Thursday, September 30, 2004
Cheerleader Boots Protect Denney
ESPN is carrying this story: Did cheerleader boots help protect rookie?
It’s a nice addition to the “you can’t make that up” file. Soon to be “ripped from the headlines” and put into a Law & Order episode I’m sure.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Center Field Not Found
Apparently there’s a big Yahoo ad in center field at SBC Park in San Fran and right next to it is a 404 marker. As a geek this made me laugh. The rest of you can just shake your head and go about your day.
Monday, September 27, 2004
Getting the Hockey Blogs Together
After patiently waiting for a way to improve the way I can produce a feed, I’m finally able to starting pushing the blog feed on The Ice Block. Blogger only produces an atom feed by default and I couldn’t read those for a while. Unfortunately many sites use Blogger. No problem anymore, atom is all good now. I did have to write a few to ask them to change the encoding, but no one outside of Jes GÅ‘lbez (who does need to use Eastern European accents) will see any difference in their site by doing so, and probably allows more to use their feed besides myself. Jes did change his encoding to an ISO format and hopefully I can tweak my script to include it soon.
Until then, have a look at some of the best blogs around and follow the feed to easily get a nice group update. If you think I’ve missed any major hockey blog, or even a small one that’s just really good and regularly updated, please let me know.
Friday, September 24, 2004
The Many Flavors of a Blogger Feed
I’ve got a decent amount of people I know blogging through Blogger.
Almost none of them have a link to their atom feed (Google does atom over rss as a default on Blogger blogs).
I have been able to find a feed for all I was looking for, but it doesn’t seem like there’s one standard.
Let’s say the url for your friend’s Blogger blog is:
blogname.blogspot.com
To get the feed, try one of these:
/atom.xml
/rss/blogname.xml
/rss/feed.xml
/blognamefeed
Note: you can also normally view the source of a Blogger’s page and get the feed location there.
If I find any more, I’ll post them.
Yankees Clinch 10th Consecutive Playoff Berth
Yup, let’s say it again:
Yankees clinch 10th consecutive playoff berth
Everytime I get heat for being a Yankees fan, well… I don’t really care; but anytime people start spouting off crap about people being fair-weather fans I remind them that I watched Andy Hawkins lose a no-hitter, so you can have fun with that new Yankees fan from from Iowa, but leave me be.
The last 10 years have certainly been great compared to the 10 years prior. I do wish this year’s team was filled with the character of about 5 years ago, but they still pulled it together despite a disappointing start and some mediocre numbers from star players (and some injuries/illness).
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Internet Reminder
Whenever I’m wondering why we all participate on the this internet thing, I always wind up getting some sort of reminder about how great it truly is. Today’s reminder is brought to you by this Ebay auction.
Trade Me Soon
So I was reading more about Jeremy’s sale of his blog, ensight.org and fine his latest post with a bunch of quotes from other blogs about it. So BJ’s post stood out to me because I’m not really up on Blogshares. To quote the site, Blogshares is:
“a simulated, fantasy stock market for weblogs where players invest fictional money to buy stocks and bonds in an artificial economy where attention is the commodity and weblogs are the companies.”
Seems like fun, reminds me of Wall Street Sports, although I used to do it back in the late 90s and it went on pause for a while and I don’t know how the new site is.
Anyway, seems I’m listed on Blogshares already, but I’m listed there twice. Once with the trailing slash, once without. I wrote to support, hopefully they can consolidate this and I can go tell you guys to buy and sell me. Just another fun thing to distract you from whatever it is you’re trying to be productive at.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Google to Release Its Own Browser
That’s what the NY Post wrote a couple of days ago at least.
I’m not positive Google wants to get into the browser game, but you never know. Ever since Google has made a lot of cash after going public everyone’s trying to predict what their next big move will be.
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Jeremy Selling His Blog
Jeremy C. Wright of Ensight is selling his blog. While blogs are usually quite personal, and I don’t think I’d give up the name “VodkaFish”, as it’s me, I was all for this decision. His domain name isn’t just him, it’s just a name, and even though he mentions he’ll continue writing on Ensight (which means many will continue reading), I don’t feel that he’s really selling himself off, just something he built. You can argue that anything you build is a part of you, but there’s a difference between selling “something” and selling your identity. Jeremy will certainly keep his identity when all is said and done, and help his family by bringing in some extra cash. Can’t think of a better way to start the fall.
Monday, September 13, 2004
Lockout Silver Linings
I certainly can’t be the only one who’s thought of “what I will do” if there’s a lockout come September 15th. Usually you see “I’ll follow the AHL” or some other hockey league, something I hope to cover in an article on hockeyfights.com soon, but I’m starting to think of the things outside hockey that I may be able to accomplish with more free time.
Like any hockey website owner, my site(s) eat tons of my time in-season. Generally I check the forums a bit more, but watching games nightly and recapping so much afterwards leaves me little free time, besides sleeping much less.
Web work.
So what can I possibly do with more free time? Well, first off, it’ll allow me to finally finish some other sites. The Ice Block is still in beta, something I need to complete - but even after completed - it’s another hockey site! So scrap that for a moment. Same goes for yet another hockey site I have planned. KO Corner never got the attention it deserved and now that I’ve finally been able to reprogram it a bit, I hope to make that a little more robust, however some of that may happen within a week or so. I have one more sports site planned, centered around a few sports and a lot of statistic referencing. Should be fun, but I’m not completely motivated about it yet. Lastly, I have one completely non-sports related site coming up. Zero work has been done on it and I’m just waiting to see if I get the domain name I want. If so, I’ll be moving on that fast and it will eat up a lot of my time during the initial build. After that, little maintenence required.
Still have to things to do.
However, no hockey doesn’t mean no working on a hockey site. There will be the fun “he said/she said” press releases from the NHL and NHLPA to post, and I’ll be writing more thoughts on the subject I’m sure. I’ll also conduct some interviews and keep backtracking on the fight log (something that is more complete then what is shown on the site). Make some video clips and keep the site moving forward until the day we have our game back. Programming-wise, I have a decent amount I’ve been wanting to do on HF for a while. I’ve been re-doing the html of most pages, but it’s a pretty slow process. After that I want to add a few new features and integrate more into the forums (for login purposes). Add that stuff to the content additions and it’s enough to keep someone busy for a long time.
What hockey do I have left?
Being in the NY metro area actually leaves me with few local hockey options. There aren’t any minor league teams that play close to NYC. The AHL has the Bridgeport Sound Tigers, but that’s not exactly around the corner. I’d love to go to a few games as I’m an Islanders fan, but I know it’s not an easy trip from here. The ECHL has the Trenton Titans, the former Islanders’ ECHL affiliate (their new affiliate being the Atlantic City Boardwalk Bullies, a former Rangers affiliate). Not close either. The UHL expanded to Danbury, CT with the Thrashers, but that’s another one that would be a good day trip. Plus, I still happen to be bitter that the UHL seems to be the only minor league that doesn’t feel like putting me on their press release list. I will check out some Central Hockey League games on chltv.com. I caught a few last year and the games can certainly be entertaining (something I’ll be sure to mention in a “hockey alternatives” article).
Outside my tech-sport world (kinda).
So, more (“for fun”) programming, still some hockey - but that’s not going to eat up my time completely, nor should I want it to. Non-work things I want to do with more free time:
- Sleep more - don’t know if I can, but I’ll try
- Play more video games - yup, this is seriously something I want to do more of. There’s a lot of fun stuff out there and I’ve got the consoles, so why not?
- Go to more movies - we watch a decent amount on tv, but going to the theatre is usually more fun. I certainly want to catch more indie films like I used to.
- Don’t get any more pets - we have a zoo already, it’s always good to remind youself that you don’t need anymore
If the whether is right, I’d like to go to the zoo, which brings me to… - See some NY stuff - I live here, so why not. Outside of going to the Museum of Natural History (last year), we haven’t done many NYC-only things.
- Read a book - yup, I’m going to read one. Not since Charlotte’s Web have pages been so scared.
- Start working out again - it’s rough going from gymrat to, well, gymnothing, but I did it and if I can find some sort of middle ground, I’d be quite happy. Maybe reading Jeremy’s posts will help inspire me to start going again.
- Clear out my inbox - this may be near-impossible, but if I can get it down to 10 emails, that’d be saying something (as I normally have 75-100 to respond to). No hockey season will help it from filling up too quickly.
- Write more - whether it be for one of my sites, this blog, whatever. Just keep writing.
- Take a trip easier - I’m never one for easy travel. I always think of all the things I have to do back home. Not having to closely watch a website or two (and respond to a gazillion emails) will make the time off less stressful.
- Try not to do too much - while I’d love to take advantage of every free minute, I just need to relax more. Go grab a drink after work with friends I haven’t seen in a while, go do nothing at someone else’s apartment. The little things can be big, should just start there.
Hell, I could probably go on forever switching between specific events and generalized things I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. My assumption is everyone’s got some sort of list of things they’ve been meaning to do. So hockey fans - this is your chance to do it, and instead of mourning what may be the loss of a season (and the sport as you know it), go make your own list and just see this as some sort of opportunity to check a few things off from it.