Archive - Jan 2005

So this is how you do it.
Place a salary cap on base salaries offered to players, say $20-25million per team. Then, take a percentage (say 45-55%) of what I call the "popularity" revenues (e.g., television contracts, merchandise sales, etc.) and devote that to annual "profit sharing" bonuses to the players. Each player gets their percentage of the overall salary pool in bonus.
[Note: Something would have to be done in terms of revenue sharing/correction to smooth out what the teams get for local TV deals, say maybe aggregate all TV dollars that go to players and split them, but give the owners the remainder after ratio for their markets.]
I think it's an ideal system, shares risk/reward, unites both sides in trying to promote the game, etc..

First off, thanks to Constable Amy Hunter (Kevin's fiancee), and the Ottawa Police Service for providing me with the opportunity to see law enforcement in action :)
I spent my Friday night last week on a "ride-along" with Constable Hunter of the OPS. It was a very interesting experience, and I would certainly recommend it to anyone. You can get pretty much open access to what they do, after signing a confidentiality agreement of course (so I can't go on about details).
I hope I can go again in the summer, things are supposed to be a little more interesting then. :)

For those of you who don't know, my sister taught at a school in China for close to a year. Most people would jump to the conclusion that she taught English, but in fact she taught math and science; and she doesn't know Mandarin or Cantonese.
In fact, she taught Ontario curriculum classes to Chinese students at a boarding school. One of many that can be found in China now.

So a bunch of weblogging providers/companies/etc. have gotten together with the most popular search engines in the hopes of doing something about comment spam. What a great idea. See they've introduced a way for weblogs to alter their comments so that the links in them won't be counted by the search engines (to determine site popularity) when their robots scan the web. Very cool.
So I've implemented the tag here, hopefully it and my diligent cleaning of the spam using Jay Allen's Blacklist tool will eventually help rid the world of comment spam. It sure is bothersome, especially when I had a bunch of rape links on my site... talk about disturbing.

Kevin feels my pain.

Oh... and I saw the news about the tag on Russell Beattie's blog.

Boris, when is Drupal implementing?

The thing that would make this even better would be the ability for me to go in later and alter comments so that their links don't end up with the nofollow attribute.

If the NHL can't figure things out in time to have a 'semblance' of a season, I wonder if they could instead have an expanded 'playoff tournament'. Seed the teams based on last years standings or something, start with best of 3 series, go to best of 5, eliminating teams until you reach the normal Stanley Cup playoffs....

Party #1 bumps into party #2.
Party #2: Sorry
Party #1: Sorry

:) Canadians are so polite....

Jen was telling me on the weekend that she had heard of some Americans who played a game when they came to Canada where they would try to see how many people they could get to say sorry who hadn't done anything to them. Crazy huh?

I've been to a few Ottawa 67's games this season, and while the talent level certainly isn't as high as that seen at the World Junior Championship, it's still enteratining for sure. Not to mention that I was able to quell a bit of my hockey blues last weekend by playing a bit of pickup hockey for the first time in 8 years. I've got some photos that I'll post this weekend. It was excellent. :)

Well, this year has started off on somewhat of a right foot. While the disaster of the Tsunami in South East Asia ended last year on a poor note, the influx of giving by individuals and corporations (even the credit card companies are donating their commissions on Tsunami donations!) has been nothing less than stellar. It leads you to think that when bad things happen, we as a world may actually be able to pull together.