The Blog of Harald

Gareth’s Oilers battled the season-winning Leafs to a 1-1 tie, forcing a 2-minute, 3-on-3, sudden-death overtime period. Alas, the Leafs’ star player scored a little less than a minute into the period.

It was a hard fought game; lots of aggressive defense on both sides (although there were surprisingly few penalties to go with it; they were playing clean, at least!). The kids were exhausted when they came off the ice, especially the Oilers who only have 12 players (Goalie, 2 defense lines, and 7 forwards rotating through two lines).

Goulding Park plays a double elimination tournament tournament, so The Oilers go to the semi-final game on Thursday at 6:30, and if they win that they play the Leafs _again_ in the final on Saturday at noon. Go Oilers!

It always amuses me that the smaller the debt, the more aggressive they are at making sure it’s going to get paid. I can borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars on a whim, but miss one freakin’ cable payment and the hounds of hell are called out…

Gareth’s team won, although it was a tense 2-1 win. Kudos to our defense for shutting down several plays. (I don’t think I’m too biased, even though the boy plays defense :).

The Leafs won also, so the top two teams play each other on Saturday. Our record against them goes both ways; they clobbered us early in the season; we clobbered them in the middle; we had very close games at the end. The winner goes to the final; loser goes to the “last chance” game, and gets one more chance to be the other team in the final…

Why the treasure ships from the Americas were allowed to skip Customs: no one inspects the Spanish acquisition!

(Shamelessly stolen from “olletho”:http://olletho.livejournal.com/381557.html)

There’s a major freezing rain and storm warning for Toronto right now. I must be getting jaded, because I really can’t decide if this is genuinely going to be a dangerous storm, or if people are just panicking because we’ve had so many mild winters recently.

I guess the bottom line is: I’m not going to take any chances on the road with the kids in the back seat :). I guess I’m getting conservative in my old age!

*Update 16:30*: ok, it’s truly ugly out there. It took me 70 minutes (round trip; 25 there, 45 back) to get the kids from school, about a 4km trip. The roads weren’t _excessively_ slippery, just covered in snow and full of crawling, bumper-to-bumper traffic. But conditions were getting progressively worse during the drive, and the freezing rain hasn’t started yet.

Here’s wishing all a safe drive home, should you be on the roads.

This time it was packed closer to the middle of the box, but was rattling around inside; there weren’t enough packing peanuts. I’ve already complained to the shipping manager; they obviously have a quality control problem in the shipping department. The internet suggests that many people have received DOA drives from them recently, although it’s always hard to tell on the Net of a Thousand Lies…

Anyway, I installed the drive and ran a bunch of I/O benchmarks against it. It’s not making the evil loud “I’m dying!” seek noises that the old one was, and all of the S.M.A.R.T. values are staying normal (for Seagate drives, that is :). I think I’ll keep testing it through to the weekend before putting any important data on it…