One of the reasons I like having an office is that I can play my radio, or more accurately, have the computer play the radio. Usually, this means I'm listening to WGN radio out of Chicago. It's one of the few stations left that does the mixed interview/talk format without doing the "let's see how many screaming loonies we can get on the phone today" format. Any given day, they have a couple of authors talking about their latest book, an interview with an actor with the Chicago production of a play, and a couple of chats with people who are in the news. I can tune in without having to play "So, what's the theme of the day?". It also has some of the best commodities news (12 noon CT) available.
The past couple of days, however, I've had the phones on, listening to my iTunes collection. There are two reasons for that--the portion of my brain that pays attention to the taking is currently occupied with other things, and sleep has been in short supply, which means I have to supply a lot more stimuli to keep the neurons ticking over. That means coffee and Blue Oyster Cult (or Berlin, or Maroon, or Alan Parsons) when I'm not actively involved in a slogging out meeting.
I once remarked to a researcher that if you do statistical analysis and ZZ Top all day for three days straight, you see God. Tomorrow's day three, and it ought to be interesting....
Given my current state of mind, I think a new car designed by a 30-some year dead and gone guy might just be just my style. But it would have to have a really good sound system.
Has anyone seen/heard the latest "Just because Harley Earl is dead doesn't mean he's stopped working for us!" commercial from Buick translated into any other language?
Or has GM decided that anyone who might think that having a car designed by a ghost as a definite block to purchasing isn't their kind of customer anyway?
Last night, the Sharks had their first pre-season "home" game that was actually at the HP Pavilion (née Compaq Center, née San Jose Arena). The hockey was definitely pre-season--there were more than a few "I thought you were over there" moments during play. It looks like Scott Parker will keep the goons from being stupid around the Sharks, and that's good--I expect to see fewer "
I also check out the amenities and services at the arena. As I point out to the engineering project managers, you haven't dealt with a hard deadline until you've dealt with opening night. These pre-season games are just the beta releases, so to speak. Pre-season games allow you to get some of the kinks out of the system, but that product had better be bug-free and fully functional on opening night.
So, what did I notice?
New signage: okay, since I can see the arena from the big red A, this isn't a big surprise. It shows they're spending money on external looks though.
Happy, friendly ushers: Yes, I admit it, I will cherry-pick door ushers if I get a chance. If I'm able to build a relationship, there a re fewer questions about the camera, why I'm bringing in an iPod, and the occasional hand-held scanner. All are allowed, but why invite the hassle? Besides, my purse is usually packed in such a way as to make an x-ray crystalographer weep with envy, and it can be a bear to re-pack on the fly.
But smiling, friendly, helpful ushers help to set the scene. If your customer's first impression of the arena are ushers who act like they were let go from their previous position as a correctional officer because they were too nasty--well, that impression is going to carry throughout the evening--and beyond.
Sidenote: Why are there still too many people in the arena management business who act like their idea of a perfect audience is one that paid for the tickets and then stay at home? And why do I keep finding them still employed? This attitude makes professional sports franchises really, really, upset--the event is only one aspect of the customer experience, and if the customers don't come back because the rest of the experience is awful, the franchise loses. And for some reason, some arena management groups just don't care. Moral? If you're a sports franchise, you get a contract as soon as you can that puts the onus on the arena mgmt company to produce. And if the management insists on being idiots, they get canned or stuck in the corner, where they can't get in the way. Better to eat a couple of salaries than to permanently lose customers.
Okay, next thing--facilities: I sit in the club section, so the washrooms are both below ground, and below the water line. This makes plumbing difficult. Trying to have the toilets flush properly can have, ahem, interesting results. The water went down the toilet, which is, as one might say, the expected result. The rest of the washroom had been worked on over the summer, and was in good working order.
Seating: Is the area clean? Yes. Seats clean? Yes. Glass clean? woo-hoo! Its clean! This is another sore point for me--the glass is so easy to keep clean, so if it's allowed to get smeared and streaky, it shows that someone can't be bothered. If you're paying $85-120 a seat, you ought to be able to see through the glass.
The boards were clean as well. I once documented the state of both the remnants of a chocolate sundae thrown at the boards, and a pack of ketchup packets squirted on the boards, over the course of five games. That was a little over two weeks. Yes, that's disgusting-you ought to sit in that area, and see what's it's like in real life. Yes, the seating area can be a problem to keep clean, and I can handle eau d'not tobacco after concert nights. But I don't want sticky floors or seats.
Food and Drink: If you're offended by someone consuming alcohol at a sporting even, read no further. Okay, one of the big complaints last year is that the waitrons were no longer allowed to serve hard liquor. Club seat owners had to head to the bar and bring their own drinks back. Here's news-- the CC and ginger drinkers aren't likely to be the ones to get too rowdy. This year, the liquor is back, and they're naming the liquors (note: check and see if they are all from the same importer). That's civilized.
The Anchor Steam is gone, replaced by Guiness. No problem with that.
The food selections have expanded as well. The menu noted the new selections (give whoever thought that up a cookie!), and among those are the return of the hot dog and hamburger (yes, they were not on the menu last season), as well as adding a turkey wrap and California sushi rolls. I don't eat at my seat that often, but when I do, I like a choice. This also indicates an acknowledgement that there are people in the club section who attend a lot of games--it's not all the "schedule C, take the customer out for a game" crowd.
Other notes--the Tank Patrol is now wearing coveralls, and they're sponsored Give whoever thought that up a cookie as well. Either Sharkie's lower jaw has already been snapped --an occupational hazard when you're repeatedly covered by small children--or that's this year's look. And given how wacky the weather has been down here--either 100 with 15% humidity, or 65 with heavy marine layer--the ice was in pretty good condition.
Overall, it looks like the Shark Tank will be in a fine state for opening night.
Last week was the Worldwide meeting for my division. The good news was that I was able to see all the people from the field who I work with. The bad news is that I had to try and see them in 4 days.
One of the side-effects is that I've become seriously caffienated. There's a lot of "Let's blow this Popsicle stand, get coffee, and talk", which involves heading off to Starbucks. There are three within 30 minute meeting distance, and another if we needed to take an hour to get some more serious discussion in. I had lots of meetings....
Oddly enough, it's not the caffeine at the time that's a problem--Chuq can tell you about my drinking a quad mocha after a Tacoma Tigers (tells you how long ago that was) game, getting back to the hotel, and being asleep 30 minutes later.
The first day without appreciable caffeine is the painful one. And today was that day. I now have a latte, and life is looking much better, thank you.
...at least do some research. This piece by Mac Engel of the Ft Worth Star-Telegram came down the wire service today , and was picked up by a bunch of newspapers.
Anyway, here's the phrase that pays:
"While many goalies of yesterday were little people with munchkin pads, the average height of today's NHL goalie is more than 6 feet. Twenty years ago, 6-foot-5 Coyotes goalie Sean Burke would have been the Manute Bol of his day."
Let's take a look at how many ways this shows a lack of research, okay?
At 6 ft 5, Sean Burke would be one inch taller than Ken Dryden and Gary "suitcase" Smith, who weren't playing in 1983, mainly because they had retired four seasons previously. Oops!
Even the goalies who were playing in 1983 weren't a pack of runts. 83-84 was the first season for Tom Barrasso, who's listed at 6ft3. He won a Vezina and a Calder that season for Buffalo. Mike Liut, at 6ft 2 is playing in St Louis. And a bunch, including Ken Wregget, Doug Soetaert, Steve Penney, Pete Peeters, and Bob Mason, are coming in at 6ft. And there are a couple of kids in the system by the name of Ron Hextall and Patrick Roy, who both measure past 6ft tall.
That, by the way, took me 10 minutes looking through a Sporting News Hockey Register from the 84-85 season.
So, let's take a look at the 1960's then? Okay, Gary Smith shows up mid-60's for Toronto, right before he descends into expansion hell, so there's your "high water" mark.
Glenn Hall is listed as 5 ft11, Terry Sawchuk is listed as 5 ft11, and so is Tony Esposito. Eddy Giacomin is also 5ft11 and and Jacques Plante is 6ft. True, goalies are a bit smaller, but guess what? So are the rest of the players! Bobby Hull is 5ft10-5ft11, and Phil Esposito is considered "huge" at 6ft2 and 210 lbs. Just by eyeballing the numbers, I'd have to say that goalie height has fairly well tracked skater height.
Looking up those numbers took another 10 minutes, and I was eating a salad at the time.
Finally, there's the myth of the goalie as the youngest brother, or the kid with the coke-bottle lenses, or some semi-in shape pudge who was stupid enough to want to stop pucks for a living. Even if there were goalies who had that background, the goalie as the worst conditioned player on the team went away permanently by the 70's. Think about it--the synthetics that were going to make equipment a lot lighter and flexible was still 5-10 years off, but this was the era where both the butterfly and flopping goalies came to the forefront. Slap on some 1970's era gear and throw yourself to the ice repeatedly for 60 minutes. Gee, not getting up quickly? Maybe you should work on your conditioning?
The big changes in goaltending hit when there was a full generation of well-trained and conditioned goalies that came up through the ranks, combined with the new materials that allowed goalies to be able to play without being encumbered with 35 lbs of leather that soaked up a couple of gallons of water and sweat during the game. The trouble is, this is the same time that Islanders and Oilers were playing offense, offense, offense (but backstopped by Billy Smith and Grant Fuhr--interesting how high scoring teams that do well have a killer goaltender? No, you cannot get away with "don't worry, we'll score more" as a playing philosophy), and nobody noticed!
So, do goalies have too much of an advantage? I think that's not yet played out, but is are the goalies suddenly too big? Are goalies suddenly so much better in shape than they were? I don't think so.
Jeremy Zawodny and Buzz Andersen write about the blogger and corporate culture. I touched on this earlier in the "Sally Rand" piece. It appears that Microsoft is ahead of the curve on this, at least regarding Scoble and Poccaro--they have a very good idea what they can and can't post because it's been communicated to them.
I really, really do not want to see this become a flash or freak-out point for corporations. This has already been touched upon in the harvard Business Review-- Halley Suitt, of Halley's Comment, wrote a blogging scenario as that month's case study.
At first, I thought--you know, this should have already been taken care of back in 1995, when corporations first started to pay attention to that their employees had their own web sites. I remember situations where an employee either said some pretty negative stuff about their company, or informed the world about a product that wasn't yet on the market
But wait a minute....
This should have been taken care of at a lot of corporations back in the 1980's, when they discovered that their employees were using email and posting to Usenet! Anything before that is a pretty small set of people on the net, who worked for companies (or universities--they have stuff they'd rather not have passed along) on the net. And since most of them had email addresses that referred to their place of work or study, it was pretty easy to track down.
So, this shouldn't be a big surprise to the boys in the carpeted wing, should it?
I guess it must be, because right now, most bloggers who write about their own milieu are either aligning with corporate culture (want to prove that's an implied corporate standard in a wrongful dismissal court case?), or just not mentioning where they work.
This is just not going to work in the long run--we're going to have someone who's posting stuff that their company really doesn't want to be shared with a couple million of their closest friends. And what I'm worried about is that some will take the easy way out--tell their employees that they can't identify where they work, or make them sign something that says they can't discuss anything that has to do with the technology that the company produces. Yes, they'll get a lot of control, but they'll lose a lot of goodwill on all sides.
This is the time for corporate and employee bloggers to get together to talk about what's appropriate and what's not, and put together a reasonable set of guidelines.
Unless, of course, they want a repeat of "ohmygawd, they have web pages!" from 1995, and "ohmygawd, they're posting to Compuserve" from 1988, and "ohmygawd, they're posting to Usenet!" from 1982...
...and so on
Ever get the idea that there is a serious disconnect somewhere between the execs and the individual contributors? I suspected as such about 13 years back--what the execs were saying and the directors were implementing were two different things. If the execs had been paying attention downward rather than outward, they would have noticed.
So, when I was invited to an "exec communication meeting" which was sort of a 10 ICs/first level managers get to talk to the exec staff, I introduced the game of "chase the meme".
The rules are simple. An exec, in this case the EVP of HR stated a new policy that was then supposed to be communicated down through the ranks. The dtae it hit the dept meetings would be reported back to the EVP, and if the meme didn't work its way through in 8 weeks, that would be reported as well.
In this case, the meme was "spend your employee relations budget", because we had directors and dept managers who were attempting to win the "good dog" award by not spending the money. This wasn't a big chunk of money--about $150 for each cost center per quarter, but when the company is doing quarterly layoffs and re-orgs, keeping the people you want to keep ought to be a pretty large priority. Your meme can be something as simple as "have a quarterly meeting and serve a snack"--anything that's easily trackable.
Lucky for me, and unknownst to the EVP of HR, I had an MBA study buddy on his staff. She let me know when the announcement was made. I enlisted some more MBA buddies and told them to let me know when the meme made its appearance.
What happened? The meme made it through 20% of the time within the 8 week time period. I kept track and found that was it--if the meme didn't make it by 8 weeks, it wasn't going to. The HR people did their work--they announced it at every director level staff meeting--it just wasn't implemented.
I reported this back to the EVP of HR, was thanked, and not a damn thing happened.
Think about it--if something this simple and innocuous isn't being passed along, what else from the exec level isn't making it to the employees? Corporate strategy, perhaps?
No, I don't read all the Micro-bloggers--if I did, I don't think I would have time for much of anything else. But I do read Robert Scoble's and John Pocaro's blogs on a pretty regular basis. Now, both are paid by Microsoft to "spread the faith", as it were, and sometimes the amp needs to be cranked down from 11. But the sheer joy they have in talking about Microsoft products is apparent.
However, after one too many iterations of "ooooh Longhorn" (think bogeyman, not doughnuts) lately, I began think about the late 80's and early 90's, when the prevalent method of sending out information to the computer users (a much smaller group than these days, true) was either mailing lists or Usenet, and at the same time, I also started seeing companies who changed their business model from "what's good for us" into "oh no--how do we deal with Microsoft!", and it came to me:
What a marvelous method blogging and other implementations of RSS will be to keep so many people so interested in a product that's not exactly going to be on the shelves for Christmas!
Because RSS is evolving from something that the early-adopter techies use to much broader markets, and it's going to hop across technology in a big way, more people are going to be plugged into the "gimme-ness" of RSS and getting directed information.
And that information is going to be very hard to ignore. If you're a product marketing person who's watching their back, you're going to be completely freaking out in the next year, there's going to be so much information hitting you from all sides. If you're not sure in your decisions about your own products, you're going to switch from presenting your agenda to your customers, and start making comparisons to a product that hasn't even hit the street yet.
And the question I have--why aren't more companies getting on board with this? There are people at every company--sales, marketing, evangelism, and a bunch of engineers--who are wired to do this sort of thing. Not that Microsoft is overtly telling their staff "go forth, and blog!", but I feel that there are corporations that either actively discourage staff from identifying, or are completely unaware of what's going on "out there".
The flip side also appears to be missing--where are the pointers to the user group blogs, and the blogs of people who are talking about they use your company's products? You can't buy that sort of stuff. Relationship marketing, anyone?
Yep, this one will get more thought....
(And oh yeah, Sally Rand was a well-known "exotic dancer" at the Chicago World's fair back in the 30's. She was best known for being clever about hiding the "naughty bits" behind stragetically placed balloons. If you have a product that won't be out for a bit, you're not going to spoil the surprise by revealing all. But giving out enough "information" to keep the audience interested is always a good idea....)
Fast forward 10 years. I'm now in Silicon Valley, and the company I am working for has made a serious move towards Unix. They are also trying to get SAP implemented.
Well, I couldn't do anything about SAP, but as one of the Unix people, and as a manager of a systems support group, I'm asked by the IT group to come to the computing center and help train the phone people working there on Unix. This is not rocket science--most of the phone people are local university students, and I've taught an Intro to Unix class in industry and at UCB extension. So, one sunny morning, I take off to the computing center, about 70 miles up the road.
The training was pretty uneventful, everyone behaved themselves, and I provided them with a "20 most likely asked questions and the standard answers" sheet. I had an hour before I needed to head back, and the shift manager at the computing center decided to give me a tour of the operations.
The machine room looked like a mini-mainframe swap meet--there were Amdahls, Tandem proprietary boxes, IBM VM and MVS systems, some random Vaxen, and one lonely Sequent mega-box. In all they were running nine different databases on eleven HW/SW combos. None of the databases talked to any of the others.
I commented that once the SAP systems, running on AIX servers, were brought in, their 5000 sqft machine room was going to look a little empty.
The shift manager gave me a look. She said: "Look around the control room--how many operators do you see? We employ at least three people; an operator, a sys admin, and a DBA, for every box, for every shift. We're been told that when SAP comes in, they'll lay off 80% of us. Do you think we're really interested in that? They'll never install SAP here."
And SAP wasn't installed there. They managed to find all sorts of interesting ways to put off and break the installation from the HW on up. Two years later, Europe and Asia had SAP running, but North America didn't. The VP of IT was let go.
Only when the corporation had a CEO who took a good hard look and canned 80% of corporate IT for being more interested in keeping the status quo than getting the coroporation into the 1990's, did SAP get installed.
A few morals here:
The VP of IT should have never told the group that once the magic system was installed, he could get rid of 80% of them. Turns out that he was trying to win the "good dog" award by getting way under budget.
Even if you consolidate on one platform and one system, you will likely need more than one set of people to take care of things. After all, you're still going to be crunching a good proportion of the the current job load-- or more, since once systems are consolidate, groups tend to ask for new stuff.
If you're an IT person who's made their mark with a now aged system, you'd better expect that someone is going to want to upgrade it. Your job is to make yourself useful enough that you're brought on board to learn the new system.
There are people who manage to drag things out to the bitter end--I worked with one CS person at university who knew the insides of NOS (old CDC 6-bit byte operating system) like no one else. After the university had no more use for him, and he refused to learn Unix, he ended up at the old ihnp4 (Indian Hills Naperville AT&T site), tending their antiques. Not a lot of future in that, though.
If you hang on to an old system, you can expect things to end badly.
Note: This is different from an unpopular or politically incorrect system, although the outcome might be the same.
And finally, the CEO owes it to their corporation and their shareholders to pay attention to what's going on in IT. If the IT organization goes through Directors and VPs like Chiclets, there's a big mismatch going on, and it's not a good thing. Don't expect that your IT organization will run on auto-pilot. It always amazes me that while a CEO will pay close attention to engineering, the part of the company that books and bills gets relegated to the garret.
...Computers, that is.
Prime was pushing very heavily in the early 80's to get a chunk of the mini-mainframe/mini-computer market. When they found out that the Ag Econ dept had funding, they did a lot of serious wining and dining of the prof who could actually cut the check. The prof, who wouldn't have recognized a computer two times out of three, should have handed over the actual decision making to the profs and operations staff who used and knew about computers.
So, we ended up with a Prime, running the fabulous Prime OS. And it turned out that the university where my mother worked bought a Prime at the same time.
We awaited the Prime. It showed--with a forklift hole straight through the CPU.
As one might say, an ex-computer. The head of operations called Prime to get a replacement. It was pretty clear that the forklift damage hadn't happened at the university--the rips in the packing material had already aged.
They told us that they would have to send a SE up to the university, but they couldn't make it for a couple of weeks, because they were "busy". Um yeah.
Now, it was spring in the midwest, and one of the attractions of spring in the midwest is that the weather reports switch from snowstorm warnings to tornado warnings. A fairly nasty storm hit the university where my mother worked.
A bolt of lightning hit the side of the administration building, taking out a chunk of the wall, and reducing their Prime computer to, ahem, art.
So, their computing staff called Prime, to find out how to get a replacement, and since it was fresh out of the box, determining if an Act of Nature meant that the university was going to have to hit up their insurance to pay.
Prime said that they would replace the computer, but they would have to send a SE to see if the computer was truly non-operational. It would take two weeks.
The operations staff offered to send a photo of the cooled pile of slag that used to be a computer. No dice. Well, could they get a SE from the sales office 20 miles away, rather than having to deal with one 200 miles away, but in the same state?
Nope.
Now, with customer service like this, it didn't matter that PrimeOS was a piece of garbage. No more Prime computers would darken the hallways of either university.
Ag Econ received their computer about six weeks after the fact. After having to replace most of the innards--it appears that even when you didn't have a gaping hole in the CPU, the hardware was made out of Silly Putty--we finally managed to get the thing to boot all the way up about four months later.
The other university? They took the insurance money and bought a real computer.
Ag Econ kept hoping for a good storm....
About twenty years ago, while I was pursuing YA degree (some people collect charms for charm bracelets, I collect graduate degrees), I was working both at the university's computing center, as well as working as a computer cruncher for the dept of Ag Econ. Ag Econ had received a chunk of money and was looking for a new computer. The university computing center found out and one of the upper managers cornered me on my next shift.
He: "I hear that Ag Econ is looking at getting their own computer."
Me: "Yup, I'm pushing for a Vax 780."
He: "Why aren't you telling them to transfer their funds to the Computing Center, and we'll buy a computer and give them time on it?"
Me: "..and what would you offer to them?"
He: " Well, we would buy a 780, and they could get time on it..."
Me: " But not between 5-9AM , since you do backups, and PM, and not from 5PM on Saturday to noon on Sunday, because you don't staff then, and also not from midnight on Sunday until 9AM on Monday ?"
He: "Well, of course..."
Me: "...and they would have to share the system with others?"
He: "Of couse, and they would have to pay us for usage."
Me: "So, instead of having their own computer, which they could have all to themselves, and since they have their own ops staff, can take care of themselves, you want them to hand you their money, so you can charge them to use their own equipment when you feel like letting them?"
He: "Well, they'd have to hand over their ops staff and funding for them to us."
Me: "You know, I just don't think they're going to buy that...."
(The career-limiting response would be: "HOW STUPID ARE YOU!!!!")
Postscript: The Ag Econ dept bought a Prime (stupid, and that will be discussed later), the Computing Center kept losing business to anyone who had enough funding or know-how to get their own computer and put it on the engineering schools' network, and within a couple of years after I took off, were relegated to a backwater operation. Oh, they're still there, and amazingly enough, a bunch of the same upper management are still there as well, but that's more of a testament to the difficulty of doing something about an entrenched dept at a public university.
Frank Hofer gives a recap of the season ticket holder event, well, most of the practice, anyway.
I used to attend these,but I have the same problem Frank has--I'm not there for the autographs, and for a couple of seasons, the practices were less than inspired.
One nice story from a practice about 7 years ago. I took some photos of Taras Lendzyk, who was in the Sharks training camp. He had graduated from Minnesota Duluth, and was in on a tryout. I put the photos up on my website with other goalie photos.
Then, couple of years back I hear from friends of his--could get they copies of the photos, since they were the only record of his ever having been to an NHL camp? Sure!. I made duplicates of the slides and sent them. A couple of weeks later, I received a nicely autographed ECHL program from Taras Lendzyk, who had received the photos from his friends. Nice!
I just checked, Taras Lendzyk is currently goalie coaching up in Duluth. He has his memories of the Sharks camp, and now he has the photos as well.
I was just reading Jeremy Zawodny's blog entry about "secure IT jobs" (nice poke, btw), and suddenly flashed on my old theory of expanding and contracting IT organizations.
I postulated this after having seen this happen across a number of companies in the valley. Here's how you can tell:
1. Does the engineering organization have its own IT group that *doesn't* report into corporate IT?
2. Do you have a system where groups that are politically powerful enough get their own service organizations, and everyone else has to deal with corporate?
Sound familiar? This is how I look at the chain of events, based on way too many empirical observations:
1. IT organization is running seriously behind technology/customer service curve. Engineering, deals with it by splitting off its own organization
2. Engineering organization manages to get funding that engineering usually would have paid into corporate. Since they can spend all of this on themselves, they go out and get lots of neat toys. They hire in sys admins, tools geeks, the whole works.
3. IT finds themselves further behind the curve, and worse, other groups who can figure out a way to get their own org or to convince engineering to do this do so.
4. Corporate initiative is started to "bring rest of campus up to engineering standards". Usually, this gets about 60% of way there in 200% of the alloted time.
5. The really good corporate IT people have all found their ways into engineering IT positions.
6. Corporate IT makes a case for "global functions should be handled by corporate IT" and demands that the engineering group be folded in to corporate.
7. Groups that don't belong to politically powerful groups do get folded into corporate IT. A small core of sys and net admins are left behind in engineering to deal with "departmental issues". Corporate IT promises all services will be kept up to standards (with a cash infusion of what engineering was paying for their own services)
8. Six months later the folded in engineers are laid off. Engineering is told that if they want to continue to get the same level of services, they will have to pay for contractors, and those contractors will be assigned to them, and will do only tasks for engineering.
9. They aren't--and their cycles keep bleeding off to corporate IT boondoggles.
10. Services call behind the curve, and engineering looks around and sees that their small group of support staff are doing some pretty wild things. Plans are made to expand their functions.....
And so on. I'm just using engineering as a placeholder--I've seen this done with a sales support org as well.
And I suspect that "move jobs offshore" ought to be inserted somewhere into step 8, but it's really it's own contraction/expansion cycle. More on that later....
Did anyone notice that LA has cleaned goalie house? I think they're still going to run into problems playing Cechmanek and Hlincka, they're less likely to have to dip into their minor league system--when they ended up playing Cristobal Huet, who'd been with the French Olympic team before the 02-03 season, it showed how few reserves they had to deal with. Potvin, who never played out to the heightened expectations of the early 90's, is off to the old goalie rest home in Boston. And Jamie Storr? He's not on the LA Kings roster at all--he's off being an unrestricted free agent, and playing for Omsk in Russia. He says he'll be back "when the labour problems are over".
Yeah, and if he's back, he'll be back on a two-way, as a back-up to lower third eschelon team. Storr's just not that good, and is too fragile to be the number one for anyone in the NHL.
Storr might still be in the NHL if he had just figured out that for every hotstuff kid goalie coming out of juniors, there's a half-dozen 25 yr olds in the AHL, trying to wake up from the nightmare. Jimmy Waite--supposed to be a sure thing--hey, he toasted the competition in world juniors, didn't he? Last time I checked, he way playing in Germany. Tim Cheveldae was the answer to a question Detroit wasn't asking. Even the college ranked goalies aren't a sure bet--Turco (a holdout in Dallas) is looking a lot better than Steve Shields ever panned out to be, and both were touted as the next great thing.
Instead Storr came in, acting like the Kings should just hand over the reins to him. He complained when he was sent to Phoenix, and he complained when there were questions about his ability to compete as a number one goalie in the NHL. Compound that with his string of injuries--for the style he wants to play, I don't think his groin ever came back--and he's no longer making the cut.
If he had come close in the NHL to what he did in juniors, it's much more likely that LA would be feeling a lot more kindly to him. Instead, he's in Russia, and maybe under all the bravado, he's wondering exacly what happened.
Moral of the story? If you want the attitude, you'd better have the ability.
Becasue Owen Nolan's already injured. At least he's now Toronto's problem, and not the Sharks'.
...in the baseball world. The Cubs are officially retiring Ron Santo's number. Next stop, the Hall of Fame.
Just so you know, as part of my work with the late, semi-lamented San Francisco Spiders, I used to handle all the email to the players. Since I can read both French and English, I could let the front office know if threatening mail was being sent.
Anyway, I received email from dirties, the "girlfriend in every port" for one player, and friends of the players, who'd happily recount lost weekends they spent with the players and various female companionship. You'd think that some people might pause before they sent a piece of email to a generic address--guess not.
If for some reason, you're reading this blog, spent some time with a forward line of some minor league hockey team and a large bottle of VO, and you think they harbour any romantic notions towards you, you're wrong. You're that evening's entertainment, and there's more just like you in the next town.
Yeah, that's harsh, but that's the way it is.
I get Google News updates on hockey "as they happen". Yesterday, I received an article that had the title "The ten hottest players in the NHL". Now, you'll note that I didn't provide you with an URL. I'm not in the mood to drive business to the site (which appears to be a sidebar of Fox Spors. Oh, why am I not surprised?).
Why? There's a bunch of reasons for that. Right off the bat, it's the usual sniggery TigerBeat-ish bullshit that would get a bad grade in a grade 9 English class. It's bad writing. It's the entire attitude that this sort of phosphor-slop engenders that really cranks me.
Look, when an eight year old thinks that Pat Falloon is the cutest guy in the world and wants him to be her "boyfriend", that's kinda cute. An 18 year old "dirty" expressing the same (and in much more explicit fashion) is pretty grotty. And in a 40 year old woman whose life revolves around a fantasy life she's created, well, that's a nasty mixture of disgusting and sad. I'll talk more about that in a couple of days.
Then there's the notion that women can only be interested in sports from a notion of who in the league has the cutest butt.
That's insulting.
I have an MBA with a speciality in sports marketing management. Every giggling "fan-girl" article, every dirty, Annie, hockey-ho or bimbette that gets into the mindset of a sports franchise makes it that much harder for me, or any other woman with a legitimate interest in sports to be able to do business.
Any woman who wants to be taken seriously in sports, whether at a business level or just at a fan level, gets a little more marginalized, a little more shoved into a corner when this happens.
Am I being a hard-ass? You betcha! If this was the only "column" of it's type in a year, I'd call it bad judgement. When I see a collection of these, written over the course of the season, because some editor has decided that "this is what women want to read about regarding sports", it's like walking out to your backyard, to find it knee-deep in weeds.
And with weeds, you need to pull them out before they spread.
The Matsutake mushrooms, along with the perfect apples, arrived in the produce dept at the local Mitsu-wa. So, even though it's supposed to be 94F today, as far as that indicator is concerned, it's autumn, go deal.
The mushrooms are a low, low $59/lb. That's down from $79/lb last year. Any shrink-wrapped seasonal produce with that sort of price, you're going to remember.
The California Sycamores I see from my office window agree with the produce section's pronouncement, as their leaves have started to turn a dusty grey-brown around the edges.
If you listen to Tom Skilling at WGN TV the jig is already up--Summer runs from June 1 to Sept 1, and we're now in meterological autumn. And if you live in the midwest, that can make a heck of a lot more sense--Chicago will lose 30F over the month of Sept.
Here? It will stay warm until the third week of October, at which point the first serious "storm" will come in and drop the high temperature from 80 to 65. Even so, you can fool yourself until Thanksgiving, at which point you'll notice you're wearing sweaters, the sky is a nasty grey, and you're going to work and coming back in the dark. And you'll wonder "what the heck happened?", and know if you want to see some protacted sunshine, you'd better get on the 101 and head 400 miles to LA. At least until the end of February, when the end of the dark/dark shows a point of light.
And oh yeah--hockey camp has opened....