champions

Two, actually.

Gareth’s team won their game against their arch-rivals (the Leafs) on Saturday. They were up 1-0 after the first period. The Leafs scored one to tie early in the second, but Gareth’s Oilers took it back almost immediately, and then scored four more goals to win the game 5-1. I think the main difference between last Saturday’s 1-1 tie and this game was that the forward lines remembered how to score goals :).

hockey update

Gareth’s Oilers battled the season-winning Leafs to a 1-1 tie, forcing a 2-minute, 3-on-3, sudden-death overtime period. Alas, the Leafs’ star player scored a little less than a minute into the period.

It was a hard fought game; lots of aggressive defense on both sides (although there were surprisingly few penalties to go with it; they were playing clean, at least!). The kids were exhausted when they came off the ice, especially the Oilers who only have 12 players (Goalie, 2 defense lines, and 7 forwards rotating through two lines).

hockey update

Gareth’s team won, although it was a tense 2-1 win. Kudos to our defense for shutting down several plays. (I don’t think I’m too biased, even though the boy plays defense :).

The Leafs won also, so the top two teams play each other on Saturday. Our record against them goes both ways; they clobbered us early in the season; we clobbered them in the middle; we had very close games at the end. The winner goes to the final; loser goes to the “last chance” game, and gets one more chance to be the other team in the final…

Pachelbels Canon

As seen in the Pachelbels Canon - CollegeHumor video, it really is everywhere.

Maybe you have to be a bit of a music geek, but I laughed myself silly over this one…

leasing

Michaéla came up with a way to compromise on the “first model year” issue with the new car. If we lease instead of purchase, then if it the truck is a lemon we can return it and let dealer worry about it. We’ll take a bit of a loss, but theoretically this is smaller loss than if we tried to sell it ourselves; if it’s a lemon, the resale value will suck.

tow vehicle – done!

I didn’t get a chance to write about tow vehicles before we bought one; oh well!

We went to the Hamilton RV show last Saturday and crawled around in a bunch of pop-up trailers. The data so far:

• Fleetwood is very expensive. The quality and features are there, but I’m not convinced that they’re worth the price tag.
• We want a 10′ pop-up trailer. 12′ would be nice on rainy days, but they’re freakin’ heavy and much larger than the 2′ difference would lead you to believe; I’d rather have the slightly easier to drive with smaller trailer. On the other hand, 8′ trailers are too small for the four of us, especially as the kids get physically larger.
• Rockwood and JayCo both have nice 10′ models. Palomino (same company as Rockwood) has some nice designs too, but for some reason they’re about 20% heavier than the Rockwoods.
• We decided to go with cargo space in the tow vehicle over a “box” on the trailer. We’d be hauling stuff in and out either way, and this way we have the cargo space without the trailer too.

The Rockwood and Jayco models that we like all weigh in at around 2000 lbs. Manufacturer tow ratings only include a driver, so add 400-500 lbs of passengers and 400-500 lbs of gear. Follow the “75%” rule of trailer/cargo mass vs. tow rating, and that means we’re looking for a vehicle with a 4000 lb (or more) tow rating. Strangely, there aren’t very many of those! There’s a big gap between minivans and small SUVs at 3500 lbs, and full-size SUVs and trucks at 6500 lbs and up.

indexed

Via Ned Batchelder, I am now reading indexed, a collection of tongue-in-cheek venn diagrams and charts by Jessica Hagy.

I laughed myself silly reading the first page, so I thought I’d share…

guessing better than planning

Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted

One group has to choose which sandwiches they want for an entire week in advance. The other group gets to choose which they want each day. A fascinating thing happens. People who choose their favourite sandwich each day at lunchtime also often choose the same sandwich. This group turns out to be reasonably happy with its choice.

Amazingly, though, people choosing in advance assume that what they’ll want for lunch next week is a variety. And so they choose a turkey sandwich Monday, tuna on Tuesday, egg on Wednesday and so on. It turn out that when next week rolls around they generally don’t like the variety they thought they would. In fact they are significantly less happy with their choices than the group who chose their sandwiches on the day.

young children understand irony

From BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: Do young children understand irony?

Some children as young as six already understand the idea that people make sarcastic remarks, saying one thing but meaning another, according to psychologists Penny Pexman and Melanie Glenwright.

The children found ironic criticisms – such as “that was great play” – easier to understand than ironic compliments. A grasp of the speaker’s true belief emerged first, then an understanding of the speaker’s attitude and intention to tease tended to emerge together, usually in the older children.

nuke your sponges

you have nothing to lose but your germs!

‘Waving’ Goodbye to a Kitchen Hazard

A team of University of Florida Engineering researchers have come to the conclusion that microwaving plastic scrubbers and kitchen sponges on full power can destroy practically 100% of the bacteria and viruses, parasites or spores collected on them.

via diane duane

trailer research

We’re planning several driving trips in the next five years, and are looking into buying a pop-up trailer instead of renting trailers or RVs. In theory, owning is cheaper than renting over the long run, and it gives us more flexibility.

We’ve looked into the possibility of renting a trailer or RV, but it’s not cheap. It’s not the insanely expensive that RV rentals are (I can go to Disney for a week or rent an RV for three weeks…). Reasonably sized popup trailers seem to rent for about $500/wk. For our first summer vacation, we’ll be gone longer than three weeks, so that’s $2000 right there. I can buy a reasonable used (and sometimes new) trailer for only 3-4 times that, and as we plan to take more than one long trailer vacation, we think we’re better off purchasing. Owning also gives us the option of taking 3-4 day trips across the various weekends that the kids are out of school and have no Holiday Program coverage, instead of sitting at home.

top 10 reasons to procrastinate

back again

I’ve got [another spasm]({{ <relref “old-blog-posts/2006/ouch-2.md”>}}) in my back. Higher up this time, and not as bad as the first one; I can still put my own socks on today!

How’d I do it this time, you ask? I got in the car to take the boy to his hockey game. I looked over my shoulder to check for pedestrians before backing out of the driveway. Ouch!

real-world passwords

An analysis of a large collection of passwords gathered in a Myspace phishing attack reveals that passwords are getting better, although:

We used to quip that “password” is the most common password. Now it’s “password1.” Who said users haven’t learned anything about security?

Schneier on Security: Real-World Passwords

map of the internet

The map itself is cool, but so is the method used to create it; check it out!

xkcd - map of the internet

geeks on a ship

We all eventually noticed that the bar / look-out at the front of the ms Zuiderdam, called The Crow’s Nest, could also be referred to as Ten Forward …

Geeks. Who’s idea was that?