Cool – a rhyming title. Gotta like that.

Lacrosse season is back! The Rock played their first game of the season on Saturday night, and lost to the Arizona Sting 14-13 in OT. It was a rematch of last year’s final, where the Rock won something like 19-13, but this time, the Sting were the dominant team. They had a 9-3 lead at one point (after an absolutely awful 2nd quarter), but the Rock battled back and tied it at 11, then 12, and then again at 13 with 36 seconds left in regulation. But 2 minutes into overtime, Andrew Guindon put a shot past Whipper to end it. The Rock were rather rusty – lots of dropped balls, passes that went nowhere, and even shots that missed the net by miles. Josh Sanderson looked like a rookie – taking a stupid penalty less than a minute in, and only ending up with 3 assists. Other than the 2nd, Whipper played pretty well, and Brad MacDonald, who came over in a trade with Calgary, made an amazing play to save a goal late in the game.

Arizona started Mike Miron in net, which kind of surprised me, considering they acquired Rob Blasdell in the off-season. I assumed Blazer would be the starting goalie, with Miron as a solid backup, but perhaps it’s the other way around, or maybe they’ll platoon, as Whipper and Cosmo did a couple of years ago in Toronto. Miron played a pretty good game though, so it’s possible that the Arizona GM and coaches know more about lacrosse than I do.

On an unrelated note, I finally managed to get my new wireless G router set up the way I want it – all of my machines can connect to the ‘net and each other, and no other machines can use it (using MAC filtering). I had to download a firmware upgrade and reset the router to factory defaults at least four times before I got this done, but it eventually worked. It’s kind of a waste though – the old wireless B router gave us 11 Mbs, while the new one gives 54 Mbs. Sounds great, except that the 2 machines upstairs only have 11 Mbs cards in them, so they don’t notice any difference, only our laptops (both from work) do. However, the cable modem coming into the house only gives about 3 1/2 Mbs, so the laptops don’t notice any difference either, unless they’re copying files between each other, which has never happened. Long story short – the new router gives exactly the same performance as the old router. I’ll have to look for cheap wireless G cards on eBay or Factory Direct.

Luckily, the router was on sale – after the $20 mail-in rebate, it only cost me $10. The mail-in rebate should come in 8-10 weeks – if it doesn’t, I’ll probably have long forgotten about it by then, and even if I haven’t, it’s not like there’s anything I can do. I was promised a mail-in rebate (something like $60) when I bought 3 seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD, which I did (I eventually bought all 7), but 8-10 weeks later, I received a letter saying that I hadn’t included proof of purchase from each DVD package, which I had. But of course, I had no proof of that, so I was SOL.