Today at at lunch I was walking to go renew my license and pick up a buss pass and I saw Niklas Lidstrom, Chris Chelios, and Robert Lang sitting outside a restaurant having lunch. 

They were finished eating so I said hi and wished them good luck for the next game. I have been a fan of the Red Wings for a long time so meeting them was pretty cool!

We lost our 2nd game in a row of the playoffs last night and in our league, losing 2 in a row means you are eliminated from the playoffs. Looking back on the hockey year I had my best year since I joined the league 3 years ago:  

Player	GP	GLS	ASTS	TPTS
STEVE ROCKARTS	25	32	28	60

I also had a good 2 games in the playoffs with 3 goals 2 assists and a shootout goal in 2 games. So it was heartbreaking to lose last night.

On the bright side, I will be able to watch the Oilers play the Red Wings in the playoffs. I managed to get 2 tickets to game 6 so hopefully the series goes to game 6.

Today also officially marks 2 TV season. I love watching 2–3 hockey games simultaneously in the first round, there is always tons of action.

Dr. Dobbs has went online with his site: http://www.ddj.com. Besides the video that starts automatically on every page it is a pretty cool site, I found a Steve McConnell MP3 on software estimation and an article on Dependancy Injection and Testable Objects. This site looks like it has potential.

I took the plunge and bought TopDesk. I’m not sure that it makes my Alt tabbing any faster but now if i’m bored I can alt+tab and be amused. Besides being sweet eye candy, I think TopDesk makes finding an open program a lot easier. If you’re interested you can download a trial.

Well, Don let the cat out of the bag first. There is a new .NET user group here in Edmonton and so far we have managed to get a couple of speakers in to feed the developer hunger in this city.

The group’s goal is stated on the front page. I think that the group will be a lot better if it is a 2–way conversation between the group members and the people that run the group. Essentially, I would like it to be the group members that really drive the direction that the group takes.

Right now, we have 4 of us who are really dedicated to making this work. That being said we are looking for a 5th member from the development community to fill a role within the group. If you have a passion for .NET and helping others learn about .NET along with a lot of spare time and a willingness to run what we like to call “the gauntlet” contact us here.

Our first speaker is going to be Jean-Paul Boodhoo from ThoughtWorks. After talking to him I can tell you that he is going to give a great talk with concepts that you will be able to take to work the next day and actually use.

On a side note I was pumped to see Sasha mention the upcoming code camp on his blog! If you are interested in attending please stay tuned to http://www.edmontoncodecamp.com

Via Jon Galloway’s blog you can apply to try out Visual Studio 2003 SP1 early. It is beta but according to Jon it is really just a rollup of all the past hotfixes for Visual Studio so it should be stable.

This week was a busy one for me and I am looking forward to relaxing a bit this weekend. At the start of the week I played 3 hockey games in 4 nights, we ended up losing 2 of them and winning one. By Wednesday it felt like it was already Friday.

On Thursday The Igloo Coder, a coworker and I took a 3 hour road trip down to Calgary to see Scott Hanselman speak on DasBlog . It was a great presentation that seemed to get off track at times but when it did go off track it was still informative and interesting. I also got the opportunity to ask Scott about some code I am trying to add to Dasblog and got a couple of tips on how to improve it.

It was nice to see a good turnout at the presentation, the Calgary user groups really have their act together down there. There was probably between 50–75 people at the presentation. I got the chance to speak with a couple of presenters that expressed interest in coming up to Edmonton to present and hopefully the will come out to the Edmonton Code Camp.

The next trip down to Calgary will probably be for the Calgary Code Camp in May.

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