Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

We're in the process of moving into a new home, just across town but it might as well be across the universe since the basic packing, moving, and refinishing work is the same. We're moving into an 18-year old house that has somewhat random wiring, including an intercom and home switchboard that required the use of powered phones that are about laptop sized and much less functional.

A few hundred feet of Cat 5, RG59 coax and some AWG 14 later, I had gotten the basic "communications board" down to the bare minimum: 2 12-port Cat 3 panels for phones, 6 RG6 feeds for digital cable sets and cable modem, and two spare phone jacks for the alarm system and for the telephone/doorbell interface (so when you ring the doorbell, the phones ring, and you can talk to the person at the door via the phone, rather than the hoot and holler method).

Cutting the wires and removing old home communications toys was easy. Finding out which lines ran where was more challenging, but it let me use my latest toy: a Resi-Toner TG400, a home-quality line ringer for the weekend cabling warrior. Identifying the twisty maze of beige phone cables, all alike, wasn't too hard. I popped the Resi-Toner into the wall jack I was trying to trace back. In "tone" mode, it sends a warbling tone down the line; I then retreated back to the basement where I had a regular telephone handset, substituting an alligator-clip cord for the regular telephone line cord. Ringing out the line then required little more than clipping onto successive leads from each line until I heard the phone warbling back at me.

Something so obvious has to have a catch. I decided to start with the room furthest from the utility closet, thinking that the trips up (and down) two flights of stairs would be decidedly less fun when I was on the last line than just starting out. But after testing all 14 pairs of telephone lines, I couldn't identify the first room I had chosen. Fine, I thought, I'll RTFM; and sure enough when you use the Resi-Toner's RJ-11 output, it only sends tones on the "line 2" pair (orange/orange-white if you're a telco geek). I dealt with that curveball with a bit of brute-force engineering -- I twisted all three lines together while testing them, just in case one of the jacks was cross-wired and had line 2 on the line 1 pair.

Expecting to breeze through a dozen room excursions, I went right back to my homebrew 3-ring circus. Tested all dirty dozen lines, again, this time checking for warble on all three pairs in parallel. No tones. Foiled again. As my grandmother would say, gornisht. Not just nothing, but you're tired and you have nothing to show for it.

Back to my starting point. Unplug the Resi-Toner. The short RJ-11 cable I'm using as the veritable head end of my testing network looks old -- probably something I salvaged from one of four previous house moves. I hold it up to the light -- sure enough -- it's only a two-conductor cable, carrying one line (and definitely not line 2). So my Resi-Toner is warbling, but as I later explain, "I had an infinite impedance problem". "Didn't plug it in" is more accurate, but lacks engineering authority.

New RJ-11 jumper cable from Resi-Toner to wall jack. Three pairs in parallel. I get warbles on the 2nd pair I check, wrap a nice line label around it, punch it down in my new distribution block, and write the room location on the wall next to the block. Quick sprint upstairs, move the Resi-Toner, downstairs, repeat. Once I spent the first hour figuring out why I wasn't ringing anything, I ring out the 11 phone jacks and a doorbell in about half an hour.

Next projects: wireless 802.11g distribution, new cable TV runs, and chasing down the home speaker distribution system that has a few cables that appear headed to nowhere in particular. And I get to do all of this while dealing with a work-move impedance problem.

An Open Letter to NJ Devils Defenseman Scott Niedermayer:

Let me start with something of a disclaimer: We are Scott Niedermayer fans through a set of coincidences. One of our favorite delis used to serve the "Niedermeyer burger", named after you. My son wore #27 for a year of travel hockey, because it was the only pre-numbered sweater that fit him. The number drove the fan, rather than the other way around. And one of those pro stock sticks that you broke during practice ended up in my shop, where it was outfitted with a new blade, and I scored three assists and a goal with it. We enjoy watching you play; we respect the (alternate) captain's letters on your sweater; you are, intentionally or not, part of our hockey family.

Don't leave our family.

The press has been all over your announcement that you want to test out the free agency market next week. Given that you're probably looking at a serious cut in pay no matter where you play, that's fair. But I believe it is time for some equally serious leadership in hockey, starting with the owners and continuing with the players, in ensuring that the free agency free-for-all doesn't hit the "undo" button on some of the structure put in place by the new collective bargaining agreement.

Free agency is good for the players in that it prevents them from being locked into one team's finances for an entire career. Market forces are good at establishing market pricing. However, the current economic situation of the NHL, combined with the new salary cap, means that the market forces are effectively constrained for a few years. There are supply side economic forces at work in the NHL in that the cost of goods has been limited by laywers.

So where's the upside? What's this have to do with leadership? It's quite simple: Build a fan base. Be loyal, and bring pride and joy (and the Stanley Cup) back to the Meadowlands, and this will translate into money. The new economics of hockey tie the salary cap to league revenues. Hockey doesn't have a supply problem; it has a demand problem. Create demand through leadership -- the leadership that put the "C" on your sweater in the absense of Scott Stevens, coupled with creating (and demanding) loyalty, hard work, and copious amounts of fun. I've always thought that's why we played hockey, as kids or adults.

So, New Jersey needs the Nieds. Simple. Stay for the next season, and enjoy the rules changes that will benefit a fast skating team like the Devils. Feed the puck to Elias, Gomez, Gionta, and hopefully Zach Parise, and watch the statistics pile up. Use your own speed (for those not in the know, Scott Niedermayer has won the "fastest skater" competition at the All Star Game more than once) and create excitement. And fans. And loyalty. And league revenues.

It's a virtuous circle, to be sure, but it has to start with one or a few virtuous acts. Stay in New Jersey. I'll even return your broken Easton stick to you.

My first attempt at broadcasting a sporting event occured in January 1984. It was the dead of winter break at Princeton, and the entire WPRB-FM student sports staff was skiing, swimming, or anywhere other than the basketball cage. I volunteered to do color commentary, thinking "How hard could this be?"

Sportscasting is hard work. Very hard. As the first half wound down, I realized I hadn't totalled up statistics for the halftime break. There weren't enough commercials to play to buy computation time, so the halftime scoring report was the slowest on record, calculated in real time. Most of my color commentary consisted of comments like "He's got great jumping ability" and "Another rebound for the Princeton center." I didn't quite devolve to the level of "Alan is really tall, and he's improving in English class," but it was close. I was reduced to talking about a guy that sat near me in freshman literature. Friends teased me that my microphone must have broken because I didn't use it.

Twenty-one years, several blogs, two books, and a press pass for the Oakland Athletics-Seattle Mariners game later, I was determined to make my second run at the sports beat. My sole problem was finding a story line. Following Seattle on the road trip were roughly two dozen Japanese media people, some of whom blogged the game from the row in front of me. Ichiro has a posse, and he was clearly the story for the gaggle of reporters. It helped that he deposited the second pitch of the game over the center field wall, silencing the quarter-full Oakland Coliseum. Ichiro ended up going 3-for-4, adding two singles -- one pulled to right, one punched over the shortstop's head, and reaching on a fielder's choice when he grounded right back to the pitcher.

Ichiro wasn't the headline story, though. My story was my own fault. In the second inning, with a runner on first, Brett Boone fired a frozen rope. Dan Johnson, Oakland's first baseman, caught the line drive, turned and stepped back on first to double up the runner, an unassisted double play. I did what any baseball fan would do, witnessing an outstanding defensive play: I cheered.

My bad. Sometimes having nothing to say is better than breaking the code of professionalism. The press pass clearly says "No autographs", but it doesn't need to warn "No stupidity". The looks I received from the other writers in the box were a pretty clear indication that my days as a beat writer were definitely more beat and less writer.

I learned a few things from my trip to the press perch:

• Scoring the game affects players' paychecks. Not when we score the game as amateurs, and lose interest after spending an entire inning in line for an Atomic Hot sausage (highly recommended), but when the official scorer passes judgement on passed balls, wild pitches, hits and errors. There is a real person who does this. I took the elevator up with him. (That was cool). A player with incentive clauses depends on the game being scored fairly; a few too many errors and you don't win a Gold Glove. There is a written admonishment not to petition the scorer on the wall of the press box. I didn't botch that one (even though I thought the wild pitch scored in the bottom of the 4th was a passed ball by the Seattle catcher).
• Brett Boone's dad was in the house for his son's rifle shot to first. Even professional athletes fail to make the desired play when their dads are looking. But nobody yelled at Boone, he just ran back to the dugout. A lesson for the parents of young athletes.
• The press box is filled with amazing little statistics sheets, covering everything from how each batter does in various situations (2 outs, less than 2 outs, runners on base) to how the team defends those situations. Color commentary is much easier when you have an array of statistics to choose from.
• Even professional sports writers use mlb.com for statistics, background and a real time game flow. I was proud (again) to be part of Sun's effort with Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the engineers behind the web site. After that evening, I don't think MLBAM will admit my affiliation.

So went my first -- and probably last -- sojourn to the press box. It was the shortest tenure in the fraternity on record, lasting three innings with one error. As for my other story, well, Ichiro is really tall and his English is improving.

Since this morning's early missive about a potential NHL deal, I've been looking for signs. Got one as I stopped for coffee on the way home from the city. Another guy, a rink kind of guy, sitting in the corner of the Dunkin' Donuts, reading the newspaper. I asked him if he was ready to go back to work, with pride and joy once again. He had no idea what I was talking about. I told him there was an NHL deal coming, imminently, I could feel it in my bones. He said he'd check it out, after his coffee.

He's not a player. He's a Zamboni driver. He cuts the ice at South Mountain Arena, the NJ Devils practice facility. And his life has been impacted by the labor problems with the NHL. Emphasis here on "has". Past tense.

There will be hockey in North America in 2005-2006.

The NHL and the Player's Association reached a deal, announced in the last hour.

It's about time. For the past year, the community of professional hockey has been neglected. Not just the players who lost out on roughly a billion (yes, billion) dollars of salary, but the Zamboni drivers, beer guys, concession stand cooks, and parking lot attendants.

Signatures, ratifications, publicity and final final still need to happen, but the labor penalty clock is ticking down. Hockey is back at full strength.

How do you get information when there's no information readily available? I'm an amateur writer; I have no file of names and addresses ready to comment on any and every subject. Sometimes you have to infer information from what you (or others) see. I'm sitting in the Starbucks on 7th Avenue and 49th Street in Manhattan at this very moment, just after 7:00am in the morning, and there are a dozen butts perched in the window of a 2nd floor conference room in the building across the street. Morning call? Deal going down? Someone trying to move a big block of stock today? Earnings (a number of tech companies are reporting today)? The conclave in the fishbowl conference room disbands within 10 minutes -- probably nothing market moving.

What's of more interest to me is what might be happening just a little further across midtown at the NHL headquarters. League officials have denied a deal is done and that's certainly all the public news available. But that doesn't stop me from asking the guy who knows some guys if the other interested parties are working a deal. My guy is convinced there's a deal coming. For the sake of hockey fans everywhere, I hope he's right. While it's amusing to be an author of butt stories, it's more entertaining to read auteur du but stories in the French Candaian sports pages.

Here's hoping that everyone lines up for a handshake after doin' a deal.