Times are tough

This is the time of year that puts us NHL fans deep into the internet searching and searching for anything we can get. I myself spend fruitless time daily looking for any Minnesota Wild news, but as is usually the case, come up empty handed almost always. You do of course have the usual rumors published, but those are writers who are stretching thoughts that, in the end, turn into gibberish at best. It's funny to me how a 'source' is used one day on an impending deal, only to find that days and weeks later that the whole thing has vanished.

Yes, these are the dark days for NHL news and notwithstanding the countless blogs and news gathering sources online, getting our Wild news is no exception. So I am going to give you a few very random thoughts on the a wide range of topics...

I was watching a vintage game on the NHL Network the other day and it got me thinking of how this is the one league that really separates themselves from the other major sporting leagues when it comes to marketing and attracting new fans. The game at hand featured what I remember as the 'glow puck', or something that the FOX network labeled the 'FoxTrax'. Yes, the glowing puck with streaks and all, that was supposed to enhance the viewers vision of following the puck. Now I don't know about you, but I really don't have that hard a time following the puck during a game, even without the glow puck. In fact, the FoxTrax made the broadcast game unbearable to me. But for some reason, one that usually leads back to dollars, the league gave the go-ahead...and with that decision, virtually ruined the national telecast for the season. About the only thing that I now find interesting about the whole experiment, is the method and way that Fox used the concept and brought it to reality. Below is a quick paragraph from Wiki...

To create the FoxTrax puck, a standard NHL puck was cut in half, and a tiny circuit board with a battery was placed inside. The circuit board contained a shock sensor and infrared emitters that were located on the flat surfaces and perimeter of the puck. The enhanced puck was engineered to have the same weight, balance, and rebound as the original puck. The two halves were then bonded with a proprietary epoxy compound and the puck could be used for gameplay. The FoxTrax was developed with assistance from News Corp's Etak navigation subsidiary. While the batteries were designed to last for 30 minutes, and some were successfully used in tests for more than 60 minutes, a typical puck lasted only about 10 minutes on the ice. For that reason 30 FoxTrax pucks were provided for each game. The puck was activated when it was dropped by the ref or struck by a hockey stick.

During a Fox NHL broadcast, the puck emitted infrared pulses which were detected by both the 20 pulse detectors and the 10 modified IR cameras that were located in the rafters. The shuttering of the IR cameras was synchronized to the pulses. Each IR camera had an associated 486-66 PC to process the video locally and transmit the coordinates of candidate targets to the "Puck Truck" (a 55' production trailer). The truck contained computers that superimposed computer graphics on the puck coordinates, which could be seen by viewers at home.

And how about those Coyotes?

Does a league who wants to be taken as a serious major league entity really want a franchise to remain in a location that has never produced a profit? The Phoenix area may have it's small die-hard supporters, but that has proven to be short when it comes to revenue generated. And to keep a team in that location, after being there since relocating from Winnipeg in 1996, is absolutely crazy. That time amounts to over 10 years of bleeding and it's time to make it stop. I am not going to bash the overall landscape of the southern markets, but this goes to show how one man will cut off his nose to spite his face...the expansion and relocation era was under comish Bettman's watch and he is not going to admit any failures, when anybody with a right mind can see the disaster that he created. Bettman, formally a buckets guy who came from the NBA, has certainly has had a hard time adjusting to the NHL, and this only after 16 years at the controls.

The time has come to move the franchise back to Winnipeg...

Open source

I really love open source programs, not because of the fact that I am a programmer looking to add to the quality of the application (although I wish I were), but because of the quality you usually find at a much lower price, usually free. That is why I am a big supporter of the firefox browser and thunderbird email applications for example. My latest find was due to the fact that I recently updated my desktop and was not satisfied with the image editor/graphics program that came installed. So I did my usual search and found the wonderful Paint.net program, free of charge. Now I have never gone out and purchased one of the top-of-the-line programs for image editing, but I have to believe that with Paint.net, you have to be getting pretty close. And the beauty of the 'open-sourceness' is that there are countless developers who have built plug-ins to enhance and strengthen the program. I have had this program on my machine for several month now but am only now finding out how good the program is. Some of my latest 'Wild' creation, logo orientated, will pop-up here from time to time...I do recommend this program for those interested and in need of an inexpensive image editor.

Five days and no updates?

I find it very hard to believe that Michael Russo over at the strib has stayed away for this long, but it appears so. I don't find myself in their comment section often but I do know that he does appear there from time to time so it is possible his streak has ended with a posted comment. Even so, if there were news, we would have it from Mr. Russo...and that is the frustrating part, no news.

Yes, times are tough...