jimdahl

More effects of CAFTA on ag from the GF Herald. Highlights for sugar:

Before I saw this thread, I saw today that it is linked from the SI front page. Pretty cool pulse of sports fan in N.D. North Dakotans weigh in on sports #1 sport of North Dakotans -- UND hockey. Was there any doubt? #1 most hated sports figure by North Dakotans -- Favre. It's funny, not living near North Dakota anymore, I always feel like I'm the only person in the world who hates Favre; the rest of the world seems to love him. I was grinning ear to ear when his (now) typical choking-by-interception knocked them out of the playoffs. #1 sports enemy of North Dakotans -- Minnesota. Gee, it's not that NDSU-SDSU rivalry/lovefest #1 North Dakota athlete -- Roger Maris. I'm a little surprised Kleinsasser made this list, but I guess he is fresh in people's minds

They used to give us those when I had student season tickets to Gopher football. They included such original suggestions as yelling "Gophers" at the end of the Star Spangled Banner, which we all dutifully ignored. It also included the spelling of M-i-n-n-e-s-o-t-a so we had a fighting chance of all spelling it right after TDs. Honestly, I've always thought it would be cool if everyone at UND knew "Fight On Sioux" and sang along.

That's what I, personally, find fascinating about sitting down and looking at the actual games remaining and assigning points. If you'd just asked me to come up with a ranking without considering the games, I probably would've had UMN a little lower, CC and AA a little higher. However, when I actually had to assign 4 points per game to one team or another for the remaining games, I was a little surprised by my own prediction.

One quick reminder, saving is smart so you can revisit how your picks result in a conference finish as real results come in (your picks for games that have passed are replaced with the actual results). The other nice thing that does is let us create some aggregate statistics, the prediction of the people, if you will.

Call me homer, but UND does seem to be in the drivers seat yet again (though we all know how that ended last year). Why wait for the games to be played, I can tell you how it will end: UND 42 UMN 36 UW 34 UMD 33 SCSU 32 AA 26 CC 26 Denver 26 Mankato 17 MTech 8 Q: Wait Jim, are you sure you got that right? CC and Denver in the bottom half? A: The numbers don't lie. It's the year of the Minnesota teams. Q: The Gophers overtaking the Badgers, really? A: Have you been paying attention at all lately? Q: AA is so scrappy, are you sure they won't finish over .500? A: Honestly, I felt like I was searching for extra points to give them. Maybe they'll surprise me. Feel good story of the year. Lots of goals from Jim Dahl. Q: It's not that I don't trust you, Jim, but I'd kind of like to see the numbers for myself A: What-if calculator Q: I heard this thing is full of bugs? A: Nah, I declare it ready for human consumption. I fixed the numerous known bugs last week with two exceptions: it doesn't deal well with trying to load your saved picks in between games of a series (e.g. on Saturday afternoon); it still just gives conference standings, not tournament seedings (i.e. WCHA-specific tournament seeding tiebreakers are not programmed in).

It is true that moving to the new IP address broke everyone's cookies, forcing everyone to login again. However, it shouldn't affect persistence of cookies. FYI-- they'll all break again when/if we rebind the SiouxSports.com domain name to the new or old IP address for the board. At this point I'm still tweaking settings during peak periods to determine if the new server can really handle the peak load. Anyway, if you have to login every time, there's a cookie storage problem on your end, because the forum cookies try to persists for 365 days.

The big score of tonight is definitely the Badgers losing to Tech after a very lackluster win yesterday. That puts the Sioux within 1 point of the WCHA lead, despite having played 4 fewers games than #1 and #3. I was hoping UW's slump would begin a few weeks from now, but it will be interesting to see what follows this.

On posts that you've made, there should be an "edit" button. Since new stuff happened pretty quickly and no one posted after me, I just tacked my new comments onto the end. Also useful for fixing typos. Anyway, the Sioux really are trying to win this one. They're putting on a lot of offensive pressure and trying to wear down the Seawolves. They're just finishing off another power play.

Fylling scores! 2-2. about 8:00 left.

Sioux putting on a lot of offensive pressure. UAA defensemen Segal injured. Seawolves getting in the Sioux faces a lot, finally called for a hold. Sioux PP begins. ... Sioux PP ends. Worst... powerplay... ever. 8:25 remaining in the game.

Sioux score even strength! McMahon? 1-1

I think they gave it to Bochenski, though changes afterward are not unprecedented. I didn't see it, myself, but I thought I heard that they decided Porter didn't tip it.

2nd intermission Phoenix 1 Minnesota 0 Boucher is 3:46 from one hell of a record. So far in his streak he has stopped 119 consecutive shots. Unfortunately, I'm on my way out the door in about 10 mins

PP goal for AA with about 10 secs left on the PP. UAA 1 UND 1

Just peeking at the game between a workout and a shower. Looks like AA is going into their 2nd power play. Apparently they didn't do much on the 1st. UND cross-checks early in the power play bringing on a 3-5 for about 1:20.

I don't know if you all saw this: Sioux welcome mat is out for Fornier

The Coyotes' backup netminder, Boucher, is riding 4 consecutive shutouts (tying the NHL record from 50 years ago), over four and a half hours, 265:46, of shutout. The last three games have been on the road. Friday he travels to Minnesota, 43:46 shy of the all-time shutout record set in 1949. Meanwhile, the offensively slumping Wild broke out for a franchise best 7 goals last game. Will the Wild score on Boucher within 43:46 at Xcel?

Regarding the potential for a "swoon": I'd be surprised to see the Sioux make it through the second half of the season with 1 loss and 1 tie. Any worse would constitute a decline in performance, so I guess I have to admit that I expect Spring to be slightly worse than Fall. However, I certainly don't expect to see 6-8-4 like the Sioux posted in the Spring of last season. The offensive slowdown last year did come on all of a sudden, but did seem related to other external factors, so I'm not particularly concerned. If anything, our offense seems to be gaining momentum. Besides, I have my Boston tickets, so we have to do well.

Pride On Ice. In general, SiouxSports.com NCAA D-I hockey links is a pretty comprehensive resource. And Discussion of handy-dandy tools

I would find a theater curious for a few reasons: It's not pictured in their own concept drawing I personally think of theatres as primarily targeted toward locals rather than tourists; whereas the hotel, convention center, and water park are targeted towards visitors. I don't see much cross-benefit. Maybe people do go to movies while visiting other towns, though. The G.F. movie scene is controlled by one company with relatively low prices, so other companies would probably be hesitant to compete (or is demand high enough that Carmike would find it worth opening more screens? Are the Carmike 10 stadium seating? If not, they could be attacked on that front). I have absolutely zero inside information on this, it's just my personal gut reaction to the idea.

From what I understand, that's pretty consistent with the Canad Inn's development philosophy -- they like to have attractions rather than just depend on the normal hotel crowd. The way I see it, they wanted a waterpark because it's somewhat unique in the area so could convince guests to stay at their hotel instead of another in the area (I don't think it was ever meant to be a Wisconsin Dells-like attraction that would draw people from afar for the sole purpose of water-parking). Recognizing G.F.'s need for water entertainment for it's own citizens, they gave G.F. an opportunity to buy in, develop a bigger park, and offer volume pricing to the citizens of G.F. Since the voters weren't interested, I would guess that this waterpark will be aimed at out-of-town guests rather than locals, including higher prices and bundling with hotel rooms. Not a waterpark for G.F. citizens anymore, but still good for economic development.

Soon. Almost certainly this week.

When I first saw this story break a couple days ago, the big thought that came to my mind was: "I thought it was supposed to be transferred to UND at some point". The Herald article, REA has new owner, provides a few additional details. The ND corporation, UND Sports Facilities Inc., owns the arena; but the Nevada corporation, UND Arena Services Inc., still has management authority. Call my cynical, but this has nothing to do with "limiting UND's liability", rather, this is keeping complete control of the arena out of UND's hands. Frankly, I think the independent ownership is a good idea; but let's just call a spade a spade and say that direct control of the arena was not and never will be transferred to UND to isolate the arena from the fickle political machinations of the University.

FYI-- Just popped in to monitor how the new message board server is holding up under the weight of an actual game-time discussion. Looks like you vultures are overloading it a little bit so response times might not have been perfect tonight and intermittent timeouts were possible. Sorry about that. The main problem seems to be that its low on memory when it spawns dozens of web server processes to respond to the additional simultaneous requests. I'll continue to monitor the situation during peak times like this and try to come up with remedies. I'll start looking into what it would take to bump up the memory a little bit. Please do give me feedback (PM is fine) as to your own personal experiences with the performance.