Stephen Kennedy's Rants

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I think my cabin fever will start to dissipate now! My golf club (Elbow Springs) opened yesterday for play at 9:00 AM on regular greens! For the first time in a couple of years, I didn’t have a chance to play opening day, but I did head out yesterday, put my things in my locker and hit the range! Two buckets of balls and I feel good today. Got a chance to try the Nike Driver I purchased but had considered taking back. Hmmm looks like this new Sasquatch Sumo is staying in the bag regardless of how ugly it is! I will write a fuller review later.

Hopefully I will get my 5^th round for 2007 in this coming Sunday, the forecast is calling for nice weather all weekend. 5^th because I got four rounds in during our trip to Maui in January!

Stephen

Many of you may know that I now work from home most of the time. There are some advantages to this but as I am finding out there are some disadvantages! Most recently I think I have been suffering from Cabin Fever! The weather has been crappy here (clouds and snow for the last several weeks) and I find that I while I work from home I don’t go out very often. I am hoping that this will change soon with my golf club opening, but even that has been late this year due to weather!

This past weekend I decided that I didn’t want to spend a whole bunch of time sitting at my computer and basically avoided it for most of the weekend. But with the long weekend and the bad weather, I found myself complaining that there was nothing to do. I istened to all of my podcasts, watched the Masters and finally found myself playing on the Xbox 360 for about 8 hours!

Hopefully things will change soon. The weather appears to be getting a little better and Elbow Springs may open tomorrow morning! Hopefully today’s warm weather will dry it out a little. At least it looks positive for the weekend. I am going stir crazy as I have a new driver to test out and decide if I want to keep or return it to the store.

Soccer season will soon be upon us too and I’ll be able to get out and coach a little and be in the sun. Maybe the long cold winter is finally over!

S

While I was able to view most of my pictures taken with my Canon Digital Rebel XT on my Vista PC’s the built in Windows Vista apps (Windows Photo Gallery) could not open the Canon Raw Files (CR2). Today I noticed during my daily Vista Driver check that the Canon software and drivers are finally available for Windows Vista. They have updated the Eos Utility, Digital Photo Professional, a driver, Zoom Browser and finally a Vista Codec for Raw files..

If you are a Canon camera user and have Vista you might want to head to www.canon.com and see if the drivers for your camera and Vista have been loaded

Stephen

In case of any of the parents that I coached last year are reading this blog, I wanted to let you know that I made decision as to where I will be registering Breanna and Jaxin for soccer this season. You won’t see me on the sidelines for a Titan’s team this year.

I found the decision was very difficult. Both McKenzie United and Titans were advertising like crazy in the community and I checked out both web sites before I made my decision.

If you don’t know the story of the whole mess this is what has happened over the last couple of years.

Our kids were always registered in the McKenzie United club; they played there for several years. A few years ago there was an issue between MU and the McKenzie Lake Community Association that actual got very ugly and had lawyers involved. Then for outdoor soccer last year a new Club stated advertising. Titans Soccer as it turned out was the merger between McKenzie United and Rockies Soccer from the MIdnapore Area. They were forming a larger soccer club. I registered the kids in that program because it looked promising. As usual I ended up coaching both Breanna ‘s U10 Girls C team in the CMSA and Jaxin’s U6 team in the community intramural league. Titan’s had an excellent program with the backing of National Sports Development , but there was a technical panel made up for Titans of both MU and Rockies volunteers. Everything seemed to be fine and we finished the season out, but I had registered my girl’s team in the fall cup so we had a few games in September. Around that time I started seeing signs advertising indoor soccer for MU! There were a few issues I started to hear about in June and July and our U10 Coordinator left mid season. Now it was getting clear. It looked that the MU folks didn’t like the direction that Titans was going with NSD and left and restarted the MU Club.

Since the kids are too busy over the winter with other activities I wasn’t involved with indoor soccer at all.

Come the spring and the signs had gone up for outdoor registration. Again there were MU signs and Titans signs. As I indicated earlier I checked both of the websites out and saw who the coordinators were. I called Titans’ office at NSD and asked to speak to Shawna my last coordinator. Apparently she was no longer there. I then looked up both coordinators and sent them off emails why I should register my kids with their programs. The MU coordinator got back to me shortly indicating that he was out of town but that the kids would have fun with any program but that he would call me upon my return. Titans’ coordinator also got back to me saying that they would like to have me there and that my email would be forwarded to the President of the club to respond to more. I believe that this was on a Tuesday.

Sunday rolled around and I received a call from the MU coordinator and he explained some of the happenings and how their program was being run by volunteers for the kids and was staying away from the almost business model of the Titans and the NSD program. To date I have still not yet heard from the president of Titans.

Another factor in my decision was looking at the fields that were listed by Titans for practices and home games. Virtually all of the fields listed are on the other side of the river for us and I really don’t want to have to deal with traffic getting over the river. MU has said that they are not sure what fields they will have but a majority of them will be east of the bow river.

So the kids are registered with MU and as usual I have volunteered to coach for either or both teams.

I guess we will have to see if my decision was right at the end of the year. After attending the first evaluation for U10 girls, I see that there were none of the girls that I coached last year. While it doesn’t mean that they were not registered and there are none, they just weren’t there. At least with Calgary Minor Soccer there are no boundaries for the city. Any player can play for any community with the need for a release. If things don’t go over well this season, I can always register Breanna with Celtic or Titans next year.

To those girls (and U6s) that coached last year, if we don’t see you this season, best wishes and good luck with your programs. I think that what could have been a very good program got ruined by adults behaving badly!

Stephen

Just a reminder that the Calgary Centre of RASC is holding a public star night tomorrow, March 24^th at the west end of Fish Creek Park. The event starts at 7:00 PM and runs till 10:00, and goes clear or cloudy. Several members will have telescopes set up to see our special guest, the planet Saturn, (Weather permitting) and there will be games for kids, informative booths and presentations. For more information and maps to the location please visit the RASC Calgary website at
http://calgary.rasc.ca

You can also read more about the event in my earlier post about it, just click on the Astronomy category.

Stephen