The Luney Bin: H. Wade Minter

In other NHL draft-day news, TSN reports that Carolina has traded Jeff O’Neill to Toronto for a 4th round pick in next year’s draft.

On the one hand, that’s not a lot in return for a guy who was supposed to be the offensive powerhouse on the team. On the other hand, O’s production has fallen off in the past couple of years, and I guess the GM figured it was better to get a little something for him now, than nothing for him tomorrow afternoon when he became a free agent.

O’Neill had a good few years with Carolina, including a commanding presence during the Cup run, but clearly hadn’t been happy since. It was obvious that he was on his way out this year, and he’d made it clear that he wanted to go to Toronto. So, he gets his wish. I wish him luck in his new surroundings.

With Ron Francis gone, and now lifetime WhalerCane O’Neill, this really does become Rod Brind’Amour’s team. They’re probably looking to Erik Cole, Eric Staal, or Justin Williams to assume O’s role as goal-scorer.

So thanks for the memories, Jeff.

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I went to the Hurricanes draft party at the Carolina Ale House in North Raleigh today. I got there around the time it was supposed to start, and the line was already out the door. Ooops. Should have arrived earlier.

I’d say there were 200-300 fans there, a great turnout. There wasn’t anywhere to sit near where the action was going to take place, so I staked out a spot leaning against a post, directly in front of the Hurricanes area. I got to meet up with Hurricanes announcer John Forslund briefly, and get an answer to a question that had been bugging me for ages. I run the ComedyWorx mailing list, and someone has been subscribed for a while with an email address that is johnforslund@wherever. I asked him “Is that your address?” He said it was, but he didn’t know how he got subscribed. I gave him a couple of free tickets to ComedyWorx anyway.

The Hurricanes were represented by Forslund, the assistant coaches Kevin McCarthy and Jeff Daniels, and player Rod Brind’Amour. Brindy got a huge ovation when he came out, as did Daniels, who was a very popular player before retiring a couple years ago. The four were seated at a table an arms-length away from me, so I had a great seat, er, stand. Forslund was on the mic, giving a rundown on the draft, passing the mic to the others to talk as needed.

As Carolina was drafting 3rd, they held off on most discussion until after the pick. I had figured on us grabbing Jack Johnson earlier in the week, but changed my call to Benoit Pouliot this morning after seeing us trade for two defensemen overnight. However, my original pick was correct, as Carolina grabbed some Johnson at #3. He looks like a solid player who should be ready to contribute in a few years. He’s apparently attending Michigan in the fall, so I don’t expect to see him on the ice his draft year like Eric Staal was. Pouliot went at #4 to Minnesota. Carolina’s second-round pick was also on defense, Nathan Hagemo at #58, and it looks like we did grab some offense with center Joe Barnes at #64.

After our pick, the four team reps did about an hour of Q&A with the fans. To start, Brind’Amour apologized for the problems last season, and encouraged everyone to put it behind us and move forward with this season. I think he got a good reaction from that, considering that I think most people in Raleigh assign more blame to the players than the owners.

Most questions concerned how the rule changes would affect the team, whether or not we’d see some of our recent draft picks (Cam Ward, Andrew Ladd, Danny Richmond, Mike Zigomanis, etc) up in Raleigh this year, how Peter Laviolette’s system would work, that sort of thing. One fan lobbied on the mic for Brindy to be named Captain, to thunderous ovation. He smiled, got on the mic, and told the guy “I’ll pay you your $20 later. In a few months, after I start getting paid again.”

I got to ask a question – whether or not the officials and league would be able to enforce the no-obstruction rules, when past seasons have seen an early push to stop obstruction that quickly putters out when games are filled with penalties and player behavior doesn’t change. Brind’Amour seemed to think that it would take a while for players and officials to get used to it, but seemed optimistic that the clutch-and-grab stuff would go away, or at least get reduced.

So it was a fun trip out. It was good to be talking hockey again, get out amongst the Caniacs, and prepare for the upcoming season. I got a couple more signatures on my autograph jersey, those of Brind’Amour and Forslund.

Game on!

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Carolina has been busy on the eve of the draft, sending a 3rd round draft pick to Nashville to pick up Defenseman Andrew Hutchinson, who spent most of his time in the AHL last year. They also shipped a third-round draft choice to the Flames and picked up Defenseman Mike Commodore, who spent most of last season at AHL Lowell, but played in all 20 games of Calgary’s Stanley Cup run. He is also blessed with a prodigious white-boy afro.

Picking up two young blueliners makes me think that the Canes will be going for a forward in the draft, letting guys like Jack Johnson and Mark Staal slip. A likely name to be called at #3 would be Benoit Pouliot, I think.

I’m planning on going to the Carolina Ale House in North Raleigh tomorrow for the Canes draft party, so I should be there with a crowd to see the pick.

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There’s a lot of asshattery in the world. So it takes a special breed of asshat to rise to the level of getting noticed above the pack. And today, that special person is Catherine Baker Knoll, the Democratic Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania.

Lt. Gov. Knoll, who apparently has peat moss for brains and a decaying fish for a soul, decided it would be a good idea to show up uninvited for the funeral of a Marine killed in Iraq, sat down with the family during communion, and started stumping against the war in Iraq, handing out business cards, and generally behaving like she was at a political rally.

Now, I’m opposed to the Iraq war as well, but you don’t go uninvited to a soldier’s funeral and start poking around the family for political recruits, fucknut. If I were in Pennsylvania, I’d be embarassed that this person was in any way involved in my government, and demand her immediate resignation. She’s trying to spin her apology as a misinterpriation of her goals, but they ring hollow to me.

Shameful.

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So in the aftermath of my trip to Dallas last week, I was talking on #void, and Mark mentioned something about “The Wright Amendment” and pointed me to the Set Love Free website. I checked it out, and came away absolutely baffled at the level of pointless government interference.

The short story appears to be this: Southwest Airlines – the only major airline that appears to have its act together is based out of Dallas. It doesn’t fly out of big Dallas/Ft. Worth International, though, it flies out of the older airport, Love Field. Apparently, in 1979, a Texas Congressman put an amendment into an unrelated bill that said any airline flying out of Love Field could only fly to a handful of Texas border states. This means that Southwest, flying out of its home city, can only offer flights to places like Arkansas, Mississippi, Kansas, etc.

This amendment was put into place allegedly to protect business at the then-new DFW airport. In modern times, though, DFW is one of the busiest airports in the country, so it’s doubtful that it needs special Congressional monopolies to stay alive. It’s more likely that the big carriers, especially American, enjoy being able to keep fares high without pressure from Southwest. A handful of people scared of competition have been able to cherry-pick the airline regulations in the city to hobble an airline that more and more people want to fly.

Check out that site and see if you don’t agree that it’s asinine to keep Southwest from offering full air service in Dallas.

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Report: Sabres trying to trade Satan.

If there’s any justice in the world, he’ll end up in New Jersey. That would rule more than anything has ruled before.

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Holly decided over the weekend that the house wasn’t chaotic enough, and that our cat Lucy didn’t spend enough time hissing and glowering, so she went out and got us a new cat. So, without further ado, meet the newest member of our family, Mr. Felix Felicis.

Needless to say, Lucy is not pleased.

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While I was out on vacation, the NHL and NHLPA, as expected, ratified a new six-year CBA. This ends one of the most embarassing periods in sports history. As expected, the players got a worse deal than they could have obtained at any point before cancelling the season, but them’s the breaks when the head of your union is an assclown.

At any rate, the NHL is slowly grinding into motion again. The draft order is set, and the Hurricanes get pick #3. Not good enough for Crosby (he’ll go to Pittsburgh at #1), but not bad. I’m guessing they’ll take American defenseman Jack Johnson to shore up a pretty weak D corps. Whoever they pick, though, they better make it count. It’s a serpentine draft, which as any fantasy player knows, means that if you draft early, you get a chance at one quality pick and a lot of dregs at the end. Carolina will have the 3rd pick, but won’t have another shot until the 58th slot. Then they go again at 63, and wait until the hundreds for their fourth.

The league is in the salary-cap-buyback phase now until July 31st. I predict a lot of movement as teams jettison high-dollar, low-performance players under contract. Philly has already fired the first shots by dumping LeClair and Amonte. I expect to see something out of the Rangers, kicking Bobby “Unibrow” Holik to the curb among others. Many teams, though, don’t have a ton of players under contract, instead dealing with free agents. The word out of Carolina is that Jeff O’Neill is gone, as the qualifying offer to him would be too expensive. His numbers haven’t lived up to his paycheck over the past couple of years, but if he’s on track, he’s the best scorer we have. If he goes, Carolina needs to go after at least one proven name in free agency.

Speaking of Carolina, they’re putting together some ticket package deals for the re-launch. The 10-game package looks pretty good, though I don’t know if I’d be able to schedule far enough in advance to take advantage of it, with some things on the horizon around here. And, since “contract Carolina” seems to be a very popular line around the league, especially what I read on TSN, owner Peter Karmanos is saying that he’s here to stay – the team is not for sale, and the team is not moving. Good to hear, though attendance really does need to pick up. If Coach Laviolette can put together an exciting, competitive team, as he showed signs of doing at the end of the last season, I think the team will be fine. Two years of bad neutral-zone-trap hockey have brought the fans down from Cup Finals euphoria, though.

It’s good to be able to talk hockey again. Game on!

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Holly finished “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” right before I left for Dallas, so I got to take the book with me on my trip. I ended up reading it twice while I was gone. Yeah, long plane trips are good for something.

Spoilers will follow, though the book’s been out a week and if you haven’t devoured it yet, you probably shouldn’t care about spoilers. So, yeah.

I enjoyed the story, keeping in mind that it was pretty much just setup for the final chapter, and not a real “standalone adventure” in its own right. So this book was there to fill in the missing backstory and set up the final conflict in book 7. And I think it did that well. I had fun reading it, at any rate. Random thoughts and theories:

• Snape didn’t murder Dumbledore – they both knew what was going to happen well in advance. Dumbledore made Snape promise that he’d keep his cover, no matter what, even if it meant living up to his Unbreakable Vow and offing Dumbledore. The look of “hate and revulsion” Snape gives before firing the curse is echoed by the look of hate and revulsion Harry has when he’s forcing poison down Dumbledore’s throat in the cave – both Harry and Snape hate what they’re having to do to keep the hunt for Voldemort alive. That’s why Snape reacts so angrily to Harry calling him a coward – Snape has just committed what was explained earlier as an unspeakable act – murder – in order to keep Harry’s chances for defeating Voldemort alive, and Harry doesn’t see it. It’ll be interesting to see how they handle the reconciliation.
• R.A.B. is obviously Sirius’ brother, Regulus Black. And the Slytherin Locket is either in Sirius’ house, or Mundungus has stolen it. Back in Book 5, when they’re cleaning out the house, they come across a heavy locket that nobody could open. That’s it. And in Book 6, Mundungus has a bunch of stolen Black household goods, so I’d be willing to bet he picked that up unknowingly. As to how Regulus got the locket, my theory is that the took Kreatcher along with him, like Dumbledore did Harry, since the one-person boat (which didn’t register Harry as a person), probably wouldn’t register a house-elf either.
• For being the title device, the whole Half-Blood Prince thing was anticlimactic, with Snape revealing that it was his old textbook that had been helping Harry all year. It just didn’t seem to mean anything, except that Snape, the Half-Blood Prince, was the one to kill Dumbledore (the defining moment of the book), and the title “Harry Potter and Snape Kills Dumbledore” probably wouldn’t work.
• The romance/hormone angle was a little overplayed. It was good to see the kids acting like typical teenage boys and girls, providing a sense of normalcy in an ever-more-crazy world, but it got old after a while. Harry/Ginny was good, though the breakup at the end seemed pointless. What, would Voldemort capture Ginny and hold her hostage, only to hear Harry say “Go ahead, we’re not dating any more?” To which Voldemort would of course reply “Curses, foiled again,” twist his handlebar moustache, and hop on the next stagecoach out of town? Lupin/Tonks seemed to come completely out of left field – I don’t really get the need to have that storyline in. And the slow build on Ron and Hermione is working well.
• Holly and I had pegged Dumbledore’s death from the start, as the Big Cluebat of Foreshadowing was swinging all over the place from Book 1 on. From the quotes like “Harry is safe as long as Dumbledore is around,” and “Dumbledore is the only one Voldemort ever feared,” to “Harry will have to do this alone,” you knew it was going to happen. They’ve systematically removed every support system Harry has, save his friends, so he can be ready for the big fight.
• I’m pretty surprised that Wormtail has made only cameo appearances since the end of Book 4, given the talk of his life-debt to Harry. I expect him to have a bigger role in Book 7.

All in all, though, I had a good time reading the book. I’m not particularly concerned with whether or not it is High Art, or if the characters are true, well-rounded real people, only if I counted the time I spent reading as time well-spent. Which I did. I’m looking forward to Book 7, hopefully within the next two years.

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My vacation to Virginia Beach with the family didn’t quite turn out as planned…

We were getting ready Thursday night for our vacation that Saturday, when the phone rang around 11:30pm. That’s later than we usually get calls. It was a guy named Shane, who is a friend-of-a-friend with my former ComedyWorx compatriot Matt Senter. Seems that a company down in Dallas, Texas, was in a bind and called Shane. He couldn’t do the job, so he kicked it over to me.

I talked to them and got the details, and with our trip to Europe coming up in November, Holly and I decided that it was worth the extra money to take the job. We scheduled a deal where they’d fly me out of Norfolk to Dallas Sunday night, and I’d return Wednesday evening. They had me flying Delta, which should have sent up warning flags.

I got to Norfolk airport in plenty of time for the 8:15pm flight, checked my bag, and waited at the gate. 8:15 came and went, though, with no boarding. Given that I had only a 45 minute layover in Atlanta before my flight to Dallas, this wasn’t a good sign. We finally got in the air a bit after 9pm. We landed in Atlanta, taxied halfway to, oh, Detroit, then sat on the tarmac for 10 minutes or so while another plane vacated our gate.

I was one of the first ones off the plane, and sprinted through the airport in my flip-flops. We landed in Terminal D, and my departing flight was in Terminal A. I made it to the gate with a minute or two to spare, but was met with a closed door and around 10 other people sitting in the chairs. The plane was at the gate, but they’d given away all the seats and shut the door.

Fucking Delta. That was the last flight out, of course. The next one was at 7am. I called Delta booking, and they said “Oh, you’ve already been rebooked on the 1pm flight.” All earlier ones were full, of course. So I had to call the client and tell them no, I wouldn’t be ready to go at 7:30am, and call the hotel they’d booked for me to tell them that I wouldn’t be arriving. Then I had to find a hotel in Atlanta. On my 7th or 8th try, I found one that had internet access and open rooms, so I ended up at a Super-8 near the airport. At least I got to sleep in Monday morning, though since my bags were checked to Dallas, I only had the shorts, ratty T-shirt, and flip-flops that I had been wearing on the plane. I’m sure that made a wonderful impression showing up like that in the client office.

Back to the airport to complete my flight to Dallas. I actually got to the client site around 4pm Central, and worked until around midnight. They switched my hotel booking to a very nice suite deal, but I didn’t have much time to enjoy it. Sleep, then back to work at 8:30am. Worked again until midnight (the job was Samba/LDAP, DNS, DHCP), and made very good progress. There was only one detail left for Wednesday. I stayed up too late Tuesday night finishing the new Harry Potter, then went back onsite at 8:30am.

The minor little detail wouldn’t get resolved, though. Two workstations were having trouble mounting shares and authenticating to the new Samba PDC. I was due at the airport around 1pm for my 3pm flight, and by 12:30, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to get this fixed in time. I had the client bump my flight to the next available one, which was 9am Thursday. Sigh. It was an even bigger sigh when it turned out that the cause of all my problems was a completely client-end issue with the XP workstations – the XP “Workstation” service wasn’t started. Once that started, everything worked perfectly.

But, I got that fixed, did some knowledge transfer, got in bed around 10pm, and had a mercifully uneventful flight back to Norfolk Thursday afternoon. So, of the roughly 8 days of beach with the family, I was there for about three of them. At least Holly and Hayley had a good time in the sun.

The work was pretty fun, though – I went in there cold with some pretty rusty Samba knowledge, and walked out with a good solid foundation and a stable network, which was something they’d been lacking for a while, apparently. And the client was very nice, and a lot of fun to work with. Downtown Dallas is a lot nicer than I would have imagined it to be – very clean (at least the parts I saw). Traffic was a little scary, and it was G.D. hot, but all in all a decent city.

So ends the “What I did on my summer vacation” essay. I’ll say one thing, though – I’m not taking any consulting jobs when I’m in Europe.

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