Waaaaaah...

"I was looking for the puck, the ref was right there and he made a great call. Obviously the puck was free. You could see it on the replay. Perry and I just whacked away and it went in."

Backstrom thought the goal should have been disallowed.

"I watched the replay and I was sure it was under me and nobody saw the puck," he said. "Of course, you're going to get the puck out from a goalie if you slash at it with your sticks.

"That's a bad goal and we lose a game on that," added Backstrom, who stopped 32 shots.

Such a shame for a great rookie goalie to go out and cry about losing one game. He got demolished by his own player and was just lying on his back. If he wants to claim that he stopped it, well, it would have just been pure luck as he was out of the play. Penner came up, the puck was still free, and he put it into the back of the net.

A great hockey game, and one of what I hope will be many playoff wins this season. I've got tickets for Ducks home game 3 (next Thursday), but personally, I'm hoping it doesn't even get that far. Win tomorrow and then sweep the two in Minnesota. Go to the second round, and avoid playing any extra games with the crybaby Wild.

URL: ESPN.com - NHL - Penner's goal with 5:20 left gives Ducks 1-0 series lead

So all the buzz in the past week has been about the new-fangled AppleTV. A nifty little device which you hook up to your TV and use to play any videos you have in your iTunes. For being simple and easy to use, the AppleTV gets the job done. It has a slick interface, is easy to setup - just plug and play, and it apparently streams videos very well over any sort of wireless connection.

However, I just don't get what all the buzz is about. Sure, all the Apple fan boys out there love anything Steve Jobs announces, but there's been products that do exactly what this device does on the market for years, and they have more features.

The two main complaints I've heard are that 1) it only plays videos and music loaded in your iTunes (a program I refuse to use) and 2) it doesn't play anything in true high-def (though there are rumors that it will be updated with a new firmware enabling this at a later date).

Currently, I have a D-Link MediaLounge (DSM520). You plug it into your TV via a myriad of cabling options (I use HDMI - I believe the AppleTV's best output option is composite cables - which it doesn't even give you - an added expense) and then you plug in your MediaLounge to your network or set it up to play wirelessly. Your MediaLounge will connect to any computer on your network that is setup as a media hub or you can run their software and pick and choose what directories you want to share. So, for example, I just pointed it to my video directory and my music directory (you can also browse pictures).

The menu system is easy to navigate on the MediaLounge and it uses HDMI to play video back in true HD. Using a standard for encoding videos, I have moved a lot of my TV shows on DVD over to my server and now, with the MediaLounge, I can instantly call up any episode at any time. Likewise, any movie I decide to put on my server can also be called up. Now, there are some downsides to the MediaLounge - you can't stop a video and resume later (you can pause it though). Browsing directories can be tedious, but using an intelligent naming structure, it's not the hardest thing in the world. But overall, I'm very impressed with the system and it does a great job of playing movies in HD over the network and onto my 60" TV.

The AppleTV on the other hand, not so much. From the reports that have been trickling out there, the playback of supposed "HD" movies and TV shows you can download from iTunes don't play back on HDTVs at the quality one would expect. Plus, again, you're limited to iTunes movies and music. With the MediaLounge, I can play almost any file format. WMV, AVI, DivX, XviD, MPEG, etc. And while Apple has recently embraced DRM free music, I've never been bound by any DRM and can easily play any MP3 I want over the MediaLounge.

But what really got me started on this rant is watching the TV commercial for the AppleTV last night. They show the movie "School of Rock" playing on an Apple computer and then on an iPod and then on the TV through the AppleTV. The commercial is pretty slick and it looks amazing on my HDTV. However, should you download School of Rock on iTunes, you're not going to get the same 1080i pristine video that I got through cable of the "School of Rock." Instead, you're going to get a compressed, blocky video via iTunes and your AppleTV. Truth in advertising sure would be nice.

Oh yeah, that 8 core Mac Pro looks sweet.

URL: Apple - Apple TV