rollsteady

Dissapointed in the Sharks, I created a new website

// April 30th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Blog

The Sharks once again let me down completely. I am even contemplating dropping our season tickets for next year. When you spend that kind of money on the team you get really emotionally involved and the constant let downs at the end of the season would be easier to take if I hadn’t ponied up for season tickets. With all that in mind, I created a new website TradeJoeThornton.com. There are a lot of calls from fans to either trade Joe or trade Patty. I’ve thought a lot about it and I think trading Joe is the answer. Some fans think Patty is the answer, some think we should hold both.

Sharks gave us some hope

// April 22nd, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Blog

Well they aren’t dead in the water after all. The Sharks came out with that killer instinct last night and showed they weren’t happy with just playing well — they were only happy with a win. Looks like the Cup winning veterans that Doug Wilson brought in are finally having that positive impact. After game 2, while a lot of the core of the team were talking about how they were playing well and keeping positive, Dan Boyle was pissed off and talked about how the only stat that matters is the W. Finally.

While some people are saying the Sharks “held on” last night, I didn’t feel that way at all. They never were behind. They put 4 pucks past Hiller, thus proving (to themselves as much as anyone) that they can score on him. I was pretty confident that as the game turned more and more into a run-and-gun up-tempo slug-fest the Sharks would win a game like that. That is the kind of game they need to play every time. They can’t let things go tight. Sure Nabby gave up a soft one (or two?) but he’s good for one of those most nights. The pedal was on the gas the whole time and the Sharks never slowed down. This is what it will take to beat the Ducks. This is why there is still hope.

undefined method `use_transactional_fixtures=’ for Test::Unit::TestCase:Class

// April 17th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Blog

If you have upgraded to Rails 2.3 and come across this error:
undefined method `use_transactional_fixtures=’ for Test::Unit::TestCase:Class

It probably means you have tests that were generated in an older version of Rails. Just open up test/test_helper.rb and change this:

class Test::Unit::TestCase

To this:

class ActiveSupport::TestCase

Voila!

Sharks drop Game 1 to the Ducks

// April 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Blog

Well that was a disappointing game. I was fired up all day long. I decided yesterday afternoon that my goal was to get the whole crowd to eerie-chant “Hiiiiilller” to try to rattle the Ducks rookie netminder. I got my section doing it a bit but the Sharks just couldn’t sustain enough pressure to make it pay off. Sure they outshot them by a 2:1 margin, but something like only 9 out of the 35 were from within 6 feet. From my vantage point (and our seats are on the end the Sharks attack twice) Hiller sure wasn’t standing on his head. He had a clear view of almost every shot he faced. They also never got their PP going in part due to the sheer dominance of Todd Marchant in the faceoff circle. So if the Sharks want to win Game 2 (which is statistically the much more important game than #1) they must do two things: 1) Get more traffic directly in front of the net — use their SIZE! and 2) Win the faceoff battle — They were #2 in the league in FO% after all and Anaheim was in the bottom half of the league in that stat.

Easter Egg Hunting

// April 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // Blog

This Easter was Andrew’s first real egg hunt. He did a great job and only smashed a couple of the eggs together!

Easter Egg Hunt 2009 from Patrick Hutchinson on Vimeo.

My garden

// April 13th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Blog

The garden is doing nicely. We were able to harvest some arugula thinnings and radishes for a nice peppery salad on Easter.

Wordpress for iPhone

// April 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // Blog

Just installed the Wordpress plugin for my iPhone. Now I can write some posts on the go. I’m not sure that it will mean I will be posting more often or not though, since I think Twitter will remain my quick hit method of choice.

Video of Andrew walking

// April 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Blog

In addition to moving my pictures over to flickr, I’m going to start posting videos to Vimeo. I don’t know that I’ll move all the current ones over, but here is one just to get going. This was taken the evening that Andrew first walked.

Andrew Walks from Patrick Hutchinson on Vimeo.

Switching to flickr

// April 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Blog

With my new blog theme I decided to finally take the plunge and start moving my photos over to flickr. For awhile now on both this blog, and on the family blog at muchhutch.com I have been using a semi-hack I set up for Christine and I that uses blogger.com to allow us to post pictures from our iPhones and display them on the blogs’ sidebar. Basically these “mobile blogs” were obfuscated locations that we could grab a feed from and then using the KB Advanced RSS widget I’d take the contents of the Atom feed and display the last picture plus subject. I can still do this with the flickr feed and I can still email the photos from my iPhone, but the added benefit is that it works nicely with this new feed plus I can more easily use any camera. I’ll be making the switch on muchhutch.com for my feed soon, and then work on convincing Christine to do the same.

New blog theme

// April 9th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Blog

Since Thursdays are normally my work-from-home days, and since I am on PTO this week, I decided to “work” on my blog and installed and customized a new theme. This blog finally is looking how I want it to. It has the general grungy-green appearance I longed for, the lifestream stuff going on, and can now handle all the media stuff I post. The best part was that instead of hacking it all together myself and spending a week on it, I spent only a couple of hours (mostly image editing) since it is a Woo Theme.