…And I’m laughing so hard that I can barely type.

Read This.

A few weeks ago, I got a chance to see David Allen present his Getting Things Done methodology. It really struck a chord with me, in many ways because it’s seems like such a basic point. I would describe GTD as a way of dealing with the fact that our brains haven’t evolved to deal with the details of modern day life. Face it, our brains evolved in a time when our big concerns of the day were finding food and not getting eaten.  It’s just not designed to keep the millions of picky little details that make up life today in order.

I’ve only just started reading the book, but I’ve been trying to apply what I’ve learned. I haven’t reached “Mind Like Water” yet, but I have knocked my inbox down from 400+ emails to 20. I’ve been taking it slowly – cleaning out all the new stuff plus 10-20 of the backlog every day. I’m doing it on my own – there’s a GTD addin for Outlook, but I just hated it. One of the principles of GTD is to get the stuff out of your head and into a system that you trust. Frankly, when the GTD addin started hiding my email, I couldn’t trust it anymore. So instead, I do my own thing with Outlook – heavy on the task list of course. And so far so good.

Note to self, check out Jeff’sGTD wiki…

“[H]ow many [people] can actually stand up and shout to the world that they let a BILLION DOLLARS in cash disappear into thin air?

I couldnt  name one off the top of my head that has lost cash money of 1 billion dollars or more, until today.

Congratulations Bob Goodenow, President of the NHL Players Association. You turned down 30 teams paying what would probably average out to 35mm dollars in salary per team for this year. Thats more than $ 1,000,000,000.00 in cash that would have been paid to NHL players this year.”

[Blog Maverick – How to Lose 1 Billion Dollars]

I guess it’s not surprising that the owner of the Dallas Mavericks sides with the owners. But he brings up an interesting point – the players are giving up money that they will never get back. And it’s more than a billion – the final league proposal was for each team to pay a maximum of $44.7 Million. Times 30 teams equals ONE AND A THIRD BILLION DOLLARS.

Even the league’s Feb 2nd proposal, which the players dismissed out of hand, guaranteed the players would receive a minimum of 53% of league reveues. Assuming $2.1 billion in revenue – which obviously the league won’t get back to for a long time – means the players would have received over $1.1 billion dollars.

The players have short careers (I think the average is four years) and are losing much more by not playing than the owners are. Even if you don’t believe the owners are losing less by not playing, I can’t imagine anyone believes the owners were making money hand over fist – i.e. the way the players are. How much common sense does it take for the players to realize the gravy train is over and forcing the owners to lock them out isn’t going to change that fact?

When I upgraded to DasBlog 1.7.2, I had to create an empty rss.aspx file on disk to fool the Title Mapper (that’s the part the handles the new title based URLs) into not looking for a post with the title “rss”. I knew that a large number of people read my post via the RSS feed, so I didn’t want to break what has been the feed address since DevHawk started. However, I didn’t think the atom feed would matter as much, so I didn’t bother to do the workaround for atom.aspx. Turns out I was wrong. Atom.aspx was requested nearly once a minute between 11pm and 12am yesterday. I got tired of counting, but I’m guessing that number is even higher during the middle of the day since just over half of my traffic comes from the US + Canada. So I created an empty atom.aspx page to fool the Title Mapper even further.

Now, will I have to do the same for my CDF feed?

“When I stood before you in September, I said NHL teams would not play again until our economic problems had been solved. As I stand before you today, it is my sad duty to announce that because that solution has not yet been attained, it no longer is practical to conduct even an abbreviated season. Accordingly, I have no choice but to announce the formal cancellation of play for 2004-05″ [NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman]

I have blogged about the NHL work stoppage several times - I imagine it’s pretty obvious that I place the blame for the cancellation of the season firmly on the shoulders of the NHL players association. I find it interesting that Gary open his comments today with an apology to the fans while NHLPA exec director Bob Goodenow opened his comments today by slamming the league. In fact, when asked if the NHLPA owes the fans an apology, this was Bob’s response:

“Absolutely an apology to all the fans, and speaking on behalf of all the players up here, they didn’t want to be locked out. They didn’t want to be not allowed to entertain the fans. Gary owes an apology because he started the lock out. He put all this in motion, and the proposals that these players have put forward, in particular, the roll back, which would have made the league successful in one fell swoop, very serious steps were taken, and, you know, yes, we apologize to the fans for this situation, this circumstance, and the fans can say, what are you going to do about it? Well, we’ve done an awful lot, we feel, to get to a fair resolution, and unfortunately, it’s the other side that we haven’t been able to make a contact with, and it’s unfortunate that this situation will continue. That’s all I can say.”

I guess the NHLPA doesn’t believe they owe me – the fan – an apology. Here’s my response to Bob’s response:

Fuck you, Bob.

If Bob really believes that the player’s proposal would have made the league successful, how come they didn’t accept the league’s offer last week to try it the player’s way, but have a system in place to enforce cost certainty if it didn’t work? I’m guessing it’s because no matter how many times the Bob refers to one of his proposals as “groundbreaking” than nobody – including Bob – really believes that the 24% rollback would do anything to stem the skyrocketing salaries in the long run. Bob had the nerve to say in his statement today that “During the last CBA, when revenues went up, so did salaries. When revenues eased, so did salaries. As evidenced by recent signings.” What a load of bullshit. When revenue growth dropped to around 5% year over year in 01/02 & 02/03, salary growth ballooned to almost 12%. And as for “evidenced by recent signings”, I guess Bob is just going to gloss over the fact that reason that salaries has eased recently is only because so many players went unsigned last summer since all the teams realized the lockout was looming.

Well I guess if I need a hockey fix, my only choice is catching a Silvertips or Thunderbirds game.