Archive - Mar 2005

Honestly... why go and change the size of the nets? Why not simply go back to realistically sized goaltender equipment? Narrow their pads, shrink their jersies, make their trapper smaller. Really, that's all it will take. Even lacrosse goalies say that they shouldn't expand nets, but reduce equipment size, and they should know as the NLL increased net sizes a few years back. The pictures I've seen of prototypes (on a TSN video) are ridiculous...
Mr. Campbell, don't do something you'll regret, change the equipment back to the way it used to be instead of changing the nets to something they never were.

Okay, so today I ordered a Mac Mini. Which means that within the next two to three weeks (or hopefully earlier!) I'll be joining the Mac user crowd. A number of my friends and family (including Kevin, Andy, Matt, my Uncle Steve, Sonia, Jeff and of course Boris) already use Macs, so now I'm catching up to them. I don't use my PC for games anymore, so it will likely become a fileserver, and a place to use Microsoft Office products.
The Mac was by no means cheap, but was fairly affordable without a monitor. I'll replace my current monitor in a while with a flatscreen, but will have to save up a bit of dough for that. :D

What the heck? Apparently the league's owners are debating this. WTF?? Man,(this is my best Bill Sandison impression) if these guys pass this they are as bad as Michael Jackson. Heck, they should be going the other way (I've adopted this point from the Fan590's Bob McCowan) and raising the low age to 16 instead!
Let kids stay at home... don't send them off to the Sault or to frickin' another country like Plymouth! I understand that they are talking about only allowing 14 year olds to be picked in the top 4 spots and that the WHL drafts 14 year olds... but really, it's just plain ridiculous.

Okay, there is a massive shortage of family doctors for patients in this province (and I'd guess it's the same for most of Canada). My understanding is that the reason for this is most doctors don't want to be family doctors, and honestly, I can kind of understand why that's true after a doctor goes through seven to nine years of school. Seven to NINE!?! No wonder they want to specialize, make the big bucks and not have to deal with runny noses or aching hips.

Anyway, my solution to this would be to create something between an M.D. and a nurse practitioner that has a shorter - say five year education. Come on, the majority of problems probably don't need M.D. style education. So how about creating the provinces family practice clinics with say one or two M.D.s for a whole whackload of patients, but each patient has a specific nurse practitioner/low-grade doctor. That way the MDs are essentially 'family health' specialists. The majority of the problems can be handled by the other staff and then if necessary referred onto the 'family health' specialist.

Hmm?

Wow, talk about a really bad time to go out of business for an airline. Jets Go early this morning announced they were done, kaput, finished. That leaves passengers stranded in one of the busiest travel times of the year, both those who still had homeward legs and those who were about to go away for the March break.
I'm not really sad to see Jetsgo say goodbye, Air Canada is still my favourite airline, though I do like WestJet as well (they've got nice leather seats). The one Jetsgo flight I flew on was aboard a plane that seemed to have zero noise insullation left in the plane. The roar of the engines was simply crazy.
I guess record load factors by Air Canada have removed a carrier from the air, even Westjet is having problems. I wonder what is it exactly that is rejuvenating Air Canada?
Oh well, my regrets to employees of Jetsgo, hope you can find positions somewhere else in the industry.

So an investment group has proposed a purchase of all 30 NHL teams. Hmmm... You know, I had been thinking about what would happen if the 30 NHL teams completed a mass merger, with each market receiving a certain percentage of ownership in the league as a whole. Each market would still have it's own budget, and general manager etc, but now they might be able to get away with what would have been called collusion in the past. While it's not the exact same idea because it would retain the current NHL owners, it was at least somewhat similar to this proposal.
Anything will work better than what is in place now. :)