A big win!

My hockey team won it's first game last night. 4-3. With their 3 goals being scored (2 of them) and set up (the other one) by someone that seems to play in every game, because I've played against Frankie in the last 3 weeks. It's kind of weird being part of such a small hockey circle that you see the same people every week, but I suppose it's not a particularly bad thing. It makes me feel kind of bad when I start getting a little greasy in front of the net or give guys little shots after the whistle for digging at our goalie.

It's also really weird getting adjusted to different people and their styles of play. I haven't had a steady defensive partner so far, and you have to get used to the little things that each player does. Who will just ring it around the boards, who will hang back and give you support when you're rushing the puck, not to mention which forwards will stay low for an easy outlet, which ones will help cover defensively, look out for their pointman or help out with the center.

Apart from the hockey, I've got my new computer and managed to run cables through the wall to give myself the interweb. I felt very geeky as I crimped the RJ45 cable back together after I had cut it to fit the wire through the small hole in the wall. Geeky in a good way. Like how I imagine some people feel when they use power tools.

And I got me some new geeky toys too. I got an iPod Touch, which is basically the same thing as an iPhone minus the phone. A 16GB 3.5" widescreen iPod, with motion sensing so it detects which way you're holding it and makes the text the correct way. The cool thing is it's pretty easy to load in the videos, which is the main reason I wanted it. It's a super small form factor video player for me right now, which comes in especially handy when I'm travelling. Now I just have to find a nice dvd ripper program so I can avoid having the big "evaluation version" watermark in the middle of everything that I rip.

And I also got my new phone. If you want the number, get ahold of me on MSN, because it should also always be on MSN. I got one of those fancy data access plans so I can send MSN messages from the phone, which means it should always be fairly easy to get ahold of me. At any rate, it should save on some of the long distance if I'm not at home. And it's got a GPS, which hasn't seemed to manage to find itself yet, but I haven't left it on for very long for the most part. I'll leave it on for a while tonight and see if it can start working better.

I'm heading out to Japan on Saturday, to go visit three mills. One of them is to help out with the installation and start up of some new equipment and the other two are to help out with some troubleshooting. I'll have a Saturday free in Tokyo though, so I need to figure out what sort of goodies I need to pick up for people.

And no, before you ask, I'm not visiting one of those vending machines for you.