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

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.

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.

I currently lack anything profound to say, but I do feel the need to express my extreme jealousy over a friend’s trip to Mozambique. He seems so carefree in his travel planning – wandering around the world at his own pace, checking off continents from a to-do list (I’ve already got Africa, having boated over from Spain during my undergraduate years).

In Cuba he wound up playing stickball with local children. In one of the European countries ending with ‘A’ (maybe Croatia, maybe Slovakia, maybe even Slovenia – the point is, he’s been enough places that it’s easy to forget the details) he got ridiculously smashed at a local pub on dollar pints – not a revelatory experience, but he sure made it sound colourful.

Maybe it’s just the way he writes (unfortunately he’s deleted the earliest entries from his travel weblog, citing poor writing), but everything always seems so fantastic.

Or maybe it’s just that I don’t appreciate the things I’ve done and need to stop using words like “jealousy.” I once had an anonymous comment left on my Facebook profile that read: “I’m secretly jealous/impressed by all the things you’ve done in your lifetime.”

In any event, while he’s off galavanting overseas, I’ve got priority seating for the NHL Entry Draft in two weeks.

Urban Spring is hardly beautiful. Tree branches are bare. Melting snow reveals discarded cigarettes and litter. The last of the snow is covered in a gritty yet tarry slick of road gravel dust and the most minute of particles from the exhaust of passing vehicles.

All is not lost though, for I find the small streams created by the melt to be utterly charming. Water rippling down from that snow, onto a sidewalk or road, building into a larger, yet still tiny, torrent. Though it lacks the purity of a similar scene in a pristine mountain forest, the sight of it does offer a moment of simplicity in an otherwise hectic day.

As a young boy [Ed. note: That sounds so quaint] I would create series of waterworks for the streams using sticks, stones, and whatever else I could find. I had a fascination with the hydraulics of it all – the water typically finding a way to escape my best laid plans, requiring further levees, further sticks and stones. There was an art to it – by controlling the water you could control the erosion of the soils, patterning the ground so that on dry days you might find your design still in the mud.

What is it about dying in the pursuit of freedom that is so poetic? ‘Easy Rider’ (which I finally got around to watching tonight), ‘Vanishing Point,’ ‘Into the Wild.’ I’m not sure it’s a rhetorical question.

‘Into the Wild’ seemed to hint at personal failure to rewrite the world, and as such was a compelling look at the frailty of the individual, a reassurance that those of us watching can be comfortable, that we don’t need to search for something more. …but that seems too easy, too neatly packaged, and it doesn’t explain how the characters in these films, as ultimately (the term used here in its strictest definition) flawed as they may be, so effortlessly inspire.

When I first started telling people about my degree (M.A. in Human Kinetics) I would undoubtedly be faced with questions of what I would eventually do with it. To keep things simple I told the questioners that I’d be one of those people the press would go to for comment when they were exploring a certain phenomenon in sports (hockey violence, etc.).

To a certain extent I was kidding around – giving quotes isn’t exactly what I want to be doing the rest of my life – but it turns out I was at least half-right. Both my thesis advisor (Jean Harvey) and another one of my committee members (Marc Lavoie) are quoted in today’s National Post (an article on the lack of actual French-Canadians on the Canadiens).

Photo Illustration © National Post. Great visual, but the “H” doesn’t stand for “Habitants” as alluded to in the article’s title.

As Apple hits with another round of anti-Vista advertising, I’d like to state my pro-Microsoft stance on things, if for no other reason than to help dispel the notion that all twenty-somethings who dabble in graphic design and enjoy music use Macs. I just recently upgraded to Vista and am loving it so far. It’s not a revolutionary step, but it is nicely evolutionary. Things are simpler, things are better-looking, things are more functional. Is there a learning curve? Yes, but it’s almost negligible. As far as I can tell, none of the complaints that have been paraded around hold any weight. Even my own complaints aren’t standing up anymore with day-to-day use (Could the UI use some tweaking? Sure, but things are somehow better on my desktop – e.g., the “Sleep” function actually works).

[Disclosure: I also have to plead ignorance, having not used a Mac since high school. I've not seen a reason to switch.]

The main problem others have with Microsoft as far as I can tell is that they’re at the top. They’ve got a virtual stranglehold on computer users and this engenders resentment that far exceeds any commentary on the quality of their products. Likewise, the same thing is probably happening/will probably happen with Apple and iPods.

On that note, Microsoft’s competitor to the iPod [leaving the iPhone (and iPod touch) out of the equation for the moment], the Zune, is in my opinion a superior device. Despite Apple’s best intentions, the iPod interface seems foreign to me. Scrolling around in circles such that I can scroll down a list makes absolutely no sense as far as I’m concerned. So count me among the biggest fans of the Zune pad. Similarily, iTunes sucks. Re-importing all of my music? No thanks. And again, the interface is horrible. Sure, as a store it works. As software to manage my music collection? Not a chance.

Hauntingly enough, I actually had a dream last night about the next generation of the Zune. Taking most of its cues from the styling the current generation, the next model will have a slightly curved face and back, and will appear in four initial colours: piano black, white, red and titanium. Bringing in some ideas from their acquisition of Danger, a new model would be added to the lineup: a Zune Sidekick. Basically a Sidekick with a Zune pad and Zune as the audio software running on a customized version of WinMo.

So that’s my stance. I’m a bit of a geek sometimes. Just had to get it out.