Peter's Useful Crap

I just finished the 10-week Adult Powerskating & Hockey Skills Level 1 at Burnaby’s 8 Rinks. After 3 years of playing roller hockey, I figured it was time to get some actual lessons on the basics of hockey. Of course, there isn’t a one-to-one transfer of skating skills between ice hockey and roller hockey, but if you can get good at one of them, your game will certainly improve in the other.

Most sessions start at 6 or 7am on weekdays and they run once a week. My teammate and I signed up for the 8am Sunday session (there’s even a 9:30am session on Sundays), which was about $250. The weekday ones are slightly cheaper.

Each lesson was an hour and fifteen minutes. What we covered over the 10 weeks was:

-hockey stance
-forward stride (wide, smooth strides)
-skate edges
-tight turns
-forward crossovers (leaning on edges and weight transfer)
-stopping (edges)
-wrist shot
-slap shot
-backwards skating (posture)
-backwards crossovers
-pivots — transitioning from forward skating to backwards skating and vice versa

There were always very handy and game-applicable drills, with and without the puck. Also, some lessons ended with a 5 to 10 minute scrimmage.

There were two instructors and about 15 participants (although some weeks had as low as 6 people show up). Although most of the instruction and tips are geared towards the group as a whole, the instructors do a good job at helping people out who are having more trouble. The instructors are also open to suggestions for what should be given more focus or what needs more review. The pace seemed just about right, as there were a couple of review weeks sprinkled in. Of course, if you practise on your own in between lessons (if you’re in a league or you just go to a public skate / stick & puck or even roller blade outdoors), you’re likely to pick things up a lot faster.

The most expensive session time works out to about $25 per lesson, which is much more than a $5 stick and puck, but the instruction is well worth it! Also, the facilities at 8 Rinks are top notch.

I got a lot out of those lessons and hopefully the improvement will show when roller hockey starts up. I certainly recommend these lessons to beginner hockey players, rusty players, or simply those who want some ice time to brush up on the basics. There are more advanced sessions available as well. Check the 8 Rinks website for full details.

Small Potato, who I first discovered when he released 32 WordPress themes in 32 days, produces high quality WordPress themes. From following his blog on and off for the past year, I’ve determined that he is a talented designer who is honest and tells it like it is. I even use one of his earlier themes for my site about 7-Eleven Speak Out Wireless.

In addition to the many free themes that he has released, Small Potato has also started a premium Themes Club, which promises at least 12 themes a year, full support, and a license that says “as long as you don’t resell or give them out for free, you can use the club themes for yourself and for client projects.” Club members can also influence the direction of future themes. The best thing, of course, is that judging from his past work, these are and will be high quality themes that you can use and/or learn from.

Themes in the Themes Club so far include:

The Themes Club is $5 a year, but I have 50 free 1-year memberships to give out. They must be used by the end of 2008. Leave a comment on this post (that’s it!) and I will e-mail you the free sign-up code.

Update: No more memberships left!

I was recently house-sitting in downtown Vancouver near one of QUICKflick‘s few Vancouver locations and finally got to try it out after much anticipation. The QUICKflick concept is basically movie rental machines situated in third-party retail locations (such as 7-Elevens). Currently, the rental price is $1.99 for 12 hours, $2.99 for 24 hours, and $2.99 for every 24-hour period after the first day. Therefore, if you live near a QUICKflick location (unfortunately there are only a handful in Metro Vancouver), you can rent a movie for quite cheap.

I like the QUICKflick idea because it is much more immediate than an online rental service like Zip.ca and is cheaper and quicker than a traditional Rogers Video or Blockbuster. The trade-off, of course, is that it offers much less choice. Since I’m not a movie buff, that doesn’t really bother me. My ideal rental service is pay-per-download, but bandwidth and regulatory limitations prevent this from becoming a reality in the near future.

What I did was to first sign up for an account on the QUICKflick website (this is optional), which gave me two free rental codes. Then, on the website, I was able to see the availability of about 60 movies at the location near me. Most of the movies are new releases.

I then went to the 7-Eleven that had the QUICKflick machine. The machine has a user interface screen and has the physical DVDs on a rack behind a glass panel. Each DVD has a slot number. I swiped my credit card, entered one of my free codes, then entered the number corresponding to the DVD slot on the rack. The machine grabbed the movie, sort of like a vending machine, and delivered it to me through its slot.

I took the movie, walked home, watched it, and walked back to return it. I simply pressed the “Return” button on the machine, inserted the DVD, and the machine put the DVD back in the correct slot!

I haven’t really been renting movies at all lately, but with a convenient, economical service like this, I’ll be happy to rent from QUICKflick in the future. However, QUICKflick needs to add more Vancouver locations!

I recently reviewed the magicJack, which is a USB device that costs between $50 and $60. You can plug a phone into the magicJack and make unlimited calls within Canada and the US through your Internet connection. You can also receive unlimited calls (they give you an American phone number). Update: they now offer some Canadian area codes. See this list.The first year is included in the purchase price, and each subsequent year costs $20. It certainly isn’t free, but due to many reasons mentioned my initial review, it can be a useful and worthwhile device to get.

The magicJack can now (I think this is new as of February 2008) make international calls for a fee, with rates quite comparable to Skype’s fees. One thing that really bugs me about Skype is that it charges some painful connection fees, which really add up if you get someone’s answering machine or only talk for a few minutes.

My experience so far with the magicJack has been good, except that the person on the other end sometimes complains about echoing. The device has been reliable and I’ve experienced no “busy times” or downtimes. I’ve made some calls to Hong Kong with the magicJack with good results, and it is nice to be able to directly dial the destination number instead of first dialing the number of a secondary service provider.

For longer-time users of the magicJack, international calling has arrived and delivers quite well!

November 24, 2008: Due to the number of comments on this post, all discussion about the magicJack has been moved to the forum

As an amateur PHP coder using Windows, I’d been using WordPad, the Dreamweaver code editor, and *shudder* Notepad to write scripts. None of these programs are especially suited for the task. Notepad always seems to ruin line breaks and spacing, Dreamweaver isn’t free and is too bloated for the few code editing features it provides, and WordPad, while it is the most tolerable of the bunch, always leaves me wanting more.

Enter Notepad++, a free source code editor for Windows that packs all the right features.

Since I’m a bit of an amateur, I probably don’t appreciate a lot of its features. However, it remains simple for those who have simple needs, and has more powerful features if needed. It really impresses me that it suits its purpose so well — in the few months that I have used it, it has made the coding process so much smoother and easier.

Notepad++ also loads very quickly and takes up very little memory when running.

A few of its simple but essential features include:

• Line numbers (have you ever manually counted the lines in your code to see what an error message was referring to?)
• Colour coding and different formatting for different code elements
• Easy customization of hard and soft tabs
• Color and bold identification of the current code block that you are editing (so that you know whether you have forgotten to close things like “if” statements)
• Ability to open multiple files in tabs
• Ability to collapse code blocks