A couple of sports quickies

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There have been a number of US Congressional hearings with respect to illegal steroid use in Major League Baseball. A number of current and former baseball players have been asked to testify at these hearings to determine the extent of the steroid use in baseball. Quite honestly, I’m glad this is happening, since MLB has been turning a blind eye to steroid use for years, and if it weren’t for the Congressional involvement, the Mitchell Report never would have been commissioned, people would still think steroid use in baseball was minimal, and José Canseco would still be thought of as an attention-seeking nutcase. (He might still be, but it looks as if he was right when he wrote his book about the rampant use of steroids.)

But all that aside, why is Congress involved? How is steroid use in baseball important enough to the American people that their congressmen (congresspeople?) need to get involved? Aren’t there any more important problems for them to solve?

Toronto Rock head coach Glenn Clark is in a mess o’ trouble. There were a number of fights and game misconducts at the Toronto – Minnesota game that I was at last Friday. After the game (which Toronto lost in overtime), Clark encountered one of the Minnesota players (Sean Pollock, who had been ejected early in the game) in the hallway near the Toronto dressing room. Pollock apparently made some comments about the game which Clark disagreed with, and Clark ended up punching him in the face a couple of times. Clark has now been charged with assault by Toronto Police. The NLL is also investigating and will announce the results of their investigation (likely a lengthy suspension for Clark) later this week. So not only is Clark not likely to be behind the bench again anytime soon, but he may get fired by the Rock entirely, and what’s worse, his day job may be at risk as well. When not coaching the Rock, Clark is a teacher, but if he’s convicted and ends up with a criminal record, his teaching career is over as well. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that.

Clark played for the Rock for a number of years — he was a great defenseman and I was a big fan of his (I even created his Wikipedia page). Then he got injured one year and missed over half the season, and when he came back the next season, he just wasn’t the same. He played another year or two in Toronto, but was never as effective as before the injury. He signed as a free agent with Philadelphia and played a year there before retiring to take the head coach job with the Rock. He was never afraid to drop the gloves, and always played with passion, but he rarely did blatantly stupid things. However, during one game last year, he (as a coach) had to be physically restrained by one of his players because he was irate at one of the refs. There are other coaches in the league who get all riled up and yell and swear and throw things and stuff, but I’ve never heard of Darris Kilgour or Troy Cordingley hitting a player. If Clark is less composed than Darris Kilgour, well, that’s bad.

I think he should be suspended for at least half the season, if not the remainder of the season, and should be fired by the Rock. (Some have suggested a lifetime ban, but I think that’s a bit harsh.) There’s no place in lacrosse, or any sport, for stuff like that. It’s one thing for players to lose control like that, but Clark is the Head Coach. Even if some of the players on his team are older than he is (he’s 38 — several months younger than me), he still has to be held to a higher standard. Maybe he can take the time away from lacrosse to take an anger management course.

Having said that, I don’t think there was any need for police involvement. As bad as this incident was in the world of lacrosse (or sport in general), it was right after a high-intensity game that saw numerous lead changes, went to overtime, and saw a number of players penalized and ejected. This took place during a professional sporting event, not a floor hockey game during gym class. Clark is very passionate about lacrosse, and obviously needs to learn to control that passion. I’m not defending him — he did a stupid thing and deserves to be punished for it — but I don’t think there’s any need to jeopardize his teaching career because of it. I don’t think there’s any danger of some 11th grader talking back to Clark in class and getting socked.

OK, that second one wasn’t as much of a quickie as I originally intended…

I want to be terrible too

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Here is a great article by a self-confessed “terrible programmer” who points out his own “failings” as a programmer and how he covers them up, so that nobody will find out the truth. Of course, he is not a terrible programmer; quite the contrary. He is obviously an experienced programmer who is very good at what he does. (Note that I have no idea who this guy is.) The methods he uses to cover up his incompetence are time-honoured ways of ensuring that the code you release is as correct and robust as possible: do code reviews, use assertions liberally, test the snot out of your code, and use the right tool for the job.

As for me, I do use assertions all over the place, and I’m usually pretty good at writing tests for the modules I write. I am part of the core engine team for SQL Anywhere, a relational database management system from Sybase iAnywhere. When I add features to the database engine, I make sure I test boundary conditions, confirm the syntax of any SQL statements I add, and try to make sure that whatever changes I’ve made work in multiple types of databases, and on multiple platforms. However, I work on a lot of security-related features (encryption, authentication, database permissions, auditing), so I have to do more than just write tests — I have to think about how hackers could break into our systems, or otherwise gain access to data that they should not have access to. If someone was watching packets go by, could they use that information to break into the database? Could someone write a man-in-the-middle program that makes itself look like a server so that clients will connect to it instead of a real server? Can we eliminate the possibility of brute-force attacks, or at least slow the process down enough to negate the effectiveness of the attack? Can we give the DBA the ability to detect when intrusion attempts are happening, and determine where they are coming from?

Anyway, I occasionally make the same mistakes the author does — bugs in code, not initializing variables (ran across one of those this past Friday, actually), making assumptions that aren’t true (and not backing up those assumptions with assertions), stuff like that. I use some of the same methods of covering up my own incompetence as he does, so perhaps I’m as terrible a programmer as he is. I can aspire, anyway.

Just remembered that my boss sometimes reads my blog, so maybe admitting my own incompetence here is a bad idea…

Catch-22 for Ferguson

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John Ferguson Jr. is in a tough spot. As the GM of the Leafs, it’s his job to build the Leafs into a successful team. In my opinion, he’s done a lousy job of this, and the fact that the Leafs are playing really badly, losing yesterday to the worst team in the league, is evidence of this. The right thing to do now, as I’ve believed for a couple of years, is to blow the team up and start over with young kids and draft picks. One problem with this idea is that lots of the Leafs have long expensive contracts with no-trade clauses. These will be hard to get rid of, since nobody wants to take on that big a contract unless it’s for an exceptional player, of which the Leafs have none.

And then there’s Mats Sundin. He’s been the face of the Leafs for over ten years, is a fan favourite, and is still an impact player. He has stated numerous times that he wants to remain in Toronto, but he’s by far the most tradeable player on the team, in that he’d get the most interest and the Leafs would get more for him than the rest of the team combined. The buzz around Toronto is whether or not the Leafs will trade Sundin, who’s an unrestricted free agent after this season. If they do, it’s basically an admission that they’re not going to make the playoffs this year, and that they’re trying to rebuild. As much as I love Sundin, this is the right thing to do.

I heard some hockey analysts (far more knowledgable about hockey than myself) on the radio yesterday talking about this, and they said that Philly got a couple of current players (one great, one good) and two draft picks for an injured Peter Forsberg, and that Sundin would fetch even more than that. One suggestion was that Sundin would fit in nicely on the Ottawa Senators with his good friend and fellow Swede Daniel Alfredsson. How painful would it be for Torontonians, many of whom (though not me) hate the Senators with a passion, to watch Mats Sundin hoist the Stanley Cup wearing a Sens jersey? Ouch.

But here’s Ferguson’s real problem. The Leafs’ ownership, MLSE, have not renewed his contract for next year, and Richard Peddie has gone so far as to say that hiring Ferguson was a “mistake”. The Leafs have missed the playoffs for two straight years, and are looking at a third, and it would seem that Ferguson’s only chance to not get fired would be to make the playoffs this year. So what should Ferguson do? If he trades away Sundin for prospects and draft picks, which is sacrificing this season for the future, he’s putting the Leafs in a better position going forward but all but guaranteeing that the Leafs will miss the playoffs and so he’ll probably lose his job. If he keeps Sundin, the Leafs might squeak into the playoffs but will get devastated by Ottawa (likely to finish first in the East) in the first round. He may keep his job for another year because they made the playoffs (seemingly, this milestone indicates to MLSE that the season was a complete success), but the situation next year and in future years won’t be any better. So in a nutshell, if he tries to make the team better, he gets fired. But if he keeps things the same or does nothing to prevent them from getting worse, he might just keep his job.

Or possibly MLSE will realize that trading Sundin is good for the Leafs’ future, and as long as he doesn’t get raked over the coals in the deal, maybe give Ferguson another year with these new kids — even if they do miss the playoffs this year. Sundin is also an unrestricted free agent this summer, so even if they do trade him, it’s possible that they could resign him then, and have the best of both worlds. Then again, even if they trade Sundin for Sidney Crosby and a draft pick (an arguably good deal for the Leafs, and one likely to get the Pittsburgh GM fired or, more likely, shot), they’ve still got Kubina, McCabe, Raycroft, Stajan, and bunch of other half-decent-at-best or overpaid (or both!) players. Even Crosby couldn’t carry these guys by himself.

Look at me, hoping that MLSE makes some smart decisions when it comes to the Leafs. Talk about blind optimism. Here’s what will happen: the Leafs will hold onto Sundin until he retires, and will not get noticably better in that timeframe. Then with Sundin gone, they’ll get worse.

Football pool winner! Who’da thunk?

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I’ve blogged a couple of times now (here and here) about this football pool I’m in, and how I don’t know anything about football but was doing well anyway. I am stunned beyond belief to announce that I won the whole damn thing. I finished 6 points ahead of second place, and 68th overall in all of ESPN.

Financially, I came in second in week 2 ($10), then I won week 16 ($30), and then I won $260 for first place overall, for a total of $300. I’m still deciding what to do with that money. Do I just put it toward the credit cards, or do I treat the family to something, or do I say “screw ’em all” and buy myself a new Rock jersey?

National Delurking Week

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Happy National Delurking Week! For anyone who doesn’t know what that means, “lurking” is what you do when you read a blog but never post any comments. This week, you are encouraged to post a comment, just to let me know that you’re out there.

For anyone who reads this blog (or its equivalent on facebook), feel free to post something profound, something not very profound, or just “hi”! And remember…

I continue to rock

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I got Guitar Hero III for the Wii for Christmas, and as I found with Guitar Hero II, I rock. I played a bunch of different songs on easy mode and I must say, I kicked serious ass. During Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out”, I blew the very first note, than hit the next 170 in a row, then messed up two more in the solo, than nailed the rest of the song. I missed three notes out of about 275. I was over 90% on every song, and over 95% on most. I might just be the world’s greatest Guitar Hero III player.

On easy mode, anyway.

After getting all cocky, I played one song on the medium difficulty level, and my inflated ego started to deflate back down to it’s normal size. I think I was still over 90% on that song (but only just), but it was significantly more difficult than easy mode, and I had to work a lot harder. I’ll have to play a few more songs on that mode, but someone at work did confirm that the jump from easy mode to medium mode is pretty big. I haven’t tried hard or expert modes yet, but I should probably at least try those before I crown myself king.

The game is seriously cool. Not only is there a whammy bar (which I use far more often than the on on my real guitar), but you can do hammer-ons and pull-offs, and even play chords. No sliding though. The graphics are cool — if you have time to look at anything other than the streams of notes coming at you, you can see the guitar player playing the song (i.e. strumming at the right time and such — haven’t checked to see if the fingering is correct), and the singer’s mouth is even sync’ed to the lyrics.

I read an article once where the author wondered if the next generation of guitar players might be starting out now with Guitar Hero, and I don’t think it’s all that far off. Obviously you will not learn how to play the actual guitar or read music or anything like that by playing this game, but it’s pretty good for teaching rhythm and it’s good as a finger exercise as well.

We also got Mario Galaxy and Lego Star Wars for the Wii, and I haven’t quite finished Super Paper Mario yet, but I’m not sure how much playing of anything other than GHIII I’ll be doing in the next while…

Great Wolf Lodge

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We spent last weekend at Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls with our friends the Scanlons and the Wadsworths. It’s only been open a year or two, and none of us had ever been there before, so we weren’t completely sure what to expect. Bottom line: it’s not the cheapest place around, but we had a lot of fun. It’s expensive for a reason though — there’s a ton to do, and they’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about the convenience of their guests, which it seems not a lot of places have done. I don’t think there was a single time over the weekend when I wondered “why did they do it this way?” Of course, part of that is the fact that it’s brand new — they haven’t had “backwards compatibility” issues yet. By this I mean that they haven’t yet had to upgrade things or add new things overtop of existing things. I’m sure the people at Canada’s Wonderland or other parks would love to rearrange ride locations and stuff, but you can’t shut down four or five rides for several months to move them around just to make things more convenient.

OK, there’s one thing I did wonder about — the Lodge is built in a fairly run-down area of Niagara Falls. To get there, you take the 420 from the QEW but instead of turning right to go towards the falls and the touristy section of town, you turn left and drive for a few kilometers. A minute or two after you think “this can’t be right, I must have missed it”, there it is. Literally across the street from the lodge, there are some pretty old beat-up houses. I remember thinking that some of the people who got the expensive rooms with balconies paid upwards of $400 a night, and their view from the balcony includes houses that cost less than that per month in rent. However, given the size of the lodge and the amount of land they needed to build it, it makes sense. The cost of that much land closer to the middle of town would be unreal, so it was probably much cheaper to build out where they did. It’s only about a ten minute drive to Clifton Hill anyway, so it’s not like you’re all that far away, really.

Great Wolf Lodge, in case you’ve never heard of it, is an indoor waterpark and hotel. It does look inside and out like a lodge rather than a standard hotel, as if it were entirely made of logs. The rooms were pretty nice — we had the “Kid Cabin” style of room, which was basically a suite. The kids had their own little room with single bunk beds and a third single bed, a TV, and a wall mural covering the entire room that made it look like a little log cabin, complete with windows and friendly-looking animals peeking in. The rest of the room was a fairly standard hotel room with a fridge, microwave, coffee maker, fireplace, hair dryer, and safe. The waterpark area is huge, with a number of water slides (some using inner tubes, some not), a family slide (where up to four people could fit into one raft), a “roller coaster slide”, the “vortex” (which is like a water slide into a big toilet bowl), wave pool, hot tubs, and a big play structure with lots of water-spraying devices. The “roller coaster slide” was cool — three people sit one behind the other in a raft, and after each drop there is a conveyer belt that brings you back up again (fast!) to drop again. I only rode that one twice because (a) there was always a long line-up for it, and (b) Nicky was too small to go on it, so I had to find someone to look after him while Ryan and I went on it. This was because Gail was away for almost all of Saturday, but more on that later.

The thing that impressed me the most were the wristbands. Maybe they have these at other hotels or parks or whatever, but I’ve never seen them, and I thought they were the coolest thing ever. Each guest gets a wristband which you wear from the moment you check in. The wristband contains a little RFID (I’m guessing) tag that acts as a room key (hold your wrist up to the lock and it opens), locker key, and even credit card — you can use it at the snack bar or restaurants to charge stuff to your room (though you still have to give your name and sign a receipt). You can also get tokens at the arcade with your wristband, and if you forget which locker you locked, you can scan it at a little booth and it will tell you. We could also set up the kids’ wristbands so that they could unlock the doors and be used with lockers but they couldn’t be used to charge stuff to the room (I’m sure they call this feature “teenager protection”). The wristbands are (obviously) waterproof, so when you go to the waterpark area, you don’t need to bring anything. You automatically have your room key with you, and if you want lunch or snacks or drinks or anything, you don’t need to run back to the room to get cash, or worry about hiding your wallet under your towels while you swim. If they could only build a 10 MP digital camera in the wristband, we’d be all set.

The rest of the weekend in a nutshell:

  • “Cub Club” was a club for kids where they could make crafts, play, and watch TV, and they also had “story time” every evening, where a story teller came out and read a couple of books (the night we went, it was “Green Eggs and Ham” and Robert Munsch’s “Mortimer”). The kids really enjoyed that.
  • The food was good and not overpriced for the most part. The food at the snack bar was pretty good, and the dinner buffet was excellent. The breakfast buffet was also very good but expensive, so I wouldn’t do that again, especially considering that there were more reasonably priced alternatives. There were a couple of little cafés in the hotel that had muffins and doughnuts and even bowls of cereal.
  • There was an arcade as well, with both standard video games as well as games where you win tickets which can be cashed in for prizes. The tokens were not as expensive as at other arcades I’ve been to. Of course, we paid $60 in tokens all told, and ended up with maybe $15 worth of prizes, but that’s to be expected.
  • One night, Ryan wandered into the arcade accidentally (we asked him to go find one of our friends in front of the arcade, but he misunderstood). He saw a light flashing on a game, hit a button, and won 150 tickets. Another time, he put a token in a “Wheel of Fortune” type game, hit the button at exactly the right time, and won 250 tickets. Those two wins constituted about one third of the whole family’s total winnings all weekend.
  • We had dinner at the Rainforest Cafe right at the base of Clifton Hill on Saturday night. Afterwards, we went for a ride on the Niagara Skywheel further up the hill, where we had a great view of the falls and the rest of the city, though I spent half the time fumbling with the new camera, trying to take a picture that actually looked good. Because it was at night, the camera wanted to use the flash and it ended up bouncing off the glass. Turning the flash off didn’t help either, because it then kept the shutter open longer, and so everything was blurry. I’m quite sure the real problem was user error, but I’ll figure it out, eventually.
  • After the giant wheel, we drove out to see the Winter Festival of Lights, which was very cool, as always. We try to get out there every year.
  • In the waterpark, chlorine smell was surprisingly minimal, considering the amount of water and the fact that it was indoors. By Sunday afternoon, however, it was starting to get to me. By the time we left, I was coughing almost uncontrollably, but the coughing stopped minutes after we left the water park area.

Gail had to miss Saturday entirely because of a funeral. Her great uncle James passed away on New Years Day, and the funeral was on Saturday in Ingersoll, so she had to drive two hours each way. This was the second vacation in the last year that was interrupted by a death in the family — our trip north last July was cut short after Gail’s aunt passed away unexpectedly. You hate to say this about any death, but Uncle James’s passing wasn’t quite as tragic as Aunt Barbie’s — she was only 57 and her death was unexpected, while Uncle James was 85 and hadn’t been in great health for a while. Over Christmas, we had discussed the idea of having a little “reunion” some time soon, as James and his sister Helen (Gail’s grandfather’s brother and sister) and their spouses (Gail’s dad jokingly refers to the four of them as the Matthews “elders”) were getting up there in age. Unfortunately the idea came too late.

I’ve put some pictures from the weekend up at my family web site.

Next we’re getting rid of the rotary dial phone

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We joined the 21st century today, as I took advantage of the Boxing day sale at Future Shop and bought a digital SLR camera. Up until Christmas, we had no digital cameras at all — not a little cheap point-and-shoot, not even one in our cell phones. (This is actually not true, but I’ll describe the exception below.) When Ryan was very young, we bought a Canon Rebel SLR camera, and a year later we got a big zoom lens. The pictures we get out of the camera are fantastic, and the zoom lens is awesome. However, it’s not digital. I’ve been thinking about going digital for a couple of years, but Gail never wanted to, because she was not convinced that the pictures that you’d get from a digital camera (other than the seriously expensive professional quality ones) were as good as the ones we were getting from our SLR, and she might have been right. However, in the last year or so, prices have come down while camera quality has gone up, and we’re now to the point where you can get 5 MP cameras for under $100, and the good SLRs are over 10 MP (and the really good ones are over 20). There is no way, short of blowing a picture up to wall mural size, that a picture from a 10 MP digital camera is distinguishable from a picture from a standard SLR camera. When we decided to go to France this coming summer, we realized that we might take 15-20 rolls of pictures while there. We’d come home to several hundred dollars of processing costs, and only then would we find out if the pictures we took even turned out. People’s eyes may be closed, or the lighting was such that the picture was unusable, or whatever. This pushed Gail over the edge, and we started shopping for digital cameras.

For Christmas, we bought the boys (each) a little 5 MP digital camera, which they’ve been going crazy with (Nicholas has gone through three sets of batteries and has taken over 250 pictures in a little over a week). When we went north for Christmas, we managed to bring our camera without extra film (duh), so when we wanted to take pictures of anything, Gail borrowed one of the boys’ cameras, and I think that helped. She found (like the majority of people who have had digital cameras for years) that the way you take pictures is different with digital — you don’t always have to wait for just the right moment. You can take 20 pictures and if only one turns out, that’s fine. You don’t feel like you’re wasting film taking more than one of the same thing.

Because we have this great zoom lens and didn’t want to give it up, we were excited when we found out that as long as we bought a Canon digital SLR, we could still use the same lens. We started looking at Canon SLRs and narrowed it down quickly. The 30D was about $1200 for the body only, and we didn’t want to spend that much. The Rebel XT (8MP) and XTi (10.1MP) are cheaper ($480 and $620 respectively), but still very nice cameras. I believe the XTi is the newer version of the XT, so I went with the XTi. It has nine-point autofocus (our old camera had three), can take up to three pictures per second, and can take a picture within 0.2 seconds of powering the thing on. I’ll post a more detailed “review” once I’ve had a chance to play with it a little more. I put “review” in quotes there because I’m not camera-savvy enough to post an actual review (the Dioptric Adjustment Correction is -3.0 to +1.0 diopters — I don’t have any idea what that means, but the word “dioptric” is pretty cool), so like everything else in this blog, it’ll just be my uninformed opinions — things I like about it, things that I don’t like, things that could be improved, etc.

The exception I mentioned above was about six or seven years ago, when I bought a small digital camera at an online auction site for $40. I knew it was a pretty low quality camera, but I figured it would be fine for taking pictures for our web site or stuff like that, and for $40, it wasn’t a bad deal. When I received it, I found that calling it “low quality” was a compliment, and that I would have been ripped off if I’d only paid $4. It was no bigger than a credit card and about an inch thick, but the images it took were tiny. I took a couple of pictures of our office, then uploaded them to the computer. The pictures came out slightly bigger than icons on the Windows background, and were completely unrecognizable. I don’t remember the specs (which I obviously never looked at before buying it), but I think it must have been measured in kilopixels — and not many of ’em. Caveat emptor in a big bad way.

Meme: What Privileges Did You Have?

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Copied from cahwyguy. Bold means the statement is true, italics means I don’t know or it’s complicated:

  • Father went to college
  • Father finished college
  • Mother went to college — my mom took some university level courses when I was in high school, but they were just for interest, not towards a degree
  • Mother finished college
  • Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
  • Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers — To me, upper class is the extremely wealthy, lower class is the extremely poor, and middle class is the other 95% of us. Rather a meaningless comparison.
  • Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
  • Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
  • Were read children’s books by a parent
  • Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18 — piano
  • Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
  • The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively — Bob and Doug McKenzie notwithstanding
  • Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
  • Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs — My parents paid for residence (and tuition as well, I think) in first year, and I paid for the rest. However, I lived at home for 5 of my 6 work terms and paid no rent during those terms, thus allowing me to save up for the next term’s tuition, rent, and beer
  • Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
  • Went to a private high school
  • Went to summer camp
  • Had a private tutor before you turned 18
  • Family vacations involved staying at hotels — sometimes, usually camping though
  • Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
  • Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
  • Had a phone in your room before you turned 18 — not my own phone number though
  • You and your family lived in a single family house for a few years
  • Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
  • You had your own room as a child
  • Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course — not applicable, as we don’t have SATs in Canada
  • Had your own TV in your room in High School
  • Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
  • Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16 — Scotland when I was four and again when I was 15, Florida when I was 10
  • Went on a cruise with your family
  • Went on more than one cruise with your family
  • Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
  • You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

Merry Christmas!

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To all my regular readers (and even the semi-regular readers) (and the every once-in-a-while readers) (ah heck, even the “google search brought me here and I don’t know who the hell you are” readers), I hope you have a very happy holiday! For those of you who celebrate Christmas, have a very merry one, and for those who don’t, I hope you enjoy the movie. :-)