In Hockey, Sports on July 19, 2010 at 7:48 pm
An indecent proposal for how the Preds could practically be guaranteed to win the Stanley Cup in 2012.
The recent signing of Ilya Kovalchuk has brought the controversy of GMs “gaming” the current salary cap rules in the NHL. There are a few other bad examples of course – the other prime example being Henrik Zetterberg.
If you aren’t familiar, the current NHL collective bargaining agreement which put in place a salary cap for the league uses the average of all the years of a contract to calculate a player’s “cap hit”, that is, how much they count against the salary cap for the term of their contract. This means a player like, say, David Legwand can have a 5 year contract that pays him 5.0, 4.5, 4.5, 4.0, and 3.5 million in each year – yet counts as $4.5mil every year of the deal when it comes to the cap. So the Preds have to cut him a $5mil check in the first year, but he only counts $4.5 mil against the cap.
David Legwand
In Entertainment, History/Politics on January 23, 2010 at 11:33 am
PR Maven Margie Newman just made an interesting blog post about the much-discussed announcement that the New York Times will begin charging for content. That led me to leave a very long comment, which I realized I should really just flesh out into a post of my own:
The interesting thing to me about information portals like this is that many people (myself included) assume that the business model should be one of two things: either pay for content or ad driven. Not both. I’d be fine with paying for something that is worth it if it means never having to see an ad on the site again (see: Pandora), and likewise don’t mind visiting a site with ads if it means I get good content for free. The interesting thing of course is that traditional dead-tree editions of the paper had both: pay for the paper, still has ads.
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In Cool Tech on December 18, 2009 at 11:31 pm
A few times lately I’ve run in to several old nemeses on the web. Irritating flaws in design or function, lack of expected capabilities, or other general lack of reading my mind on the part of developers. So, like any whiny geek, I’m blogging about it.
Here is my wish list of things that I thing Google and others should tackle to make my life easier (in no particular order). Hop to it!
1) Flickr/Facebook integration: I really wish Yahoo would go ahead and buy Facebook so they could integrated it with Flickr. Flickr finally got around to letting you tag people in photos (years after Facebook did), but it is still limited to your Flickr contacts (not even just other Flickr members) and so few of my friends and family are on Flickr that this amounts to very few people being available for tagging. Facebook on the other hand has a massive adoption rate and just about everyone I know is available for tagging. But Facebook’s photo service is just bad. Images are compressed and resized to horrible quality, you can’t tag photos on maps, group them, etc. If I could tag my Facebook friends on my Flickr photos…[sigh]. That’s a world I want to live in.
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