I keep forgetting to blog about this, or perhaps it’s because I’m ashamed of my wardrobe and bad hair day, but FindFindr did a far-ranging video interview with me on a rooftop in Gastown. I did my best to be interesting. They did their best in the editing room later. Enjoy!
Guess what? I’m a real person. I’ll be at the blogtropol.us lounge @ the Web 2.0 Expo for the next couple of days. Come and meet me and the boys from Something Simpler.
No stick or puck required.
Well, I’ve been predicting that Canucks General Manager Dave Nonis would be out and this afternoon at 4:45PM Pacific Time it happened. Facing the utter collapse of the Canucks as a team this summer Nonis was fiddling, chasing down yet another Swede on a team that hasn’t finished a check since Bertuzzi finished a guy’s career. Of Nonis’ four years as GM of the Canucks, they played only three — and made the playoffs once.
Thankfully the Canucks’ new owner Francesco Aquilini has also realized that Nonis has no coherent vision for the team and it’s time to move on.
Finally, some common sense! On Friday in the Guardian World Bank head Robert Zoellick was quoted while speaking at an IMF meeting, saying that “in the US and Europe over the last year we have been focusing on the prices of gasoline at the pumps. While many worry about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs. And it’s getting more and more difficult every day.”
This is the condemnation of Ethanol that many of us have been waiting for — and it frames a problem I have discussed here and here. To wit: in a world of finite natural resources and arable land, policies which encourage us to grow fuel in fields inevitably lead to deforestation and competition with food crops.
Apparently, the NHL is recruiting “celebrities” (and I think we need to stop ascribing this title to everyone who has a TV show, given that these days practically everyone does have a TV show) to blog about the NHL during the playoffs.
I guess, in some boardroom somewhere, this seemed like a grand idea. Among the celebrities teeing up to blog are Lauren Conrad (only known to MTV fans), Jason Reitman (who has directed one noteworthy movie), Kevin Smith (who brought is “Gigli”) and .. uh .. well, a list of people I honestly can’t be bothered to look up.
… and the web application hosting business cowers in fear. Now, my friends, people are discovering what Google’s REAL differentiated IP is..
Application scaling is a real problem for the managed hosting business unless some software company comes up with a platform/solution that lets them leverage their existing computing infrastructure. This is allegorical to, and is probably as big an opportunity as, SAN and NAS a few years ago … big incumbents like EMC and Network Appliance with totally vertical solutions (Google and Amazon in this case) competing with guys using software and off-the-shelf hardware (the hosting companies licensing the wares of some as-yet-non-existent software company).
The fans who bought tickets to the Canucks vs. Calgary this past Saturday night were not offered discounts. In fact, many fans present at the Garage last night paid extra to catch a glimpse of Trevor Linden’s last game as a Canuck — after two years of consistent abuse and neglect by Canucks management and coaching staff, it’s now become clear that his time with the team is done.
Apparently though, the real last game of the season was Thursday night at GM Place, when the Canucks’ first line inexplicably failed to deliver even a modicum of scoring effort against the Oilers, a team which won’t see the post-season this year but which still had the fortitude to end Vancouver’s shot at the Stanley Cup only one year after they won their Division.
Last week I received a happy box in my mail from the folks at BladeTape. In April they’ll be launching their Goalie version of BladeTape, so I was interested to see how good of a replacement it was for my tried-and-true method of drowning each of my new sticks in traditional hockey tape.
The box I received contained two orders of GoalieTape (like BladeTape for goalies — about $20 per package), and two packages of GripTape (about $5). So, I figured what the heck and proceeded to set up two of my sticks to see how it would work for me. This is my review:
If I had a category on my blog called “cautionary tales for bachelors”, this would be the headliner story. It informs the wisdom of an increasingly common practise, whereby when you meet some reasonably attractive yet complex member of the opposite sex, you’re tempted to Google her name and/or look her up in Wikipedia.
According to Valleywag it seems that Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia, has entangled himself where so many have been entangled before: in the gaze of the just slightly right-of-Hitler Rachel Marsden. While few of us were paying attention, Marsden happens to have vaulted her career from falsely accusing SFU’s swim coach of harassment after allegedly stalking him for months to a brief but uninspiring career at Fox News.
How the man smart enough to give us the crowd-sourced encyclopedia of everything was dumb enough to become caught in this web is beyond me.
Note to Jimmy: dude, you’re the starchild of Silicon Valley’s tech culture — lots of smart, good-looking women will probably sleep with you, I’m sure of it. There’s no need to dip into the looney bin.
We’ve finished version 1.0 of RosterBot, our RSVP system for sports teams… it’s generic enough to do league hockey, shinny, Ultimate, or any sport… but functional enough to make management of your team(s) easier. I’ve described it in the past as being “.. like eVite for sports teams”.
It’s a pretty simple system: You can paste in the email addresses of all the players on your team, input dates of your upcoming games (which is even easier if it’s a recurring event) and the system does the rest to figure out who’s coming and who’s not.
Please do try it out: http://www.rosterbot.com
