[This post is a shameless attempt to keep GFMorris.net from having only Whiskerino photos. But I also wanted to spend more than 255 characters on each of these.]

Link the first: Bemidji State and WCHA announce scheduling agreement:

Bemidji State hopes to play an annual 12-game, non-conference schedule against members of the WCHA with an even split of home and road contests. However, no specific details regarding the scheduling agreement have been finalized at this time.

“The WCHA congratulates the City of Bemidji and Bemidji State University on their commitment to build a new ice hockey facility,” WCHA officials said in a statement released Friday. “[The WCHA] looks forward to helping showcase the sport at the highest level to the citizens of Bemidji, Minn.”

[Emphasis mine.]

That’s the key thing: BSU gets WCHA home games. They’ve had some, but not enough.

For those who don’t know: BSU’s current conference is that of my alma mater, Alabama-Huntsville. Our league has a team in northern Minnesota [BSU], north Alabama, Detroit, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Ummmmm … we’re not exactly centrally located. The Detroit team folds at the end of the season, meaning that no team is within an afternoon’s drive of the other. [You could do Det-Pitt okay, or Det-Niagara if you went through Canada.] The WCHA, rather, has several teams in the state of Minnesota, plus North Dakota [a few hours from Bemidji], Wisconsin, Michigan Tech, two schools on the Front Range, and Alaska. Only the last three would be fly dates for Bemidji, whereas all four of our schools are for them.

Why not just accept them into the WCHA formally? Well, the WCHA doesn’t want to kill our league, College Hockey America, because it’s the only easy place for western schools to expand into. Of course, being a geographic hodgepodge has made it hard for teams to stick in the league because of the travel costs. That’s a function of western collegiate hockey, though; when “west” starts somewhere around Harrisburg, PA, yeah, you’ve got bigger geographic problems in the west.

I think the only way for the CHA to be a viable conference is for the WCHA and the CCHA to sign scheduling agreements with all our member schools. Bemidji has been a natural fit for WCHA schools because of proximity. If the two big western conferences are serious about western expansion, well, they’ve got to give us games with their teams in our barns to make us viable. Why does that make us viable? It’s not so much us as other teams that might come up—you’ll get a lot more push to go varsity at Penn State, or Illinois, or whoever if you know you can get Michigan or Wisconsin or Denver to come to your barn every so often.

---

Link the second: Merlin Mann’s feeling that .Mac is a future sleeping giant:

Think about it: a new lightweight laptop with a small hard drive; an iPhone that’s getting dangerously close to becoming a remote for your home and life; an Apple TV that doesn’t even require a computer; an iPod Touch that (rather mysteriously) now needs your credit card info and a login to get new apps onto the device. Then, fold in a couple big spoonfuls of the company’s clearly increasing interest in becoming the people who sell or rent you the entertainment media that goes on all the machines you bought from them. I dunno.

I suppose it’s my (still congealing) contention that right now, Apple deliberately keeps .Mac a dim-witted, sleeping giant. It’s so unsexy, broken, and behind-the-times right now as to seem like a product out of a less forward-thinking company.

But what happens when that giant wakes up, stretches, and then starts standing in the middle of every single product Apple (and its partners) have to sell? It’s so mind-boggling to consider the implications, especially given that it stands as one of the few persuasive explanations for why such a smart company would stay so quiet for so long about allowing a premium pay service go to seed this badly.

I think something is up. Big time.

I think it’s wishcasting, but that’s because I’m condition to think that .Mac is always going to disappoint us. It could totally rock, but it never seems to rock. [I think it just solidifies the fact that Apple is a hardware company first and foremost; running this service is out of its core competency.]

---

Link the third: Merlin on the Amazon Gift Organizer:

Now, the cool part of all this — even if you don’t use Amazon very much — is that Amazon.com is friggin huge. Which means that they (or their “Marketplace” partners) carry a ridiculously high percentage of the purchasable, shippable items available in the consumer universe. So, if you start using the Gift Organizer today — even for stuff you have no intention of buying from Amazon — your life is going to be much easier the next time a gift-giving occasion rolls around; you’ve capitalized on several months of passive, half-assed attention to actually do something useful.

Absofuckinlutely.

[And not just because he used the term "Amazon Prime dork", because ... hello. I am one.]