At Least One League Debut, Though!

Well…I almost saw an NHL game last weekend

Technically, two NHL franchises were playing hockey.  So, there's that.  

So, some of you are aware that I tried to go to a hockey game a little while back and Ran Into Some Issues with the weather that day.  Well, the game was rescheduled for this past Sunday, and again I made the trip.  Mother Nature cooperated, but the two teams very much did not.  Jerks.  

The game was between the New York Islanders and the Philadelphia Flyers.  Heading into the last week or so of the season, things were looking promising for this game, as both teams were fighting for playoff spots in the eastern conference.  It could have very well turned out that this final game of the regular season would be a make or break game for at least one of the teams heading towards playoff time.  

Well, earlier in the week, the Islanders clinched a playoff spot, so the only thing they were playing for would be for seeding, and a first round matchup with Pittsburgh instead of Florida.  Not an overly substantial change.  The Flyers' story was much more exciting.  

Going into the penultimate day of the season, the Flyers stood one point behind the Boston Bruins, who had a Saturday game against a long-eliminated Ottawa Senators team.  A win by Boston would force Philadelphia to win both their Saturday and Sunday games to earn a playoff spot.  A win-or-go-home scenario for our Sunday game?  No.  Boston proceeded to get humiliated by Ottawa to the tune of a 6-1 poleaxing, leaving them clinging to a 1-point lead over Philadelphia for that final playoff spot.  

Philly played against Pittsburgh on Saturday night and won, securing the 8th seed in the Eastern conference and rendering Sunday's game 100% meaningless.  

Sunday's game saw New York scratch 12 players, including pretty much every one of their star players that I would have been interested in watching.  The Flyers scratched six of their finest players as well, keeping them fresh for the playoffs and not risking injury in a pointless game.  

Philly ended up winning, for what that's worth. 

I'll Hire Somebody To Write Sametime Statuses

Well, the good news is that I forgot to play the lottery yesterday   

So did the winner.  

So, for those of you unawares, one of the multi-state lottery drawings is up to some ludicrous amount of money.  Estimates currently say it'll be somewhere around 700 million bucks.  I was supposed to play yesterday, when it was a mere 400 some million bucks, but that seems like chump change now, doesn't it?   

Yeah, all those suckers who played yesterday are feeling pretty silly now.  

So, now I'm in an office pool where everyone hopes to not have to come in to work next week.  I don't know how many sets of numbers we end up with out of it, but it's not going to change the odds of winning all that much.  You're still more likely to get struck by lightning that winning 700 million dollars in the lottery.  That's one way to look at it. 

Of course, another way to look at it is that eventually, somebody is going to win a stupid amount of money for buying a ticket, so it may as well be me.   

I've Turned It Into A Game

My toy train doesn’t stop where it’s supposed to

You're supposed to buy it a little station to stop at, Jeremy.  Clearly, the problem is you.

That's not exactly the problem.  It stops correctly when I tell it to.  I just usually don't tell it to.

So how can you complain that it doesn't stop in the right place?  There's no tiny engineer running the thing.

Because math.

So, you're probably aware by now that I work as an engineer.  That means that things are supposed to be consistent and make sense in order to make me happy.  Ideally, if you do things the exact same way each time, you get the same results every time.  It's the natural order of things, and it's really quite satisfying when it works out. 

My train doesn't work out.  

I should explain one other concept here.  I got an adorably tiny toy train to run around the base of my Christmas tree.  Its purpose in life is to do just that...meaning I'm not entirely clear what I'm going to do with the thing for 10 months out of the year, but that's beyond the scope of these proceedings.  What's important is that I bought a toy train.  Also worthy of note is that the lights on my tree are plugged into a timer.  At some point in the early evening, the lights come on, and at some point slightly after bedtime, the lights turn off.  Pretty standard fare.  Well, the toy train is plugged into the same timer, so when the lights come on, the train starts its little rectangular journey.  I have not adjusted the speed of the train since I set up the tree.  This is important.  

So, you would expect that with the train running at a constant speed (It kinda doesn't, since it goes a little slower when it has to make the climb to the rug, and goes a little faster on the way down to the floor, but you really have to be paying attention to notice the difference.  Either way, it's a pretty consistent variation, so it shouldn't matter) and the timer running for a constant time, and the length of track being constant, that there should be some order to the place where the train stops when the timer turns everything off.  

You would be wrong.  

This irritates me a little.  I would think that the train would make a reasonably consistent number of laps around the tree, stopping in a predictable place with respect to the last stop.  If one day, it stops in the front of the rectangle, and the next day it stops on the right side, I would expect the following day, it would stop in the back, having completed X+3/4 laps in the allotted time.  I don't know where the variation is coming from, but there is clearly some margin for error in my system, since the train stops seemingly wherever it darn well chooses.  Either the train is not traveling at a constant speed, or the timer just guesses at what time it's supposed to click off.  The track length is pretty fixed here.  Those are the only two possibilities, really.  It drives me a little nutty, and is the sort of thing nobody else would have even noticed if I hadn't said anything.