“ONOES THE CANADA LINE WAS DOWN!”

I've never been so angry about a minor inconvenience, just wait till the Internet hears about this!!!111one!~

The way Twitter exploded you’d figure a bomb had gone off or a Kraken was laying siege to the only bridge servicing The Canada Line between Richmond and Vancouver; the daily commute to work was interrupted by irregular service, panic, chaos and crying children – it’s not truly a catastrophe unless some kid somewhere is crying like it’s the end of the world. Saw it during the Olympics when there was a bomb-scare on the Sea Bus and a small child had pieced together that he might have been in the vicinity of the blast. I expected much of the same and was completely let down.

There was no great orange ball of fire – that was a day earlier at the Christmas Market – or giant squid, people were very orderly and the only kid I saw was absolutely fascinated by the fact that he got to go over a bridge he’d never been on before in a bus. The two people in front of me, former coworkers, were even having a laugh about being permitted to be late for work due to the weather and arranging a midnight snowball fight.

For those of you not in the know, a large – by Vancouver standards – dump of snow, heavy gusts of wind and barely sub-zero temperatures caused an electrical failure on two trains while they were passing over the Fraser river around 9:30am; leaving two trains and about a hundred people stranded for an hour. As this is the only way across the river and the mentality of “just send more trains” has since been determined as an entertaining but ultimately pointless loss of human life, passengers were diverted while they deiced the bridge. Coming from a city where -30 degree temperatures is a typical winter day and it takes a combined ambient and wind temperature of about -45 to cause any major interruption in Light Rail service the whole scenario smacked of absurdity and possibly a small engineering oversight. Protrans BC handled the situation smoothly and the agents stationed around the Canada Line were forthcoming with answers to any question asked of them. Not nearly the panic inducing chaos that Twitter suggested.

The whole situation got me thinking; 90% of the Tweets I read were expressions of extreme negative disbelief that a situation like this would ever befall a 2-billion dollar mass transit system. Sadly, I even got caught up in the disappointment that my daily commute was going to take a bit longer than normal, but this is why I typically leave a little early for work – in-case shit like this comes up! Was my own pissy comment a little childish to make? Yes. Was getting to work today such a massive hardship that no longer justifies the convenience of normally being able to get to work in a quarter of the time it took before the Line opened? Not even close.

Lets Pretend This Changes Everything. Again.

In the year 2012?

It happened sometime around 10am PST, I was sitting behind the laptop doing my daily check of the usual sites when I started to notice a strange trend. Apple was stationed in nearly every “currently trending” slot on Twitter. Several blogs I read had already produced headlining articles about the unveiling of the new iPhone. Throwing a few numbers out there; Engadget, typically runs 19 articles on its main page, as of 14:08 PST 16 of them are iPhone related and 14 of those are directly related to the launch of this product. Every major news source had at least one article on its main page that was peppered with comments. My Twitter feed was filled with praising Tweets and ReTweets and comments had begun showing up on Facebook.

A storm like this is easy to weather, walk away from the computer for a little while and do some chores around the apartment. Phone a friend and arrange a meeting for coffee. Pop in a movie. Listen to some music. Do anything except pay attention to what’s happening online. The joygazm will eventually pass and things will return to normal. “Normal” being a continual bombardment of sometimes-clever commercial marketing campaigns designed to generate hype, remind people that the product still exists and that they should buy it.

Then my phone rang.

Being an unemployed person actively hunting for work, any mid-day phone call has the potential to be life altering. (I’m grossly over estimating the importance of one phone call, but to the unemployed a call has the ability to bring a lot of change.)

It was an automated voice message from a Fido customer instructing me to “check out the Apple website”.

I don’t want to jump to extremes, but this illustrates there’s a good chance that as a species, we are fucked. The Information Age has been kind to us, but imagine what’s going to happen when this speed of information begins to infiltrate absolutely every fiber of our being – it’s happening already and progressing rapidly. Imagine if The Cuban Missile Crisis happened tomorrow. I don’t remember how tense the situation was, I wasn’t alive, but I hear it’s probably the closest we all came to surrendering the planet to the cockroaches. Now imagine if a media frenzy equivocal to the release of the iPhone 4 centered around something a little less frivolous? Maybe that phone call would have been “Cuba has the bomb” and all the supporting information could have easily been plucked from online news sources and blogs with semi-doctored photos and uninformed, but seemingly rational, opinions. We’d have a situation brewing in a matter of hours that could severely impact us all. Humans like to panic and we are conditioned to be fearful. I remember where I was when I heard about 911 and I shudder to think of how I would have reacted to the news if it happened in 2010.

It’s only a matter of time before some clever politician – maybe even a clever terrorist – figures out a way to dupe us all into believing hype just long enough to react to it by doing something incredibly stupid, my guess is that it’ll have something to do with an election.

~J

Short: 2010 Stanley Cup Finals Prediction

The Chicago Blackhawks vs Philadelphia Flyers for the Stanley Cup?

Chicago in six. Conn Smyth; Jonathan Toews. (Though I feel that Dustin Byfuglien should win the trophy because of the amazing job he’s done getting under everyone’s skin.)

I know it’s not an elaborate prediction with a whole load of “what ifs” and conspiracies, but sometimes a guy just wants to predict.

~J

Short: One Way To Get Good FHL Re-Rates

Awesome Fan Mail looks like this.

To the person who searched “how to get a good re-rate in fhl simulator” and came across my blog,

Here’s the easiest way:

During the course of the season. Exploit the Farm Streak and Slump settings. If the Commish has the option turned on and has lax rules surrounding waivers you can freely send players back and forth. Typically on the farm (with the option turned on.) you’re able to boost a player 2 or 3 OV points based on his performance. If you mill this back and for, over the course of the season it could be good for 8 or 9 OV points. If the player being sent down is good enough, he’ll also make the performance of his linemates much better, meaning they’ll experience a bump in OV as well. If the Commish has tighter waiver regulations, your operating window is a little smaller, so exploit it to the fullest.

As for the end of season re-rates. Good luck with that. FHL is notoriously bad for applying logical automatic re-rates. You’re better served by being in a league with some sort of manual re-rate system or GM controlled re-rate system. If you’re looking for artificial end-of-season boosts in OV (I know an 80OV player looks more attractive than a player with 79OV, regardless of how that player will actually perform, and are easier to trade/flip for assets.) IT and ST are weighted strongly, dump extra points in there. Also, depending on the attitude of the Commish, you might be able to eek out extra points by actively debating your re-rates.

~J