June 2006 Archives

It's funny, I figured I'd be done with hockey for a while once the playoffs were over - no high first round pick means the draft's a crapshoot, and no first round pick at all means I would have been unlikely to recognize the names of the Oilers draftees (and I was right, I don't). But with that bombshell that shall no longer be named (until I change my mind) it's easy to write about that, and that raises the bar for everything else.

Since while it's not quite the wee hours of the morning, but they are approaching quickly, I think I'm allowed to say I'm actually kind of annoyed with myself for this. I've got lots of other things I need to do, and plenty of other things I'd really rather write about. But I haven't been doing them, and I haven't been writing about the others.

We now return you to your regular sporadic updates.

I had a long and sometimes heated discussion with SWMBO last night regarding Mr. Pronger and his family.

Basically, she felt I was blowing it way out of proportion, and that I was expecting way too much of Pronger.

My argument was that while I don't feel he did anything *wrong*, he could have done things *better*. It looks bad to have the agent make the request while you're out of town. Lowe knew something was wrong but hoped it would go away, or so he said. Nobody is saying much of any substance, least of all Pronger who has been reported to be, variously, vacationing in Mexico, in Saint Louis, or talking to Gretzky and Janet Jones in LA to see how to handle going from hero to zero in a split second. (OK, I made that last bit up.)

I guess it's not a rumour now. It was great, and I know he has to do what's best for his family, but I wouldn't be surprised if the boo-birds come out in full force next time he's in town. If they booed Gretzky and Weight, they'll boo anybody. I'm pretty disappointed myself. Why sign a long-term contract if you're even thinking about leaving?

One of the worst weeks in Oilers history, I think.

And it's that much worse considering the Flames and Canucks only got stronger. The Avalanche are arguably improved too - they still have at least one proven sniper in Hejduk, and Sakic's not exactly dog food yet, and Leopold's a decent pick up for them. Minnesota's now got one of the men Edmonton wanted last summer too.

I know Lowe won't trade Pronger until and unless he thinks the return is best for the team, but man. Are the Oilers going to be doing penance for Pocklington eternally?

This was originally going to be a reply to this post but I never really completed it - most of the body was written 2005-11-14. With the latest rumours about Chris Pronger now, it seems relevant again (I almost deleted it last week).

Bertuzzi's blown town in Vancouver, and the Canucks are getting their first really good goalie since... hm, Richard Brodeur might be stretching it, let's say Kirk MacLean in 1994. Cloutier's fine, no doubt about it, but you have to wonder if there's something to his playoff performances, and has the man ever not been hurt during the regular season? Of course, now the Canucks have two starting goaltenders. I don't know much about Kracijek, but Bryan Allen's a fine defender - what you see is what you get, I think.

Pronger's agent is saying that a trade request has been put to the Oilers. I don't know what's up with that. "Personal, family reasons" can mean anything - of course, Oilers fans, particularly the hysterical HFBoarders, will claim it's because his wife hates the city, and will take it personally. I'm not sure why a guy would sign a 5 year contract one summer, then want to leave town the next - but c'est la vie. I have no doubt that if he really wants to go, Lowe will accomodate him, once the right deal is in place. The draft is a good time to make that deal: Edmonton's without a first round pick, and Pronger's certainly worth that - and more. However, I'd rather not see him depart for just a pick. Ryan Smyth isn't getting any younger, and neither are the defensive corps. If Pronger leaves though, Edmonton needs a big time #1 defenceman coming the other way, whether it be in that trade or another.

Georges Laraque is coming up on UFA. He'd said before that he would never play for any other team, but in the post-season interview (courtesy edmontonoilers.com) he backtracked a bit and said that "this year more than ever I'm ready to move on." The difference? "Not playing every game. Pretty simple, eh?" I think when he didn't play much during the Finals, that was the writing on the wall for Le GG. He still thinks he can play every game, and he'd like to be back, but if that doesn't happen, he'll move on. I suspect that next year, if there's an Oilers tough guy with a French name, it's going to be JF Jacques, not Georges Laraque. I'll miss him, I think he brought a certain je ne sais quoi to the team, but he was pretty expensive for a guy who scored like he did. If taking down Todd Fedoruk twice in one game was his swan song though, it's not a bad one to have.

I expect Lowe will ask Dwayne Roloson what he wants, ballpark, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Rolo go to UFA. I expect the Oilers will likely make him an offer - bum knee and 36 years old and all, he's still a better bet than Markkanen keeping up his hot streak and Conklin re-finding his game. Considering the Leafs are even worse off, and Rolo's just about old enough to make the Toronto all-rookie squad, JFJ is likely to give him a good offer. Whether he'd take it or not is something else again - the Leafs aren't going to be a good team next year, and I don't know that I'd be too crazy about finishing off my career with a lousy team in a crazy city.

The draft should be interesting from an Oilers perspective, that's for sure.

Stanley Cup hero Rod Brind'Amour has a new contract, and what a contract it is, apparently - 5 years, 18 million dollars. OK, he just won the Selke, and he was a damn fine player for the Hurricanes in their Stanley Cup run (although he fell off after G2 against the Oilers) - but a 5 year contract for a 36 year old? I'd thought the Oilers were going a bit overboard signing Chris Pronger for 5 years, and he's in his early 30s, and a multiple trophy winner to boot - Hart, Norris, etc.

Jim Rutherford said his biggest learning experience - he didn't call it a mistake, although that had been the question asked - from the 2002 run was re-signing almost all the players that he felt had carried the team then. Is he making the same mistake now? The numbers say Brind'amour's entering the twilight of his career: born 9 August 1970, last year he had a fine season points-wise, but he'd been declining each and every season since 2000. (More limited icetime? Lousier teammates? Not sure, don't know the canes all that well, although certain of you who may still be reading, even if only to gloat over the fab colour scheme :) may be able to fill me in a bit.)

Crazy like a fox, or just crazy? My vote's on the latter. Maybe John Ferguson Junior mania is spreading in the Eastern Conference.

The sun came up this morning. But only technically - it was pretty grey.

Life went on. But only technically.

I'm not emotionally devastated or anything, and I didn't mope around at work today (my boss, who reads, will be glad to hear that, I'm sure) but still, it's just not as fun plopping in front of the TV with my laptop, knowing that there's no real hockey for about 4 months. It's always fun to speculate, debate, read mc79's stats posts, but.. that's what I do when there's no interesting hockey going on, and it just doesn't get any more interesting than the Stanley Cup Finals.

Maybe there will be some time for some number crunching; hopefully guys like lowetide and mudcrutch79 will keep it up though, because I'm not sure that I can.

Part two honoured.

Psst, Wade, I'm going to need your mailing address. Take your time though, I'm going to need a bit to come up with some appropriate items. ;)

Sorry for the Hartford colours Wade, red and black on its own is just a bit too boring. (Hate to say it, but with my limited artistic abilities, the red / black, green / grey / blue looks a bit better than the copper, orange, midnight and navy blue. sigh.)

I almost forgot - sorry Wade, but you'll forgive my brief oversight.

Carolina is #1.

There, I said it.

Stuck in my keyboard a bit, but I'm a man of my word.

Colours to follow.

(The year inclusion in the title isn't a qualifier, it's because I hope that we'll have the same bet again next year.)

Game 7. Puck drop approx 2015h Eastern, Royal Bank of Canada CentER, Raleigh.

I thought "all the marbles" just as Brind'amour said it to Elliotte Friedman.

While the jingoism from both sides this series has been annoying, it's kind of nice to see the CBC remember what that first C means. Every shot in their pre-game montage was the Oilers scoring. Most were Oilers delivering hits. No question about whose side they're on, that's for sure.

The pre-game show is terrifying: I've never seen a 50 foot high picture of Doug Weight before. The less said about the anthem singer, the better. Poor woman.

I promised myself I wouldn't do this, snowcrash doesn't need two posts on any game in these playoffs, not even game 7 of the Finals, but I'm too jittery not to. I'd have even started earlier but we had a dinner guest and I'm not (very) rude, even if it was an unexpected invite of one of the stepdaughter's friends.

That being said, I'm not sure that what I have to say will actually add anything to the sphere of weblogs (I refuse to use that other term), but in the spirit of weblogs, I'm going to say it anyway.

I'm not expecting the Hurricanes to roll over and die after G6 any more than the Oilers did after G2. So, I expect a return to the 2-1 type hockey we saw in games 3 and 4. Special teams will be key - if somebody's PP can pot a couple of goals and that team doesn't suck ES, it's over. As somebody (maybe even the CBC d00dz) said, teams that score shorthanded tend to win the game. I expect if there's a SHG, it'll be an Oiler raising his arms in celebration - Carolina's nowhere near as aggressive, usually.

Both teams have been known to be reluctant to shoot the puck; I expect that the team with the most shots that the other team's goalie has to handle (forget the shots directed on net metric, both teams are shot blocking fiends the likes of which haven't been seen since the 1998-1999 era Dallas Stars) will win the game. I think Markkanen's going to be ok, but the jury's still out on Ward. He'll likely be ok - he was good last game, considering how his defence didn't play in front of him - but you never know with young guys. If Edmonton can continue to be more mobile and harder on the puck than the Carolina defenders, they ought to be ok.

Thunderstorm rolling in: guess how pissed Mike is gonna be if there's a power outage?

I'm nervous about it, but I'm going to stand by my prediction of an Oilers win, even if I totally blew the number of games. I'll even stick it out and say it'll be 5-2, with the 5th into an empty net and a pair of power play goals.

All that aside... As I commented to my boss and a co-worker this afternoon, I've been tossing around how I'd like to see the game go. Do I want to see lots of great hockey from both sides? Or do I want to see a blowout? (Obviously I'd like the Oilers to take it either way.) Fuck it, I want a blowout, I want Edmonton to win 10-0. I've had enough of this back and forth heart in the mouth hockey, I've seen enough of that this year. I only want to hear about the Wales^WEastern Conference banner going up in the Royal Bank of Canada Centre next season, to join the list of Whalers^WHurricanes that played in the 06 Olympics. I want that Oilers third jersey logo with the 5 bolts representing the 5 Glory Years Cups to become an anachronism. I want to see Doug Weight in a suit, watching aghast as his former team pounds his new one the way he always wanted to pound the Stars and the Avalanche. I want Cam Ward to be Jim Carrey as a Bruin, not Patrick Roy as a Montrolorado Habalanche. I want the Oilers prospects, who started camp today, and players like Michael Peca and Sergei Samsonov to say "I *have* to play on that team next year," and Todd Marchant to eat a big helping of "I'm leaving town to join a winning team" pie.

OK, I could keep going, but what's the point? Even my wife is saying "Go Oilers!"

Start time: approx 2015h Eastern, Edmonton.

I actually listened to some of the interviews before the game.

MacTavish yesterday: "Not to get too corny or carried away, but hockey molds character and reveals character . . . it's gonna be open book on display in the next two games." He doesn't have any confidence problems, at least not in public.

Rumour is Doug Weight is going to be out - he's not been Carolina's best player, but he's one of their better ones and runs the power play. At 35, he's not going to get too many more chances at this. Sucks to be him, sucks to be Carolina, but good news for the Oilers. The Hurricanes will find somebody else to help out though, I'm sure - won't be a series-breaker like Roloson (almost?) was.

Weight was asked to pick a guy who would be a difference maker tonight for Carolina; he chose Erik Cole, who was out for the pre-game skate. Cole himself apparently wouldn't tell Scott Oake if he was going to be playing or not. Intrigue abounds. Cherry doesn't think Cole should play.

Laraque was in a suit at the dressing room door, so I guess Harvey draws in again tonight. Aaron Ward is definitely playing. I think the first 5 minutes will set the tone; first goal will likely win tonight.

Cole's on the bench, so it looks like he's playing.

Edmonton's crowd is no better at the Star Spangled Banner than the Carolina crowd is at O Canada, so I guess that's fair enough. I think the Mountie was a bit late on her salute; hard to blame her, the players were having to yell at each other on the bench. Nice shot of Stephen Harper, remarkably unsurrounded by obvious bodyguards - presumably they're there.

Originally written: 2006-03-18 13:25:17

Cleaned up slightly since.

At my place of work, we make heavy use of a modified version of RT. It's particularly important to us in the Research Support Group, because we have to bill our time out. (Rather, we're accountable for it; we don't get paid, nor does our department, on the basis of "hours billed". But we do charge money to the researchers.) My first task when I started, since I lacked a manager and all the other staff were busy, was to just go through all of the open RT items. So I did that - about 900 at the time. I learned a lot of things; not so much about what we did, but how people did them, and how they documented - or didn't - what they'd done.

Originally authored on: 2006-05-06 10:29:30

Published incomplete because I doubt I'll finish it any time soon. I will update if I ever do complete it though.

Primary scoring is usually the team's top forward line - they're the top offensive threats, so of course you want them out as much as possible. Thornton and Cheechoo are the cogs there[0], with Nils Ekman[0] providing support. Most teams have a defenceman they expect to score a fair bit too: he'll play the point on the first PP unit and generally get 25ish minutes a game. His partner may or may not be expected to score bunches too. Early in the season for the Oilers, Chris Pronger and Marc-Andre Bergeron could have been considered to be primary scorers. MAB has fallen out of favour, and I'm not sure why - obviously his game has gone a bit sideways, but for what reason I don't know. I'm sure he'd like to know too.

Secondary scoring is everybody else. Sometimes a team won't load up their top line with their top scorers: Edmonton vs Detroit moved Ales Hemsky to the second line, and mostly went with Brad Winchester on the RW with Horcoff and Smyth. Great move by MacTavish, I think - moving Hemsky, I mean, not necessarily going with Winchester. But hey, Winnie seems to thrive up there, so go with the hot stick.

So, succinctly, primary scoring comes from the guys you *expect* to score. Secondary scoring comes from the guys you *need* to score. You won't win if your primary scorers don't, and you can't win if your secondary scorers don't.

In today's NHL, if your primaries aren't approaching a PPG during the regular season, they're disappointing. I don't care how they get the points - ES is the most important, but if they can't score on the PP, you don't want them out there. The Oilers have 4 expected primaries and one surprising one: Hemsky, Horcoff, Smyth, and Pronger you expect scoring from, and Jarret Stoll is the surprise. All of the forwards had 20 goals (ok, Hemsky had 19) and scored at least 66 points. Pronger had 12 goals - a bit of a disappointment, but he found his game late-season - and 56 points, pretty respectable. Not surprisingly, that's their top line, their second line centreman, and their #1D.

The best of your forward line secondary scoring should be 0.2 - 0.5 points per game.

And just for future reference, I got logos from the Oilers and Hurricanes sites (as well as the unmatched hockeydb website) for the classic and current Oilers and the Hurricanes, glommed them into the gimp, and here's the colour codes (Wade, take note in case you need them next Monday ;) ).

Hockey because this is directed squarely at the CBC commentators, *especially you Don Cherry*.

We're not American. We don't pronounce the rank spelled Lieutenant "loo-ten-ant", that's how the Americans do it. We do it British style, "lef-ten-ant" or "left-en-ant" (depending on your cadence).

Cherry, you say you love the troops - learn to pronounce their ranks correctly.

Just something small, but it's important, y'know?

Ron MacLean got a pass earlier this season, but Cherry ripped into people for calling the Memorial Cup "the Mem Cup" - hypocrisy is one of the worst sins in my book.

Start time approx 2025h Eastern. Looks like Raleigh got hammered with a rainstorm - ouch.

Laraque out, Harvey in. MacT: "We need bodies in front of the net." Yup. CBC commentary pointed out that Stillman just plain shot the puck on the PP - if it goes in, great, if not, maybe there's a rebound. Yup.

Stillman's apparently going to be doubleshifting.

Hm, the home crowd doesn't seem too sure of the lyrics of either national anthem, but at least they drowned out whatsherface. Two points for trying!

I set up a test blawg on my router here at home, but it's a PITA - man, editing styles in MT sucks. Editing them twice sucks more. I'm sure there's an easier way to do it than using the built-in editors. So I'm doing it live during breaks in the play.

I'm going to go with Oilers colours for now - hopefully they won't have to change soon. At least I'll have something other than the defaults.

Dean Bennett (no byline, no idea who he writes for, although the link title suggests the Canadian Press) needs to do some. Writing a report card for both teams after the game, he said of Edmonton's special teams:

A train wreck. Hurricanes shut down the Oilers power play by pressuring the defence up high. Edmonton allowed the Canes to get back in the game in first period by allowing a short-handed goal. Special teams have been the Oilers undoing in the series. Grade: F.

He's not wrong, the power play was sucktastular last night, and that's why they lost. But the first Carolina goal wasn't a shortie - it was a power play goal, and there frankly wasn't a whole lot the Oilers could have done except not take that penalty in the first place. Perfect set play by the Hurricanes.

I give the reporting for this series a D: that's not the first mistake I've caught in a column, just one of the worst. Can't these guys even read the boxscores they crib from nhl.com?

I still have some other things to figure out with MT 3.2, besides the obvious of schemes and colours (damn you Wade :) ), to do with RSS feeds. For some reason LiveJournal thinks this feed is tomorrow; my previous PGP post is dated Tuesday at 0233h, I think about 12 hours in the future. Also, I need to figure out how to separate entry body from extended entry in the feed; I kinda feel bad for anybody who reads the feed on LiveJournal (or, probably, anywhere else) because... damn, those hockey posts are long.

Start time approx 2020h Eastern; Edmonton, AB.

Laraque stays in, he didn't see much ice at all last game (24 seconds? ouch).

Keys for Edmonton: keep the offensive pressure up, make those Hurricanes dmen scramble. They're not the most mobile group in the world, so take advantage of it. Early speed, take advantage of the energy and noise that's created from the introductions and anthems. Take the body hard - Carolina's forwards aren't the biggest group in the world, although they're obviously not easily intimidated either. Traffic in front of Ward, especially since it seems to piss off the Carolina players - maybe they can get sucked into some retaliatory penalties. And finally, win-streak Markkanen with a .934SP, not the ZOMG WE NEED A GOALIE .885 Markkanen. Clearing the crease helps with that.

Per practising what I preach, I've switched my mail clients to using GnuPG signing by default, or have at least started on switching them - main work machine done, laptop and home Windows PC to go.

One of my complaints about email is that it's difficult to verify the sender or the contents, but I don't do anything to help people receiving my email to do so.

Plus, it started making more sense to me some time ago, protecting myself from people who might misquote me in order to cause harm to me professionally.

It's not perfection, but it's a start. My one bitch is Thunderbird/Enigmail will remember my passphrase for an arbitrary amount of time, but can't be set to clear when the screensaver comes on, for instance. I poked about at gpg-agent, but couldn't find any frontend for MacOS that seems to do that.

Start time, approx 2000h Eastern, Edmonton.

Sorry Wade, I meant to reply to your comments but I got busy.

Not much needs to be said, I think, except Edmonton needs to do pretty much the opposite of what they've managed to do the last couple of games. They need pressure in front of Cam Ward, they need to stop giving up odd man rushes, and they especially need to stop the giveaways at centre ice and at Carolina's blueline - which will help stop the odd man rushes. I made a change too - I had a beer with supper before the game started, so I'm one up - if they get blown away again, I won't care as much.

In the crowd, USA vs Canada tshirt - guess the jingoism isn't the sole domain of Yanks. Hey guys - Carolina's best players so far (Brind'amour and Ward) are Canadian, and Edmonton's best this series is a Czech.

What can I say that hasn't already been said? MacT won't talk about who's starting and I don't blame him - I think partially, he's not saying a word because he knows the reporters really badly want to know, and he doesn't have to tell them. Can't say as I blame him.

MacT's starting Markkanen, it turns out - he led the Oilers on-ice for the warmup, apparently. First start for him since March 1st. They were showing pools of water on the ice - ouch.

Something I forgot to put into my goalies entry. There was some fair bit of kvetching in the media (and, I imagine, in other weblogs and web boards, although I haven't looked) about Marc Andre Bergeron. Poor bastard. They asked Roloson how he felt about it, he said that in his opinion, Ladd's running him didn't even deserve a penalty (one of the few, he said), and Bergeron had just been doing his job - it could have been Pronger, it could have been Smith, it could have been anybody. I think he's right - Bergeron was a bit enthusiastic, but they've got to know how much Rolo hates being run, and probably are a bit more zealous than normally they would be trying to clear the crease. Roloson was out a bit, going for the rebound, and that's that.

That's hockey, and that's life - sometimes bad things happen for no real particular reason.

And that is, I promise, my final post of the day.

WestJet and Air Canada settled, courtesy of the CBC. The PaulDotCom boys picked up on it in their podcast - I'd submitted the story to them, intending to get them to link to my writeup, but I never took the time so I just gave them the raw link. Now I'm taking the time, because I think they missed something in their show.

There's a couple of interesting items here. First is the most obvious, and the one they caught: what was an employee who'd presumably left on poor terms (but left!) still doing with a login id and password, valid from off-site, for what is presumably a considerable length of time?

Second is the settlement. It's curious that AC would settle for legal fees + litigation, and a contribution to charity from WestJet. Did they figure they couldn't win the original $220m lawsuit? Are they essentially admitting guilt to the charge of trashing the WJ exec's house? Either way, that's a pretty interesting result to what appeared to be a relatively straightforward case of industrial espionage.

I rarely listen to podcasts at work - except for stuff that's arguably work-related, I've never done so before. I made an exception today when I saw interviews with Roloson, Conklin, and Markkanen pop up on the Oilers podcast. I had a listen, there's about 9 minutes with Rolo, a minute and a half with Markkanen, and about 6 with Conklin.

It boils down to this: Roloson says he'll make a quick recovery, third degree MCL tear or maybe a bit less, but he has no hope at all he'll be back for the finals. He said for a change, he didn't feel that when he got run that time that it should have been a penalty, and that Bergeron was just doing his job. He said he also hyperextended his elbow (seeing him favour his arm, I'd thought at first that it was a shoulder injury, so at least I'm not totally out to lunch).

Markkanen didn't say much, just that it will be "a big challenge" and "a second chance."

Conklin said MacTavish had yet to make a decision about who'd be starting, and he'd likely find out when the reporters found out. He sees this not as "a second chance, but it's an opportunity" - something along those lines. Interesting he rejected the words Markkanen used. They asked him about The Play last night, and did he wish it had gone differently - he said "Yeah, I wish the puck hadn't gone in the net," and that there'd be plenty of time in the summer to beat himself up, if that's how things went.

So, yeah. Roloson's gone, the Oilers are back to where they were in February, except if Conkannen gets hurt or falters, there's not even Mike Morrison in the ECHL waiting to be called up, just Jeff Drouin-Deslaurier, who has hardly impressed.

They said all the right things, and even with Conkannen stinking it up every other game practically (there was a stretch of what, 5 games, where whoever started didn't finish?) the team was still above .500. While I have to admit that my hopes aren't what they were 24 hours ago, I'm hardly ready to concede the bet, sorry Wade.

Why not? Just said, this was a good team even before Roloson came along. They're playing about as well as can be expected defensively and they haven't had a lot of trouble scoring goals these playoffs - they're still in decent shape. They've got leadership galore, including Michael Peca who, lest we forget, knows exactly what it's like to get to the Finals and have one's hopes dashed to flinders by a crappy play. Ryan Smyth, Chris Pronger, Jason Smith, all those guys know what it's like to get just the slightest lick of the brass ring. Their younger guys have all been steady.

At the other end of the rink, Ward's been hot, but so had Toskala been and they lit him up for 6 - twice in a row. Legace was extremely good all year, they got to him too. They pumped 5 pucks by Bryzgalov. Score like that, and the other team's got to work really hard to beat you. Ward's young and Gerber's as vulnerable as Conkannen.

It'll be tight, but the Oilers are hardly sunk. The series is still very much up in the air.

I'm still going to be reading up on MT docs as to how to change colours though. Just in case. And I wanted to anyway, this default scheme sucks.

Scott Oake: Would you say that Eric Staal can expect to see a lot of Chris Pronger?

Craig MacTavish: *laughs* I wouldn't... I'm not going to say that. I will say that with Pronger playing 30 minutes a night, Staal will see him. (paraphrase)

MacT cracks me up.

All the reports are correct: RBC is freaking loud. A friend of mine and I were talking earlier, we both figure there won't be any blowouts these Finals; all the games are going to be 2-1, 3-2 type affairs, I think. (Although Cam Ward is the weakest link here; if he melts down, there could be a blowout. I think it's very unlikely Rolo will melt.)

My LISA 2004 buddy Wade is a confirmed Hurricanes fan. Approximately 0.0005 seconds after the Canes beat the Sabres, he emailed me:

"So we gotta make a Stanley Cup bet.

How about this - Oilers win, I'll paint my blog in Oilers colors for a week and proclaim their superiority, and send you a box of North Carolina stuff. Canes win, the reverse happens."

(That's how I found out who won the game, in fact.)

So, bet on, Wade. Oilers in 5.

In the unlikely event of a Carolina victory, I'll have to figure out how to change the colours in this damn thing, and figure out what sorts of Canuckian things he might like.

A bunch of people found this weblog looking for Ubuntu hangs in PCMCIA CS (Card Services) whilst upgrading from 5.10 to 6.06. In case it's not clear from my previous post, the problem appears to be related to using a 686-smp (and probably k7-smp) kernel on certain classes of hardware. I've seen it myself on the Asus P5LD2 motherboard (mine's a rev 1.02 VM model). Symptoms are hangs on dist-upgrades or upgrades done using the update manager. It seems to trigger a CPU-intensive loop of some sort on PCMCIA, and for me, it hangs altogether starting ACPI services. (Why PCMCIA is appropriate on desktop class hardware, I've no idea. Perhaps somebody can illuminate me.) This bug is reported in Ubuntu's launchpad as bug 37430.

To my knowledge, despite the "Fix Released" moniker, this still occurs - I tried it yesterday, post-release.

The workaround is to boot a -386 kernel first. The fix, if your pooch has already been screwed by this, is described in the bug report. You'll need a boot / rescue CD and a little knowledge of dpkg.

Dear Captain Copyright: I hate you and what you stand for. But I'm going to link to you anyway. Have fun trying to stop me.

(Reference: here.)