Archive for June, 2009

Good year to be a Pittsburgh sports fan.

Was I ever wrong.  Quite frankly I was also quite excited to be wrong.  The Pittsburgh Penguins looked like they were going to follow the trend of last years Cup finals by doing their best to manage a single win in the best of 7 series.  However after a rough start the Pens kicked it in to high gear and are the 2009 Stanley Cup champions after an amazing 7th game in Detroit.  The series had everything a championship series should have.  All-stars, surprise heroes, momentum switching, come from behind drama, last second nail-bitters, and maybe a dash of controversy.

What I am upset about, however, is if you listen to the sports media you’d assume Sidney Crosby won the Stanley Cup all by himself, and those others guys were just fans with really good seats.  Seriously, he didn’t even score in the last 3 games of the Detroit series.  Max Talbott, the 4th line wonder scored both the Penguins goals in their 2-1 victory over Detroit in game 7.  Malkin won the MVP.  Fleury made a last second diving save to keep the Wings from facing overtime.  Sure, there’s no denying Crosby is a great player, but lets face it, he had a lot of help.  The entire team stepped up when they were needed and the team earned that cup.  Likely none of this media obsession is Crosby’s fault, nor do I think he buys in to the hype generated about him.  It just shows how team sports have eroded when the media places all their emphasis on a single player.  No team in the NHL wins Lord Stanley’s cup merely by having one stand out player on their team.  Without all the pieces there is no team.  Look at the LA Kings back in the day banking on Gretzky to bring them home the cup.  How many cups does LA have?  Sadly about as many as my Sabres: zero.  One incredibly player can be a game breaker – he can be that edge in a closely fought contest.  Everyone needs that go to guy.  But if your whole team is built around that one player, no matter what level you play at in hockey, you’re not going to win the big games.

Son congratulations to Evgeni Malkin, Marc-Andre Fleury, Max Talbott, Marian Hossa(oh right, he thought Detroit would win), and a whole host of other Pittsburgh Penguins who I don’t really know.  And yes, congratulations to Sidney as well – all of you earned it.

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Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Jun 15th, 2009

Photo Blogging.

Well my Gallery site I was originally using to post photo’s suddenly decided it wanted to upgrade itself – and apparently it upgraded itself in to some sort of permissions nightmare.  As I’ve always felt gallery was a little over-complicated for my needs I decided to look around at other options.

Flickr, is of course, the most obvious and tempting option.  Lots of people use it.  Lots of people seem really happy with it.  However it has one flaw that keeps me from using it.  It’s all run and controlled by someone else.  That someone else being the Yahoo! collective and I’m not sure I want them asserting whatever rights they feel, or selling the entire site to whomever they want at the drop of a hat.  I’m not as worried about losing photos if they ever went away (I doubt Flickr will just close its doors overnight at some point), nor am I worried about what happens if their servers fall apart, or are hacked, or what have you.  I back things up.  I have local copies of everything as well as offsite copies.  I just don’t like giving too much control over my words or pictures to others.  It’s why I maintain this blog (more or less) in addition to my LiveJournal one.  It’s also why I post more important (to me anyway) posts here and use LiveJournal for announcements and random thought type posts.  So at the end of the day I decided to use Yet Another Photo Blog plugin with Wordpress.

Right now I haven’t added all the photo’s that I had posted before, but I will slowly be adding my favorites along with new ones that I find.  So feel free to explore my new PhotoBlog!

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Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Jun 9th, 2009

United States of the Recording Industry.

To say I’ve been dissapointed with certain aspects of our new President would be quite the understatement.  No, I don’t think he’s about to bring the American way of life to its knees or send us all to some form of doom and darkness as a lot of Republican pundits seem to believe, but I do find some of his early choices eerily striking to other politicians who have made a career out of limiting freedoms.  It started with him appointing several RIAA key lawyers to top spots in the Department of Justice.  This is a group of lawyers who seem to think that the law doesn’t apply to their own clients.  Their crusade against the evil people of America who are setting out to bring an end to the noble and ethical recording industry (please not the substance dripping from your monitor is indeed sarcasm) has gone far beyond a misuse of justice.  Sure, I believe they have every right to make a profit and to defend their copyright.  Downloading copyrighted material without the right of the copyright holder is against the law and I have no beef with that. I do have a beef against the tactics used in targeting lower and middle income families who can’t mount a proper defense on their own behalf.  I have a problem with their unethical use of private investigation companies who have been found guilty of breaking laws throughout various states, yet arguing that whether the evidence was gained legally or not doesn’t matter.

Obama’s most recent Supreme court justice nominee seems to be falling right along with all his other legal picks.  Perhaps the thing I find the most appalling in these trials is the ludicrous damages awarded to the recording industry.  While, if found guilty, I do believe that damages should be awarded, I am alarmed by the amount of said damages.  Rulings that awards tens of thousand of dollars per song downloaded in damages, in my mind, fits the definition of a cruel and unusual punishment.  In fact the Obama administration supports the $150,000 dollar per song maximum under Copyright Law.  Charging the guilty the full retail price for each album they downloaded seems a much more reasonable course of action – or if the goal is to really punish perhaps double the albums retail value even if the entire album, only a couple of song, were downloaded from it.  There is no validity that anyone has been able to show that suggests one person downloading an album illegally causes the recording industry to lose tens of thousands of dollars.  In truth, if the people didn’t download them, a large percentage of them probably wouldn’t have purchased the album anyways.  The math, the arguments, the logic, it’s all wrong.  What does any of this have to do with Obama picking Sonia Sotomayor to become a Supreme Court Justice?  She has ruled in favor of excessive damages in Copyright infringement cases throughout her career.  With a challenge to these damages potentially appearing before the Supreme Court in the near future her appointment would only further Governments support of big business and its continuing trend of putting the people that elected them in second-class role.

I never expect politicians to speak much truth, especially during an election, but Obama seems bent on going out of his way to contradict his idea of being a man of change.  Things seem pretty status quo to me.

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Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Jun 2nd, 2009