February 29, 2008

Woot woot

Filed under: Sports — Adam @ 10:59 pm

After a miserable 4-6 loss Tuesday to Columbia and a 0-3 loss last night to Charlotte, the Seawolves came back for a 1-0 win over the Charlotte Checkers. I wonder if the coach making veiled threats in the paper had anything to do with it:

“Guys need to just step up in the absence of their soldiers and we didn’t do that (Thursday),” Walby said. “There’s some professionals in that locker room that need a wake-up call because their career could be ending real soon.”

Two players got called up, and we got nothing in return, and that contributed. But the play Thursday night was not up to par with the play tonight. If they played every night like they did tonight — staying on the puck, keeping the other team from getting a good scoring opportunity, fighting — then there’d be no contest. Playoffs would be guaranteed.

Right now, it looks like it could very well come down to the last three games between us and Pensacola to determine which team goes to the playoffs. We’re leading them by twelve points now, but we were leading them by fifteen or so and that lead was growing. Now, Pensacola has turned their losing streak around (beating the fourth ranked Florida tonight in a shoot out), and we’ve all but stalled (losing nine out of the last twelve games). The calender year started off well — I think we had a seven or eight game winning streak, and we beat the top ranked Texas in regulation. Texas has only lost six games in regulation all season. That was quite a feat — and then that team sort of fell apart.

Walby has every reason and every right to be pissed off at his team. We may be a rag-tag, put together team this year, but we’ve got a lot of really excellent players. Walby sat out coaching for two years to coach here, he was an assistant coach before, and he was a player before that. We’ve got a great team with great management and a great coach — but despite all the times I typed great there, the meshing doesn’t qualify for the word.

Even after a game like tonight, there are so many problem areas — passing, puck awareness, and positional awareness — that need to be improved. We got the “stay on top of them” thing down, swarming the Checkers like bees, but our passing of the puck isn’t so good, and quite a few times players missed great scoring opportunities because they weren’t aware of the position of the puck, or players weren’t where they were supposed to be for a given formation. More than once I saw a player pull this surprised “hey I have the puck!” looking move after hesitating. That is not cool.

That said, we were sort of thrown together at the last minute. A lot of our players are great, they’re just green. Given a season or three, I think we’ll be as big a threat as Texas.

February 24, 2008

Seawolves Weekend

Filed under: Sports — Adam @ 9:00 pm

I haven’t written much about the Seawolves seeing as how they’ve been on a series of away games.  I missed our home game Tuesday night for class, and we lost 4-5 to the Pensacola Ice Pilots.  Then at the game last night, we lost to Gwinnett 2-6 in a game that was just pathetic, extending our losing streak to six games and all but erasing our hopes of hitting 50-50 Win/Lose this season.  However, tonight I figured, “We’re playing Pensacola, how can we lose to them again?”

Well, when they got on the board twice before us, I had a pretty good idea how.  Especially when their second goal was a short handed goal (meaning, for the unaware, they had only four skaters on the ice and we had five).  0-2 and the second period rapidly approaching an end, and our #55, Chris Cava, poked on past their goalie.  That was more like it.

Around halfway into the third period, our #17, Mark Hurtubise, caught the puck just inside the blue line and slammed it hard.  It hit the net so hard that it bounced out nearly as fast as it went in, and the game was tied.  It remained tied despite two bad calls by the referee (oh well, the puck nailed him in the shoulder seconds later) through the rest of the third period and into overtime — and then through overtime.

A shootout is the second most intense part of any hockey game — the only thing more intense is a sudden death shootout.  I’ve only seen one sudden death shootout I can recall, and it was against the Pensacola IcePilots.  So when they scored on their fourth try… and then we scored on our fourth try (with a GREAT fake-out by #17 perpetrated against their goalie), I thought it might come down to that.  They missed their fifth shot, leaving just our final go at the shootout before a sudden death shootout.

“Now shooting for your Seawolves, number six, Jason Tejchma!”

Oh hell yes.

That puck hit net, and our ending streak stopped.  3-2 Seawolves.

February 22, 2008

Mario Kart: Wii

Filed under: Entertainment — Adam @ 2:25 pm

Allow me to giddily state that finally, the Mario Kart series will have motorcycles.

Yay.

Casino Royale

Filed under: Entertainment — Adam @ 2:10 pm

I’m not a fan of James Bond, despite generally being a fan of women, gadgets, and spy stories.  I’ve seen a few of the movies and they never really struck me as all that great.  I saw Casino Royale after it was released on DVD, however, and it was one of the better movies I’ve seen.  At least when it comes to spy stories and women.  (Don’t even get me started on how in love with Eva Green I am…)

So I decided I’d read the book to compare.   I got the book earlier this week, and read it in two sittings; the first, I didn’t have time to finish and only got thirty pages in.  But last night I sat down and finished it.  This didn’t take much time at all.  I read faster than average in the first place and I’m used to books that are four or more times longer than this.

Well, the book is pretty damn good.  Bond is such a misogynistic prick that you can’t really like him, but he’s such a misogynistic prick that you sort of have to.  It’s great.  The book definitely has some qualities the movie could have kept.  Like the part where the book didn’t have Bond jumping around like a moron chasing some guy at a construction site.  The one thing the book was missing, in fact, was Eva Green.

It’s so good, in fact, that over spring break I might get around to reading more of Fleming’s Bond novels.  Next up on the docket, however, is the original MASH book (that the movie and subsequent series were inspired/based on).

February 20, 2008

He can’t be serious

Filed under: Imbeciles and Kooks — Adam @ 2:07 pm

So a guy hollows out a book and hides a box cutter in it. The airport catches this on an X-ray scan of his stuff. A box cutter hidden inside of a hollowed out book. Think about it. How likely is it that this is an accident? I vote that there is no likelihood this moron accidentally hollowed out a book and put a box cutter in it, then accidentally carried it with him to an airport. The full story is at Michelle Malkin’s site, linkage. It gets better:

TSA and airport officers charged him because “he was black and carrying the Koran,” he said.

I vote he goes to jail for another year for trying to play the race card and pretending that we’re all a bunch of racist lunatics, when he’s the peckerwood with a box cutter in a hollowed out book. The fact he’s pretending somehow he’s the victim makes me just want to smite him with a Clue Stick.

February 19, 2008

Whoa hey

Filed under: Politics — Adam @ 2:17 am

Castro resigns.

Now he should do us all a favor and die.

February 17, 2008

Free Women are Hot

Filed under: Politics — Adam @ 10:31 pm

Celebration of Kosovo’s freedom

Kosovo, Welcome to the free world, careful about those French guys. And Russia: Get over yourselves.

Note that in all these freedom rallies — there were some in Lebanon a while ago — the women are extremely hot.  Hot chicks dig being free.

Dear Sweet Crude…

Filed under: Final Frontier — Adam @ 12:21 pm

For a long time now, a lot of us space geek have been frustrated with the lack of motivation our government has shown in getting us off this rock. Well, this ought to motivate some people. It certainly makes me want to go to the stars:

Saturn’s moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to a team of Johns Hopkins University scientists, adding to evidence that oil is not biological in origin.

That is a lot of energy. And there is no wildlife on Titan to protect. It’s just a great big oil find waiting on us to get the hell out there.

February 16, 2008

Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs

Filed under: Personal — Adam @ 8:53 pm

I swapped back over to CFLs today. I didn’t really do this out of any urge to be green. We’ve been swapping the house over for a while now because they use less energy, and they give off less heat. We rarely have trouble keeping the house warm. Keeping it cold, on the other hand, is a real bastard. Especially my room. Even before I had a computer on a lot in here, it was difficult to keep it cool.  Also, I hate changing lightbulbs.  It’s just irritating and a waste of my time.

As I said, I swapped “again.” The reason for this came last summer when I replaced my old ceiling fan with a new one. I picked it out without really paying much attention because it was nice looking. Once it was installed, I found out it required those stupid little candelabra lightbulbs. Anyone to ever deal with them knows two things: They suck and they get hotter than regular incandescents because of their size. The glass is too close to the filament.

Well, finding CFLs that are brighter than a public school student is pretty hard. Even the incandescents are sort of hard to find. And I dared not put more than 40W incandescent bulbs in. Those got up to about 240F. And they weren’t that bright. So I ordered some of these babies and plugged them in today.  They each use 11W of electricity, so in my four-bulb fan, I’m now using 44W instead of 160.  They give off the light of a 55W bulb.  So now instead of 160W worth of light (not sure how many lumens), I’m getting 220W worth, which is like, a light and a half.

According to the site, they give off 550 lumens each bulb.  So that translates to 50 lumens per watt.  Assuming the ratio is the same for the 40W incandescents I had (11W CFL comparable to 55W incandescent) then they would have given 400 lumens each, which is 10 lumens/watt.  That’s a five fold increase.  And, regardless of their power consumtpion:

I can already feel the difference, and I can see the obvious increase in brightness.  So I’m getting more light, less heat, and using less energy.

Real Sugar

Filed under: Personal — Adam @ 2:39 pm

I’ve been trying to cut soda out of my diet entirely. I’ve almost completely succeeded. But earlier this week, I came across something I could not resist. I found the website of Dublin Dr. Pepper, a bottler who makes Dr. Pepper with sugar, not corn syrup.  I’m pretty sure high fructose corn syrup is one of the most evil things to ever grace the American diet, and despite a general opposition to the stupidity of corn ethanol hope that rising corn prices will cause food companies to use real sugar again.  I think we’d be better off.

Unrelated to all that nonsense, I wanted to try this mythical soda with real sugar.  I was always something of a fan of Dr. Pepper, even though I dropped it from my diet in an attempt to not be such a fatass. So I ordered a case of the bottles (I’m a big fan of glass bottles and soda; I think audiophiles are nuts but I can taste the difference from plastic to glass containers).  It got here Wednesday, and I’ve drank more soda in the last four days than in the last four weeks before.

It is like night and day.

This stuff is better than any other soda I’ve ever had.  Nothing even comes close.  It tastes really good.  And I actually see how the 10-2-4 slogan came about; this peps me up.  Energy drinks don’t, but an eight ounce Dr. Pepper with real sugar wakes me right up.  The stuff even smells good.

It’s like a gift from God, straight from heaven, delivered by UPS.