nice.  from the folks at blendtec…

“i think i’m going to press the smoothie button.” bah ha ha ha

(thanks to mike for the link!)

now that the site is stable, i have gone back and started adding all the photos i never uploaded. both 2005 and 2006 are complete at this point…

updated albums include:

• Duck! (2005/2006)
• Josh and Kat Wedding (20050904)
• Miscellaneous Photos (2005)
• Miscellaneous Photos (2006)
• Duck! (2006/2007)
• Eric’s bachelor party weekend (200609)
• Grandpa Joe’s 90th birthday party (20060422)
• Alison’s graduation (20060606)
• Kate and Jim’s Wedding (20060610)
• Tamara’s birthday party (20060909)
• Alison’s NYC bridal shower (20060917)
• Alison’s office photos (20060926)
• Scott and Angela’s wedding (20060930)
• Christmas at home (20061225)
• Sabres v Rangers (20061105)
• Thanksgiving at home (20061123)
• Sabres v Rangers (20061126)

*PHEW*

all of 2005 and 2006 have been “keyworded” and “tagged” as well.

stay tuned for 2007 updates as well as a nifty overhaul of the look and feel in the photo section…

in our last game of the regular season, the blue bombers took down our doppelgangers the (red) bombers by a score of 5-4.

sounds a lot closer than it was — for most of the game.

we had a 4-0 lead through 1/3 of the third period and then things went a bit awry… we gave up a few funky goals and had some defensive lapses. we came out with the win, though.

personally, i scored on a wrister that hit the goalie’s shoulder and bounced into the net behind him.

peter was great in net — it was really cool of him to fill in for dom…

bob had some key defensive plays in third — cleanly tracking down to breakaways.

on to the playoffs… next friday… against the gulls.

the simpsons movie marketing team is absolutely fantastic.

7-eleven’s turned into kwik-e marts…  and, now, mr. burns has taken over the blog of the CEO of jetblue.

creativity in marketing.  thank god.

after losing briere and drury you just knew this was going to happen…

vanek — a restricted free agent — signed an offer sheet with the edmonton oilers this morning for…

wait for it…

7 YEARS and $50M 

wait for it…

the sabres matched the offer within minutes which is one of the richest and longest sports contracts in buffalo sports history.  and that includes the bills.

personally, i think that:

• it was a no brainer after losing drury/briere
• the contract includes 3 years of time where he would have been eligible for unrestricted free agency
• the money paid out over 7 years is pretty reasonable IF vanek can continue to produce like he did last season (43 goals…)
• the money paid out is actually front loaded so that in 7 years, he will be making less than half of what he will be making next year

however…  there are some downsides here.  the oilers (and GM kevin lowe) have set a bad precedent on being predators in the RFA world.  it may come back to haunt them when someone signs jarret stoll to a $50M offer sheet.   vanek is now making more than double what the next highest paid sabre.  that could cause a few rifts — both with the team and with the fans — if he does not produce…

i’m glad to have him back in the fold…

check out this article — “woe is buffalo” from page 2 at espn.com…

i have read it a few times.  more than a few times, actually.

i was bummed when the sabres season ended.  another promising season…   but all season long, i had a bad “feeling”.  why didn’t the sabres lock up drury and briere before the season started?  when briere got $5M in arbitration i could almost feel it coming.  darcy should have given him a long term deal right then.  the train was already off the rails.  and drury?  rumour has it that he was offered, and agreed to, a long term deal early in the season, but…  darcy never sent the contract.

now?  both of them are gone.  briere to the flyers for 8 years and $52M.  drury to the rangers for 5 years and $35M.  the sabres could have had both of them locked up at 2/3 of that cost if they had done it at the beginning of the season.

as the season was drawing to a close, i, as a long time fan, was willing to part with briere.  he had a great season — 95 points and MVP at the all-star game — but i knew — we all knew — that $5M was not going to get him back.  he may have gone with a hometown discount for nearer to $6.5M for a long term deal.  in the cap era, that number was not going to work — assuming the sabres were going to re-sign drury, not to mention vanek and roy (both RFAs).

whoops on that assumption.

the sabres alienated drury and, although they were willing to match the offer from the rangers, he was already gone — to his “hometown” team — leaving behind 3 years in buffalo that only further cemented his “captain clutch” moniker.

now what?  the sabres signed…  adam mair (perennial 3rd/4th liner with grit), peters (ye olde enforcer), teppo (a D man pushing 40 years old) and mike ryan (a promising AHL’er that spent some time up with the big boys last season).

vanek?  nothing.

roy?  arbitration.  paetsch?  arbitration.

wonderful.

i have a lot of faith in the abilities of the team.  they CAN do well.  but, as the ESPN article points out, the sabres have given up being a surefire cup contender for next season for a “i hope so…  maybe…” season.

woe is buffalo, indeed.

I am not the first, nor will I  be the last, to put my $0.02 in on the iPhone…

I spent a bunch of time playing with one at pool on Tuesday.  Our resident Mac zealot got one on opening day…

The numero uno thing that I was wary about was the keyboard. I am a Blackjack owner and love it long time. It is a familiar interface and I dig the “tactile nature” of devices like that with a hard keyboard (same thing with a Blackberry).

Let me just say… the iPhone keyboard is pretty kick ass. In the 30-45 minutes I played with it, I probably typed better slash more accurately on the iPhone than I do on my Blackjack.

I love the Safari interface. It is intuitive and I don’t have to look at “mobile versions” of websites.  If you were to go my website from most mobile clients I have it feeding a mobile version rather than the full monty.  (thank you, Alex King!) Although my site is not terribly graphics heavy, it is segmented and that can often cause clutter on small screens. What I liked about Safari on the iPhone was that it got the full monty and I could zoom in/out as necessary. Zooming in/out may sound like a “process”, but, again, it was very natural.

The SMS “grouping” is pretty cool to look at – as the messages are threaded in “balloons”. But… No MMS.

EDGE ain’t that bad – if you are in a big city. I would not want to give up my 3G Blackjack to go backwards, though. Connecting through WiFi is nice – especially with so many hotspots out there…

The phone is smaller than I expected – it is slimmer than my Blackjack… It is also WAY sturdier than I expected.

The landscape mode is kick ass. Just turning the phone puts it in that mode. However… It really only worked in Safari.

The voice quality was pretty good, but as I am a Bluetooth junkie, it was difficult for me to tell in “actual use” as I did not connect my headset to it.

Email was something I would have liked to have played with a bit more. (It is tough to “play” with email on someone else’s phone – I felt like I was prying….) There is an Exchange setup app – but it requires IMAP. The POP3 stuff I saw looked nifty.

And, yes, it also plays music. ;P

Which gets me to what is sure to be an annoyance for both Windows and Mac users alike…  EVERYTHING having to do with the iPhone when connected to a computer is done through iTunes.  Music, mail, contacts — EVERYTHING.  I am honestly not sure I am willing to have my life ruled by iTunes.  One of the benefits of the Blackjack is that plugging it into a computer gets me management of certain items through ActiveSync, but, more importantly, the whole phone shows up as a hard drive on my system.  Copy.  Paste.

The 3G thing is a killer for me. I’m with the Blackjack, at least, until they get that running.

Some of the stuff I was reading:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/03/iphone-review-part-1-hardware-interface-keyboard/

http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/review_iphone/

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9739169-1.html?tag=nl.e501 

alison and i certainly love going to the bridge cafe! as i have mentioned before, we take everyone we can think of there for dinner…

this time? we got taken!

the corporate real estate folks at alison’s law firm had an “outing” on monday. (for the record, alison is not in the corporate real estate practice.) they started with a walking tour of the area near the brooklyn bridge IN brooklyn and then proceeded over the bridge to manhattan. i did not go on the tour, but alison thought it was pretty dang cool. caissons and contruction, oh my! they even took the “secret staircase” down from the bridge…

the group then headed over the bridge cafe. when alison mentioned how close her husband was to the restaurant — i got an invite! woo!

there were about two dozen folks from the firm there — mostly summer associates with a few partners and real estate associates mixed in. we sat with the smallest group — three summers (one from cordoza, one from buffalo and one from columbia) and a partner. really nice folks! one of the things that struck me was how young they were. although alison passed the bar last year, she had been working for several years as a scientist and a scientific adviser before practicing. in other words, she is 6-7 years older than the average associate who went to law school after undergrad. the other thing that struck me was how willing they were to soak in her experience (and some of mine!) — they asked a lot of good questions.

the food was off a abbreviated bridge cafe menu. everyone was started with a mixed greens and roquefort/walnut salad with a vinaigrette. shockingly (ha!), i had the diver scallops (with the andouille sausage and grits preparation). alison’s fave dish — the lamb — was not on the menu so she went with the massive ribeye — 2/3 of which is still sitting in our fridge.

there were both a red and white wine served, but i did not get a good look at the labels. the red was distinctively not californian, a bit dry, but still with subtle fruit flavours. we did not try the white…

“thank you” to the firm for taking us!

success!

i have fully moved erock.org in two different ways. both of which i had been meaning to do for quite a while.

first, i “physically” moved the site from my midphase to dreamhost. in the past few months, midphase has started to take away features that i specifically chose them for several years ago. things as simple as DNS changes became a major hassle and the price point for the space/bandwidth i was getting became SO FAR OFF the “market” that i would have been stupid NOT to move.

read the rest of this entry »

in our first season without danny, we, um… really missed his goal scoring.

we finished with a pitiful 33 goals for in 17 games.  ugh.

on the bright side, adam (our goalie) is DA MAN finishing with a 4.19 GAA (adjusted for the forfeit game).  that may sound like a lot, but a) he kept us closer than we often deserved to be and b) the best team’s GAA was 3. 41.  D5, traditionally, has a lot of goal scoring… 

our final record:  5-12-0-0  (wins-losses-ties-overtime losses) netting us 10 points on the season.

the top team (hudson hawks) finished 13-3-0-1 for 27 points.

beyond the loss of danny, we certainly suffered from losing a few folks in-season (kyle, bobby, etc…) and were often crushed by the small rosters we were bringing to the games.

homer’s is combining with the blue bombers (as usual) to play D6 for the 4-on-4 session in the summer…

back in the fall!