SomewhereOnTheInternet.Com

I’d like to make a plea to any of you billionaires out there who may be considering the purchase of a major league sports franchise.  Please buy the Pittsburgh Penguins and build them a new arena so that they can stay in Pittsburgh.

What does this do for me?  Not a hell of a lot.  I live within spitting distance of the Shark Tank in San Jose so it’s not like I’m going to lose my hockey fix if the Penguins eventually leave Pittsburgh.  I just think it’s the right thing to do and I believe there will be great rewards to anyone who should take on such an endeavor.

For one thing, Pittsburgh is supposedly a great sports town.  They’ve got two beautiful facilities in Heinz Field and PNC Park for the Steelers and Pirates respectively.  It goes without saying that the Steelers are one of the premier sports franchises in the country even without having won Super Bowl XL.  The Pirates are a venerable franchise though they admittedly have no chance of winning a title under the current system the idiot owners of Major League baseball have going. But that’s another subject for another blog.  Pittsburgh is lacking an NBA franchise but who watches basketball anymore anyway?  I mean since Jordan retired and they stopped enforcing traveling, what’s the point?  A past and future Stanley Cup winning franchise will nicely round out the sports landscape.

I believe the main hold up in keeping the Penguins in Pittsburgh is the lack of a new arena.  The Igloo is outdated and the people of Pittsburgh have been reticent to commit public funds for a new building.  I’ll never understand the mentality of people who oppose committing public funds towards a sports facility.  That kind of thinking is so short-sighted in my view.  I understand why that kind of thinking takes hold in a place like San Francisco - that town is filled with nuts.  Correct me if I’m wrong but Pittsburgh isn’t filled with a bunch of liberal hippies … is it?  The bottom line is that new public facilities spur economic development and become gathering places for the community whether it be for a sporting event or something else.  Recently a local peace officer was killed in the line of duty and the HP Pavillion was the site for the memorial service.  It’s nice having a good facility around.  Public monies are so often wasted that when the opportunity to commit it towards something that’s actually going to bring a lot of pride and joy to a community I do not understand the hesitation.

So that’s the benefit to Pittsburgh in keeping the Penguins in town, what’s the benefit to you my billionaire friend?  You’ll have the honor of having the Stanley Cup presented to you in the not so distant future.  Why am I so sure about this?  You’ve got the great Sidney Crosby on your roster.  I know recently there has been a bit of a backlash against the young phenom which is entirely out of line.  What was Daniel Alfredsson thinking when he called Crosby a whiner?  Hockey players are usually so disciplined in not giving other teams bulletin board material that I’m shocked he would say such a thing.  I may have rooted for the Senators in the East this year but I think I might have to pull for Carolina now. 

I guess most of the Crosby bashing has occured as people have compared him to Alex Ovechkin in the race for rookie of the year.  I don’t think there is any question that Ovechkin is the most deserving of the award.  His Google highlight video speaks for itself.  Ovechkin is amazing and in defending Sydney Crosby I will never disparage Alexander the Great.  But Alex aside, Crosby has the goods.  I can’t believe as an 18 year old on a terrible team he still has managed to stay in the top 10 of the scoring race.  I’ve watched him in several games and the guy has “got it”.  With his puck skills and vision he generates scoring chance after scoring chance.  I don’t think anyone since the Great One himself has displayed such coolness on the ice.  He will be the most productive scorer in the league over the next decade.  For that I am sure.

If Pittsburgh builds a new arena and surrounds Crosby with a decent line-up I have no doubt that the synergistic effect will be a Stanley Cup Championship.  I don’t have a few hundred million lying around to make this happen but if I did that’s what I’d do.  You Mr. Billionaire can.

Congratulations Dolphin fans on your acquisition of Daunte Culpepper for a mere pittance.  You must be wondering at this point, which Daunte Culpepper you will be getting.  The one who lit up the stat sheet in 2004, or last year’s version who lit up the stat sheet in the wrong categories.  As a Viking fan with the Sunday Ticket I’ve seen almost everyone of Daunte’s professional games.  And I can tell you this.  There is only one Daunte.  In 2004 and previous seasons, the Vikings had enough going for them on offense to cover up Daunte’s most glaring deficiency and that is his lack of decisiveness when getting rid of the football.  Daunte does not pass the ball in rhythm.  Daunte drops back and holds the ball and waits to see what develops.  Unless receivers are WIDE open he will not throw the ball.  For a quarterback to have the luxury to do this he needs to have a certain number of things in place.  One, obviously is a stout offensive line.  Previous to last season the Vikings had this.  The loss of Matt Burke and David Dixon put a couple of holes in the Viking O Line that they were not able to fill.  Consequently, Daunte did not have the time to survey the field he had in previous seasons.  Those holes in the O Line also had a negative impact on the running game which exacerbated the situation.  Now teams were playing the pass meaning he was facing a stiffer pass rush.  In addition, the loss of Moss has been grossly understated.  Just because Moss didn’t light it up in Oakland this past season, and the Vikings have a good stable of receivers people overlook the effect Moss had on defenses.  When Moss was in the lineup, Daunte knew exactly where the safety was going to be on almost every play.  Without Moss, Daunte was certainly seeing defenses he had never seen before and was not able to adapt immediately.  So what does all this mean for the Dolphins?  It means if you want to get the production out of Culpepper he had previous to the 2005 season, you had better shore up your offensive line.  You’ve got pretty good receivers over there but without a running game and good pass protection, Daunte will not find them open.  Of course there is always the possibility that Daunte will take a step forward in learning the mental aspect of the game.  But I doubt it.  As a Viking fan one of the things that annoyed me the most about Daunte was that he was too proud and too headstrong.  He’s got to learn some humbleness.  Only then will he realize his mistakes and give himself a chance to fix them.  And lastly, remember this.  For as good as Daunte’s numbers were in 2004, in the last game of the season against the lowly Cardinals, needing a win to make the playoffs, Daunte could not manage to put up more than 18 points and the Vikings lost.  When the chips are down, Daunte is at his worst.  I think any Viking fan will agree with me on this point.

After putting it off for a couple of months, I finally decided to pull the trigger on a Canon i9900 printer. It received and excellent review from an excellent web page, imaging-resources.com, and I was hooked. Two things kept me from making the purchase sooner. One was that I am always hesitant to part with $500. The second is that when I went to Fry’s Electronics I saw an HP with nearly the same specifications and the same price sitting right next to it. It was an HP8750. I went back to the imaging-recource.com website to try and find a review. They had not reviewed that product as of yet. I waited a little while to see if they would. No luck. Eventually I searched other websites for reviews. I found an informative review on PC Mag’s????? website. (I don’t remember exactly where. All I really remember is that they liked the Canon a little better than the HP.) So now I had my mind made up and it was just a matter of going over to Fry’s and picking it up. I checked the newspaper ads on the weekend hoping to see it on sale but no such luck. After work on Monday I went up to Fry’s on Brokaw and went straight to where the printer was on display and still being sold for $499. A sales person came up to me and I asked if it was available. He came back a few minutes later and told me that it was not in stock. I asked how long it would be before they would get one in and he said maybe a few days. Then he added that the Campbell store had 10 units if I wanted it right away. I almost went to that store to begin with as I live and work about equidistant from both stores so I thought “what the heck” and headed down there. The traffic jam on 880 was annoying but it could have been worse. As I pulled into the Campbell store’s parking lot I was reminded of why I do not prefer going to that store. There’s not enough parking. I was fortunate however and someone had just pulled out of a spot near the exit and I parked right away. In the store, I grabbed a cart and wheeled it back to the printers. I parked next to the Canon while a salesperson helped another couple. When he was done with that transaction another sales associate conferred with him on some other issue. To my surprise neither seemed eager to help me. In a store where the salespeople almost outnumber the customers I couldn’t believe I was having to wait around to be helped. Thankfully as the other sales associate was walking away he stopped and asked if I needed help. He understood immediately what I was after and grabbed my cart and headed off to go get me one. I felt good about it. He stopped what he was doing to go get me my printer. After quite a few minutes he finally returned empty handed. He said the system shows there were 3 in the store but he couldn’t find them. He asked the department manager where they might be and was told they were out of stock. The only one in the store was the display. The sales associate asked the manager why they were listed in the system and he just said flatly that it was a mistake. The sales associate wanted to direct me to go to the San Jose store and I informed him that I had just been there and they told me you guys had 10! To this the manager said the system always showed that. I stood there for a moment waiting for him to offer me some sort of option, but this arrogant bastard did not feel like being communicative. I asked him when they might expect to have the printer in stock and he said he didn’t know. Furthermore, because the system showed they had printers in stock, he said headquarters was not likely to ship more. Then he tried talking me into an Epson printer - offering to sweeten the deal with a discount. I told him “no thank you” and turned and walked out of the store.

As I left I felt relieved to not have made my purchase at Fry’s. I’ve never liked that store for all of the reasons I just illustrated above and I was glad they would not be getting any of my money. I celebrated with a burrito from Baja Fresh. The next morning when I got to work I logged onto newegg.com (from where I had just recently purchased a 19″ Hyundai flat panel monitor) and searched for my printer. There it was. Sales price $411. With the $15 shipping and tax, the grand total was $455. Should have gone there to begin with.

The moral of this story is that I will never make a big purchase from Fry’s. The chance of saving a few bucks is not worth going to that zoo. In the summer I will probably sell back vacation time and put that money towards a big LCD television. Some place other than Fry’s will be getting my money.

I started SOTI (somewhereontheinternet.com) as a place to rant about one thing and many things. Putting the site together didn’t take much time, especially with the blogging software WordPress. And as I breezed through the setup and config, I hit an unexpected wall. I was stumped for hours, staring blankly at the setup field called “tagline”.

There are many seductive lines that attract people. And before you start tooting that quintessential homerun “Hey there, do you work out?”, I’m thinking of ’seductive lines’ in a different sense. In a world where everyone is a consumer, we continue to bombard each other with a myriad of tag lines, phrases and ‘isms - infusing ‘bad english’ jargons in our daily conversations. Does “dude, are you gellin’?” sound familiar?

Everyone knows “Just Do It”, “If it doesn’t get all over the place, it doesn’t belong in your face” and “The Freshmaker”. I hear those words and I want to strap on my Air Jordans, slam a CJ burger down my throat and follow it up with a Menthos chaser.

And everyone knows the office buzz words “paradigm shift”, “equilibrium point” and “synergy”. Maybe you’re a bit younger and only remember “out of the box thinker”, “5 Nine Uptime”, “what do you bring to the table” and the ever popular “30,000 foot view”. Waitress, check please!!!

For the SomewhereOnTheInternet.com site, I wanted to have that ‘everyday Joe’ tagline. It’s a truck stop, a diner somewhere on the information superhighway. And the tagline should be something that has withstood recessions, inflations, fashion and trickle-down-economies. It must exude comfort, honesty and apple pie. Yet it doesn’t offend anyone (offending everyone is highly acceptable). It should open its arms and embrace those who knock at the front door. It should attract passers by like “Vacancy”, “Buy One Get One At Half Price”, “Finish Our 40 Ounce Steak And Your Dinner Is Free”, “Under New Management”, “Liquidation Sale - Everything Must Go”, “Live Nude Girls”… And then it hit me…

“Open 24 Hours”. What better describes ’somewhere on the internet’. Sweet.