slimmed down to just using that, and I rephrased the area to make it much more of a “tip jar” concept, to keep it low key. I hadn’t put the affiliate links on the blog detail pages (I have no idea why), so in fact, they weren’t being seen by users who just pop onto the site to read something and then leave. I’ve also made sure the Creative Commons text is prominent on the detail pages now, also.

All in all, minor but important changes. I think it better represents my ideas of what the site is about and how I want it to look — and I bet in six months, I’ll feel I need to do some tweaking again because I’ll have learned more based on how users react to this change.

Back in July, I completely revamped the site after living with the old look for a number of years. I’ve been doing some simple analytics of the site since, but in the last week, I’ve done some deeper evaluation to see just how usage has changed. One thing I didn’t like about the old site was that users who came in from outside links never seemed to explore or visit any other part of the site, making every item seem isolated and there really was nothing to encourage users to come back again after visiting for that one item.

So how have things changed? Looking at two typical weeks (in other words, weeks where there aren’t spikes of traffic for some reason), here’s how things have changed from this time last year:

Visits are up 56%
Pageviews are up 90%
Pages per visit is up about 22%, from about 1.3 to about 1.7
Average time on site is up 29% from 1:08 to 1:28.

All in all nice moves in a positive direction.

About 23% of traffic to the site comes from search engines; that could be more if I worked on SEO harder, but since I’m not trying to drive revenue, it’s not a priority. Of the search engine traffic, about 96% of it is Google. Bing is a distant second, Yahoo is third much farther behind. Interestingly, search engine visitors do more exploring and stay longer (1.9 pages per visit, 1:46 time per visit).

There’s been yet another discussion about “is RSS dead” out there (to which I respond “oh, slow news day?’); if that’s true, I’m not seeing it. My RSS subscriptions are flat to up slightly, right around 700. While it hasn’t grown much, article readership via RSS is massively larger; I distribute full articles via RSS, so the vast majority of RSS subscribers never visit the site — and that readership is above and beyond the numbers above, so the growth in eyeballs is actually much higher than the analytics imply. (Hello, faithful RSS readers!). So while the absolute number of RSS subscribers hasn’t changed, the “quality” has — they’re more engaged, they read more. If I wanted to drive revenue, I could add ads to the RSS feed, maybe, but I hate those, so I haven’t (and have no plans to); the joy of not particularly needing to drive revenue around here…

But there is a strong growth in readership via channels that seem to be doing the same thing as RSS, and the biggest one is Twitter; blog posts go out via RSS, they also get announced on twitter, and twitter does cause people to read pieces on the site (instead of remotely within the RSS). it’s too bad twitter doesn’t really integrate with analytics well, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on there, but twitter is a top five source of visitors now, and growing. The size of the group following me on twitter is now over double the size of those following me on RSS, and growing, so if I were to focus on putting time and energy into one or the other, the answer is obvious. At the same time, twitter really isn’t the same as RSS (it’s not a passive subscription model), but it also isn’t purely social, either, given that we all dump links onto it as well as converse. It really has turned into this new generation instant messaging mosh pit, and I’m finding it a fascinating beast these days.

Facebook, however, is above that, and growing faster (much to the chagrin of folks who like to diss Facebook). I also see a lot more commenting and engagement from facebook readers; it’s a very active community, and it’s #3 in driving traffic after google and RSS. Right now, it’s about 1/3 of the size of the RSS traffic, but about double what it was a year ago.

If you look at all of the social sites I’m involved in (facebook, stack exchange, etc), places where I interact with the community, the combined traffic they drive to the site is now larger than my RSS feed, and about on par with the search engines. “social networking” can be an infinite time sink if you allow it, but it’s an effective way to build relationships and get known, and those are ways to get people interested in what you have to say and visiting your site. Just don’t expect overnight miracles, and realize if you push too hard, you’ll turn them off you, not onto you. It’s not about using these things as marketing, it’s about building community on them, and that is what markets you.

What’s next? To me, it’s worrying about what I consider is the real, number one, most important driver of interest in a site: good, interesting content. If you don’t have that, it doesn’t matter what you do trying to attract visitors — so I’m going to continue working to create stuff people are interested in reading and talking about, and go back to not worrying much about subscriber numbers or SEO geekery or any of that stuff. It’s fun to dive into it once in a while and it makes for a fun report card (especially when the numbers are “up and to the right”) but ultimately what matters is the writing and images.

Right?

Today’s Shared Links for January 27, 2011

Boors, Birds, and Bad Behavior
The Importance of Cropping

How hard can it be?

It’s interesting, and sad. We’re in a massive obesity epidemic; overall, about 1 in 4 adults in the US are considered obese, and that number is growing. About one in ten are diabetic, and the numbers there are staggering, with an expectation that half of Americans will be diabetic by 2020, and there are estimates that in the next couple of decades, that could rise to one in three.

And yet, do you have any idea how often someone suggests to me all I need to do is put less on my plate? eat less? exercise more? Simple concepts, which, in fact, fail miserably and have for years for wide swaths of humanity.

Here’s a hint: if it was that simple, I’d have probably figured it out by now and done it. (yes, I’m back on the “it’s complicated” meme again. sorry. but it IS).

This is just the latest facet of the damned Nancy Reagan “Just Say No” mentality, where simple platitudes make you feel like you’re accomplishing something, when in fact, you aren’t. Just say no doesn’t work for drugs, it doesn’t work for teenage sex, it doesn’t work for alcohol or smoking or eating. Real life isn’t that simple. If it was, you wouldn’t need to keep running around yelling “just say no” to people, they’d figure it out on their own. But I guess it makes people feel better. Too bad they don’t actually see if it works before building it into government policy…

Okay, enough ranting. well, maybe. I wanted to share some stuff I’ve run into that may help you understand just how complicated this is. Right now, we’re spending billions of dollars on research into obesity between government programs and medical/pharma industry (because they know if they can figure this out, there’s a goldmine on the other end that’ll make Viagra look like a generic pill). The fact is, obesity is winning, because there are no simple cures. And researchers are seeing this in their research.

I’ve been doing some research into what they’re learning and what’s going on out there, and I’m finding a lot of this fascinating. Hope you do, too.

For instance, there’s good data that at least some obesity might be happening because of a virus. So you might have caught a bug, and it’s decided it wants its host fat and happy, and it doesn’t care what you think.

One of my pet peeves is High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). Don’t get me started. (too late). The food industry keeps telling us it’s okay, there’s nothing to worry about. They so believe in the product they’re trying to change the name (so they can maybe hide from the increasingly bad news about it) for a few more years. But some studies have shown a correlation between the growth in diabetes and insulin dependence tracks on a line that matches the growth in the use of HFCS, and more and more research is calling it into question. For instance, an interesting rat study at Princeton showed that rats gained more weight on Corn Syrup than they did on sugar, even when they were fed the same number of calories (now, you have to be careful translating animal studies to human, they rarely are perfect analogs, and you have to be careful about dosage issues and whether the uses are rational for comparing in humans — if it would take 30 pounds of sugar a day in humans, there are bigger problems…). By the way, these rats showed classic signs of metabolic syndrome (a precursor to diabetes) and increased tryglycerides. Another study out of Florida showed the same issues using fructose instead of sucrose (fruit sugars). And the bottom line? Well, according to the folks at Harvard, here it is: The combined findings demonstrated a 26% higher risk of developing diabetes type 2 and a 20% higher risk of developing metabolic syndrome among people who consumed 1 to 2 sugary drinks per day, compared to individuals whose monthly maximum was just one such drink. Even daily consumption of just one 12-ounce sugary drink raised diabetes type 2 risk by approximately 15%.

Still want that Coke or Pepsi? If so, make it a diet.

Other things impact obesity and weight loss. Feeling depressed? Are you getting enough sleep? Urban living, where you run into pollution, seems to be a factor. And there’s growing evident that, in some cases, your genes do it to you. So can snoring, although what I believe they’re really seeing here is sleep apnea, for which severe snoring is a key symptom.

Fortunately, progress is being made. One thing that seems to make a difference is to move from refined carbs back to complex ones. So look at your carb sources, and work to shift back to whole grains. There’s also research showing that more protein helps. Remember my note yesterday about shifting more to turkey and a higher percentage of protein? Guess why?

Science is starting to understand that diets don’t work; that it’s about lifestyle change (hmm, didn’t I say that recently?) A hot trend is forcing restaurants to display nutritional information (hey! just say no!) — too bad it doesn’t seem to work. wish they’d studied it before implementing those laws, but heck, they probably feel better because they did something.

There’s good news out there, too. A little bit of alcohol helps fight metabolic diseases. If you get rid of sweetened breakfast cereals and go with unsweetened ones, your kids will likely go for the fruit to sweeten it, not sugar (so no more count chocula!) And, of course, getting up and moving around is a good idea. Diet alone isn’t enough, you need to add in the fitness aspect. grumpy knees or no.

What do I take out of all of this?

Well, here’s my “I am not a lawyer” thing: I’m a layman. I’m studying this so I can better understand how to fix my own situation. I’m sharing this so you don’t need to put the time in to find this stuff on your own. But — I’m a layman. So talk to your doctor about this stuff, and have them help you figure out what it means for your situation, because your situation is different than mine. And — believe it or not — I might be wrong here.

But… having said that…

As many changes as I’ve made in my life in the last few years, I still have a ways to go. and what this research gives me some hints on things that are useful options.

I gave up most corn syrup years ago; it’s empty, wasted calories. If you haven’t — stop. Now. I love unsweetened iced tea, fortunately, and in fact over the last few years I’ve done a good job of retraining myself away from a nasty sweet tooth in general. But HFCS sweetened fluids are the first thing my doctor told me to nuke, and he was right. There’s an amazing amount of calories there, and it adds nothing to your diet BUT calories. I’m not someone who is in the “no tolerance” camp for corn syrup, because in american society it’s practically impossible and I’m not going Vegan any time soon (heck, with my allergies, I don’t think I CAN, honestly, even if I wanted to), but whenever I have a choice, I choose away from fructose in general, and high yield corn syrup as much as possible.

After that, where I can, I’m trying to eat whole grains over refined grains. I’m trying to eat more lean protein and less fat and a managed set of carbs. Where I eat carbs, I’m trying to eat complex ones over simple ones (that’s a whole different discussion for later). I avoid trans-fats and processed fats in favor of natural ones (butter rules). And yes, Laurie and I still enjoy a bottle of wine here and there, and I am still known to drink an occasional single malt. But my alcohol usage is probably averaging about 1/3 glass a day or less over a period of a week. AND I’m trying to build up the exercise program.

So in my grand scheme of “fix one thing at a time, and fix it permanently” school of building up a new set of healthier lifestyle habits, the first one I recomment to you is to learn to like unsweetened beverages. Or at the very least, diet — if you tolerate aspartame okay. (I don’t, but I don’t mind using splenda).

One goal I set for myself, and I’ve found it to be a useful one, is to work to make every calorie be worth it — we tend to eat a lot of crap that frankly doesn’t taste that good, merely because it’s there. And a lot of that crap is bad for you. And yes, the occasional In-N-Out burger is “worth it” and so it the occasional Kit-Kat Bar, at least in my universe. but the key word there is occasional, and if you stop and think through what you eat, you’ll probably find a lot of stuff going into the mouth not because it’s tasty or good, but because it’s there. And that’s a good place to start your thinking (well, after you nuke the sugared sodas). And for that, the food diary is king, because it forces you to be conscious of what you’re eating, and once you get conscious of what you’re eating, you’ll probably start thinking to yourself “why the hell am I eating THIS?”

And that starts you down the path to eating better….

okay, I’ve probably ranted about this enough for you all for now, so time to shift to something else. but we’re not done here, are we?

Nah. didn’t think so…

update: This article on diabetes just came out. 26 Million people in the U.S. are diabetic, and another 79 Million are pre-diabetic. 8% of America is Diabetic, and a third of the U.S. adult population is pre-diabetic now. wow. (for comparison, the population of the state of California is roughly 37 million, so we’re talking about 3X that impacted here).

Today’s Shared Links for January 26, 2011

It’s complicated…

My plan to get the weight off is off to a slow start, thanks to the grumpy knees. It’s hard to get an exercise program going when you can’t walk, and for a couple of weeks around Christmas, I wasn’t doing much more than hobbling and hiding under a heating pad. It’s been about two years since I was diagnosed with arthritis in the knees, and so I was due for a few bad days. I just wish I knew what triggered it — I have no idea why the knee got inflamed, and the only thing that seemed to knock the inflammation down was time, rest and heat.

It took a couple of weeks after the holiday for things to settle down, but last week, I felt it was time to get moving and see what happened. Half a mile walk, and that evening, things felt pretty good, so the next day, I did it again. It still felt pretty good, so the day after that, I spent some time doing some cleanup and hauling stuff around in the garage. That left things pretty sore, so I spent a day just sitting and resting — and now it feels pretty good again. Not 100%, but probably 95%.

One of the interesting challenges of arthritis is that one of the best methods to keep it in check is to exercise the affected joint, but if you cause inflammation, you make it worse. So there’s this set of lines you travel through and try to navigate between too little and too much, and when you’re just starting out, “too much” might not be a lot. One of the best ways to impact arthritis is to get off excess weight, but if you can’t exercise, getting the weight off is an interesting challenge. so it all twists into itself and it’s this slow, careful process to get the knotted tangle cleaned up and everything moving forward smoothly.

One of the lessons I’m learning — the hard way, repeatedly — is that this is something you can’t out-stubborn. I have to learn when to back off, when to shut it down and use rest as a therapy. I’m getting better at that, but honestly, my personality is to just bulldog through everything that gets in the way, but some things win, and it’s not always easy to realize you need to go around and try a different strategy…

The answer: just keep trying. Learn to listen to the body, pull back when it tells you to, push forward when you can. It’s a balancing act. And not get frustrated when it’s not right the first time, and not focus too hard on results too quickly in ways that cause serious regressions or major downtime by injury. It took many years to get to this point — it won’t fix itself overnight any more than a baseball player can score five runs with a single swing. Baseball players know this — and yet sometimes they still try. they’re wired that way.

And so part of the trick here is to rewire yourself.

When I started talking to my doctor about these issues, that was one of the things he emphasized. It’s not so much about weight loss, it’s about restructuring your lifestyle, and with it, the health changes will come. If you don’t fix the lifestyle issues — even if you lose weight, changes are, it’ll come back.

That’s something the diet industry doesn’t want to talk about — diets don’t work. Even if you lose weight, most people gain it back. Many people gain back more than they lost — and there’s growing evidence that yo-yo weight loss is more harmful to your health than doing nothing.

The plan my doctor and I talked over years ago was to understand what the root causes of the weight were and deal with the lifestyle and diet issues, to get everything under control and moving forward. Remember that in 2004-05, when this process started, I was living on the burger and fry diet five or six times a week (at least), so to say my diet was a disaster is understating it.

All of these things are habits — and habits are tough to change. It takes about six weeks to rewire a habit, and even after that, can take longer before it feels natural. If you break the cycle of rewiring along the way, you tend to fall back on the old habit again and then have to start over. That falling back can be caused by many things, but a prime cause is stress, so stress is one of those things you need to learn to manage and reducing stress in your life is an important aspect of all of this.

I also found what worked best for me was to keep it simple; one of the worst things you can do is change everything at once — because you’re dealing with so many habits that you’re going to lose out on some of them, and once you do, they cascade and you tend to lose everything. What worked for me was picking some pieces I felt I could change and doing them.

Over time, I went from bad fat-laden, calorie heavy breakfasts, fast-food lunches and generally eating way beyond my metabolism, and eating really crap stuff.

Today? Well, before christmas I spent two weeks logging my food.

(digression: the first and best weapon in getting your diet under control is the food diary. I’ve used a number of tools, including pure manual paper logging, but today, I like Livestrong.com as a place to manage that information. Food diaries, if you’ve never done them, mean you take a period of time and you log everything you eat. EVERYTHING. When, how much. what. and then you work out what the nutriional aspects of that food is. I’ll probably talk about food diaries in more detail later, but suffice it to say, it is a great tool for showing you the food you’re eating that you don’t realize you’re eating by forcing you to be aware of it, but it also gives you a baseline for understanding where your diet now, so you, or a nutritionist, can figure out what you can change to improve it, one dietary problem at a time. this presumes you don’t lie to yourself, of course, and that’s sometimes the hardest part of using a food diary, because deep down inside, you know you’re screwing up and hate to force yourself to admit it. And sometimes, doing that alone makes a big difference…)

What I found was pretty much what I expected to find. My diet breakdown was about 35% calories from fat, anywhere from 30-50% calories from from carbohydrate, and the rest from protein. My goal has been a balanced, 30-30-40 diet, so these numbers are things I could take to a nutritionist and feel happy with. It’s a huge change from when I started (when I was probably 50% or more fat in the diet, much of it saturated), and it affirmed to me I was eating pretty much at maintenance (finally) although not losing.

The problem? That’s a gerat diet for a normal person, but for a diabetic, the carbs are too high, and that’s contributed to the weight I’ve gained since I started treatment, since one of the drugs managing the blood sugar does so by reducing insulin dependence and encouraging moving carbs into the fat cells. Which I need to better manage by reducing carbs so they aren’t there to sequester, which… (like I keep saying, it’s complicated….)

So I need to get those rations to around 35% fat, 30% carbohydrate, 35% protein. I don’t want to raise the fat percentage to reduce carbs, that’s for sure. And I’ve already pulled a few hundred calories a day out of the diet, but I need to pull out another 500 or so to make sure the weight loss gets going on on the downward slope, but I’ve found I have to be careful how I do that, or there are side effects. So I know what I need to do, but finding the right combination of changes that work for me has been — a bit of a challenge.

The big problem spot in the diet is mid-day, when I’m running around and at work. At home, I have my stock of stuff and on weekends things tend to work pretty well. But the weekdays are fighting back. See, carbs are portable. I can stuff Clif bars in my backpack and haul them around (and I do, for those times when my body starts doing the “you need carbs” dance or I end up in a meeting that spans a normal mealtime). Protein? You can’t just stuff a turkey breast in a backpack and not expect bad things to happen if you haul it around for a while — this all requires more planning and care. Most proteins need refrigeration, where carbs tend not to; so I’m having to figure out how best to change all of that around, and yes, that means “carry your lunch”, and using blue ice bricks and stuff. and that means changing out some habits, and…

And in my case, this is more complicated than usual, because of some food allergies. One common protein you can use that doesn’t require refrigeration is nuts, and so peanut butter is a common item in all of this. And guess what? I have a nut allergy, so that’s off the list.

Fortunately, I do in fact like turkey and it’s now a staple. The current goal is to move to a much lighter carb load during the day, and swap in some turkey, add in a regular salad and include a couple of pieces of fruit for morning and afternoon snacks to help regulate the blood sugar across the day, and see what happens.

So we’ll see. It’s been working on weekends, so it seems time to shift it to the weekdays. I’ve picked up the lunch sack. I know how I have to change my shopping (and laurie’s a huge help here, also). The grumpy knees have made me, honestly, not really feel like screwing around with other stuff so much, but now they seem to be cooperating again (mostly). So know we see how it goes, I guess.

And if it doesn’t work, we’ll learn from it and try something else…

Talking about “stuff”….

When I started talking to people about whether I should blog about some of the “stuff” going on in my life — the weight, the diabetes, the apnea, and now the arthritis — I had a lot of people strongly suggest I keep that private. A few were seriously freaked I’d even consider talking about the breakdown, which simply shows that we have a long way to go about understanding and dealing with these kinds of issues as a society. Which is, in fact, a strong reason FOR talking about it, to help teach and help people understand. A common worry was that potential employers reading my blog might shy away; honestly, the fact that I’m 50 hinders this as much or more than any potential worry, and to put it bluntly, any employer that won’t hire me because five plus years ago I needed some help getting my head straight over a few weeks is an idiot, and I don’t want to work for them anyway. It’s their loss. (the whole “aging geek” thing is it’s own discussion for some time in the future, maybe).

There’s a lot of self fear — people worry themselves into inaction. I’ve been there, done that. it took me a long time to go from thinking about talking about this stuff to actually talking about it. Part of that was because I wanted to be sure I knew what I was talking about — that I wasn’t going to screw it up and that I could talk about it intelligently and not but proclaim my expertise in something — but there was also the fear factor.

What I’ve found since deciding to start on this is that it’s making a difference. Every time I talk about the apnea, I get one or two emails from people telling me I’ve convinced them to go get checked, and in a couple of cases, I’ve heard back about the diagnosis and how the CPAP has improved their life. That pretty much everything I’ve heard back has been supportive and positive, and that there’s concrete responses that it’s making a difference — that’s huge. And it makes any potential worries about doing this trivial to me. I don’t know what your goals in life are, but among mine are to leave the world around me a better place, even if only in little ways, and to make a difference instead of just existing; and this seems to be working for both of these goals. When the apnea kicked in, and then the diabetes, it drained a lot out of me and I found myself crawling in a hole just to keep the essentials moving, and now, it’s rather nice to be able to see my ability to fill that hole with concrete and build a launching pad on top of it to get back into the place I’d rather be, which is in the middle of stuff and stirring it up….

Three things helped me get over this hump — and be strong enough to start this discussion. And given the news that Steve Jobs is taking another leave to deal with his issues, I thought it was an appropriate time to talk about them and pass them forward to you as items for you to consider as well.

First one is, not surprisingly, Steve and his commencement speech.

I was still working at Apple at the time, but I knew my time was heading towards the end there. One of these days, I need to write about Steve, having been able to watch him and Apple from a close vantage point for so many years (and Laurie worked at NeXT, way back when as well). What I will say right now is that he could be a tough person to work for, but I never saw him demand more of anyone around him than he demanded of himself. Tough, brutally honest, and yes, I saw him obsess over a comma on a couple of occasions, but that’s because he knew those commas mattered. My last project — Chatterbox — was sometimes the object of his affection and sometimes the object of his attention, and it wasn’t always easy, but Steve isn’t about easy. he’s about getting it right and doing it right, and I’ve said more than once for the right situation, I’d happily go back and see how close I could fly to that particular sun, because if it didn’t kill me, it’d make me a lot better at what I do.

Whatever’s going on now, Steve, good luck at it.

The second thing that got me over this hump was Randy Pausch’s Final Lecture:

I didn’t catch onto it when it first came out, but came back to it more recently. I strongly recommend his book The Last Lecture. Here is someone who found out he was going to die, and his response was to look for ways to make a difference, to leave something. You look at what Randy did, and how can you not be inspired to join him and try as well? I was, and I recommend him to you, also, if you haven’t.

Finally, a third person who showed how you can make a difference if you get over the fear and worry of what people will think. Laurie and I have become fans of Craig Ferguson’s Late Late show, and so I read his book, American on Purpose. It’s a fascinating look at how he got to where he is today (and why), but more important, he made a choice not to be afraid to talk about how he screwed up his life and what it did to him — and use it as a way to try to help people avoid going to the places he went to.

If these people can do it, why can’t I? It turns out the person we most fear in stepping out on these issues is ourselves. And when we grow beyond that fear, good things can happen.

Every time I’ve talked about the apnea, I’ve heard from at least one person who’s written to tell me it’s caused them to realize they need to talk to their doctor. This last time, I heard from two, and one of them has since gone on a CPAP and wrote me to tell me how much better he feels already. When I started talking about the diabetes, similar things happened.

And nothing bad has happened. Nobody’s made me wear a scarlet letter, I haven’t been shunned, I haven’t been ridiculed. I’ve been thanked. And I’ve impacted people’s lives in positive ways — perhaps getting someone into a doctor before the apnea causes a stroke, or before that diabetic coma hits or the kidneys fail from trying to clear out all that sugar. These maybe aren’t huge victories — but they’re victories. And that’s awesome.

I expect at some point the trolls will arrive, because that’s what they do. But what’s more important — avoiding trolls that have no power you don’t hand to them in your reaction? Or helping someone change their life for the better.

That first time you do it, it’s tough to get over that hump. Once you do it once, you’ll find it’s pretty good, and pretty easy. So here, for you, are three things that might help you, too, get over that hump.

You can change the world, one person at a time — if only you decide to try.

Today’s Shared Links for January 25, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for January 24, 2011

January 24, 2011

Notes from the Commish — The New York Islanders

Welcome to the latest ruling in “Notes from the Commish” where I as the Commish of the NHL (in my universe) and my Vice President of Disclipine Barfy will pontificate upon the state of the game and what I think needs to be changed. The fact is, NHL hockey is in pretty damn good shape overall, not that you’d believe that reading some of the pundits out there. But the reality is, a business the size of the NHL can never be perfect, and there are always things that can be improved, and there will always be things that need to be fixed. And I’m the guy to fix it. (or replace this with something witty and snarky)

Tonight’s Note from the Commish is about the New York Islanders.

Today is the day I call Charles Wang and tell him its over. Lighthouse isn’t going to be built. His existing arena is a pit, and whatever options he thinks he has to replace it are fantasies. It’s clear his interest in building a competitive team is waning and budget is becoming a bigger priority on the Island. he gave the Island a good and well-designed shot to build a new building, and they chose not to.

That’s their prerequisite. Nobody HAS to build new arenas just because an owner wants one. But we, as a league, aren’t required to keep a team in a place where it can’t be competitive and doesn’t have an acceptable place to play.

So I call Charles Wang, and I tell him to open negotiations with the folks in Winnipeg. The Islander lease is up in 2015. There’s plenty of time for a deal to be worked out, for the Winnipeg arena upgrades to be funded and implemented, and for the team to be relocated gracefully and with minimum angst. Assuming Winnipeg can come up with the money for the needed arena improvements and an ownership group that can afford to buy and operate the team. I think they can — but they so far haven’t had to, they’ve just said they want to.

This seems to work for everyone, except the people on the Island. And.. Well.. Sorry, Islanders fans. Talk to the folks who stood in the way of the new arena, okay? We tried. There comes a time when you have to cut your losses and move forward — just as the league did in Quebec City and Winnipeg in years past.

it’s of course possible a Winnipeg deal wouldn’t happen; talk is cheap, funding is not always as easy as you might hope. So the fallback here would be to find the right people and move the Islanders to Kansas City, another place I believe could support a team now. Definitely support it better than being the third team in New York Metro, at least.

But whether it’s Winnipeg, or whether it’s K.C., it’s time to do something with the Islanders, and the thing that needs done is realize it’s not going to happen on the island, and it’s time to move this team forward elsewhere.

Agree? Disagree? drop a comment with your opinion.

Got a rule or some aspect of hockey you want the Commish or — Colin — to rule on? drop us an email or a comment with the question. And we’ll be back soon with another Note from the Commish.

Today’s Shared Links for January 23, 2011

Cold Weather Photography

Today’s Shared Links for January 22, 2011

National Geographic Afghan Girl

Today’s Shared Links for January 21, 2011

detroit, Nabokov and “throwing the dice”

Erik Duhatschek:

The Detroit Red Wings’ decision to throw the dice and sign goaltender Evgeni Nabokov represents a fascinating gamble, but not that much of a departure from organizational policy – pre-lockout organization policy that is.

Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but I’m guessing there’s less dice throwing here than most people think, and as far as I can tell, Detroit has an option nobody’s talked about in public. That is going to one of the teams low in the standings, and therefore with the highest priority in the waiver all, why would you not be interested if Ken Holland called you up and offered you a third round pick to pick up Nabokov off waivers and then trade him back to Detroit? Any reason why Garth Snow would not be interested in a free draft pick? And if the Islanders were to claim and trade Nabby, that’d ace almost everyone out of the derby here.

If Holland is willing to put the money and cap space up to sign Nabokov, I can’t see any reason why he wouldn’t protect his interests by working a deal to make sure Nabokov ends up through waivers and in a Detroit uniform, and dealing with a team low in the standings and offering them some compensation to help seems an obvious gambit here — and I can see nothing in the rules precluding a waiver call and a trade back to the team that signed him. All it takes is a GM willing to cooperate, and why wouldn’t a team like the Islanders want that draft pick?

So I won’t be at all surprised if (a) Nabokov clears waivers, or (b) Nabokov gets picked by a team that trades him to the Wings for some consideration. What will suprise me is if this happens, and people are surprised by it, because the Wings prove time and time again they leave very little to chance.

(update: so the islanders did pick up nabby, but one aspect I missedis that he’d have to go through waivers on a trade, so he’s stuck there. and as of now, he’s saying he won’t report, so we’ll see how this new drama plays out…)

Today’s Shared Links for January 20, 2011

Going out for a walk…

The weather was wonderful here in the Bay Area today, so I went out for a walk. Not a huge one — a total of half a mile, but just before christmas, one of my knees decided to secede from the Union and I’ve been working to bring it back into the fold since.

I think I need a bit of a digression for that to make sense. Back in late 2007, I was out birding and walking, and while out, took a step back and landed in a gopher hole, twisting my knee and doing the “hop around on one leg cussing like a sailor” thing. So I got myself home and got ice on it and gave it a couple of weeks to recover.

It didn’t get better. So I resigned myself to having it checked and went to my doctor, and told him I’d torn the meniscus. So he sent me off to the orthopede and we took xrays of the knees, and he sat me down and said “see this? you’ve torn your meniscus”.

And so I asked him if we needed to go in and clean it up. His response wasn’t what I was expecting, it was “no, we’re trying to delay your knee replacements as long as possible”. And then he showed me the arthritis. Which today I realize shouldn’t have surprised me, since there’s a family history — and since i tore the meniscus of one knee back in high school (long before arthroscopic surgery was invented), grumpy knees the predict the weather isn’t exactly a new thing.

But I do have to admit hearing that I should expect knee replacements at some point didn’t exactly make my day. But we talked over various options and ways to manage it when it flared up, and thanks in large part to 500mg of Relafin twice a day, the last three years have been almost painless (literally), beyond the usual weather predicting grumpiness and the occasional twinge.

This wasn’t a twinge, however. For reasons I don’t know (I have no idea what caused the flareup), the other knee, not the one I messed up in 2007, but the one that’s been grumping at me for 30 years, decided to have a major argument; swelled up, stiffened up, lots of pain and general “don’t you know it’s the freaking holiday, why now?” kind of thing. So for the last month, I’ve been living mostly on the couch under a heating pad. There were a couple of weeks where I should have used crutches, but I’m too damn stubborn some days…

This is the kind of thing where it just takes time to get the inflammation down, although I was starting to think I might need to get my dosage raised or consider a switch to a different drug (but the Relafin works well, I tolerate it nicely, and honestly, I really don’t want to load up on larger doses of NSAIDs unless I absolutely have to…). Fortunately, while it flared up a second time during the trip to SoCal (the main reason we cut the christmas trip short and cancelled our plans for Salton Sea….), it’s been slowly getting better and the last week or so has finally been getting almost back to normal.

So when I say I went out for a walk, given how things were two weeks ago, that’s awesome. Not pain free, but now it’s time to start the dance down the thin line of getting exercise onto the joint without so much exercise that it flares up again. The nice thing is, 30 minutes under a heating pad after lunch at work and the stiffness and pain was all gone, which is what I was hoping for. Shows that we’re almost back to normal.

But this has complicated some of my plans for the last few weeks; I couldn’t implement the exercise program because I couldn’t exercise, and I’ve been doing a lot of sitting on the couch with the iPad consuming stuff rather than at the laptop creating stuff, but that’s also a nice break; I don’t do that enough, honestly, and it gave me a chance to catch up on some reading, which I’ll try to do reviews on soon — that’s been on the todo list for a while.

Being limited to what birding I can do from the car has been annoying, so it was nice to get out to EEC in Alviso and wander a bit. And the downtime has given me a chance to put some research time in on some issues, and you’ll hopefully see the results soon.

And I get to keep my own knees for a while longer, even if they occasionally behave like spoiled teenagers and pout when the weather’s bad…

Today’s Shared Links for January 19, 2011

Free Short Fiction — Gord and Fnord Go To the Zoo

The feedback I got for posting Downtime at Christmas was heartwarming and very positive, so I’m going to post some of my other fiction as well. Thank you all for the kind thoughts.

This story was originally titled Guilding the Lily, and was sold to Jane Yolen for Xanadu 3, published by Tor in 1995. It’s one of my favorites of all time, allowed me to honor Fritz Leiber and his Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories a bit while doing what I seemed to do best, which is take some standard genre conventions and poke at them until they squealed. In this case, it’s not so much a fantasy story as it is a story about living in a fantasy.

Neither of us liked the original title, and neither of us could really figure out what the title ought to be, so I mentioned my working title, which is actually an obscure reference to an obscure Bill Cosby comedy bit, and so we ran with that. You will either really like this story, or you’ll really hate it; it tended to polarize readers based on whether they could put up with me playing games with genre conventions.

Gord and Fnord Go To the Zoo

“Gord! Gord, wake up, dammit!”

Across the stained and battered table, a mightily-thewed warrior lifted his head and groaned, staring at his companion through blood-shot, unfocused eyes.

“Keep your voice down, Fnord. My brain hurts. What do you want?” The head fell back to the table with a thump.

The thin-faced, shifty-looking thief stared at the quivering hulk of his partner. ”Gord, I’m bored. Let’s go do something.”

Gord stirred again. ”You woke me up to tell me you’re bored?” He sat up. Swaying, he almost fell off his stool, but grabbed the table to steady himself. ”Would you rather be bored? Or dead? Barkeep! Another beer!”

“Gord, it’s going to be another week before the Count musters the army and marches us off to attack the Archmage Frelming’s castle in the Valley of the Archetypes. Until then, we have nothing to do.” A large, bald man scurried up, left a full tankard, and hurried back behind the bar across the room. ”We can’t just sit here drinking for another week!”

“Why the hell not? Seems like a reasonable pastime to me!”

“For one thing, you overgrown dolt, if we sit here for a week doing nothing but drinking and watching you pass out for hours at a time, the readers are all going to flip past us and go read the next story.”

“Who cares? I don’t care about those voyeurs, anyway. Have you ever seen one? If they were real men, they’d be carrying swords, not reading about them. The hell with them.” Gord took a huge swallow and then symbolically belched at the ceiling.

“For another thing, we only have enough money for one more day of drinking at the rate you’re putting it away. After that, we’re on the wagon unless we can find some cash to tide us through until the muster.”

“Well why didn’t you say so?” Gord shuddered and then gulped down the last of his beer. ”I am not looking forward to meeting Frelming sober.”

“You don’t have to. I know where there’s a large treasure store about a day’s walk away. We’ll even get a reward from the Count for recovering it, and have enough cash on hand to not only let you drink yourself into oblivion, but to do so at Katrina’s House of Humping.”

The Barbarian’s face lit up. ”Really? Great!” Suddenly, the face clouded over in a frown. ”What’s the catch? If it’s only a day away, why hasn’t someone else gone and got it yet?”

“Nothing serious, Gord. The treasure is protected by a dragon, that’s all.”

“That’s all!” Gord reached across the table and grabbed the thief by the throat. Around the room, conversations stopped. A few of the more timid people dove under their tables.

“Gord! Gord, put me down and listen! GAK! Gord! Put me down!”

The barbarian let go, and Fnord fell to his stool with a clunk. He sat there for a second, rubbing his throat and staring at Gord in disgust.

“Listen, you lunkhead. Think it through. We have a week before the war starts. We’re almost out of money. There’s a treasure hoard just out of town, and it’s being guarded by a dragon. The author needs a sub-plot to keep the reader interested in the story until the real action starts. All we need to do is wander down to the dragon’s cave, kill the dragon, bring back the money, and then the Author will send us offstage for a few days of carousing until the war starts.”

“Right, Fnord. Why can’t the Author simply have us kill the dragon offstage and give us a few days of on stage carousing at Katrina’s instead?”

“We’re not in that kind of book, Gord. You know that.”

“Yeah, well. How do you know the sub-plot isn’t two idiots get eaten by a dragon’?”

“Think about it. Have you seen any other characters in this story? Everyone in the bar is a spear carrier. They don’t really exist. Even the bartender is a generic stereotype, and he’s the only guy who’s even had a walk-on. We’re the stars of this novel. The Author can’t kill us off for at least another 100 pages! Nothing can go wrong!”

Gord rubbed his forehead. ”I dunno, Fnord.”

“Here, look at this.” Fnord reached down to the floor for his pack, opened it and pulled out a sheaf of papers. ”This is the first draft of the book. I sneaked if off the clerk’s desk at the Hero Guild before we signed up for this story. We not only survive the dragon, but we go on to rally the armies when all seems helpless and carry the day on to victory. We’re heroes, Gord!”

“I can’t read, Fnord. I’m a Barbarian, remember? Never trusted all those squiggles and stuff. I still don’t know. Dragons are nasty business. I don’t like the idea of going up against a dragon single-handed.”

“You won’t be going against it alone. I’ll be there, too.”

“Oh, well, that’s different. What the hell. Let’s go. I like the idea of finally being the star of my own story.”

# # #

The next morning, the two adventurers set out. Gord, his furs only slightly matted and his eyes almost focused, bore a huge, gleaming broadsword slung across his back. The thief was in his green-dyed leather armor, and carried a short sword and two daggers stuck into scabbards in his belt.

“Wow, Gord. What a great day. We’re heading out on adventure, just like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, or Bing and Bob.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Just some other famous teams of adventurers.”

They followed the wagon path out of town, and at a fork took the smaller path that led off in the general direction of Mount Blackheart, a huge, black outcrop of obsidian that loomed to the south. It was there they’d been told the dragon had his lair.

They made the base of the mountain by early afternoon and decided to rest before beginning the climb. While munching on their cheese and stale bread, they saw a huge black shape cross the sky and disappear into the mountain about a third of the way up. ”See, Gord! There he is! Piece of cake!”

The barbarian shuddered. ”You don’t suppose we can convince the Author to turn the dragon into a rabid wolverine, could we?”

“No, Gord. Has to be a dragon. C’mon, let’s go.”

“How are we supposed to kill this thing, anyway?”

“Well, here’s how the Author’s written it in the first draft. We climb the mountain to the dragon’s cave. He’s just returned from feeding on the Count’s cattle, so he’ll be sleeping. We sneak into the cave without waking him up. I sneak behind the beast to hamstring him, but the dragon wakes up and swipes at me. I’m thrown against the wall and badly injured. It looks like the end for both of us, but in a final desperate move, you make a wonderfully dramatic attack and behead the beast. It dies, you give me the potion of healing I have in my pack, and then we grab as much gold as we can and the head of the dragon and head off for our reward and a few days at Katrina’s. Sound reasonable?”

“I don’t like this, Fnord. How about I give you the broadsword and you make the dramatic attack?”

“Gord, we can’t do that. I’m a thief. You’re the barbarian, right? The Guild rules say that I have to run around in the background and make sneaky backstab attacks, while you scream at the top of your lungs and do berserk things with your sword. You don’t want to lose your card, do you?”

“Um, no.”

“Good. So it’s settled.” Fnord stood up. ”Let’s get climbing.”

There was a sudden rush of wind and flapping of reptilian wings, and the dragon landed on Gord from above. Gord did the only possible thing: he collapsed in a heap.

The dragon turned around and stared at Fnord. He smiled. ”Ah, fresh meat! And they deliver. How nice.”

The thief stared at the huge, black beast. It picked up the former barbarian in one large claw and poked him with the tip of one wing. ”Hmm. They sent this one already marinated.” With a sudden movement, the dragon snapped off Gord’s head and swallowed it. The dragon dropped the former barbarian to the ground and looked at Fnord. ”Your turn.”

“You can’t do that! You’re supposed to be up in your cave asleep so we can kill you! We saw you come back from your cattle hunt!”

“I wasn’t hunting. I was at a Dragon Guild meeting that ran late. I’m lucky I got home in time for your visit.” He licked his chops. ”I’m starved.”

“You can’t do this! The Author won’t allow it! We’re the heroes of this book! We can’t die! We’ve got at least another 100 pages and a war to fight!”

“How long has it been since you checked in with the Guild? You dimwit! There’s been a change. The Editor thought you two were boring, so the Author cut you out of the book. This isn’t a novel any more. It’s a short story!”

That day, the dragon fed well. The next, he returned to the Dragon Guild to apply for a new story.

# END #

Today’s Shared Links for January 18, 2011

20+ years of hockey.

Laurie and I are both part of the increasingly rare group known as first season sharks fans (and cow palace survivors) — laurie was the 150th person to put a deposit down once the Sharks started taking reservations. Our first year at the Cow Palace we did a partial season, in year two, we upgraded to full season and we’ve been doing full season tickets ever since, and we’ve been sitting in 127 since the arena opened.

It’s hard to think this is the Shark’s 20th anniversary, but it is, and that’s a lot of hockey passing before us. We typically get to between 35-40 games a year in San Jose; every year we tell ourselves we’ll sell off a few more tickets, and every year, we rarely do. Our best guess is we’ve been in the house for 650 Sharks games so far, plus/minus about 20. Add to that our season working for the San Francisco Spiders (35 games with the spiders, plus about 30 games with the Sharks that year), and our regular road trips which have included games all over the west coast, from San Diego (the IHL Gulls) and Vegas (the IHL Thunder) and Phoenix (the IHL Roadrunners) to Vancouver, Portland (the WHL WinterHawks), Seattle (the WHL Thunderbirds and Laurie’s seen games in Everett) and even places like Victoria (go Salsa!) for some junior-A action. We even made it to Fresno for the ECHL all-star game a few years ago, mostly so we could say we did…

All in all, a lot of hockey; not bad for an LA-born southern california boy. As of now, my arena life list includes:

NHL –

San Jose Arena (Sharks)
Cow Palace (Sharks)
The Fabulous Forum (Kings)
Staples Center (Kings)
The Pond (Ducks)
GM Place (Canucks)

IHL (may it rest in peace) –

San Diego (Gulls)
Las Vegas (Thunder)
Long Beach (Ice Dogs)
San Francisco (Spiders)
Phoenix (Roadrunners)

WHL

Portland (Winter Hawks)
Seattle (Thunderbirds)

BCJHL

Victoria (Salsa) — both in the old arena (now torn down) and while they were playing in Esquimalt

Still on my list to od some day — a trip through the Ottawa/Toronto/Montreal area for the NHL teams and the OHL/QMJHL teams I can fit in along the way; I really want to do the Calgary, Red Deer and Edmonton trip in the winter when there’s hockey (we’ve done it for baseball, back when there was still minor league baseball in those cities), and a major run through BC to hit some of the WGHL teams, especially out in the Okanagan. Someday.

Until then, I’ll just have to “settle” for the Sharks. Not that I’m complaining.

I was thinking about this at the game the other night — the Sharks (that were at that point losing to Edmonton and looking ugly doing so and I wondered if this team could win against some of the more classic Sharks teams, and the invoked the name of Robin Bawa as I’m known to do. This is not an insult to Bawa, FWIW — he wasn’t the most talented Shark ever to skate in teal, but he brought his work ethic with him every night.

This got me thinking about the good times and good players back in the early days of the Sharks, and given this is the 20th anniversary, what the heck. I decided to create my personal all-time Sharks All Star team.

The rules were simple. Players had to be no longer playing in the NHL to be eligible. I’m trying to build a full team. For reasons I’ll go into shortly, I decided to do three “offensive” lines instead of two, plus an energy line, plus a fourth line, for five forward lines total. Three defensive pairings and two goaltenders.

Here’s my list.

Forwards:

Igor Larionov, Sergei Makarov, Johan Garpenlov
Kelly Kisio, Owen Nolan, Jeff Friesen
Jamie Baker, Mike Ricci, Vinnie Damphousse
Mike Sullivan, Gaetan Duschesne, Ulf Dahlen
Jeff Odgers, Andrei Nazarov, Shawn Cronin

Defense

Sandis Ozolinsh, Jay More
Rob Zettler, Doug Zmolek
Mike Rathje, Gary Suter

Goaltenders

Arturs Irbe
Mike Vernon

Notes on these choices –

The reason I went with five forward lines is because the line of Larionov/Makarov/Garpenlov was a special one for the Sharks (and I hope at some point the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame inducts them in as a line), but I wanted to recognize some of the others that contributed as well and I wanted more than three spots. So I made a special exemption here rather than what typically happens, which is the checkers and energy guys get screwed. So we have three “top six forward” lines, plus a checking line, plus an energy line.
I included Nazarov over Link Gaetz because I think in the grand scheme of things, he contributed more,l onger, to the Sharks, even though Gaetz is legendary — albeit not in a positive way. My other candidate for enforcer is probably Lyndon Byers.
I declared Nabokov “not retired” and not eligible. And then Laurie and I had a long discussion about whether Vernon would be chosen over Nabokov even if he was eligible. I argued in favor of Vernon; I don’t think I won the argument.
Players I’d find a way to attach to this list if they were retired: Ray Whitney, Brad Stuart, Marco Sturm, Evgeny Nabokov (probably; I rarely disagree with Laurie on goalies, because I wouldn’t win).

So, who’d be on your list?

Today’s Shared Links for January 17, 2011

The Social Graph: Revolution or Evolution?

The Social Graph: Revolution or Evolution?:

Arguably, the first serious discussion into implementing archival and retrieval of public online information was via Usenet; in early 1985 Chuq Von Rospach posted an RFC for a “usenet article archive program with keyword lookup”.

Social discussion online in itself is obviously not new. Usenet used to be a particularly social platform, distinguished from walled off forums by being decentralised and entirely public. The same metrics used to grade the value of Tweets and Tweeters could be used in any other public arena of social discussion where links or their equivalent are shared, presuming that individual contributors can be identified (which would admittedly be less clear on Usenet than Facebook and Twitter).

I’d actually forgotten about this stuff. In reality, Brad Templeton did a lot more work looking into keywording (reinvented these days as tagging) on USENET; I did some research into how the keywording that was added to USENET was used and found out that user-added keywords were mostly junk and experimented with auto-generating keywords and just didn’t find it useful in that context. Brad pushed it further, but it never took off.

Another thing in the dark annals of time to mention in this context — Erik Fair wrote an article on a concept called an “Accolade” for :login — which today has been invented as the like button. It’s fascinating to see those ideas in the context of today, now that technology has created the opportunity to actually do these things; remember, at that time, USENET and most of the net was actually driving by low speed modems and not only hadn’t been HTML been implemented (not for another decade), but there were no significant database back ends to store all this data in, much less shared data sets or web services (since HTTP is also close to a decade away); all this data needed to get slogged out to every server to keep a local copy of — USENET ultimately may have been the most wonderfully inefficient use of network capacity ever…

Links for your amusement: link, link, link, link.

Has it really been 25 years? How time flies when you’re having fun.

And I’ll close with a quote from that final link, which is just as true about the net today:

USENET is like Gene Wolfe’s Soldier in the Mists. Every day, it wakes up and sees everything as new.

Today’s Shared Links for January 16, 2011

why I don’t like photo a day projects…..

30 Post 365 Project: 3 of 365 « PhotoCapM:

First, let me say that I’m only 3 days into my first 365 and I can absolutely see why people struggle to get it done. I’m only shooting 30 minutes or a little more and I’m feeling the “crunch” today with time. Wow… You really have to push yourself to get it done.

This statement by Michael Frye, in a microcosm, is why I don’t like photo a day or 365 projects…

I have nothing against them — but personally, I can’t see a purpose for me.

I’ve met too many photographers who’ve committed to one who get in a few weeks or months and find themselves at 10PM at night, taking a picture of their stapler just to do something, and about then, they seem to wonder “WHAT AM I DOING?”

There are many aspects about being a better photographer that this not only doesn’t help, but I feel gets in the way of. It’s not about improving your eye for composition, or practicing your post processing, or studying technique, or extending your craft. It’s about pushing the button — to me, it turns into grunt work very quickly, and sends a message (which I don’t like) that the only thing that matters is pushing the shutter button. How does that improve your craft?

So my recommendation is this: If you go into this kind of project, understand what your goal is and know why this project is going to help you with that goal. The day it turns into a grind you regret starting, or that you don’t feel like it’s helping those goals — stop. it starts being destructive the day it starts making you hate touching the camera….

And remember that pushing the button is really a minor part of being a photographer, and not necessarily a major aspect of photography. if all you’re doing is hauling out a camera once a day and pushing a button while pointing it at something, why are you doing this?

If what you need is some project to force you into the habit of taking pictures — great. but realize that at some point of the year, you’re likely to start taking pictures just for the project, and not for the larger goals. When you do that, ask yourself if the project still makes sense.

And realize that there are many other things you should also be doing to continue your growth as a photographer, and do those as well.

For me, that’s why I made a decision to do the Saturday Foto Fest, and the Friendly Feathery Sunday postings. It forces me to evaulate my portfolio every week, and make choices — and it also forces me to add new material on a regular basis so I don’t run out of stuff to post; but it also recognizes time realities and the other aspects of my life, and that I feel more that it’s about the finished product over time than about a daily ritual of button pressing.

If you want to do a 365 project, have fun! and I guess that’s my point. The day if stops being fun is the day you should stop. Don’t continue just because you started it; continue it because it’s helping you with the goal you set when you started it.

Canon EOS 7D AutoFocus Modes Explained

There’s some really good suggestions here on how to take better advantage of the capabilities of your camera by using custom options to tweak how it thinks — getting out of the default settings and further bending the camera to your needs. You should definitely check out the article by Gary Luhm he points to, because there’s some great suggestions based on how Gary programs his camera for these situations. I’ve always done what many photographers do and reprogram AF away from the shutter button and use the AF button to engage it, but his idea of leaving AF engage on the shutter and using the button as an AF OFF button to turn it off when you want to freeze makes sense. I’ll need to try that. My only wonder — is it going to be easy/possible to hit both the AE lock and AF OFF at the same time? Not that I need that often, but…

Canon EOS 7D AutoFocus Modes Explained | Serious Amateur Photography:

Capturing images of birds in flight is perhaps the most difficult task a camera (and photographer) can tackle. Even the most experienced wildlife professionals are always looking for a more robust AF system in their cameras to improve the “hit rate” of tack sharp shots they take in the field. No photographer wants to spend hours, days or weeks shooting graceful takeoffs and landings of birds in flight and return home to find their images soft, blurred and worthless to their clients. So whenever a camera manufacturer develops a brand new autofocus system for their mid-level cameras like Canon recently did with the EOS 7D, a lot of photographers will sit up and take notice.

Having a camera like Canon’s EOS 7D with a brand new AF system doesn’t guarantee sharp images however, unless you take the time to learn to use it properly. Unfortunately, learning the “ins & outs” of a camera’s AF system can be a difficult and time consuming process, even for the most seasoned of professionals. With that in mind, here’s a few things about the 7D’s new 19-point AF system that you should know before heading out to the field.

2010 Collection of Best Images Listing (via JMG Galleries)

Every year, Jim Goldstein at JMG Galleries collects a list of photographer’s best photos. He’s now published the list, and it’s got a whopping 160 lists, including some really awesome imagery. I’ve included mine for the second year (my list is here).

You can check out Jim’s blog on this (also, make sure you check out his list of best images), and here is this year’s list:

Best Photos of 2010 blog project Results

via JMG-Galleries and Borrowlenses.com

Best Photos of 2010 by Jim M. Goldstein – JMG-Galleries
Best Photos of 2010 by Matthias Wassermann – Mawpix.com
Exploring Light -Top Photos 2010 – Chris Moore
My Top Ten Photos for 2010 – Tom Varden
My Top Ten Photos of 2010 | Craig’s Musings – Craig Vitter
Top 10 Photos for 2010 | Dobson Central – Ken Dobson
Best Photos of 2010 – Carol Bauer
My Best photos from 2010 – Janis Janums
2010 – Year In Review – Jon McCormack Photography – Jon McCormack
S Zacharias: Best of 2010 – Stephen Zacharias
2010 Photos – David Hernandez
Iceman Photography – Top 10 in 2010
Best of 2010 – Dave Wilson
Skolai Images – Bears of 2010 – Carl Donohue
My Best Photos From 2010 – Art Kuntz
2010 in Review – Jay Goodrich
My Favourite Images of 2010– Sven Seebeck
Lunchisoptional: Favorites of Year: 2010 Edition — Ken Trout
Top 10 of 2010 – Behind The Clicks – Mohammad Noman
Top Ten Photos Of 2010 – Jed Link
Chuqui.com- Best Photos 2010 – Chuq Von Rospach
2010 Favorites – Pat Ulrich | Pat Ulrich Photography
Favorites of 2010 – Kevin Moore
Top 10 of 2010 from BlazingB Photography– Bill Pennington
My Favorite Photos of 2010– Mike Criss
My faves from 2010 – Matt Smith
My favourite shots of 2010– Catalin Marin | Momentary Awe
2010 a Year in Review, My Top 10 Memorable/Favorite shots – Mike Criswell
Craig Ferguson Images – A Year In Photos – Craig Ferguson
Top 50 Images from 2010 and Goal Setting – Mike Cavaroc
Jim’s Photography – Jim Wheeler
Sharpimage.net – The best of 2010 – David Sharp
StephenWeaver Photography/Earth Systems Imaging-Stephen G. Weaver
Best of 2010 – Changing Perspectives – Jenni Brehm
katzekotz.de – best of 2010 – Thomas Kneppeck
2010 Favorite Images – Alpenglow Images – Greg Russell
Best of 2010| Simon Says – Simon Ponder
My Favorites Shots of 2010 – Fine Art Prints – Jeff Colburn
Mountain and Climbing Photography – Alexandre Buisse
Olivier Du Tré | 2010 in review (black and white) | 2010 in review (colour)– Olivier Du Tré
John Dunne Photography | My Top 10 Favourite Images of 2010 – John Dunne
Best of 2010 Flickr Set – Tony Rath
Top 10 from 2010 – Behind-the-lens-lukey – Luke Weymark
Evan Gearing Photography’s Top 10 of 2010 – Evan Gearing
2010 Photos in Review: Water– Rebecca R Jackrel
Justin Korn [dot] com – Best of 2010 – Justin Korn
My Best Photos of 2010: Learning and Growing> – D. Travis North
Uncommon Depth – Roberta Murray
Organic Light Photography Best of 2010 – Youssef Ismail / Organic Light Photography
The Best of 2010 – blackandwhite.ie – Neil McShane
My Best of 2010 – Larry Rosenstein
Will Wohler Photography: 2010 A Year in Review – Will Wohler
digitizedchaos – best of 2010 – rian castillo
My best underwater photos 2010 – Suzy Walker
Favorite Photographs From 2010– Fine Art Landscape Photography of Seung Kye Lee
Best photos from 2010 – Amanda Herbert
Graf Nature Photography | Reflections on 2010 photographs – MARK GRAF
VACANT SHOP IN DOWNTOWN SANTA BARBARA – G. Kaltenbrun
Pat O’Brien Photography – A Look Back at 2010 – Pat O’Brien
G Dan Mitchell – 2010 Favorites– G Dan Mitchell
Favorite Photo of 2010 – Naturalvision-photo.com –Derek Griggs
Crest, Cliff & Canyon – Jackson Frishman
2010 In Review - Photoimagery.net – Peter McCabe
Favorite Photos from 2010 – In the Field Photo Blog– Richard Wong
Year in Review Best Photos of 2010 – Matt Graham Photo Blog – Matt Graham
Elizabeth Brown Photography PhotoBlog: Ten Favorite Photos of 2010 – Elizabeth Brown
My Top Photos of 2010 – Jonesblog – Bryan William Jones
latoga photograph: My Favorite Photos of 2010 – Greg A. Lato
Best of 2010 Images – Rob Tilley
Living Wilderness: 12 Best from 2010 – Kevin Ebi
Highlights of 2010 - TO KNOW MORE WEB JOURNAL – KENT MEARIG
My Best Photos of 2010 – Michael Russell | Michael Russell Photography
Best Photographs of 2010 – Chuck Goolsbee
Favourite Photos from 2010 – Tim Smalley
My Best 10 Photos 2010 – A Reconnection to Nature – Mark Fenwick
Best of 2010 – Quotidian Photography – Jessica Sweeney
My Top Images of 2010 – ANDREW KEE
Best 10 of 2010– John Wall’s Natural California
10 from 2010 on the Ann-alog– Ann Torrence
Favorite Photos from 2010– My Photo Blog – Ron Niebrugge
My favorite photos 2010 on Flickr– Markus Heinisch
My best photos of 2010 – Mike Hellers
Dave Reichert’s Best Of 2010 – Dave Reichert
Best Pics 2010 on Flickr – Michael Rubin
My 10 Best Shots of 2010 – ROBIN BLACK PHOTOGRAPHY – ROBIN BLACK
Top 10 from 2010 – Anne McKinnell
Top Photos of 2010– Gary Crabbe / Enlightened Images
Top Images from 2010 – Russ Bishop | Nature Photo Blog
10 Best Photos of 2010 by Scott Thompson – Scott Thompson
My Top 10 photos of 2010– Alexander S. Kunz
My 10 Best for 2010– Dan Baumbach
Unified Photography – Best Photos of 2010 – Ken Snyder
5 From 2010 – Contemporary Wildlife Photography – David Lloyd
2010 Top Ten Photos – Andrew S Gibson
2010 Reflections – Dru Stefan Stone – Dru-Color My World
Best of 2010 – Dave Hammaker
Top 20 of 2010 – Jenna Stirling
LandLopers.com Top Travel Photos of 2010 – Matt Long
Best of 2010 – Stephen Davey
Views Infinitum – Best of 2010 – Scott Thomas
One Per Trip – Favorite Travel Photos From 2010 - The Carey Adventures – PETER WEST CAREY
My top 10 pictures from 2010 – Duffy Knox
Burrard-Lucas Photography– Will & Matt Burrard-Lucas
Hank Christensen Photography Top 10 2010 – Hank Christensen
My Best Photos from 2010 – 365-1/4 Sra
Top Ten Images of 2010– Michael Frye
Jono Hey’s Best of 2010 on Flickr – JONO HEY
My Favorite Photographs from 2010– Stories From Home –David Patterson
My 2010 Best Images of California and Arizona– Steve Sieren
My Top 10 Landscapes of 2010 – Andre Leopold
Best of 2010 set on Flickr – Erik Turner
Top 10 of 2010 – Brian Mangano
Best Photos of 2010 - KBTImages – Kevin Thornhill
Top 10 of 2010 – Chad Griggs
Best Photos of 2010 – WASEEF AKHTAR
My Favorite Images from 2010 – Outdoor Exposure Photography by Sean Bagshaw – Sean Bagshaw
My Best Shots of 2010 – Annika Ruohonen Photography – Annika Ruohonen
Top sights from 2010 – Mariana Travieso Bassi
Year 2010 in Korwel Photography – Iza Korwel
Top 10 of 2010 – Younes Bounhar
Light on the Landscape Photoblog/My Favorite Images of 2010– WILLIAM NEILL
My Best Photos of 2010 – Itsa a greyt day for a photo – Terri Jacobson
Listening to Nature Photography Blog by Rhoda Maurer– RHODA MAURER
My favorites of 2010 – David Richter
Best of 2010 – View from the Little Red Tent – Edie Howe
tmophoto best of 2010 – Thomas O’Brien
Best Photos Of 2010 – Dawnstar Australis – Daniel McNamara
Top 10 of 2010 - Cranial Aperture – Jeffrey Yen
10 Best Favorites of 2010– Sudheendra Kadri
Flickr – Best of 2010 – Chris Arts
Flickr: Best of 2010 – Heidi Donat
Best Photo of 2010 – Anton Huo
Best of 2010 – Travel & Landscape – Eugene Cheng
Preetalina Photography: 2010 Favorites – Preeti Desai
Hidden Light Photography 2010 Favorites – Alan Williams
5Mae 2010 Favourites Flickr Set – Sarah-Mae
Best Photos of 2010– John Fujimagari
Best of 2010 – Paavani Bishnoi
Best Photos of 2010 - Phil Colla
100 Favorites from 2010– Patrick J. Endres
Top Ten Of 2010 – Steve Cole Photography
Some of My Favorite Images From 2010 – Clark Crenshaw Photography

About “the list”

So I got out for a couple of hours of birding on Sunday, my first of the year. I ended up down in Coyote Valley again, where there’s been a couple of Palm Warblers hanging out. I tried for them once before in December and while I think I saw them, I didn’t get a good enough look for me to feel I could say “yes, I definitely can say they were Palm Warblers” and put them on my life list.

This trip was different. I showed up at the location they’re hanging out in, ran into another birder watching them, he pointed out where they were, and about 20 seconds later, one of them popped out and proceeded to put on a show for about 15 minutes, wandering around in bright, full sunlight about 25 feet away. It was almost anti-climactic. I’ve got some nice pictures, but I haven’t processed them yet for upload.

But it got me thinking about lists, and how to explain them to non-birders. Birdwatchers (like any social group with a similar interest) has a vocabulary and jargon that can be rather opaque to outsiders. If you’re not a birder, when I pop in and go “Hey! Palm Warbler! 251 on my life list!” as though that actually is a good thing, I realize you probably have no clue what I’m talking about…

So a short introduction to why birders talk about lists and what they mean….

Birders tend to keep lists — lists of the species they have seen, when and where. In geek speak, the basic piece of data a birder cares about tends to be the set that includes a species name, a date/time, and a latitude/longitude. Over time, you can define your birding career based on all of that collected data.

It’s possible, of course, to add to that data: sex, age, coloration, environmental data, behaviors, pictures — some birders keep very extensive notes, some (like me) tend to keep it more simple, although in general, the rarer the bird and the higher burden of proof there is about the validity of the identification, the more data you tend to collect and report.

But at its most basic, a birding trip boils down to a list of what you saw, when you saw it, where it was seen.

Early on in my birding life, I decided not to keep lists. I kept one in my head, but didn’t do anything formal; I was interested in enjoying birding, not keeping lists or making birding a competition. Ultimately, my list got long enough i had trouble keeping it in my head, so I switched to keeping a formal list. For that, I use eBird, which is run by the Cornell Ornithology lab, and which has a nice side effect of helping create a useful data set for research.

Once you start keeping data, you tend to organize it. Every birder makes decisions on how they want it organized. There are about 10,000 species of bird in the world, and about 900-1000 that inhabit the US and canada. Of that, here in California, 641 species are recognized as having been found in the state. (digression: not all birds are common in the state, not all birds are willing to be seen easily, so every species is given a rarity number from one to six, where one is endemic, like the mourning dove, and six is exceptionally rare).

So when I talk about my life list, it’s every species I’ve seen since I started keeping track. My list is now at 251. One of the realities of a life list is that as it gets larger, it’s harder to find new species to add to it — you either need to chase the rarities that show up (known as “twitching”), or you need to travel to new areas to find species that aren’t local. 250 is a good number for a late beginner, but to get to 350 is going to take some work. Top birders in the US might have 600 species. There are birders who are well over 1,000 species, but they tend to be ones who do extensive travel over a period of years.

After the year list, every birder has their own preferences. I keep a year list, which is the species seen in a calendar year. Some birders keep state lists and county lists, some keep seasonal lists, since with migration, some birds are in a location only certain times of years. How a birder organizes their lists depends on their interests. In my case, I do 90% of my birding in Santa Clara and Alameda county, so I keep it simple. (I also keep a yard list, which is birds I’ve seen from my home property. While typing this, I had a brown creeper wander up the telephone pole at the back of the property near the bird feeder — a new yard bird, #42, which is a nice high number for a suburban backyard. If you keep your eyes open, life can be full of fun little surprises) I’ve met birders who’ keep county lists and who’s goal is to see 200 species in every county in California. I’ve met others who’s goal is 700 species on the life list.

So when you hear a birder talk about lists, that’s what’s going on.

Sharks at the all-star game

Seven d-men likely as Braun back from minors, Couture’s skill competition memories, Boyle glad to be going | Working the Corners:

*****Dan Boyle said that he valued his selection to the all-star team — and, yes, that new format where players are drafted two days before the game could prove more enjoyable for the fans and media than the players themselves.

No offense to Dan Boyle, but he wouldn’t be my pick for the All-Stay game from the Sharks. I know Couture is going as a youngster for the skills competition, but the two players that I felt deserved serious consideration here were Couture (as an all-star, not just a rookie) and Ryane Clowe, who doesn’t have the name out around the fans but really deserves to go. Boyle’s done fine, but Clowe’s really impressed me on many levels — consistently — all season.

Notes from the Commish — A couple of changes in how suspensions are managed…

Tonight’s Note from the Commish is about two changes in how we are going to manage discipline moving forward.

Colin Campbell gets a lot of crap from the media, mostly because he’s an easy target. The reality is, he does a very good job (not that you could tell that by listening or reading to the pundits) in a tough situation. Perfect? No, but I think he gets it right a lot more often than those ripping on him do. And of course, whatever decision he makes is going to piss off whoever he rules against, so no matter what — someone’s complaining, and that’s what you read in tomorrow’s column as quotes.

That said, there are two changes I’d make to how he handles discipline today.

First — I send out the memo announcing that, effective immediately, suspensions will be managed as they are today, but the length of suspensions will be doubled from previous standards. That means a suspension that yesterday would have cost you one game now costs you two. What last week was three games is now six. And etc. I simply don’t believe that the suspensions that are handed out today hurt the player enough financially, or hurt the team on the ice enough to be a significant deterrent. We’ll cap the maximum length at 20 games, so a suspension that used to be ten will now be 20, but one that used to be 15 will also now be 20. Anything that would have been longer than 20 games won’t be changed.

Second — the other change I make effective today is that the roster spot for a suspended player is frozen; in other words, the team can’t call someone up to replace that player. That freeze exists for up to three suspended players at one time (because otherwise, it becomes impossible to dress a full team). If you have a guy suspended for ten games, then you play a player short for ten games. That will — I guarantee — get the coaches and GM’s attention, and the only way to convince players to stop doing stupid stuff that gets them suspended is to have their coaches and GMs convince them to stop doing it. This will help. Oh, by the way, suspended players salaries will count against the cap; no cap relief while they’re out.

Agree? Disagree? drop a comment with your opinion.

Got a rule or some aspect of hockey you want the Commish or — Colin — to rule on? drop us an email or a comment with the question. And we’ll be back soon with another Note from the Commish.

My 2011 photographic goals

I’ve been thinking through the goals I want to set for my photography in 2011. I think I’m going to keep it relatively simple:

Push myself into new areas of photography to continue to improve my skills; specifically, it’s time to get serious about learning how to use flash, and it’s time for me to get serious about both field and studio macro photography.
I want to try to get back to Yosemite sometime this spring, hopefully when the dogwood is out and alive. I had planned a trip for 2010 at that time and ended up not being able to.
I want to get out on a photo trip to an area I haven’t been to and photographed and force myself to figure out how to shoot and then publish a piece about that area and tells its story.
I want to see if I can take at least one workshop as a way to push my skills via hands on work with someone else.
I want to take a close look at whether I can be “photoshop free”. I’m hoping to see what Apple has up its sleeve with Aperture 4.0 — I don’t know a damn thing if this even exists, but I’m assuming it does, and I”m guessing 2011 might be the year I can retire photoshop completely, and see whether Aperture does what I want and make myself free of all Adobe software (I like Lightroom; I don’t think Lightroom will ever be allowed to innovate enough to make photoshop irrelevant to all but the most hardcore photographers — and apple doesn’t have that political problem with aperture).
I’m going to do a personal quest to photograph as many species of bird again this year, and see if I can beat my 2010 number of 142
I need to experiment with video more.

And I’ll note for the record that nowhere in this list is “buy new stuff”; which doesn’t mean I won’t, but the gear needs to be defined by how it will implement the goals, not the other way around…

Happy 2011, all.

2011 projects — back to writing

I really had no plans to get back into writing. Well, I always felt that “someday” I’d start writing again, but I certainly didn’t see it happening any time soon.

But I was off doing some research on app stores and economic realities because I wanted to be able to talk to developers coming into webOS understand what the realistic expectations would be for sales and income, and to see what insights I could come up with as far as marketing that might be useful.

The more I looked around, the more I became intrigued with what I saw as the early stages of a massive disruption and the creation of a new independent publishing channel — ebooks and the ability to push written content out through multiple channels in multiple formats relatively easily, with the ability to charge for the content without having to build a full e-commerce engine. For the small/independent author and for authors with midlist material, this creates new opportunities, and the market is just starting to happen. In reality, the worlds of app development (what I do in my other life) and that of authors and photographers and other visually-oriented content creation are crashing together, and it’s going to create a massive publishing disruption and many new opportunities. I discussed this a bit back in October, and I’ll nudge you at the blog of Dean Wesley Smith (author and former publisher at Pulphouse Press) if you want to see more about that.

What I didn’t expect was that this was going to get me thinking about writing again — but it did, because I started to think about the opportunities here, and then my novel started whispering at me. My initial thoughts were oriented more towards photography and ebook publication of image-centric books (the most interesting and innovative group figuring this out is David du Chemin and his Craft and Vision, and it’s something I want to return to and talk about in more depth later, but I think he’s got a really interesting handle on how to make this work — and why it’s very different than traditional photo book publishing).

But for some reason, after almost 20 years of having no motivation to write, I kept coming back to thinking about getting back on the novel, and how to use the new publishing realities to move back into fiction writing. I’ve more or less ignored this idea for a couple of months while trying to figure out what my 2011 priorities are going to be, and the more I think about this, the more I realize now is a pretty good time to do try.

So I will.

I’m not entirely sure what this means yet. I don’t have any concrete goals, other than “dust off the novel and start typing”. but it just feels like the right time to pull this out of retirement and see what happens while I continue to try to figure out publishing and ditribution strategies and see how this market forms and how I can be a part of it. There’s something really interesting happening here, and the more I poke at it, the more I want to be part of it and try to make it flourish. Back in the 80′s when I was experimenting with e-publishing with OtherRealms the technology was unbelievably primative and we were feeling our way in the dark. I’ve always wanted to return to that kind of experimentation — and so it’s time to try.

One great unknown still for which I don’t have a real answer, though, is how to get content onto the various devices. It’s possible today to take finished content (where finished is some form of HTML/CSS/Javascript) and use Phonegap to turn it into apps that can be published into the iPhone or Android store.

But that doesn’t solve a larger issue, which is also getting that content onto the Kindle and Nook and into the MOBI and EPUB formats. It shouldn’t be too hard (famous last words) to create an environment that you could do some kind of structured set of HTML docs and have it create the navigation for you, and then shove it into phonegap to create apps, and then format it up into MOBI and EPUB, all in an automated or mostly-automated way.

Ultimately, I’d like to be able to build a set of HTML pages that define the content of a publication, push a few buttons, and have it turn into iPhone, Android, webOS, Kindle and Nook packages, all automated and all pretty and worth your $1.99, iwthout a lot of hacking or geeking to get it there.

It seems to be (ahem) there’s a developer opportunity to create a tool suite that (ahem) other content creators would love to take advantage of, and perhaps toss a few shekels at. So that’s a sub-task of this new writing initiative, look into the possibility of creating a tool environment that a writer could use to take their content and push it into the various stores and environments in a graphically pleasant way without needing to be or hire a geek. As someone who more or less lives in both places, I think I have at least a base of information to start exploring this as a possible opportunity…

So I will.

And we’ll see how it goes. But it’s one of the things I’m really looking forward to digging into in 2011.

2010 – the birding year.

A short summary of my birding life in 2010…

I was finally able to break 250 species on my life list, adding 11 species in 2010: Lawrence’s Goldfinch, Golden-crowned Kinglet, Mountain Chickadee, Tropical Kingbird, Band-tailed pigeon, Egyptian Goose, Pine Siskin, Mitred Parakeet, Common Tern, Wrentit, and Northern Fulmar.

I broke my previous number of 197 for year list, getting to 199. I actually broke 197 back around thanksgiving, but a combination of this winter’s really funky and wet weather and a flareup of my knee arthritis stopped me cold for most of December, so it looks like 200 will evade me again. Barely. Well, something to shoot for in 2011. Our plan to go to Salton Sea after christmas was cancelled because of the knees, which was just as well, because two days before we were going to head out there, the Taiga Bean Goose disappeared during a winter storm and hasn’t been seen since. Of course….

Overall, I filed 105 checklists with ebird in 12 counties. Not bad, given time and other contingencies. Over on flickr, a number of us did a photo challenge to see how many species we could photograph in one year. I ended up with 142 species in 140 images, or about 3/4 of my year list. the winner of the challenge had somewhere around 360 species for the year, but this was really about pushing yourself, and I’m quite happy with the results.

I’ve been trying to decide what I want to do with my birding in 2011; mostly, it’s just what I have been doing, and perhaps some bit more of it. But I’m not that interested in twitching for rare species, and birding is something I want to leave as a relaxation and escape and not assign too many rules or deadlines to, so I think my goal for 2011 is “just” to keep working on being a better birder and enjoy the hobby for what it is. It would be nice to expand the life list again, so if I could add another 10 species to the life list, that’d be fun. More even better, but it depends on how much time I have and how able I am to go finding new birds — and whether they’re out there.

For what it’s worth, I filed my first list for 2011; a short feederwatch here in the home office. Nothing too fancy, but the first 9 species of 2011 got ticked off. If the knee and the weather cooperate, I do hope to get out and do some birding before the holiday ends.

Notes from the Commish — about the Winter Classic

Tonight’s Note from the Commish is about the Winter Classic.

Another New Years has come and gone, and another Winter Classic has happened. For the first time, the weather didn’t completely cooperate, but I thought the NHL did a good job of managing the situation, and I like the idea of prime time or evening games. I’m not sure that’s my first choice — but I’ll leave that one to the experts. What matters is they did a great job of handling a less than perfect situation and made it happen. Nobody got hurt, everyone’s happy, and a good game between two good teams.

So, what’s next? I hear the jungle drums beating from New York City already, but them New York is insulted that they haven’t already gotten a Winter Classic, and in fact, insulted that it hasn’t been offered to them permanently. Because they are, you know, New York, center of the universe. Just ask them. Or at least, their beat writers.

I like the Winter Classic setup. I think it’s great publicity for the league and I think it showcases the sport nicely. I also think New York would be a great venue for it. Just not next year. Here’s what I’d like to suggest to the league as they consider next year’s edition:

Go West, NHL. Go West. It’s time to bring the Winter Classic further west, out of the Eastern time zone. My preference: as the Vikings showed this year, there’s this rather nice, if a bit chilly, stadium in Minnesota you can use. Minnesota Wild vs. Dallas Stars, New Years day in Minneapolis. Hopefully in a swirling snow storm. You won’t get rain, that’s for sure… But a second option would be Denver, with the Avalanche meeting someone like the Coyotes or Sharks. Either venue would be viable and interesting and something you could build stories around — and connect with the western half of the league that tends to get ignored far too often.

After that? Detroit, featuring the Red Wings and the Toronto Maple Leafs for the first cross-border winter classic. THAT would be a classic.

And then, another trip west, this time — Las Vegas. We’ve seen games played there in the past, and ice making technology has improved since then. Fire up the UNLV stadium and get the casinos in to help with the hype, and watch what happens on new years when the Kings and Ducks meet.

THEN we go to new york. By this time, the series might need a refresh to make it special again, and how better than to play it out at Yankee Stadium between the Rangers and the Devils? Although I’m not sure I want to be the person explaining this to Charles Wang. Honestly, though, you know in your gut it’s gotta be those two teams. And Brodeur might still be in goal then….

Agree? Disagree? drop a comment with your opinion.

Got a rule or some aspect of hockey you want the Commish or — Colin — to rule on? drop us an email or a comment with the question. And we’ll be back soon with another Note from the Commish.

Looking forward into 2011

Welcome to 2011. If this is how you feel, remember: you did it to yourself, but it’s temporary.

I’m really looking forward to 2011 with anticipation. There have been a number of challenges the last few years, but that which does not kill you makes you stronger, and so far, I’m still breathing. 2010 turned out to be the year I started thinking forward again and deciding what I wanted to focus on, and now that 2011 is here, it’s time to start pushing those things forward.

I don’t know about you, but here in my life I’m interested in way too many things for my own good. My planning isn’t so much about “what should I do?” as it is deciding what of the things I want to do I need to defer, because if I try to do them all — none of them get enough time for me to do them well. One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned the last few years is that I do, in fact, have limits, and while it’s a lesson I don’t like, I’ve learned to try to focus and prioritize and do fewer things well instead of simply pushing harder to do them all.

I have, at least to start the year, chosen to focus on three projects. There are a couple of other projects that I may add to the list later (or replace something on this list with if it makes sense), but I’m not yet ready to talk about them in public, because they depend on decisions by others before I want to commit resources to them. I’ve got a total of five projects on my “A” list right now, but only three of them are at that point I can talk to them and move forward on them now. We’ll bring the others into the light if and when it makes sense.

I’ll be talking about each of these things, but right now, I want to focus on one.

The first — and clearly the most important — project for 2011 is my health and my weight. I was diagnosed diabetic in late 2009 (joining about 1 in 10 of the American population), and 2010 was in many ways a year for coming to grips with diabetes and learning how to keep it controlled and keep things stable. As a friend and fellow diabetic told me, diabetes is one of those things that is no big deal at all — and something you have to take great care with. For 2011, I don’t want to just keep the diabetes under control, but to take the initiative and shove it as far out of my life as I possibly can — by taking off the extra weight I carry, by getting in better physical shape, by learning to be better at managing diet, there’s a good chance I can live life without using diabetic drugs and managing this strictly through lifestyle and diet. It may not happen — but we’re sure going to try.

It’s also crucial that this weight comes off for other reasons; getting it off will reduce the impact of the apnea, and perhaps let me be rid of the darth vader machine I sleep with. Needing a CPAP to sleep has some impacts that might not be obvious at first, but here’s one: you can’t camp or backpack. Life is tied to a hotel room with electricity (which excludes Curry Village in Yosemite, also) — and that impacts your ability to explore as a nature photographer. That was one factor that led me to decide not to try to go pro in my photography this year. another impact on my photography — when you’re carrying around a lot of weight your center of gravity if affected, and so is your ability to scramble off trail or even get down on the ground for a shot and get back up again without looking like a grounded walrus. And when you lose your balance, bad things can happen. Losing weight will in a very direct way make me a better and more capable photographer.

A third aspect of this is — my knees. In late 2007, I was out taking photos and walking when I stepped in a gopher hole and tore the meniscus in my right knee. In talking to the orthepedic surgeon, he showed me the xrays and explained that it wasn’t about going in and cleaning it out, it was about delaying replacement as long as possible, due to the arthritis in both knees. Thanks to 500mg of Relafin twice a day, the knees have been quiet and stable since, until about a month ago when they started acting up, and it’s clear I need to go in and have another chat and probably up the dosage. But the single best thing I can do to improve my knees is to take weight off.

If there’s a plus here, it’s that I weight what I weighed two and a half years ago, and I weigh less than I did at my max in fall of 2008 (but not by much); it’s something that it’s at least not going up. On the minus of that, starting in the fall of 2008, I lost a fair bit of weight — because of the diabetes, and it came back once I started treatment. I do wish I’d been able to keep some of that off, but that’s life.

In American culture — the land of Nancy Reagan and “just say no” — the answer to these problems is seemingly simple: eat less, exercise more. If only; if there was truth to that, the world wouldn’t be having this massive obesity crisis and we wouldn’t be having this conversation (and — hint — pretty much every place some variation of “just say no” is proposed, it fails miserably, whether it’s teenage sex, smoking, catholic priests and little boys, or losing weight. So can I please suggest that we as a society get past simplistic slogans and deal with real problems using real solutions? thanks).

In reality, it’s really complicated. I’ve come up with a set of things I think will work — and now that the holidays are over, it’s time to see if they will; and what needs to be adapted and changed. I’ve also done a lot of research into this whole shebang, and I’ll share some of that with you over time. And no, don’t expect daily weigh ins or any of that; it doesn’t work for me, and it’s incredibly boring for you. but we’ll talk when it makes sense and there’s something useful to say.

This is an initiative I have to make succeed; if I do nothing else, I have to make this work — or I have to decide I can’t, and then start looking at other options seriously, like surgery. And frankly, I look forward to gastric bypass even less than the thought of going through knee replacement, because gastric surgery would be admitting failure over something I honestly believe I can solve — and in fact have been working to solve for the last few years. And now I’ll find out if I’m right, I guess.

The goal? for now, let’s just leave it at ten pounds, and then start on the next ten. I need to lose 100 pounds to get back to the weight I was at 30, and that’s probably a two year process. Step one is to just take that first step, and then build on it… It’s a good question what my goal weight ought to be, but that’s another one of those complicated discussions about something people like to make simple…

and hopefully we’ll chat about that soon.

Until then, to all of you, I hope your 2011 is as good and positive for you as I plan on making it for me.

The Princess and the Dragon

Gord and Fnord Go To the Zoo

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