Okay, I'm taking it up a notch and now going to hockey camp four times a week! There are two sections and today I got permission from our coach to attend both on Monday-Wednesday AND Tuesday-Thursday evenings (and pay just for the *remaining* extra lessons). Yesterday and today we started doing 2 on 1 type drills. It's great to move on from drilling on "fundamentals," as we've been doing for the first couple weeks, to practicing more game-type situations, like we did tonight. I wish I didn't have to work and could just focus on improving at hockey. Before hockey tonight, I had dinner with "The Cool Kids," as Matt calls them, from Microsoft at Chapel

Yesterday, just in time for hockey camp at 9, I checked the (paper) mail to find that my Flexcar membership kit had finally arrived! Since I moved to Seattle, I've been borrowing the Neon from Matt all the time to get to hockey. The arena is located 15 miles north on I-5 and camp ends pretty late so neither taxi nor taking the bus is an option. Flexcar is a system whereby members reserve cars parked around the city in advance and pay about $6 - $9 per hour to use them. Since I can bike to work every day, the only time I really need a car is for stuff like climbing or hockey in the evenings. The price seems high when you are used to owning a car and driving for free, but if you amortize the cost of buying your car, insuring and maintaining it over all the miles you drive, on average Flexcar turns out to be cheaper. Here's a link to the AAA research the Flexcar people quote. So the procedure is pretty simple. I go to the website, login and reserve the car. I'm pretty lucky because there's a Honda Civic on 24th and Madison, only one block away from my house. I spent a minute looking at the schedule and it looks like the car is almost always available. Both times I needed it for Hockey, I booked only 2 minutes in advance, and never had a problem. Next, you walk to the car (which is always parked in the same 24hr reserved spot) and open the door by waiving your card over a sensor on the back windsheild. The keys are in the glove compartment, but the car won't start until you type your PIN into a keypad inside the vehicle. I guess the car has some kind of wireless connection to the internet because later on the website it knows exactly how many hours/miles you used. Anyway, I think it's a cool system partly because of the technology and mostly because I don't need to worry about car maintenance, insurance, parking, theft, etc, etc, but I still have the 90% of the convenience of a car ownership.

Amazon Launches A9 Number one of the Seven reasons you should use A9 is that Amazon's Search Inside the Book runs concurrently with all your web searches. Just resize the search panes and you can see results from both indexes. This is pretty cool -- after all, most of the world's knowledge is NOT yet on the web, but rather it's on paper. (Paper that's convieniently packaged in book form and available for sale at Amazon.com!) When I first saw the beta internally a few weeks ago, I was astonished that the search results were powered by Google. Astonished because every article I had read on the subject of Amazon's spinoff A9 emphasized the "Amazon versus Google" angle and now evidently A9 has decided to just buy the web results from Google rather than "compete." Reflecting further on this, now that A9 has launched, I think this strategy of "extend rather that compete" makes a lot of sense. It would take an enormous amount of resources to catch up to Google w.r.t. web search. Why should Amazon try to enter web search when all we want to do is sell you stuff? And I think that goal is nicely accomplished by the "Search Inside the Book" results right there in the next column. I think I'll try this as my primary search engine for a while and see if occasionally a SITB result comes up that catches my eye. I guess this is another reason A9 decided to use Google results -- current Google users have nothing to lose by switching to A9 as their primary search engine because the web results should be the same, plus you get SITB! Congratulations A9! Update:Slashdot linked to somebody with a way better A9 analysis

Ah the sweet pungent smell of Hockey is in the air because tonight I attended the first session of Hockey Educational Systems Phase I Adult Clinic. Hockey school is located at Olympic View Arena, way up in the middle of nowhere. While carless John typically considers anything not on Capitol Hill or within a <15 bike ride from it way out there, this really WAS way WAY out there. I borrowed the Neon to attend tonight's lession, but I'm going to sign up for Flexcar ASAP. The course costs a couple hundred bucks for 12 one-and-a-half hour classes. The group is very diverse, with a couple guys my age, some women, and even some grandpas. We didn't play a game tonight, rather, it was all drills and working on skating and puck handling fundamentals. The funnest part was playing the hockey version of British Bulldog. You have to carry your puck down the length of the rink without losing it to the players who live in the neutral zone. If your puck gets stolen, you join them and try to steal other people's during subsequent crossings. Players go back and forth until the last person to make it across with their puck is declared the winner. If you ranked us all by our British Bulldog score, I would sit roughly in the middle of the class. The purpose of British bulldog was to work on protecting the puck when you have possession of it. After we learned that technique, we practiced the complementary skill -- stealing the puck by any legal means. We leared what was a slash, what was high sticking and what were the allowable ways of messing with the opposing player in order to take the puck away. By the end, I was a bit tired but not even as much as after playing a UW Rec. game. It was funny because the coach kept mentioning how if we felt light-headed or too exhausted by the drills we should feel free to take a break. I guess they've had a few heart-attacks/lawsuits in the past. Mom and Dad: Why wasn't I playing *hockey* as a kid instead of, say, taking all those piano lessons?

I'd like to complain about a Bank of America ad I just saw on TV tonight. A woman comes home from work, puts popcorn in the microwave, then uses her laptop at the kitchen table to pay her bills using the BOA online banking website. The point of the ad: their bill-pay is so easy you'll be done with your banking even before you're popcorn is ready. Now, what is wrong with this picture? Anyone? I'll give you a hint: There is no ethernet jack at the kitchen table and microwaves and 802.11b wireless networks do not get along. Update: I just sent them a letter. Yes I am a geek.

Matt just called while I was eating dinner (steak) and I left my food on the coffee table to go upstairs looking for a cable he needed. Minutes later I came back down and found my steak gone and plate licked clean by one of our dogs Mia the whippet!