Slightly North

Make a deal you dicks. A letter to both the NHL and the NHLPA.

I hate Gary Bettman. He and the rest of his "team" are complete tools. Because of his stubborness and the 30 teams' lack of payroll restraint, there will be no NHL season this year, and maybe never again. The player's union made an offer to the NHL of a 24% salary rollback. That is a ton of money. But the league is not going to accept the proposal because it doesn't offer any long term consessions for keeping player salaries down. Here is a wild idea for the 30 teams -- DON'T OVER PAY PLAYERS JUST TO KEEP THEM IN TOWN!!!. It is your own fault these players are making so damn much -- YOU KEEP OFFERING IT TO THEM!. Stop it. It usually doesn't work anyway. Just look at the amount of money on the Rangers' payroll. How many cups have they won recently? Oh yeah, none. There is nothing that says the teams MUST keep paying these players so much. If the players can have an unwritten code about behavior on and off the ice, then the teams can have an unwritten code of conduct about how much to pay players. Sure, some really good players might have to sit a few months or more not playing, but if no one will pay what they are demanding, then the player's price will start to drop until a team will pay for it. Unwritten code of player salaries. Someone needs to write that. heh.

Anyway... winter is not the same without hockey, neither is Saturday night. Comcast sent Erin and I an offer for 2 free tickets to go to a Seattle Thunderbirds game this month, but I am so annoyed by the NHL I don't even know if I want to go to a junior league game.

The CBC finally has RSS feeds. CBC is one of the last major news sites I read to offer them.

CBC News Feeds

They even list Sharpreader in their list of RSS readers. Nice.

Lest we Forget is a comp of "45 unreleased songs by 35 great old Berkeley Bands." A lot of this stuff I was listening to in high school in the early 90's. This was a tape released in 1991, and the MP3 files are side 1 and side 2.

According to the site, this tape can be reproduced and distributed at will. Yay!

Errorware - I want the broken link shirt.
Google Suggest Beta - Real-time suggestions as you search.
Bejeweled 2 - Must.... resist.... time-sink....

It seems the days of the Alaskan Way Viaduct are coming to an end. Well, not really quite yet, but in a few years. Well, not really in a few years, more like 12 years.

The Seattle P-I is reporting that the city finally decided on an option to replace the damaged viaduct and sea wall along the Seattle Waterfront. The city finally sided with the state and federal governments to say the best replacement is the most expensive option, a six-lane tunnel. But don't count on it soon, construction isn't even set to start until 2009. Lets hope another major earthquake (on average every 5 years) doesn't strike until 2017. Odds are though, that another earthquake will happen and could close the viaduct for good. I can't imagine the traffic impact that would have on I-5, 1st Ave, and the rest of SoDo.

The cost of this project is supposed to be $3.4 billion to $4.1 billion. Legislators say the state might contribute $2.5 billion.

Timeline of the project... notice it is going to take 3 years just to see if it is an environmentally safe option.
2006: Issue final Environmental Impact Statement.
2007: Obtain environmental approvals. Utility relocation begins.
2008: First phase design complete. Continued utility relocation.
2009: Begin construction.
2016: Project complete.

All in all though, I am excited to see some progress here. The Viaduct is ugly anyway. Some of the pictures on the P-I page look really nice.

Amazon.com must be doing well this holiday season. Their website is so slow right now. Maybe it has nothing to do with the volume of shoppers, but it seems like every year they do more business. I keep getting errors when viewing my cart and timeout messages when searching for items. I'm happy that Amazon.com is doing well, but it is a bit annoying when I can't use the site properly.

Actually, now it is down. I can't get to anything on amazon.com anymore. Great...