Washington Capitals record in the past four games: 4-0
Washington Capitals record in the past ten games: 4-4-2

That is what in the business of hockey you call “streaky”.

When your recent winning streak includes wins over Dallas (16-8 at the time, 19-9 now) and Eastern conference leading Buffalo (20-3-2 then, 21-4-2 now), you can feel pretty good about yourself. Being only one point out of the playoffs doesn’t hurt either.

On the other hand, the East is a beast this year. Only Florida and Philadelphia are below .500. Everyone else is in the thick of the playoff hunt. Another six game slide would really hurt the Caps’ playoff chances. By comparison in the West, seven of the fifteen teams are below .500 (i.e. everyone not currently in a playoff spot). Dallas, at ten games over .500 is 3rd in the Pacific Division behind Anaheim (+18) and San Jose (+12).

Finally, it’s always nice to be looking down on the Penguins in the standings. But their not far behind. Their 26 points puts them in 13th place in the East, but they’re at .500 (11-11-4) and only five points out of a playoff spot. Next Monday’s game should be a good one. It’s even on national TV in HD!

Most of the technical blogs I read are individual blogs (like this one). Yet, most of the political blogs I read are multi-user. Typically, there is a primary poster – such as Josh Marshal from Talking Points Memo. But TPM has at least four other bloggers on their home page (Paul Kiel, David Kurtz, Greg Sargent, Justin Rood). I wonder why these two blogging communities are so different?

With the real and serious problem we face in this country – the civil war in Iraq, the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, rebuilding New Orleans, etc. - it boggles the mind that we waste any time at all on faux controversies such as the so-called “War on Christmas”. Getting Wal-Mart to use “Christmas” instead of “Holiday” in their marketing seems like a dubious accomplishment at best.

But where I rail against such stupidity, my brilliant wife writes poetry. One of Julie’s conservative friends sent her an insipid poem that’s been making the rounds on the Internet called “How The ‘Left’ Stole Christmas”. I must have missed Wolf Blitzer changing his name to “Wolf Blitzen” or the Senate passing legislation to take away Christian’s faith and forbid them to speak of salvation and grace.

My response would have simply been “Read the First Amendment, idiot!”. My wife, however, wrote a poem of her own in response. Check it out.

My wife wanted snow, and main Microsoft campus got it. Not much – less than an inch by my measurement – but enough to snarl traffic getting off campus. Jules and I decided it would make more sense for me to grab dinner in the campus cafe and wait out some of the crowds rather than brave the snow and traffic on a nearly empty tank of gas.

Of course, I don’t work on campus any more. My office is way down in Issaquah. Unluckily for me, I had a meeting on main campus today. It was a great meeting – talking about my project with some field architects. But I didn’t expect to get trapped on campus by snow or I would have blown it off. Next time, I need a meeting room with windows!

Update: It took me only 45 minutes to get home, which is actually fairly typical for me to get home from main campus in the evening. There must have been an accident on 520 because when I crossed the freeway by campus, it was bumper-to-bumper as far as I could see in both directions. But when I passed the 520 exit by my house, there was only a trickle of cars coming off it. The side streets were surprisingly empty. Maybe everyone was afraid they’d be impassible with snow? Takes more than an inch of snow to stop me and my 4WD Chevy Blazer.

As per Major Nelson’s blog, the XBL Video Marketplace went live yesterday. Being off work yesterday (vacation time: use it or lose it), I fired up the ol’ 360 to have a look see for myself. V for Vendetta in HD? Cool. 6GB? Not so cool. Guess I’ll have to blow away some of the demos that I’m not playing in order to make space.

The amount of HD space needed for HD movies begs the question, why isn’t Video Marketplace available for PC? My 20GB of Xbox HD space is taken up with game demos and downloads. But my home PC(s) can spare that kind of space. I’d much rather download the content to my PC then stream it across my home network to the 360 when I want to watch it. Not sure how DRM (I assume the content uses WM DRM) impacts network streaming, but I would guess that’s a solvable problem.

While I’m talking about DRM, why do I have to pay to download DRMed rental content? Shouldn’t I pay when it’s time to actually watch the content? I understand having a time limit (24 hours) to finish watching content I rented, but why is there a time limit (14 days) to start watching it? Once it’s downloaded it, I’m no longer using XBL resources, so why put any limit on it at all?

The pricing model seems pretty much in line with iTunes and/or Blockbuster. $2 to own a TV show, $3 to rent a “classic” movie, $4 to rent a new release movie, with a 50% markup for HD content ($3/$4.50/$6). While these prices are pretty typical, where’s the all-you-can-watch subscription plan? The all-you-can-listen model is one of the key values of Zune or PlaysForSure services like Napster and Urge not to mention NetFlix. I’d probably scrap my premium channel cable plan if I could get an unlimited subscription to XBL Video Marketplace.

I’d also like to see more content pricing tiers. Owning a 45 minute CSI for $2 seems pretty fair. But $2 for an 11 minute Space Ghost Coast to Coast seems overpriced. And while I’m making requests, how about making it easy to buy an entire season of a given show – both from a pricing perspective (i.e. a discount for buying an entire season) as well as a user experience perspective (i.e. one click to buy the whole season).

So all in all, a pretty cool service with some room for improvement. The availability of significant amounts of good HD content is a MAJOR winner for this service and a great foundation to build on. Like all things XBL related, I assume Video Marketplace will evolve over time. Can’t wait to see how it goes.