ian andrew bell

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

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There’s now a mailing list for Vancouver Goalies hosted at Google.  A great way for goalies to find spares and talk about whatever.  Why didn’t I think of that?

Doh.

This past weekend, I and some friends played 9 hockey games over 36 hours on Greg Egan’s backyard rink. It’s an incredible rink with a gorgeous view of the Monashee mountains, and when you go there to play you stay at his comfy Bed & Breakfast where the beds are comfortable and the hot tub’s always warm. It’s truly a unique experience and an amazing getaway from Vancouver where you and your team can enjoy some shinny (3 on 3, it’s not a huge rink) while working up their conditioning and relaxing in the cabins. Read More

I have often (as have all of us, I’m under no grand delusions here) suffered at the hands of the ineptitude of large companies. I understand the rhetoric of the executive class when they say things like “expanding our relationships with small business” and being “customer responsive”. I’ve been there, I’ve written the press releases. I know that nobody at big companies actually mean such hokum.

I have now been attempting to buy a number of DELL 24″ flat-screen monitors for the staff here @ Something Simpler for nearly a month now. My first order was placed via Dell Canada’s web site on January 5th.

Here’s my letter to Dell:

If you’re listening, Dell, which I doubt, my first order, #196489702, was initially delayed for credit card verification, which I provided, and then was spontaneously dropped with no explanation or notification. It wasn’t until I called after two weeks of no word or sign of any shipment that I discovered what had happened (sort of)…

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Yesterday I wrote a long piece on the Something Simpler blog based on a conversation I had with Brendon Wilson. I think it’s worth checking out.

Have you read “The Tipping Point“? Many of us have. The growth of sales of the book itself is an example of the idea it attempts to illustrate: ideas can spread like wildfire when they capture a zeitgeist or purport to solve a common problem. It’s a book that contains many great ideas, and provides a pretty interesting layman’s summary of the concept of memetics. Memetics is a concept I spent way too much time studying in University, and which has moved from circles of furry-browed academics and into popular culture since the book’s publication because many people want to “get rich quick”, and almost as many have experienced failure when attempting to put the lessons of Tipping Point into practise. Read More

Apparently I’m one of the “People to Watch” on the Vancouver tech scene for 2008. As if it’s not easy enough to look into my townhouse from the street already, you people have to watch me working as well?

Kidding aside, it’s great to be listed among such folks as the RainCity crew, Danny Robinson, and Mozilla’s David Ascher. Missing from the list are folks like David Gratton, Boris Wertz, and Dick Hardt. Their enterprises are I think poised for big things this year, and success on their part will do much to bolster the tech scene in Vancouver in general.

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Readers of this blog and my old mailing list know that I am no big fan of Network Solutions and its long history of anti-competitive and generally dirty business practises. From YCombinator comes this nugget about Network Solutions, exploiting a loophole extended by ICANN to pre-register domain names you’ve searched for on their site, thus preventing other registrars from handling the transaction later. Network Solutions currently charges $35 for an annual domain name registration, while most of their competitors land squarely between $7 and $15.

The problem exhibits itself thus: A query at the Network Solutions web site via its whois service will cause the domain name to appear to be available via NetSol, but in performing the same search via a third-party registrar the domain name appears to have been registered via Network Solutions to a private registrant. This is evil.

The piece has since been picked up by eWeek and in some depth at DomainNameNews.

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There are rumours circulating that the NHL season will start with games in Sweden and possibly other European capitals for 2008. This might vindicate my post from a few days ago which stated that the league needs to start a dialogue with fans in Europe. Looks like the NHL would start the season with a two-game series between Ottawa and Pittsburgh at Stockholm’s Globen Arena, and Ottawa would warm up for the game with an exhibition match vs. Frölunda in Gothenburg. This a still a rumour, but is discussed with little real substance in a Swedish daily called “The Local”.

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It ended this afternoon (early evening, Buffalo time) with a shoot-out goal by phenom Sidney Crosby on Buffalo goalie Ryan Miller before 70,000 freezing, mostly-drunk fans mixed from Canadians and the occasional actual Buffalo Sabres fan amid a blinding snow storm.

If you squint a little, that’s kind of how professional hockey began, more than 125 years ago, in the ponds and rinks of Ottawa and Montreal. Ironically it was in Buffalo where the beautiful game captivated the imagination of my favourite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, inspiring him to become a sports writer. Even with more than 45 minutes of delays for snow clearing, hole patching, and refreezing, it was a great game which took hockey back to its roots. I think that’s an important point.

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