It's....ALIVE!!

Long time has it been. Some noteworthy news since last I posted...the wife and I are expecting a little one come October. I suppose that should pass as some kind of excuse for letting the blog lie dormant for so long.

In other news, I was promoted last November, which was kind of a big deal as well, but much less interesting. Work on the house is proceeding. We have several concurrent projects, which hopefully will be finished before the little one comes along. Both bathrooms, the kitchen, all the plumbing, and several other little things within the house are being overhauled. Also, we're planning on doing some cool things in the backyard along these lines.

And now I'll probably disappear for another 6 months.

the rare hockey post

The Buffalo Sabres are 6-0-1. It is early in the season. They have played less than 1/10th of a (regular season) schedule. Still, I cannot help but remark on the following:

-they are enjoying this early success without Chris Drury, Daniel Briere, and Brian Campbell.
-Thomas Vanek, thought to be drastically overpaid by many, is leading the league with 9 goals in 7 games.
-Darcy Regier, vilified by just about every hockey fan in western new york, built teams that, even excluding the early success of this season, have enjoyed unprecedented success in Sabres' history.

I was in the minority last year in holding Sabres' management blameless for Drury's departure. Why is Regier so wrong for expecting a player to uphold his contract and then negotiate in good faith? Let it be known that the Sabres matched the Rangers' offer to Drury. Drury, and no one other than the man himself, chose to accept the contract offer of the Rangers. As far as I'm concerned, he abandoned the team that brought him into prominence in this league. Yes, he won a Stanley Cup with the Avalanche, I know -- but was Chris Drury a hockey-household name of his current stature before he came to the Sabres? Certainly not. He made many public proclamations of his love for Buffalo and for the Sabres organization before jumping ship to the Rangers. As far as I'm concerned, he can lie in the bed he made with them, and I hope it's decidedly uncomfortable.

The other players mentioned here were only doing what was best for themselves and their families. Was Briere likely to ever have as large an offer as he received after the 06-07 season? Not in my opinion. He had to take the big payday, and the Sabres couldn't oblige him. It would seem to me that he left on good terms, as did Campbell and Martin Biron, the popular goalie the sabres traded last year.

Anyway, here's to Regier: one of the finest hockey minds in the NHL.

this thing writes itself!

watch the whole thing for the best zinger of the campaign.

This is so good that I had to quote it here. I won't say who it is except to say it is from a friend of a friend who grew up in communist Russia:

Its a puritan, religious country... since the beginning. The only thing everyone agreed to is hating taxes.

A third of the country doesn't believe in evolution... and that's not even a very difficult theory to understand. How much easier is it to say that God is everything when you talk about partical physics? Or claim that the Large Hedron Collider will create a black hole that eats the earth (impossible say scientists! i'm going with my gut says the common man!).

we're run by a populist president who went to yale - but can still imply that educated people are somehow suspect. everyone is equal! everyone's achievements are the same! no-one is better than you simply because you are a lazy sack who never graduated high school, and they busted their ass to earn a degree and learn something!

for a country that hates communism, we certianly echo its worst traits: blind patriotism, distrust of education and knowledge, and a broad dismissal of critics as traitors and snobs.

So, tell me why we shouldn't fear Sarah Palin? To paraphrase Matt Damon: if one goes by the actuary tables, there is a 1 in 3 chance that John McCain dies in his first term in office, meaning she would become President Sarah Palin. And so we would go on, following our fearless hockey mom leader as she ruled in her best creationist-spewing, tolerance-smashing, ignorance-spreading way. People need to take notice of this and consider the future. I'm not saying Obama is immune to criticism or other issues, but at least he doesn't think its wrong to tell our kids that the universe wasn't created in 6 days.

Ignorance Is...How does that phrase go?

This is not the most original or truly astonishing prose, but I found, somewhat surprisingly, that it rather concisely sums up my concerns about a certain presidential candidate. I found the following to be especially poignant:

I am sick and tired of the president of the United States embarrassing me. The world we live in is too complex to entrust it to someone else whose idea of intellectual curiosity and grasp of foreign policy issues is to tell us he can look into Vladimir Putin's eyes and see into his soul.

George Bush's record as a student, military man, businessman and leader of the free world is one of constant failure. And the part that troubles me most is he seems content with himself.

He will leave office with the country $10 trillion in debt, fighting two wars, our international reputation in shambles, our government cloaked in secrecy and suspicion that his entire presidency has been a litany of broken laws and promises, our citizens' faith in our own country ripped to shreds. Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been.

I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.

the old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be

Between 1988 and 1997, the golden age of the MS-DOS operating system, I became an expert at writing boot menus. Various boot configurations were necessary in those days to run certain programs, because they all had different memory requirements, CD driver requirements (when CD-ROM's became available), and sound card interrupt and DMA settings. It was a complete pain in the ass. Usually after purchasing a new game, an entire day was needed just to figure out how the system needed to be tweaked in order to get it to run--and remember, this was before the Internet made it easy to just google an answer. Research by reading, trial and error, and plain old fashioned person-to-person communication was needed. I was such a PC gaming junkie in those days, and had become so good at doing this, that I actually parlayed the skill into a job, for a time anyway. Every PC at Cyberjocks, a local multiplayer gaming establishment, used a special version of my boot menu from 1996 to 1997.

During this same group of years, I became intensely interested in home theater, specifically multi-channel surround sound systems. There was something about high fidelity audio playback systems that fascinated me. Of course, back then home theater was sufficiently esoteric as to be out of the price range of most people, and the best a student with relatively small amounts of disposable income could do was voraciously devour every bit of information available on the subject. Of course, I fortified this with sporadic purchases of very well-researched, relatively inexpensive yet highly regarded pieces of home theater electronics. The true fuel to my passion, however, was the project of building the ultimate subwoofer with my good friend, Aaron Kondziela. Over a period of at least two or three months, we acquired the various components necessary for the project, took over his parents basement (which was delightfully full of useful tools and gadgetry), and constructed a beautifully proportioned (from the perspective of audio design, anyway), gargantuan 30 cubic-foot box. It was a ported design that required a design modification of intuitive ingenuity of which I am still proud. So exacting and fastidious were we in our construction efforts that the final product was able to move enough air to blow shut a door 50 feet away, and shake the foundation of my parents very old, very large and very brick house. I still remember the first sound produced by that behemoth: track 6 of Harry Connick Jr.'s "She:" "Follow the Music," which has an initial bass note so deep and strong that you need a good sub just to hear it properly.

So, what's the point? Well, I still enjoy video games. I still enjoy home theater. But now, I have a PS3, and Xbox360, a Wii, and a relatively capable gaming PC. Over the years I've acquired so many games that I probably wouldn't recognize them all if you laid them out in front of me. I have a dedicated home theater room with a 100" screen, a 1080p projector, and a high end multichannel surround-sound system capable of playing high-resolution audio. I have reclining leather theater seats, and about 5 gagillion movies. In short, if between 1989 and 1997 I had made a list of all the things I could possibly want, the list would be an inventory of my current home (ok, and few other things that I haven't quite been able to take care of...yet). The funny thing is that while I still enjoy all of these things, something is lost now that I own all this stuff. There is no challenge, no work in it. I didn't have to design anything, write any code, or even break a sweat for any of it. Of course, I worked to earn the money needed to buy all this stuff, but that's not really the same thing, is it? I guess that what I'm trying to say is that after acquiring all this stuff, I've never been less interested in it. The irony is not lost on me.

I feel like a prophet...

Here's a column talking about the same things I've been spouting off for years.

"We'd sell if we could, but we'd lose our shirt," Johnson said. On a recent walk, she counted 15 "For Sale" signs. A similar home nearby is listed below $400,000.

"I was so glad to get out of the city, the pollution the traffic, the crime," she said. Now, the suburbs seem mean. "I wouldn't do this again."