Hockey at the Sommet Center. February 2010. Photo © Elly.

The better albums I listened to over the past decade. My “Top 100″ list, if you will. 114, actually.

2009
The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love
Doves – Kingdom of Rust
Fever Ray – Fever Ray
Kasabian – The West Rider Pauper Lunatic Asylum
Wild Beasts – Two Dancers

2008
Adele – 19
Beyonce – I Am… Sasha Fierce
British Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?
Conor Oberst – Conor Oberst
Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid
Johnny Flynn – A Larum
Juvelen – 1
Laura Marling – Alas I Cannot Swim
Lykke Li – Youth Novels
M83 – Saturdays = Youth
Nada Surf – Lucky
The Stills – Oceans Will Rise
The Subways – All or Nothing
Young Knives – Superabundance

2007
Arctic Monkeys – Favourite Worst Nightmare
Bat for Lashes – Fur and Gold
Battles – Mirrored
Blonde Redhead – 23
The Cinematic Orchestra – Ma Fleur
The Coral – Roots & Echoes
The Enemy – We’ll Live and Die in These Towns
Jamie T – Panic Prevention
Joel Plaskett – Ashtray Rock
Kings of Leon – Because of the Times
The Marzipan Man – Stories
MGMT – Oracular Spectacular
Mika – Life in Cartoon Motion
The National – Boxer
Pearl Jam – Live at the Gorge (Box Set)
Radiohead – In Rainbows
Silverchair – Young Modern
Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Swod – Sekunden
The Twilight Sad – Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters
The White Stripes – Icky Thump

2006
…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – So Divided
Detektivbyran – Hemvagen (EP)
Kasabian – Empire
The Killers – Sam’s Town
Lily Allen – Alright Still
Peter Bjorn & John – Writer’s Block
Sloan – Never Hear the End of It

2005
Boards of Canada – The Campfire Headphase
Fiona Apple – Extraordinary Machine
Hard-Fi – Stars of CCTV
Idlewild – Warnings/Promises
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – The Proposition (Soundtrack)
The Secret Machines – The Road Leads Where It’s Led (EP)

2004
American Music Club – Love Songs for Patriots
Bjork – Medulla
Devendra Banhart – Rejoicing in the Hands
Esthero – O.G. Bitch (Remixes)
Feist – Let it Die
Jem – Finally Woken
k-os – Joyful Rebellion
Various Artists – The Ladykillers (Soundtrack)

2003
Anthony Hamilton – Comin’ from Where I’m From
Aqualung – Still Life
The Blood Brothers – Burn Piano Island, Burn
Boomkat – Boomkatalog.One
The Cardigans – Long Gone Before Daylight
Clearlake – Cedars
The Darkness – Permission to Land
The Jayhawks – Rainy Day Music
Sam Roberts – We Were Born in a Flame
Various Artists – Big Fish (Soundtrack)
Sufjan Stevens – Greetings from Michigan
The Thrills – So Much for the City

2002
…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – Source Tags & Codes
Archive – You All Look the Same to Me
Boards of Canada – Geogaddi
Brendan Benson – Lapalco
Death in Vegas – Scorpio Rising
Hot Hot Heat – Knock Knock Knock
Idlewild – The Remote Part
Interpol – Turn On the Bright Lights
Paul Westerberg – Stereo
Sigur Ros – ()
Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2001
The Charlatans – Wonderland
Fugazi – The Argument
Goldfrapp – Felt Mountain
Manic Street Preachers – So Why So Sad (Single)
Remy Zero – The Golden Hum
Various Artists – Snatch (Soundtrack)
Starsailor – Fever (Single)
The Strokes – The Modern Age (EP)

2000
Alpinestars – B.A.S.I.C.
Blur – Music is My Radar (Single)
Chantal Kreviazuk – Colour Moving and Still
Daft Punk – One More Time (Single)
Dead Prez – Let’s Get Free
The Delgados – The Great Eastern
Doves – Lost Souls
Elastica – The Menace
Ian Brown – Golden Greats
JJ72 – JJ72
Mansun – Little Kix
Moloko – Things to Make and Do
Oasis – Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
OutKast – Stankonia
PJ Harvey – Stories from the City Stories from the Sea
Primal Scream – XTRMNTR
Radiohead – Kid A
Six by Seven – The Closer You Get
The Smashing Pumpkins – Machina/The Machines of God
Stroke – First In, Last Out
Tegan and Sara – This Business of Art
The Wu-Tang Clan – The W

Photo © Nashville Predators.

Status? Complete. I’m moving to Tennessee.

Free agency this year has been a buyer’s market with regard to goaltenders. Martin Biron took a 60% pay cut, while Manny Fernandez is still looking for work. If Biron’s agent miscalculated the market for his client this year, what do things look like next year, when Biron is once again unrestricted?

[See the full post at From The Rink and download a breakdown of next year's free agents here: Free Agent Class of 2010 - Goaltenders (Excel).]

When one service dies, another rises up in its place. It’s the circle of life for music on the internet.

That I can recount at least a rough history of music on the internet shows my age. My own experiences started with downloading .wav and even .midi files. I remember when mp3s hit the “mainstream” – by early 1998 (a lifetime ago in internet time) it was crucial in the leak of “Given to Fly.” Full albums then became widely available through FTP, regulated through upload/download ratios.

P2P revolutionized things of course, with the simple setup offered by Napster, which hit in the last year of high school and was widely adopted by the time I got to university.

When Napster [effectively] died, I moved onto Audiogalaxy, which was a godsend for finding rare tracks. Unfortunately the service went under fairly quickly (once it gained popularity it also gained the eye of the RIAA).

When the Gnutella network held rule, Morpheus took up some space on my hard drive, then Kazaa before it succumb to the money offered by adware/spyware vendors. eDonkey 2000 takes the cake for the most ridiculous name of the bunch, though it provided the most functionality of any program I’ve ever used, combining the Gnutella network with Overnet and torrent capabilities, so it did have something going for it.

Torrents eventually replaced everything else. Azureus Vuze was my primary software, but even that happens to be gone from my system these days.

Others that came and went? Ares, iMesh, WinMX, Soulseek and even LimeWire. There are probably one or two others that I simply can’t remember.

Nowadays it’s all about the web services. I’ve never been a fan of MySpace, nor imeem, nor iLike. I never got around to trying Pandora. My website of choice thus far has been Last.fm. The “scrobbling” feature is fantastic, as are the statistics derived from it. The automatically generated recommendations have proven useful for my discovery of new artists and songs. Unfortunately they’ll be charging users for radio access from now on, so I’ll have to look elsewhere for my new music fix.

Signs are looking good that my new favourite toy will be The Sixty One (www.thesixtyone.com), which provides me with internet radio and still scrobbles.

Victor Hedman. 2009 World Junior Championship. I served as a Team Lead for Team Services – managing game pucks, ensuring teams had Gatorade, etc.

There’s something inherently wrong about turning a short story into a nearly 3-hour feature length film. Such an adaptation, if faithful to its limited source material, is bound to struggle against tedium, and this is where ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button‘ fails.

This type of story – sharing the basic premise of recounting one’s life with films such as ‘Big Fish‘ and ‘Forrest Gump‘ – needs to survive on its characters and their charm. The story in this case is quite linear, and so simply shuffles off to another adventure as soon as we feel we are getting to know any of those appearing on screen. If these are individuals that are to have made an impact on the story’s protagonist, they should equally make an impact on those of us watching the story unfold.

Yes, the film has its charming moments, it has scenes that might draw a few tears, but ultimately it feels slow and uneventful – a symptom of trying to do too much with story arcs.

A film like this might be saved by the acting, but even here things disappoint. While Tilda Swinton is fabulous, Cate Blanchett still seems to be channeling her over-the-top role from ‘The Aviator‘ and Brad Pitt doesn’t seem to know what to do with the role once he grows out of old age.

Watchable? Yes. What the film does with special effects to make Pitt appear seamlessly older than his years in the early stages is incredible. Deserving of 13 Academy Award nominations? Only in a lackluster year for film.

C

Fetisov, with Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin. AP Photo.

Slava Fetisov, 20 November 2000, in the Toronto Star, discussing the Russian Hockey Federation and the prospect of coaching the Russian Olympic hockey team: “I think every time they hear my name, they get scared that I’m going to come back there and take over hockey.”

Here’s what followed:

09/02/2001
Expresses his displeasure with the Federation and his desire to coach the team.

21/08/2001
Appointed head coach of the Russian Olympic hockey team with help from Vladimir Putin.

06/03/2002
Demands an overhaul of the Russian player development system.

29/04/2002
Fetisov named chairman of the State Committee for Physical Culture and Sports.

27/07/2002
Creates a public organization to tackle the development of sports infrastructure.

08/08/2003
Suggests Russian ownership of an NHL franchise.

07/02/2008
On the soon-to-be-formed KHL: “We’ll definitely be a serious contender to the NHL.”

02/03/2008
“We must protect our clubs from the NHL…We will be No. 1 regardless. We have everything for this: talented people, government support, money, desire and great traditions.”

From Assistant Coach of the New Jersey Devils to Putin’s right-hand man responsible for the country’s sports infrastructure (which would include Sochi 2014) and the government’s point man for Russian hockey… I would say that the RHF’s fears were well founded.

Apparently he also has an asteroid named after him.

This world needs an open-source album information database that would include high-resolution album art. Something like what CDDB once was before it was commercially hijacked.

Why do I think this? Despite having “Only update missing information” checked off in my Zune software settings, all of my album art is being replaced, often with mismatches, often with washed out images, or incorrect versions, etc.

Fractured ribs. This is my second substantial hockey injury (the first was taking a stick through my upper lip attempting to block a shot on my elementary school’s outdoor rink – lots of stitches), and it came during warm-up. This is what bad (read: soft) ice can do to players.

I’ve been playing with the injury for two weeks now; apparently that could have seriously increased my chances of pneumonia.

No hockey for at least 3 weeks. Doctor’s orders.