John Tavares - Best Hockey to Watch
John Tavares - Best Hockey to Watch
As we start the NHL playoffs, my personal favorite with the addition of Billy Geurin is the Sharks. But isn't this a great time to talk about the best hockey to watch?For about the next two years, it'll be the Oshawa Generals in the Ontario Hockey Association (Major Junior A). Sixteen year old John Tavares just finished his second year in the league - special rule waiver to let him play when he was only 14 - and he scored
| Player |
G
|
A
|
PTS
|
| John Tavares |
72
|
62
|
134
|
There is NOTHING like watching a rising star play Major Junior hockey. NOTHING as good. And for the next two years, it's all about the Oshawa Generals.
Here's a link to the Gen's site where you can read all about him: http://www.oshawagenerals.com/team/playerprofile.php?ID=1800
| Article published Aug 17, 2006 Building the future, one child at a time "While children only make up a small portion of our population they are 100 percent of our future." As you read this, somewhere in your neighborhood, state and nation a child is receiving the message that they are "slow," "incapable," that they are "no good" or will "never amount to anything." From time to time, we hear on the radio, see on TV or read the horror stories of physical and sexual abuse perpetrated on our most vulnerable citizens. These stories make us sick and we quake with anger over how cruel adults can be. While less visible, the constant negative messages that some parents, teachers and other adults drill into our children's heads take their toll too. How many Bill Gates, Henry Fords, Booker T. Washingtons, Harriet Tubmans, Albert Einsteins and Fredrick Douglaseshas our society lost because a child's spirit has been crushed by an adult entrusted to raise them up? Not all successful people had ideal childhoods. Many of the people mentioned above overcame great odds to see their dreams become reality. The world is full of successful people who were once considered "slow," "different," or "odd" and were told they would never amount to anything. Those who escaped the negativity were fortunate to discover someone who believed in them even if that only person was them! All people have the inherent capacity to effect change in their lives and we owe it to all of our children to provide them with the tools to help them succeed. Quality education is a great equalizer in this world. Our collective future is sitting in our classrooms today. The viability of our society, the strength of our economy, the quality of our lives, the vibrancy of our democracy and our place in the world all depend on how we educate our youth. When children are taught to hate, they hate, as we see in far too many situations across our nation and the world today. We need to give children the best start in life possible, filling them with love and knowledge along the way. Yet, believe it or not, and as tragic as it is, far too many of our children enter kindergarten or first grade not knowing their numbers, alphabet or colors. They do not know how to read because, not only have they not been read to, they have not been cuddled and loved. Human tragedy is compounded when a child begins life with the emotional scars of negativity ingrained so deeply that they seldom recover. For Michigan to be healthy, we need all of our children to be physically, emotionally and intellectually healthy. We need to create a shared vision and common agenda across this region and across our great state where every child has a sense of worth, where we all accept responsibility for ourselves, our families, our communities and society at large. We must nurture our children, families and communities in ways that build a quality of life for today and tomorrow. Here are some suggestions for building up our children and simultaneously building strong communities and likewise, a strong state and nation:
Further, take a moment to reflect on your life. Recall that special time when an adult, parent, pastor, grandparent, teacher, or coach made you feel like you were on the top of the world. Often it was a simple gesture: a kind word, a pat on the back, attending your piano recital, cheerleading event or football game or just knowing that this person believed in you and was there for you. Yet, as simple as the gesture was, we can still recall with great intensity the joy we felt knowing that a special adult was there. When an adult touches your life in a positive way, it is a memory of a lifetime! Take a few minutes to call or visit that special person who made such a difference in your life and thank them for helping make you the successful adult you are today. Perhaps more important than saying "thank you" emulate them. Promise yourself that you will take extra steps today and everyday to build up, and not tear down, your and others' children. The children of the world will become our collective future. Think how your small acts of kindness can help shape the world. Remember, the world would be a much cleaner place if we all sweep our own doorstep think how clean it would be if we helped to sweep our neighbors'! Tom Watkins is a business and education consultant. He served as State Superintendent of Schools 2001-2005 and President and CEO of the Economic Council of Palm Beach County, FL, 1996-2001. Read his internationally recognized report: The New Education (R)evolution at www.nacol.org. He can be reached at tdwatkins@aol.com |
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Scripting News
Andrew Burton put up a service, I gave it a try, with no luck. Maybe we can get this working. Ideally, I'd like to run it on the same machine as the application that calls it, since the images can be fairly large.
Here's a text file containing the text, and the picture I used.
I was a Pownce user. (Ack it can't find my page -- and I was a premium, paying user! Oy. When did that happen?)There were some things I liked about it, but I agree it's time to pull the plug.
I stopped using it when:
1. Twitter got its act together and stopped acting like a Norwegian parrot pining for the fjords.
2. FriendFeed occupied the space above Twitter, as the messaging system with more (than Twitter). FriendFeed has never had trouble staying up.
The biggest problem with Pownce was:
1. It couldn't handle even a modest load. It would get very very slow when anything interesting started happening, therefore keeping anything interesting from happening.
The one thing Pownce got right was:
1. It had payloads!
Three things that slowed adoption of Pownce beyond the inability to handle a load:
1. It was in private beta for a long, long time.
2. It took forever for it to get an API.
3. When the API finally came it wasn't compatible with anything.
Net-net, there were interesting things about Pownce, and we'll remember it with a certain amount of fondness.
Hopefully Leah can take what she's learned and turn out something great at SixApart.
I'd recommend: Twitter-Plus-Plus. (With lots of interop, and do the payloads thing again, they need a kick in the ass over there at Twitter to get it into their product.)
Consider this screen (click on it to see the detail):
Suppose you used a photo site that wasn't one of the ones listed, but you had an RSS feed for your photos and favorites on that site. What are you supposed to do? I always assumed you should just add the feed under "Blog" but then your readers will start asking why your pictures don't do all the neat things that happen automatically with Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug or Zooomr sites. I have such a site, and I don't want them to do anything special for it, I just want to tell FF that it's a photo site and have all the cool special goodies they have for Flickr kick in automatically.
If you pop up a higher level, you'll see that this is actually contrary to the whole idea of feeds, which were supposed to create a level playing field for the big guys and ordinary people. That's why a guy like Mike Arrington was able to start TechCrunch and eventually be a competitor of CNET. The fact that RSS didn't favor the big guys made that possible. In fact the whole web is like that. You don't need a special client to read the NY Times and another to watch videos on YouTube. Any browser will do, for any site, no matter who's writing and who's reading. It's why many of us fell in love with the web, at first sight. In the software world before that, it mattered who you are or who you worked for. Kind of like FriendFeed. :-(
It's also against the level playing field idea to favor people, like me, who can program to the APIs. The point of feeds was to make the technology transparently understandable to people who just had brains, that you wouldn't need to understand anything deeply arcane to make RSS work. Since FF is about feeds, it seems to me that it ought to be consistent with the philosophic simplicity of feeds. Again, this is just another application of a principle of the web -- you could always View Source to see how a website worked, and if you were willing to do a little trial and error, and head-scratching, you could make your site work the same way as any site you could view in your browser. This was a good thing.
Now, don't get me wrong, I like APIs, I even love APIs, but only when a feed won't do. There are cases where the API shows more power than the feeds, where feeds can and should have the same power. For example if I want a description to come along with a picture, I have no choice but to write a program to push the content to FriendFeed. That seems wrong to me. RSS and Atom both have description elements, why ignore them? Also, I can if I want make sure the content arrives in a timely manner, but only through the API. The functionality of a web app shouldn't unnecessarily favor programmers. That's unweblike imho.
Now I wouldn't make these criticisms if I didn't think FF was an excellent web app. But like all technology it can be better. That's why I make the suggestions.
It's impossible to tell how tech companies will take feedback or advice, I just give it as it occurs to me. I don't try to sugar-coat it, but then I don't think that there's anything wrong with providing an imperfect or incomplete product or service.I was the guy who said "We make shitty software" to his developers as he passed them in the hall. To which the standard response, which always got a laugh, was: "With bugs!"
It's a joke, but not really. We know our software sucks. But watch, we'll make it suck less.
Anyway, offering advice to most developers is a waste of time, and only makes them hate you. But what are you supposed to do if you want to build on their product and keep hitting the same brick wall, month after month. Is there a polite way to express frustration? If so, I'd like to know what it is.
In Thursday's piece I said developers are every bit as insistent about ignoring users as news people are. I see it happen every damn day. It's just as bad no matter where it happens.
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