November 2007 Archives

Apologies are good.  If I screw up, I need to apologize and try to make amends.  Riffing on Seth Godin's take on dinner speakers: if you find yourself constantly having to apologize, maybe you should stop.  Don't stop apologizing, stop behaving in ways that cause you to have to make amends.

We all know people who fly off the handle or say something rude to you, then apologize.  After the third or fourth iteration, you find yourself thinking, "Don't be sorry, be quiet!"  People who find themselves constantly apologizing (or leaving people feeling like they ought to do so, anyway) generally have a problem, and it's not the people around them.  If everybody says you're a jerk, you probably are.  We shouldn't apologize for being jerks; we should endeavour to not be jerks.

I love DoubleCommand, because it allows me to use my Unicomp Windows keyboard more naturally.  (If Unicomp made a Mac keyboard, I'd be all over it.)  But DC seems to just kill Leopard.  Leo's got problems enough on its own without an attempted install of the latest DC causing an instant kernel panic.

Too bad, I'm going to miss being able to tell my reluctant G5 that Alt is Command and Windows is option.

I guess I'll try again in a few versions, but for now, DC + Leo = poison that hurts you bad.

(Update: I just found out about Keyboard Preferences | Modifier Keys.  At least I can remap "option" to command, and "command" to option.)

Courtesy James Mirtle, we see Damien Cox's take on the whole Jiri Tlusty thing.  Things were so much better in the old days, if only we had good ol Smythe back, he'd tell things like they are, he'd show them how pissed off he is.

Yeah, things were so much better in the old days at Maple Leaf Gardens:



Not that the Maple Leafs are alone in having a poor history with matters or allegations of sexual abuse:



Yeah, I think if I was Damien Cox, I'd think twice about talking about what old-time guys might say about today's relatively benign happenings, or moaning about the disappearance of the good old days.

This started off being a comment in this thread at Lowetide's, but as I commented, I don't write here enough and don't want to hijack that thread.  Dennis, a smart guy with an unfortunate habit of engaging mouth before brains made an interesting comment about Dustin Penner, saying: "As much as Penner's a slow fatty who isn't making anyone look good, I have a feeling that he's not gonna be bothered by people getting on him if it comes down to it."

Penner's an interesting player to me.  I'm no hockey player (and nobody sane would ever confuse me with one), but when I look at him I can't help seeing somebody not unlike myself.  Everything he has professionally he worked his butt off for, he's a late bloomer, and he seems to have a bit of an up-yours attitude.  I think that attitude comes naturally to late bloomers.

In other words, Dennis is right: I doubt Penner gives a rat's ass what the average fan thinks.  Even if you ignore the justifiable pride of a self-made man, he played a year on a team with Chris Pronger, who gets booed in virtually every arena he plays in, which never stops him from being a potential Norris candidate.  I'm sure at least some of that attitude must have rubbed off.

Unlike Dennis and a lot of the rest of the Oilogosphere, I don't think Penner's played that poorly.  I will grant that there have been games he's looked bad, but he's hardly a unique Oiler in that respect.  I will also stipulate that he's not playing like a 4 million dollar man - 0.5ppg and 10PIM in 17 games is more the speed of somebody making a quarter his salary.  That being said, his salary is what it is and just think, Oilers fans: it could have been Thomas Vanek, whose boxcar numbers are almost identical for yet another 3mm per year.

Dennis - and others - have put one of Penner's key issues crudely, saying he's fat.  While I don't agree with the statement, it is fair to say that Penner's conditioning isn't there - and this as much as results is probably driving his icetime.  But. remember Billy Guerin's comments after his first game as an Oiler?  I couldn't find any quotes in Lexis/Nexis, but they were something along the lines of being exhausted, not being used to the pace.  Any team with a guy like Shawn Horcoff behind at least two or three other forwards on the speed depth chart is fast.  While I don't think Penner will ever endanger Horcoff's spot, never mind Cogliano or Sanderson, I do think he and his linemates will adjust.

I don't want to rely on hearsay "saw him good" and boxcar numbers as my sole evidence, but I will point out that 46 shots is good for third on the team - some of those have got to start going in, although comparing to his career shooting percentage is dicey.  It's probably safe to say though, that if #27 emulated the former #94 on the power play, his point totals would go up.

Looking at 5 on 5 data, Penner's fourth among forwards, slightly behind Horcoff, Torres, and Hemsky.  Horcoff's playing with Penner now, so we can likely expect them to converge.  The numbers would also appear to support my perception that Penner's doing ok defensively: he's got a GF/on of 3.39, GA/on of 2.61 - he's outscoring at even strength.  GF/off is 1.79, GA/off is 3.12 - the team is much worse at scoring when Penner's not on the ice, and is worse at preventing goals too.  By way of comparison, Horcoff's numbers are 3.39/2.42, 1.61/3.23 - so Penner's right in line with his new linemate.  Considering the team as a whole is in the minuses, Penner's doing pretty well.  (Stoll's numbers are horrific, for instance.)

I'm not going to talk about the power play; the team's woes at that this season are well-documented, and while Penner's sure not helping there, I don't think he's hurting the team either.  He doesn't kill penalties much, so no point in talking about that.

So, while Penner's not earning his fat paycheque, the numbers say he's not holding the team back, either.  He's not making Lowe look good, and you can argue whether he's worth the money - probably not, for a rebuilding team - but relative to his teammates, he's doing just fine.  Why's the team so lousy then?  That's a matter for another time.

Last night's game Penner had a couple of decent chances and rag-dolled Phaneuf.  That last alone should warm the cockles of any Oiler fan's heart on a dark winter night.  He's made some smart defensive plays too - like a lot of college guys familiar to us Oilers fans, he's pretty good in his own end.  I don't think he'll ever be confused with Fernando Pisani, Shawn Horcoff, Todd Marchant, Mike Grier, or (had to say it) Craig MacTavish, but you never know.  He's just turned 25, old for a hockey player with essentially only 1.5 NHL seasons behind him, young for a Stanley Cup winner and a fellow whose signing bonus last year was likely more than a lot of us will make in five years.  Could be by the end of his contract, he will be making everybody look good.  Oilers fans had better hope so.

(Image from ESPN.com, credit to AP Photo/The Canadian Press/Richard Lam.)

(Edit 21 November: remove some of the more egregious grammatical and structure mistakes.)

#1 Hockeytown
What arrogance, what hubris.  I guess 10 Cups gives them a right to some arrogance, but that’s not even half as much as Montreal.  Hockeytown USA I could stand, barely.

#2 Annoying players
It’s pretty easy to hate Kirk Maltby, Dallas Drake, and even Tomas Holmstrom and Dan Cleary.  They play no-holds-barred, and Holmstrom is as bad as Ryan Smyth for bumping with the goalies.  Cleary’s re-invented his game as a grinder, and he’s good at it.  None of them are big, but they all hit and facewash with the best of them.



#3 Chris Chelios
He could slot under annoying players, but he deserves a class all his own - not the least because even vets like Maltby and Drake are kids next to this guy.  He’s done it all; scored big goals, fought big fights, won with the team (two Stanley Cups, a World Cup) and won individual awards (three Norris trophies and All Star nominations like nobody’s business).  He’s also one of the dirtiest players going, and even worse, gets the benefit of the doubt from the refs.

#4 The Octopus
I mean, really.  Throwing dead marine life onto the ice?  Brad Winchester’s an ex-Oiler now, but one of the best moments of the 2006 playoffs for the Oilers was Winchester’s handling of the octopus - Lowetide has used that picture a few times now.  And Detroit’s not even a port city!  I guess it would be in poor taste to throw 9mm cartridge casings on the ice.

#5 They’re good.
Yeah, this one’s getting old, but for the last 10 years, has there been an overall better team than the Wings?  It didn’t hurt that they also consistently ran with the big dogs payroll-wise - they slipped under the radar a bit with the Rangers grabbing the spotlight, but this was a team with a 60mm+ payroll for a couple of years running when the median seemed to be in the 40s.

(Image ganked from Viewimages.)

It's been too long since I wrote something hockey-related; a Battle of Alberta on HNIC seems like a good time to pick up the stick again.  Some quickie notes, it's not a Flames-Oilers Hockey Night in Canada without:
   * some lousy puck luck.  The last few years it's been the Oilers getting the nasty end of the stick, but the first goal was one of the luckiest I've seen in a long time.
   * lots of fast skating and spirited play.
   * Dion Phaneuf shoving somebody from behind after the whistle.  He got Penner and somebody else, didn't catch who but Stortini wanted a piece of him for it, and naturally he wanted nothing to do with getting his knuckles bruised.
   * Robyn Regehr head-hunting Ales Hemsky.  Twice.  I thought he was lucky to just get two minutes after slamming Hemsky's head into the boards, and Hemsky's lucky his neck's still in one piece.  The CBC guys were calling for a major; the way the NHL's going after headshots, I think that should have been a match penalty.  Hemsky's a much tougher guy than he gets credit for.  I'm sure he'll be feeling that tomorrow though.
   * some sick goaltending.  Kipprusoff let in one softie, but was otherwise great, and Mathieu Garon is making me forget about poor ol Jussi whathisname.

Matthew Lombardi's looking really good - I don't follow Flames games much, but since the Oilers effectively traded him for Stoll, I'm always interested in him.  Speed to burn, and sometimes the hands are there.  He drew at least a couple of penalties, and gave the Oilers defenders fits all night.  An interesting player.

Alan Rourke was on the ice with a couple of minutes left; Simpson commented on it and said something about MacTavish being forced to deal with inexperience.  Rourke's not a total babe in the woods though, of course; he's 27 and while he only had 42 NHL games before tonight, he's got about 300 AHL games under his belt.  (He even played with Robert Nilsson in Bridgeport.)

At any rate, good game and the good guys won, so enough said.

I've been using MacOS 10.5 on my G5 PowerMac for the last week now, and so far, I'm not terribly impressed.  You can likely find tons of fanboys slathering saliva all over the nifty features, and you can find tons more haters piling poo upon their install DVDs, so I'll just go over the stuff that *I* noticed and that I've not seen discussed in much detail.  (Not that I've really looked.)

My G5 has a gigabit interface - two of them, in fact, although I've only used one.  It's connected to a gigabit switch and has been Just Fine, Thank You Very Much since I got the machine in December 2005.  I upgraded to Leopard, and poof - all of a sudden it's 100mbit.  I don't think I need to say how annoying that is, particularly since I'm regularly shipping ISOs around.  The other issue I noticed is when the machine wakes from sleep, it takes a full minute sometimes for it to reacquire an IP from DHCP - this part is so annoying that I finally just set my IP statically.

The first time I powered the machine off after installing Leopard (Wednesday or so), it did its shutdown thing, then the sleepy light came on and *all* the fans started running full blast for a full minute - until I got annoyed and held in the power button.  That behaviour hasn't repeated, my machine is its usual quietish self, but I guess I'll see if it repeats this weekend.

X11 is really annoying now, from the $DISPLAY thing to no fullscreen.  It broke Gimp.app seriously, and the MacPorts gimp port is busted.  I get to shuffle over to my Linux machine when I need gimpy.

I got a 250GB external FW400 drive for the express purpose of trying out Time Machine.  I plugged it in, and my system crashed immediately.  I guess it didn't like the partition table on the drive (likely had been running an NTFS fs), but experiencing some data loss - fortunately not catastrophic, and I have other backups anyway - when trying to set up a feature that's supposed to reduce this sort of thing is sort of... crap.

Boot Camp.  Not strictly a Leopard issue, but since you are apparently No Longer Allowed To Use It since Leo's been released, I'll blame it anyway.  I understand *why*, but that's a *very* chintzy move, Apple.  I know they're a company that needs to make money, but there's no real reason to do this beyond "we don't give a crap about our existing customers."  I have an iMac at home, purchased mid-September, which will be running 10.4 for some time - if Boot Camp has been disabled on it, I certainly won't be forking out $180 to upgrade, I'll just suffer with VMWare Fusion.  Apple didn't lose a sale cos they'd never made it, but they won't be making one and now I'm angry to boot.

The positives from the 'upgrade' so far are few and far between, mostly because I was honestly satisfied with 10.4.  The biggest one?  I can now - finally - rotate my displays, which again just makes me that much more angry with Apple, since there's no reason they couldn't have distributed an updated driver for my 10.4 system.  Thankfully, upgrading work machines only costs $80 and it's not out of my own pocket.

All in all, if you're not running 10.5 already, I really wouldn't bother.  Spaces?  Buy CodeTek Virtual Desktop, or any one of the other applications that do what Spaces does except better.  Time Machine?  Meet Carbon Copy Cloner.  Stacks?  Give me a break.  297 other features?  I've yet to really see them, I suspect that 1-50 are "1. updated Documents folder icon.  2. updated System Preferences icon.  3.  updated Downloads folder icon." and so on.

I have a paid copy of CodeTek VD, which I purchased about a year ago now.  One of the features it had that I liked was the ability to "lock" one of my displays, such that it showed the same application regardless of the desktop I was in.  After having enabled that for the right hand display, I would always open Firefox there, that way I could browse documentation online for any of my virtual desktops.  I discovered that if I told Spaces to open Firefox in all Spaces, then always opened FF in the RHS display, it had a similar effect.

However, it doesn't allow me to keep a particular Terminal window open there at all times, which is handy if I'm asking questions in IRC or just wanting to keep a window for time tracking open.  I don't want *all* my Terminals open in *all* Spaces simultaneously; in fact, that's quite the opposite of what I want.

The other difficulty I've had with Spaces is that I can't seem to figure out how to make it so that I can have Terminals open anywhere I like - it always wants to switch back to The One Space in which I've opened one.  Perhaps I can work around that with the above - tell it to open Terminals in all spaces - but again, I don't want all my terminals scattered everywhere, that's why I want virtual desktops to begin with!  At any given point, I could have five or ten terminals open to various machines.  Messy messy.

edit - of course, as soon as I posted, I figured it out.  Open Spaces, then just drag the window to the space in which you want it, duh.  Kind of nasty, but it works.

I'm a fan of DoubleCommand, since as previously noted I like a Unicomp keyboard.  Despite some complaints, I've found that DC works just ducky in Leopard, although I did a format and reinstall - most issues seem to come from upgrades.  I rebooted this morning though, and had to re-enable my DC mappings, so this time I made them a system mapping instead.

One other issue I noted is my network connection is gigabit, but after Sleeping my G5 last night, when I came in this morning it only seems to detect 100mbit - at least it's FDX.  That could be a switch issue (but I doubt it).

#1 Consistently inconsistent.
2004 - last place in the division.
2006 - Conference finalists, done in only by injuries.
2007 - President’s Trophy.
2008 - back to the bottom.



#2 Darcy Regier.
He let Danny Briere and Chris Drury go, but matched the Oilers offer to Tomas Vanek for 50 million over 7 years.  You think he could have kept at least one fo those guys for that kind of coin?  Lowe should be pleased - Vanek’s certainly not covering the bet.  Regier matches the salary, then blames Lowe for salary escalation.  Could have signed him earlier, guy.  Couldn’t make up his mind - let the two co-captains go and rebuild, or try to win another regular season championship?  He tried to grab both and failed miserably.

#3 They’re so... squeaky clean.
The closest they have to a tough guy are Adam Mair and Andrew Peters, who got a whole 253PIM combined last year.  This is the team that used to dress Rob Ray?  How can you do anything but hate a team that’s so unhateable?  Peters has done ok for himself, but while I admit to a more limited knowledge of eastern teams, he’s certainly no Boogaard or Brashear.  He’s not even a Laraque.

#4 The Buffaslug.
Enough said.

All in all, this is actually a pretty hard team to hate, but I’ll try anyway.

(Image from http://www.mikelynaugh.com/.)

One of my projects has been improving my writing.  Succinctness is one way to do this and is probably the area in which I need the most improvement.  Constantly saying "I haven't had the time to make this shorter" is saying "my time is more important than yours."  This is bad when writing personally (or in your weblog), and disastrous when writing emails in a business context.

Having said that, I can recommend Stephen King's On Writing as a general resource.  I recently purchased and have been working my way through William Zinsser's On Writing Well, which I can also recommend for non-fiction writing.

If free is more your bag, copyblogger.com is full of good tips, including the most recent post, "Are you writing with clarity".  Seth Godin is one of the best I've seen at the craft of weblogging.  If you want to become a better writer, then one of the best things you can do for yourself is to read.  All good authors read other good authors.

As far as weblogs go, some people might argue that they're only writing for personal interest, and therefore they should not have to be terribly concerned with writing well.  That is unmitigated bullshit: if we weren't interested in having our thoughts read, we wouldn't go to the bother of setting up weblog software and posting to it.  So, if you're interested in a wide(r) audience, it's in your best interests to hone your writing.  If you're not interested in getting your points across clearly, then you would be doing everybody a favour by saying "this is just a braindump, I don't expect you to understand it so don't waste your time reading it" at the start of every post.

As an Oilers fan, I have particular reason to dislike this particular player.  I don't know the guy so it's unreasonable to say I hate him, but I don't like what he stands for.  It was with pleasure that I watched the Oilers snap their futility streak on the PP with him in the box after he failed to goad an Oiler into scrapping with him.

From NHL.com:
"Boogaard did not return to Minnesota's 3-2 home victory over Calgary after a second period fight with Eric Godard. Wild coach Jacques Lemaire said he had a sore hand and couldn't hold his stick."

Does it really matter if he plays with a stick in his hands or not?  Career so far: 126 regular season games, 2 goals and 5 assists.  Only JF Jacques and I would likely have worse totals with that many at-bats.  He couldn't even score in junior (174gp, 3-18-21), and even Dave Semenko and Georges Laraque had hat-tricks in the NHL.

The way to play this guy is to not let him goon you.  If he's not fighting or hitting, he's useless, as the Oilers demonstrated a few weeks ago.  Easier said than done, of course, although the fact he can barely skate at the NHL level hurts the latter.  Unfortunately, he *is* very good at what he does, given the chance.

Hey kids, long time no write.  Normally I despise meta-entries of the form "sorry I haven't written in so long, I feel bad", but I assure you - I don't feel bad, and this will not be solely a meta-entry.  I had a paper due this week, so all my creativity had been going into that, and then all my energy went into a system upgrade, as you'll see in my weekly roundup tomorrow.

I've been remiss in my non-Oilers watching - see above.  I did catch about half of Al Arbour's return to the bench last night though, and it was a good game.  The parts I watched had lots of good scoring chances at either end, and while I'm not normally an Isles fan at all (hangover from 1983) it was fitting that they won the game in the end.  Linda asked me how many ex-Oilers were playing - she now knows who Mike Comrie is thanks to her celeb-news - and it was actually a bit surprising.  The Isles had Comrie, Satan, Bergeron, and Guerin, while the Pens had Nasreddine, Sykora, and Laraque.  Are the Islanders aping their across-the-city cousins from 1993-94?  At any rate, we watched the post-game ceremony in its entirety, classy stuff.  Hockey players are so guileless sometimes; Mike Sillinger was openly crying, and Billy Guerin had a good case of shiny eyes going too.  That's what we love about them.

Going from love to anti-love, I've not forgotten about Reasons to Hate, and hope to have an update today.  Also, I've been putting some thought into accountability on weblogs, and hope to have an interesting piece up on that this week.