This morning at 10am, Blackhawks playoff tickets went on sale! For those of you that don’t follow Hockey or the Blackhawks… This is a relatively big deal as the Blackhawks have not made the Stanley Cup Playoffs since 2002 (when they were man-handled by the Saint Louis Blues in 5 games). They haven’t actually WON a playoff series since 1996 when they swept the Calgary Flames, only to be eliminated by Colorado in the second round.

Yes, its been a long time (not as long as its been for the Cubs though!) and Blackhawk fans finally have something to get excited about again! 

The United Center doesn’t quite have the same roar I remember from the Chicago Stadium, but I can’t tell you how excited I am about the return of playoff hockey to the West Loop.

I didn’t get to actually look for tickets until about 10:30am and was afraid that I’d missed my opprotunity. Sadly, TicketMaster’s website blows chunks when it comes to purchasing tickets. I had to continually search for tickets while hoping for some good luck. First, you can’t really select a price range without severely limiting yourself to a small subset of seats, so you end up having to look for “best available” and it kept offering me 200 level club seats for $150 a pop. No thanks, i wanted the $50 cheap seats! Also, you can’t search for multiple games at once as it gives up your previous tickets! (i lost out on some decent seats thanks to that!)

Finally, I pulled the trigger on 3 games for Standing Room tickets. $67 for a pair to each game with that crazy TicketMaster fees ($5.75 a ticket PLUS a per-order conveniece fee!? You HAVE to be kidding me! why hasn’t someone run them out of business yet?!) really isn’t that bad! Those are for Game C of the first series (3rd home game) and Game A and B of the second series. Obviously tickets for the second series are worthless if we don’t survive the first round. The 3rd home game in the first series would be game 5 if we lose home ice, or game 6 if we keep home ice. So even that isn’t guarenteed.

If I could script out how the first round of the playoffs were to go, I’d take home ice and hope the series goes a full seven games. Somehow along the way while I was looking for best available tickets, ticketmaster offered me seats ON THE GLASS right behind the goal for Game D in the first round! Obviously, if we lose home ice, we won’t get a 4th home game, and that 4th game won’t be played unless the first 6 games are split. I quickly made the purchase ($390 tickets, ouch!) after I realized that I’ll either get all that cash back, or I’ll be able to witness a MONSTER event from great seats! Plus, those silly TicketMaster fees don’t seem as bad with expensive tickets!

Definately going to make the playoffs more interesting! I’ll have to start finding out who wants to join me for the games as they draw closer. If you’re interested in going… Let me know!

I recently came across an interesting book,
The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. (Yes, you can buy the book from Amazon, but the entire book is under a CC liscense and is available for download at the books website). It provides an interesting retrospective of how the Internet got to where it is, and what may happen to it in the future.

What’s really interesting is the point made in this really well written review:

In passing, I love the brutal critique by Gene Spaford of the $100 laptop. He likens its projected impact–exposing millions to the bright side while not fixing their poverty, water, and disease–to subsidizing pet rats for every household just prior to the Black Death plague. My friend Lee Felsenstein is an equally virulent opponent of the $100 laptop, for different reasons. Me personally, I think the cell phone (but not the iPhone) is the only way to educate 5 billion people fast and with day to day relevance to their needs.

Wow… I never really thought about it, but I think its completely accurate! The One Laptop Per Child initiative has a noble goal of providing inexpensive laptops to poor children around the world as well as ensuring internet connectivity. I can’t argue with the educational aspects of the projects and it certainly would provide much more opportunity to many that the world has ignored for far too long.

However, its always been presumed that those opportunities are strictly positive. They may be overwhelmingly positive, but I’ve never considered the negative effects, nor the things it will have little to no effect on.

The Internet is NOT a safe place. This is obvious but most people forget this. Also, when most people think of the dangers of the internet, they think of either an Internet stalker or identity theft, typically an unrealistic fear of intercepted e-commerce transactions. However, there are far more dangers that are often ignored both by those that are new to the internet (who typically aren’t aware of the dangers and are overly trusting) as well as by those that are quite experienced and are aware of at least some of the dangers (ie, they know what a Trojan is, and why they shouldn’t blindly run untrusted programs).

Whatever platform gets widely deployed will quickly endure a trial-by-fire in which it’s security is tested, for if there are any security holes which allow the laptop to be exploited to send spam or access their personal information, which is a time bomb waiting to happen. As much as I support open software, I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t perfect and can be exploited. Microsoft certainly has a large target (and with saner software it might not be so easier to exploit), as will any other widely adopted software. As Zittrain says, “People rob banks because that’s where the money is”.

Does this mean that these projects should grind to a halt? Certainly not! However, I hope someone over there has thought long and hard about the security and privacy side of things. It isn’t listed in the Criticism section in OLPC’s Wikipedia page, but that either means it has been addressed sufficiently or it hasn’t yet occured to anyone to make any noise about it yet.

The other completly ignored aspect is how providing internet access won’t do a thing to help with other more important things. Sure, there’s a wealth of information available on the internet, and the education is valuable, but without clean water, medical supplies and political freedom to act on their new information, there really isn’t much one can do, other then realize just how bad they have it in comparison to the rest of the world.

Certainly some thing to think about.