I don’t have anything entertaining to write today. “Wait”, you say - “you never have anything entertaining to write.” Very funny. Anyway, not much new here. I managed to break part of this server over the past few days - hopefully I can get it back up and working properly. Really, only Erin (and I guess Jason) will have any idea what I broke, so obviously it’s not that important, but I managed to break it, so I’m going to try and fix it. I don’t know what that means.

I managed to catch the third period last night, as well as overtime. The third was pretty boring for the most part - other than when they were playing 4 on 4, it was almost entirely played in the neutral zone. Hopefully they (both teams) play a little more entertaining hockey for game 4. The Leafs have to win tonight, and I think they will. I won’t be there to watch it, since Game Two of Ultimate is on tonight.

Hopefully we can have a better night for playing than we had on Tuesday, and even though I’m scared to say it - I don’t think it could get much worse. (Watch - it’ll snow tonight or something stupid like that, just to teach me a lesson.)

I guess I should just hit post, rather than sitting here watching my cursor blink at me

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Hmm. Look at his eyes. He’s trying to hypnotize me, but not in the good Las Vegas way.” - Homer

I know most of you don’t care, but Andy Moog got hired as an assistant coach with the Dallas Stars. Way to go Andy.

We played Ultimate last night, despite the winds of 50-70 km/h blowing some poor farmer’s field into our collective ears. Our field was lined up with/against the wind, and since we lost the toss, we also lost the game (though we came a lot closer to scoring against the wind than they did…) It was pretty comical actually, we got really close to scoring a couple of times, after huge drawn out drives, only to turn the disc over in their end zone, resulting in a single toss to get the disc to the other end zone. The wind was crazy. It’s even windier today, which is ok, since we don’t play again until tomorrow. By then the wind should have died down some.

I haven’t gone to see Star Wars yet, and I’m not sure when I’m going to go. I’ve heard really really mixed reviews of it, which usually indicates that I won’t like a movie. I will not pay full price to see it at any rate - especially since the Matrix trailer isn’t showing before it in Saskatoon (apparently.) When 900 years you reach, look as good, you will not - hmmmm?

I quickly set up another blog for my pictures, though I haven’t finished the layout yet, or posted any content. Watch this space for updates on that, since I hope to have it done by the end of the weekend, and post weekly/bi-weekly pictures (so as to take it a little more easy on my bandwidth.)

Simpsons quote of the day: “Okay people, go home now. Nothing to see here. O…my God! A Firey plane crash! Crowd around everyone! Come on, don’t be shy, crowd around!” - Chief Wiggum

The long weekend was nice, if kind of short. Friday night, Erin and I went on a bit of a date - we went to Moxies, then to see “A Beautiful Mind” at Rainbow. Saturday, we did a little running around, then went over to Jason and Amy’s for the beer fueled gathering. I enjoyed it, as did Erin. I think we’re getting old though, because we wound up going home before midnight.

I guess I never made mention of the Ultimate game that I played in on Thursday…It was every bit as much fun as I hoped it was, lots of good sportsmanship, fantastic plays, and lots of laughs. We lost 10-7, in a pretty close game. Both teams had moments when we looked good, and moments when we looked bad. I think there were quite a few more veterans on the other team than we expected, though since almost none of us had even played a pickup game before, our team did ok. We had to borrow a female from the other team, so that our ladies could switch off - hopefully that isn’t the case very often, cause I know how badly I was sucking wind after a shift - I was grateful for the switchoff. Next game is tonight, hopefully the rain stays away for us.

I had some slight server issues over the weekend, specifically my Linux router finally needed a reboot. I’m not sure what the problem was, since it had stopped allowing me to log into it in recent weeks (I wasn’t sure if I’d turned off remote logins or not, so I had just assumed I’d done it on purpose ) Anyway, the site was down for a little while Monday because the router stopped forwarding the ports. I got it back up and running, despite mis-diagnosing it as a changed IP. My system is set up to handle IP changes, but I was quite upset to find that my IP had changed, without my system doing the stuff it had to do. Turns out that the “What’s My IP” thing that I tested out was wrong . Anyway, I rebooted the web server as well, and compiled my own php, so now I have built in image thumbnailing. I think I’m going to work on a travel/photo blog in the near future. It will be separate, though likely will make use of a lot of the same infrastructure that I have built up here.

From looking at the search strings on the logs, “Jose Theodore Pictures” has topped 100 requests this month. I’m not sure why, since there are no actual pictures of Jose Theodore here, and in fact until this post, I’d never used the phrase “Jose Theodore Pictures” on the page. I ran out of patience when looking for my site on Google using that search phrase, so I’m not sure how those people found me. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that almost everyone who finds this site through google gets a “404″ error, since I’ve removed the old style archives, which is where google points to most often when I come up. I’m ok with that though, I don’t really need more traffic. At some point google will have fixed their index of my site I suppose, and more people will actually see the content of the site (as opposed to just a 404, or going back to the google cache)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Hey Ma! I’m gonna get me a picture of this here crazy critter.” - Cletus (the slack jawed yokel)

So, the other day, Erin tells me that she had “Radiation Safety training” at work. Whoah. Other than the monitors evil rays, I don’t think there’s much dangerous radiation around here. Anyway, then later she tells me that it’s time that she starts wearing her hat indoors at work, because the bugs are coming out. As evidence, she tells me that she found a spider on her desk. Now, maybe I’m just imagining things, but aren’t there people who would kill to work with radioactive spiders? I thought it was a funny set of circumstances anyway.

Something else kind of made me stop and think the other day. Why don’t we have bullet trains in Canada? I mean, what country would benefit from it more than Canada? Being able to hop a train to Winnipeg and get there within 3 hours would be pretty cool. I suspect the reason we don’t have them is because the airline industry would suffer, and we can’t have that. The big bonus of bullet trains though is that nobody’s going to hijack a bullet train and drive it into a building.

So, basically I think we should be a nation of web slinging train riding hockey players.

Pssst. Darren - where’s your picks?
Simpsons quote of the day: “…ha ha…it says: ‘I choo-choo choose you’ and there’s a picture of a train on it!” - Ralph

We all suck. We’re a collective 37-43 on picking series thus far. There are only three series left to pick, and I guess if we predict them all right, almost all of us can finish above .500, but just barely. Most of us are at 5-7, and by way of contrast, picking the favorites every time would have yielded a 10-2 record.

For what it’s worth, here are my picks.

Carolina vs. Toronto Carolina has played well so far, but I don’t think they’ve really been hit much. I think this will be a long series, and sadly I see the Leafs coming out on top. Sundin should be back before the end of the series, and it’s hard not to see that as a big boost to the Leafs. Anyway, Leafs in 7.

Detroit vs. Colorado Detroit has been looking good since their opening stumble, while Colorado has had to rely on game seven home ice to win both of their series’. With home ice being in Detroit, you’d think this would mean I’d pick them, but you’d be wrong. Colorado has a couple of things going for them, Patrick Roy playing some of the best hockey of his career, and Forsberg having basically taken the whole year off, which means he’s well rested. He’s having an incredible playoffs, and I expect that to continue. I think this is the series to watch, should be intense, as these two teams don’t care for each other. Ever since the Lemieux hit on Draper, there’s been a pretty bitter rivalry, and I think this could be the final chapter in that story. Colorado in 6.

Simpsons quote of the day: “I told you officer, I’m not ‘hepped up’ on ‘goofballs’!” - Flanders

Apparently the city double-booked the field that we were supposed to play Ultimate on last night. We waited around for a half hour to make sure that everyone had shown up, then made a foray out to find another park. As it turns out, every park in town (well, ok, we only checked one other one) was full of soccer games/practices.

So, as it turns out, we didn’t play. It’s probably for the best, as the wind was/is a little bit crazy.

Simpsons quote of the day: “This is not a lending library. Put down that magazine or I’ll blow your heads off!” - Apu

I’m looking forward to our first exhibition game tonight, and hopefully it goes well. Should be interesting at any rate, since nobody on our team has played the game before. If you care, the game is 6:30-Sunset at Nutana Collegiate (411 11th St E.)

I expect that the gruelling schedule will catch up to me rather quickly, playing two nights a week promises to be tough. On the plus side, it should be fun, and I should be in decent shape by the end of the season

I came across a link to an online game store that looks promising - Dragon.ca - Some of their prices are good, some seem high, but it’s all Canadian Dollars, which is nice. The reason that I mention this, is that Sony announced a drop in PS2 pricing, for the console, the controllers, the memory cards - pretty much everything but the games. They also hinted that game prices might be dropping soon too. With the recent strength of the Canadian dollar, this looks good.

Simpsons quote of the day: “Miss Hoover, my worm accidently went in my mouth and then I ate it.” - Ralph