For those of you who don’t know, Mats Sundin is a former Toronto Maple Leaf and used to be one of the prime players in the league. Used to be. He didn’t resign with the Leafs this season, and hasn’t yet signed with any team, despite being offered the bloated sum of $10 million by several teams–a sum which will certainly not be seen now that the effects of the economic downturn are so crystal clear. Scott Burnside of ESPN.com wrote this juicy little tidbit, which pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter.

Is this the week Mats Sundin decides where he’s going to play?

Sweet mother of hockey pucks, we really hope so. We haven’t slept a wink since the start of the season, waiting for the big guy to bring down word from Mount Olympus on where he will suit up for the rest of the season. I just hope there’s enough space on the World Wide Web to fully honor Sundin’s decision when it happens. Just wondering whether the announcement will come in the form of smoke signals, a la the Vatican? No doubt network television programming will be interrupted to acknowledge the moment. Years from now, people will reminisce, “Where were you when Mats made his decision?” No doubt Sweden will be minting a new postage stamp to honor the event. We just hope the anticipation doesn’t cause hockey fans and writers to spontaneously combust before it happens.

Well, since I’m currently being kept awake by my upstairs neighbors (who have apparently conspired to keep me awake a lot lately), I guess an update is in order.

• Making progress on CocoNES. Finished the initial code for the NES core, minus the audio processing unit. I think I came up with a fairly slick solution that fits the code neatly into the Objective-C/Cocoa framework while still being able to cut out the overhead on some repetitive operations. More on that in another post.
• I have my second concert with Masterworks Chorus this weekend. I’ll be singing the solo movement 17 from Brahms’s Liebeslieder-Walzer. It’s a lovely tenor solo… too bad I’m not a tenor. I’ve managed to almost convince myself I could pass for a lyric baritone, though. At the right time of day. In any case, as long as my voice cooperates it should be fun. I enjoy singing it, it’s a lovely movement, it just hinges on how my G4 and A4 are feeling that day. If you HAPPEN to be in Omaha this Saturday, you should stop by the Strauss Center at UNO and take a listen.
• Hockey season has started. I’m making generous use of NHL Center Ice. Watched most of Minnesota’s season opener on Saturday (except for when I was fighting with my routers), and caught the end of another game last night. Minnesota’s looking really sharp this year, and Marion Gaborik hasn’t figured much into that, which is a really good thing, because I’m guessing that he will no longer be wearing a Wild uniform by Christmastime. Fuck him, if he wants to be greedy there are plenty of other great players out there who realize that Minnesota is the envy of the league as far as market and culture, maybe beaten out only by Detroit. Doug Risebrough did a bang-up job this summer bringing in Antti Miettenen (who had one goal in the opener and two last night) and Marc-Andre Bergeron.
• I’m finally working on some new music, a different setting of a poem that I already set in college and wasn’t really happy with the result of. I’m shopping around for a digital piano; Yamaha has a new line of home digital pianos that are really tempting. I need to work on my piano… I’d love to teach private lessons once we get a place of our own, but I won’t be able to do it fumbling around on the keyboard.
• World of Warcraft 3.0 was released yesterday. All sorts of cool new shit. I’m forcing myself to NOT get up and play it right now and throw my sleep schedule even more out of whack.

I think that’s about it.

It’s hockey season again.