indessed roscivs

The Vancouver Canucks played tonight the game that Calgary should have. They stopped Marty Turco’s shutout streak and won the game—and the series. They played well, they fought well, and they deserved and got the win.

Meanwhile, I think I’ve got whatever DW and L had. My throat feels terrible, I’ve been achy and tired all day, and I just feel all-around lousy. And my blog is having technical difficulties so, although I wrote this tonight, it will have to wait to be posted until tomorrow morning.

Update: turns out the DNS entry changed, and because I’m doing this manual DNS hack, indessed.com kept resolving to the old IP address. I’ve made a temporary fix, but I really should make it more permanent one of these days.

Calgary just lost Game 6 (and thus the series) in overtime. That means they’re finished for the season—no more hockey for them. It’s sad to see them go but, really, going against the first seed—it’s not altogether surprising.

What will be surprising (and considerably more disappointing) is if Vancouver loses tomorrow.

Today was a good day to be a Canadian, at least in the world of hockey. There are three Canadian teams in the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs: Ottawa, Calgary, and Vancouver. All three emerged victorious from their playoff games today.

Ottawa edged out the Pittsburgh Penguins in a 2-1 game in the third period, making the Penguins’ Stanley Cup hopes precarious. Vancouver also had a 2-1 game against the Dallas Stars; the Stars almost tied it with a puck trickling across the goal line, but a quick-thinking Vancouver defenseman was able to sweep it out before it completely crossed the line.

Calgary, playing against the number-one team in their conference (the Detroit Red Wings) finally managed to not disappoint me. They lost their first two playoff games—and not because they were working hard but just caught some unlucky bounces. They just plain weren’t playing. In this game, they seemed to have some life, played some good playoff-quality hockey, and managed to squeak out a win and stay in this series. It was about freakin’ time, Calgary!

I’m having a bit of trouble re-adjusting to local time after being in London. The first morning after we got back, I woke up at 3:00 am. I tried several times to get back to sleep, but I just wasn’t tired in the slightest. So, I got out of bed, and started going about doing stuff around the house. By six o’clock I was annoyed that the sun had still not yet appeared.

I got to work a bit after nine, which is not unusual in general—what’s unusual is having been awake for six hours by that time.

That night, Vancouver was playing their first NHL Stanley Cup Playoff game, so I figured that would be a good way to keep me up later than I would normally have gone to bed. The game started at 7 pm, and by first intermission I was already yawning. By second intermission (around nine) I didn’t know how I could stay awake any longer.

Vancouver had an early lead, but in the third period they gave up two goals and Dallas had tied the game—this meant overtime. And not five-minute overtime like in the pre-season games—a full fifteen minute period of sudden-death overtime. And if nobody scores in that overtime, it would go on to another one, and another one, etc.

After five minutes of the first overtime, I’d decided I’d had enough—there’s no way I could watch the rest of the game. It was already a quarter past ten and I was about to keel over from exhaustion. The next morning I checked the result—Vancouver had won! But it had taken them four overtime periods to do it. The game had gone on from 7 pm until past midnight. I’d never have been able to stay up for all that!

This morning wasn’t much better—6:22 am. Hopefully I can adjust more on the weekend?

In preparation for our trip, we’ve been waking up earlier and earlier this week. This morning we succeeded in waking up at 5:00 am, which is approximately three hours earlier than normal. That means the normally eight hour difference has gone down to five. Only time will tell whether our strategy will actually make a difference in how quickly we adjust to London time.

Unfortunately, this means that, despite it not being noon yet, I’ve been up for over six hours, just waiting. Rather impatiently, I might add.

Oh well. At least I have a hockey game to watch!

I recently discovered that the authors of the book Freakonomics have a blog where they discuss all manner of things tangentially related to economics. (Well, I say “discovered,” but I should really say “re-discovered” since the book, which I got for Christmas, specifically talks about their blog and probably gives the address somewhere, but web addresses in print rarely make it to my keyboard. The “re-discovery” happened when I found the blog via another blog via the Internet.)

They discuss such interesting tidbits as a recent three-way tie on Jeopardy, or the woman who murdered her husband after searching Google for things such as “how to commit murder,” “undetectable poisons,” and “fatal digoxin doses.” (Note that the cops didn’t subpoena Google for her search history and somehow trace it back to her or anything complicated like that—they simply searched her computer and found the queries in her browser’s history. Moral of the story: if you’re going to commit murder, don’t use Google to help you. Or at least flush your cache.)

Unrelated note: Vancouver just won! Their division lead is, for now at least, safe.

One thing that annoys me about NHL Center Ice is that it’s not HD. Here I have a 10-foot TV screen and I can watch ESPN HD so crisp that you can see the beads of sweat on the football players’ faces. But when it comes to hockey, there’s not a single HD station to be found.

I never thought, when I first decided to get HDTV, that I’d become so addicted to HD. But on a screen this big, it’s like the difference between VHS and DVD. You don’t really notice going to the higher-definition format, but you really notice whenever you see something in the older format. And this is especially true, IMHO, of sports.

So why can’t I get hockey in HD? It’s ridiculous. I know, for instance, that this particular game I’m watching has an HD feed, and yet Center Ice is showing it to me in standard def. I’d be happy to pay for it, just give me HD hockey!

Just watch the video. That’s all I have to say here.