Just wanted a photo to test blogging with flickr. This was from my trip to the Grey Cup last year. The following Monday and Tuesday after the game, my brother and I left Toronto and stopped in Hamilton to check out the CFL Hall of Fame. Since we were already in Hamilton, I wanted to check out Ivor Wynne Stadium as well. No one was there and one set of gates were wide open, so we wandered into one of the endzones and snapped a few photos to prove we were there. Can’t really tell from the photo, but there was a viciously cold wind blowing across the field that day.

No, I haven’t been put down nor have I gone on the lam in some kind of bizarre Logan’s Run-esque death ceremony upon reaching the age of 31. I’ve just been lazy.

A lot’s happened in the last three months (a lot of these will be Rider-related):
- The Riders win their first regular season game in Edmonton since 2000, albeit on a pretty cheesy holding call by the head ref (Proulx) on what would’ve been the game-winning field goal by Sean Fleming in an otherwise meaningless game for the Riders. It killed Edmonton’s slim playoff hopes for the second year of their new streak of play-off misses, but so did Montreal beating Henry Burris and the Stamps that weekend.
- The Riders host their first play-off game since 1988, and win (which they haven’t done since 1976)
- The Riders win the West Division Final, handily beating the favoured B.C. Lions, for the first time in the two teams’ third meeting in four years in the West Final (it was the Riders’ fourth West Final appearance in five years), giving the Riders their first Grey Cup appearance since 1997.
- The Riders win the Grey Cup! Their first time since 1989, ending a 17 year drought of seasons without a Grey Cup. The team now with the longest current drought is Winnipeg (who lost this year’s championship game to the Riders), who haven’t won it since 1990 (the year after the Riders won it in 1989) and are thus currently also sitting in a 17 year drought. Will Stegall beat the odds (which he himself put on his own self) and return in 2008? Will Glenn not fumble the ball and get his arm broken in the process in 2008? Will the Bombers win the Cup in 2008? Will Westwood finally be able to get a haircut in good conscience? Only time will tell.
- All of this with a brand new head coach this year, Kent Austin, who’s also a head coach for the first time, and was the quarterback of the Riders the last time they won the cup in 1989. Also the Riders first full year with general manager, Eric Tillman. What sucks now that they’ve done all this in one year, is what do they do now? The only thing left really is to just keep repeating, something that any team, any where, and at any level, would have difficulty doing (unless they’re the Canadian World Junior Hockey Team, it would seem).
- I survived the birthday season and the holidays here at home without any illnesses (I wish I could say the same for my wallet). I did get a weird head cold kind of thing in mid-December, but I never felt sick or tired, just had a runny nose, like some kind of extreme allergic reaction, and it only lasted a couple days. Sounds like my recent trip to Edmonton allowed me to miss the craziest flu season Regina’s seen for some time. When I got back to work on Tuesday, tons of people were home sick, and today everyone around me is coughing and sniffling. I wonder if asking them to wear masks would be rude?

Sorry ’bout that folks. Bobtober has already begun, and here I am letting it pass by with barely a mention. The Riders went into a bit of a losing slump, and I didn’t feel like connecting to any of my friends out there in the ether. Then I got sick. Then I left the city for 5 days without an Internet connection. The good news is everything is back on the up and up. The Riders are back on a winning streak, and dangerously close to hosting a home playoff game for the first time since before Captain N: The Game Master hit the airwaves (now available on DVD). I’m still busy at work, and have a few other work-related things that I’ve been procrastinating over, so the updates still might be few and far between.

In other news, the new TV season has started, and the venerable favourites such as The Office, Corner Gas, Heroes, House, and Stargate Atlantis, have all started up again. And it wouldn’t be a new TV season if CBS didn’t have a new batch of “reality” TV to share with the masses, and so they have. There’s Survivor: China, but the big news is the new show, Kid Nation, which is basically Survivor meets Lord of the Flies, and I have to say, it’s right up there with Amazing Race as probably the most zany and quotable reality show out there. I never knew I wanted to see a bunch of kids cut the heads off of chickens, but now I’m glad I have. Eat your heart out, Mr. Linkletter.

YouTube - Kids vs. Chickens

And in conclusion, I leave you with this:

YouTube - Futurama Feature Length DVD

YouTube - Rider TD Celebration at the PressBox

It was a sad day in Maguire history today. I finally put my Daeowoo 9000N DVD player out to pasture, and by that I mean “took it to the dump.” Had a lot of great memories with that DVD player. I applied a firmware to it that would let me play any region DVD that I wanted (so I could play my DVDs from other parts of the world of content that would never see the light of day here), and also disabled the macrovision (which never really mattered, as I only ever had it hooked up to my TV anyway) and UOPs (which let me skip those ads that some DVDs normally force you to watch. Bad DVDs, bad, naughty naughty…).

But I think I just wore out the poor thing. Mom and I both bought the exact same player, at the exact same time, at the exact same place, and hers still works great, but has never been used to the extent that mine has. Plus hers is situated in a basement which is a cooler environment all year round, while mine is above ground in a cramped bedroom that is always several degrees warmer than anywhere else.

The symptoms it first exhibited were longer load times, stuttered playback, and all round a generally noisier box than normal. At first I was able to workaround it by sometimes tilting the box slightly in one direction or another, but then I had to move it out of my cabinet altogether (thinking it might not be getting proper airflow and overheating), to me finally having to remove the outer case. Then lastly, a couple of days ago I went to go play a move after having not used the player for a few days, and it just wouldn’t play. It would keep spinning up and spinning up, desperately trying to read the disc, making all kinds of racket in the process, always worrying me that it was scratching my discs.

Finally, I got fed up and starting scouring the Web for a decent player from a reputable company that I could buy in town at a decent price and make region free. The one I ended up getting was a Philips DVP5960 from *ewwww* The Source. I don’t know what it is about RadioShack/TheSource and easily hackable DVD players, but that’s also where I bought my Daewoo oh so many years ago.

So far it does everything I could want it to do. The upscaling only works through HDMI, which I have on my TV, but don’t have a cable for (but that wasn’t really a driving factor for me anyway). It also has a USB port (apparently only USB 1) for playing video files of an external drive, but I don’t know if I’ll ever even use that.