Wow.  I’m going to need full rosters for every team before I watch a single game next season.  Jagr’s gone, Naslund, Hossa, Blake, Cujo, Boyle, Avery, McGrattan, Laraque, Huet, Weight, Ruutu, Ryder, Tucker, Raycroft, Hagman, Streit, Redden, Campbell, Kolzig, Lalime, Theodore… all playing in new towns next year.  And the list is growing.  And these aren’t just fourth liners.  Some of these guys are perennial all-stars.

It looks like Toronto isn’t trying to compete this year.  The crappy thing is that part of the problem is that Mats hasn’t decided what he’s going to do next year.  His delay means that Toronto has to hold onto the purse strings just in case they need to spend $7 or 8 million bucks on him.  Of course, this is only adding insult to injury.  The sensible thing to do for everyone involved would have been for Mats to waive his NTC back in the spring to allow the Leafs to get better.  As it stands, the Leafs have made no big additions and could very well be headed for the basement (not that last year was a great showing).

Montreal, on the other hand, has added some toughness in Laraque and has retained most of its young core that made them one of the best teams in the regular season.  I’m not going to say that Laraque makes the Habs a Cup contender but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

We’ll see.  Maybe Sundin will go to the Habs.  I think that would officially make him public enemy number one in Toronto.  Can you imagine if he brought the Cup back to Montreal in his first year after 13 years in Toronto?  I can.

And yes, it counts towards the World Record attempt.

The Mozilla servers serving the web pages have all crashed but the files themselves are still being served.  I don’t think this is well known…

Firefox 3.0 (EN-US)

Update: Mozilla has fixed their web pages and now all of the links that, earlier today, showed version 2.0 are properly showing version 3.0.  SO GO GET IT!

I really don’t know if I have a knack for Texas Hold ‘em poker or if I’m just extremely lucky, but out of a total of about 8 rounds I’ve won 4.  They weren’t all with the same group of suckers, either.  Granted, we’re not talking about $100 buy-ins or the WSOP here.  It’s just a bunch of guys wasting time and not ever more than $20 per guy (I promise, dear).

My latest victory came on Friday night.  The lights at the Roblin Lake Dome, ahem, wouldn’t come on so our slowpitch game was canceled.  The boys thought an impromptu game of poker might sate our need for something macho to do.

I’m clearly not the right guy to give advice, being that I’ve only played a total of 8 rounds in my life, but the one tip I’ve found that really makes my position stronger is to only have three types of bet:

1. The check or call (you don’t always have to spend money)
2. The silo bet (is strong but doesn’t require any time or thinking to count)
3. The all-in

By limiting my plays to these three types of bet my opponents don’t have the opportunity to examine my reactions.  I know that I’m either going to call, push a silo or push all-in.  If I have to decide how much to bet and then worry about what kind of message I’m sending whether I’m too high or too low I’m clearly going to lose.  I would be out of my element in a hurry.  I’ve found that my opponents really get no read on my betting and I’ve really only been beaten by poor cards or bad rivers.

I also don’t think that revealing my methods will hurt me in the future.  The guys I play against don’t really get out (on the Internet) much.  Besides, this tip can’t help you read my cards or my face.  I’ve watched a fair amount of WSOP and celebrity poker on TV but I will never play enough poker to know, or care, what a good or bad bet is.  I have a hard enough time remembering the blinds and what beats what.

Best of luck to everyone not at my table!

I write this blog post for and about my dad.  He may not read it right away (or ever) but there are some things I think he should know.

I was gassing up my truck this morning to the tune of a small country’s GDP when I caught a whiff of the fumes.  I was instantly transported back to every summer Sunday morning of my youth, filling up the boat.  There was an hour every Sunday morning when my dad and I would head down to the boat before everyone else to get ‘er ready.  We’d take the top down, stow the life jackets and the cooler, and then we’d take it around to gas up.

As a bit of an aside, there really isn’t anything else like Georgian Bay at 8 or 9 in the morning in the summer.  It’s glass calm, the sun is just coming up and you can feel the heat of it on your skin but it’s not hot yet, it’s quiet, so quiet, and then there’s that smell.  The sickly sweet fumes of gas and the Bay mixed together.  It’s not unlike an elixir of youth - or joy.  I think it is actually impossible to be upset or worried about something when you’re down at the dock, before the crowd, on the Bay.  Lesley, when I go, just spread my ashes somewhere down the South Channel.

With gas prices heading through the stratosphere I imagine that pleasure boating will leave the realm of the middle-class to be enjoyed only by the uber-rich.  That’s a real shame.  I know I’m not the only guy out there who spent his formative years bonding with his dad over the fumes of an old Starcraft.  Like most guys, my dad didn’t try to teach me anything about life when we were alone, that kind of information you had to glean from his actions and from eavesdropping at parties when I was supposed to be asleep hours ago.  No, the stuff I learned from him in the early mornings was more about him and the kind of father that I wanted to be.  He’d sit in the back of the boat, being my first mate.  He’d wince when I came in too fast in the early years.  He’d comment about my wake (it was always too big but I just couldn’t drive that slow).  But in the end, he always let me take the lead, make my own mistakes, and learn on my own.

In the later years he’d just open a book and read until we got to the dock.  He’d follow my instructions and then let me run the show for the whole day’s boating.  Everyone knew that I was running the boat.  I know he was paying attention though because he’d never fail to thank me at the end of the day for such a good boat ride.  Imagine that, thanking me when it should have been me thanking him.  As much as I liked driving the boat I think the thank you at the end of the day was even better.

I often think about the years ahead and how I’d love to move my parents closer to me and my family.  I don’t get very far before I think about Georgian Bay and what it has meant to me, my dad, and my family in general.  I was raised on the Bay.  I proposed to Lesley on the Bay.  I think I’m about as close to it as a man can be to a body of water.  The thing is that my dad was there for all of it.  So is it really the Bay that I love?

Happy Father’s Day, Big Isi (the BBP).

I picked up a copy of Atlas Shrugged at a book swap for 25 cents.  The paperback was old enough that the price on the cover said 95 cents.  I thought I had heard of the title before and there was a faint Spideysense tingling that it was important.  I started to read it an knew immediately that it was something I would remember forever.

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