Author Archives: specialk

Don’t Retire Patrick Roy’s Number

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It’s 1995..

And Patrick Roy is getting embarrassed by the Detroit Red Wings 9-0. And he’s begging Mario Tremblay to pull him from the net.

And Mario doesn’t.

And so Patrick Roy announces that he’s done with Montreal.

And Rejean Houle trades him.

And the dark times begin …

And now we wonder if we are going to retire his number?

And he’s probably the third or fourth best goaltender that ever played for Montreal (Bill Durham may be the third). And he’s the reason we won in 1993. And he’s most of the reason we won in 1986.

But you know what, he quit on Montreal.

I don’t care about his antics. I don’t care about the fights. I don’t really care about whether he was a good human being. He was a great hockey player. And his greatness demands that we retire his number.

But I can not ever get over his quitting on Montreal.

Yeah other players held out, and were traded but they did it for the money or because things went bad between them and the team. And when they quit they always said the right things even when they were relieved to be out of town.

Only Roy demanded to be traded because he was *too* good for Montreal.

Only Roy decided that the Montreal Canadiens were not worthy of his services.

So maybe that makes him a great player, and maybe that makes him a legendary player, because he thought he was better than the Montreal Canadiens.

But you know what?

He will always be the guy that quit on Montreal. He will always be the guy that walked out on us.

And as far as I am concerned, that’s why he will never get his name on the rafters. Because he betrayed the team. And when we retire a jersey we’re making a statement about the kinds of players we want on our team, and we don’t want quitters.

So when they’ve retired Koivu’s number, and when they retire Chelios’ number and when they retire Lapointe’s number, and when they retire the number of every minor leaguer that ever wanted to play for the Montreal Canadiens and couldn’t, and when they retire the number of every kid who ever played pee-wee hockey dreaming of playing in the Montreal Forum or Bell Center, and when they honor every fan that ever bought a ticket, when they honor every mother and father who let their kids play hockey and told them about the Great Montreal Canadiens, and when they honor every attendant, journalist, fan who made being a Montreal fan so great, maybe, just maybe,  we’ll find an inconspicuous spot in the rafters for the guy that decided that he was too good for us.

But until then, he is not welcome.

What is Google?

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Google presents itself as a technology company. However, in reality they are an advertiser exchange board. Vendor A creates good or service. Customer B wishes to purchase good or service. Google makes it possible for Vendor A to be found by Customer B. Vendor A is willing to pay Google some money for that service.

The problem, and here’s the nut that needs to be understood, is to create that switchboard Google has to expend vast amounts of cash to maintain its vast server farms. In effect, Google’s server farms provide the medium through which Vendor A is found by Customer B.

Why is this important?

Google makes money from trades. They don’t manufacture the content. To be the preferred location for the trades they need to invest huge amounts of capital to create the best platform for making the trades. As long as the trading exceeds the capital cost things are going well. If the trading were to drop all of a sudden, the capital costs remain and things start getting very interesting.

Let me try this differently.

Once you bring a data center online, if the trading revenue does not match the cost of running the data center, the capital cost remains. Given that trading revenue can disappear overnight, the danger is that overnight the total revenue that Google has can collapse. In that case Google would have vast operational liabilities with no  revenue stream. The net effect would be complete collapse.

That of course is an absurdly negative belief, but it is interesting to observe that Google’s vast resources are being deployed into vast capital expenses,and that the vast resources are dependent on trading and that if the trading were to stop, then the capital expenses would remain creating all sorts of interesting pressure on their bottom line.

Is Ovechkin et al feasting on weaker Eastern teams?

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I happen to listen to the Puck Podcast on a fairly regular basis. They are one of the podcasts that I listen to when I am exercising.

This past winter, I got out of shape and as result fell behind…

Anyway, so I am listening to the January podcast, and Doug says that maybe the reason Alex the Great has that many goals (as does Kovalchuk) is because the defense in the west is better and they play a lot of games against weaker Eastern teams. He then proceeds to rattle off the names of the great defenders that play in the west, guys like Niedermayer, Pronger and Lidstrom.

And just recently, Ron Wilson of the Sharks, remarked that there are no top ranked defensemen in the Eastern Conference after Brian Campbell arrived in San Jose.  As a fan of Mr. Markov, I would think that Mr. Wilson is mistaken, but after Markov, I would be hard pressed to name a top-rated defenseman in Eastern Conference.

Personally I think that Doug was wrong, because he discounted the fact that although the West may have better defensemen, the East has better goaltending.

One of the implications of Doug’s statement would be that the Ducks Getzlaf’s 23 goals are more valuable than Ovechkin’s 60 because they are against superior defense.

But facts and numbers are always more interesting than statements.

So I decided to see how many goals did Ovechkin score vs the West and vs the East.

Ovechkin has scored 60 goals, and has 7 goals in 6 games against the West.

What about Kovalchuk?

Kovalchuk had  3 goals in 6 games against the West.

All this shows is that great players will score regardless of who is defending them. And both Ovechkin and Kovalchuk are great players.

Habs 8 – Bruins 0

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After 15 years of futility it is fun to watch Montreal thoroughly dominate someone.

The Bruins are not a bad team, it’s just their style of play is uniquely unsuited to the Montreal Canadiens. Essentially they rely on a physical game that prevents many chances. That style works well if you are dealing with a team that does not have precision passing like Montreal. That style would also work well if the Bruins goaltending is good.

The latest game was proof. The Bruins were able to stay in the game because of their excellent goaltending. The Habs had the kinds of chances they typically get against Boston, but this time Thomas was on the ball.

I do not expect the Bruins to lose another eight to the Canadiens, but it would be fun…

Dirty, Dirty Ducks

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I thought the rumors of how dirty the Anaheim Ducks are, was just sour grapes.

But wow.

With little over 90 seconds left in the game, the Ducks’ Kunitz assaults Cheechoo. Koonitz went elbow first to Jonathan’s head.

The only point of that assault was to injure. You don’t go with your elbow and stick at neck level because you want to check someone. You carry the stick and elbow at that level because you want to maul your opponent.

Wow.

And the money kept rolling in…

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This is an interesting story about how Google’s AdSense program was perverted by folks who understood the nature of arbitrage.

http://www.financialpost.com/magazine/story.html?id=324817

The real gem of the story is the following:

In 2003, Google made another huge leap forward on the advertising side, with the launch of its AdSense program. Essentially, this application allowed people to put keyword-targeted ad links, served by Google, on their own websites, with them and Google splitting revenue tied to the volume of user click-throughs. As its popularity grew, a cottage industry began to develop called “search arbitrage.” Essentially, search arbitrage involves an individual or company buying Internet traffic through the acquisition of keywords from Google, then sending viewers who click on the ad links to a site (“landing page” in Google terminology) that appears to have content, but is actually just full of online advertising linked to the original search term. Anyone clicking an ad link there makes money for the keyword holder. For example, a company might bid for the Google rights to the phrase “small town car sales” and send traffic to a website it controls, filled with more car advertisements, called “Alltheautomotive.com.” The keyword cost only 20ยข, while a click on the advertising on the website might yield $1.50 return. According to Niki Scevak, an analyst at Jupiter Research in New York, the majority of those initially involved in search arbitrage were small players. “These were guys running search arbitrage out of their basements, making maybe $20,000 a month,” he says.

Essentially you buy “cheap” words, and populate the web page with expensive words and make a killing on the difference!

And this is legal…

Fun with Symantec

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I am currently running Vista on my new shiny tablet.

And for the most part this has been a wonderful experience. I find the user-interface to be significantly more elegant. The system as a whole seems to hang better together than XP.

However, I did run into a problem with my VPN. Now it turns out, for reasons that are a complete mystery to me, that Norton 360 and my Cisco VPN will not work together. After a lot of pain and frustration I decided to call Symantec today and ask for help.

First the helpful person on the phone told me to wait a sec while she logged on to my computer. To which I responded:

How do I disable that feature?

After a lot of time on the phone, the helpful person told me to:

  1. Add a rule that allows any piece of software to use any port and any protocol to go in and out of my computer
  2. Trust every interface.

I was in a rush, and just relieved I could use my VPN and have some kind of antivirus software, so I didn’t pay too much attention to what she told me to do.

But later on this evening I thought…

Hmmm…

Now I may not be a network expert but step 1 and step 2 are the moral equivalent of:

Turn off the firewall.

Symantec rather than tell me honestly:

Dude the product you spent 79$ doesn’t actually work with this other piece of software, so go to advanced options and turn off the firewall.

The helpful helpdesk person walked me through a convoluted process to disable the software without explicitly disabling it.

Blech.

And the fans roared!

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In 1993, Montreal won the Stanley Cup by defeating the LA Kings in a memorable 5 game series.

I remember that playoff year vividly. I knew we would because I had seen St. Patrick play against the Bruins, and I knew he was not going to let this team lose. I was so confident of our victory that I bet a NY Ranger fan and a Pittsburgh Penguin Fan a 6 pack of beer that we would win.
But ever since 1993, Montreal Canadiens fans have had very little to cheer about.

The team never reached the utter abyss of incompetence, but when Valerie Bure and Oleg Petrov are the best you have to offer for your young talent, and Rejean Houle and Mario Tremblay are destroying your franchise, things look bleak.

Actually things looked so bleak, that for this Montreal fan, watching hockey had become depressing. It was like looking at a tired over-the-hill athlete who once was great, wheezing and panting trying to compete. It was brutal and painful and sad.

And even when we won, it was still sad. In 2002 when Jose Theodore was standing on his pinky (not his head) to get an unbelievably crappy Montreal team into the playoffs, I remember watching the game and thinking the only person on that team that belongs in the NHL is the goalie, this Russian dude Markov and Koivu. Everyone else could be replaced by Detroit’s AHL team. And you knew that as long as Theodore could withstand the barrage we would win, and he won 6 games that we had no business winning that year.

And I remember that I was so happy that we made the playoffs in 2002, because we had missed the playoffs for three straight years! And I would run home like a lunatic to catch games and I knew that my team sucked, but maybe things had started to change… But once I saw that team, I knew, I knew that they still sucked. So I was happy, but it looked like my aging star was reaching back for one last gasp at glory …

And then Gainey became the GM. And all of a sudden things looked better.

In 2004 we beat the bruins, but this time, it wasn’t just Theodore standing on his head. There were actually other players on the ice that could play this game of hockey. And we signed Kovalev. And things looked better.

And then there was last years’ collapse. More to the point, there was last year’s putrid defense. How can you claim to be a hockey team when you can’t score on 5×5 and your top players are -20+? The team was fun to watch but at there was still no hope. Too much of the team was tied to a collection of aging veterans. Veterans who could only get worse, not better. And was Cristobal Huet really that good?
And now we beat the New Jersey F. Devils and our nemesis Martin F. Brodeur (who we declined to persue in 1999 when he was an RFA and maybe that’s why he has chosen to dominate us so thoroughly). And it’s not a fluke comeback. It’s a not 2-1 squeaker that could have gone either way. It’s a 4-0 dominating victory. Our goaltender blocked the shots, our defensemen held the Devils to the periphery, our forwards did whatever they wanted in the Devils zone.

And it wasn’t some aging collection of veterans, or some fluke victory, but the natural outcome of young players getting better, and a team that has been playing better and better by the day.

And you suddenly knew that after 15 years, we had a good team, a team that we did not have to dread following, a team that could make you look forward to April, a team that you enjoy watching, a team that could make you proud to be a fan.

After fifteen years of looking at the bottom of the standings, being embarrassed to cheer for your team (had we become the Toronto Maple Leafs) because cheering mediocrity was beneath a Habs fan when the Montreal fans gave the team a 2 minute standing ovation, and RDS and VS decided to shut up and just let us hear the fans roar, it wasn’t because the team beat Brodeur, it wasn’t because Price had a shutout, it was because after 15 fucking years in the wilderness, our beloved Habs were back.

TV Review: Eli Stone

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So maybe I watch too much television, and maybe the writers strike is problematic, but Eli Stone is a wonderfully quirky show.

Cast in the mold of Ally McBeal (when it was good) or Scrubs, this show blends the surreal and the real into a wonderful knot.

The protagonist is a lawyer who lost his moral compass and somehow found it just before it was too late. He found it when confronted with his own morality and a set of visions triggered by a brain aneurysm.

I like the shows style, zippiness, humor and character.

If you are looking for a single legal drama, and after suffering from the imploding Law and Order series, this may be my single legal drama.