First Georgetown knocks off Duke 87-84

Then the Caps upset the league leading Carolina Hurricanes 5-2 and extend their winning streak to four games.

Read all about it here. 

Georgetown, my alma mater, just stunned the Duke Blue Devils 87-84.  What a great game.  Read all about it here 

As predicted,a Southeast division team the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup last night over the Edmonton Oilers, in another 7 game series thriller. Congratulations to Peter Karmanos and the entire Carolina organization – who are this years’ best in the NHL.

 I am surprised and disappointed in the Washington Post editors’ decision to not send their great hockey writers and columnists to cover the game. A paper as well-respected as the Post should be able to provide more coverage of the Stanley Cup finals than simply running an AP story on their front page. 

This email was waiting for me in my inbox this morning.  It reinforces my belief that one of the best things about being part of a sports team in Washington, DC is the fans

Ted:

My nine-year old son, Jake, is a hockey fanatic.  He’s a Squirt A goalie at Montgomery Youth Hockey and follows the Caps religiously.  Last night, we made him go to bed after the 2nd period, which he complained about bitterly.  About three hours later, he got hit with the stomach flu and was in the bathroom – it was ugly.  Literally in between bouts of having his head in the bowl, he asked on question: "Did the Caps win?"  Dad: "Yes, Jake, 4-3 in a shoot out."  Jake: "Nice. Did Ovechkin score again?" Dad: "Yes Jake, in the shoot out."  Answer: "Nice.  Uh-oh …" (Head back in bowl).   With fans like that, you can’t lose!  Great win last night.    Best regards, (name withheld)

You may have seem some of the media coverage about subpoenas that the Department of Justice sent to Google and other major Internet search companies last fall. 

 Because some of the initial media reports indicated that AOL might have complied with that subpoena, I want to set the record straight.  To be clear, AOL did not give the Department of Justice what it asked for in its subpoena.  We instead provided them with a generic list of aggregate and anonymous search terms.  That list did not include actual search results nor any other information about who conducted the search or when or where it took place. 

That same type of anonymous search data is commonly used by AOL and every other major search engine for features like our "Hot Searches" box and "top searches" features, and there are absolutely no privacy implications with sharing it.  Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch has actually created a whole page of all of the public places you can find that same type of data.  What People Search For – Most Popular Keywords   In summary, it’s not hard to find, and it’s not private.

We deeply value our users’ privacy, and we didn’t — and wouldn’t — comply with a subpoena that demanded that type of broad and private information about them. 

Every year millions of Americans make a New Year’s resolution to lose a few pounds.  This year, AOL and Good Morning America have teamed up to make it just a little bit easier for everyone to keep that resolution with "America Takes it Off," a campaign that offers diet and exercise tips, support and advice from experts and other members of the online community.  So far, the campaign has been a tremendous success.  Over 100,000 people have signed up and pledged to lose over 4 million pounds.  To put that in perspective, in weight (not calories), that works out to more than 400 million twinkies, or more than ten million large bags of potato chips.  It is also a great example of the power the internet has to bring people together and to improve their lives.

Check out this video of a Great American Workout session held in Times Square.

I was flipping through an old magazine and came across and article on the genesis of one of my favorite phrases: "It is what it is."   Recently I gave some t-shirts to friends with the same phrase on it, a quote from one of my favorite authors, Jack Kerouac, who once reportedly defended his bad behavior with a simple, "It is what it is, and I am what I am". 

 Kerouac was actually a close friend of my family, and he grew up in the same town as my parents in Lowell, Massachusetts.  In high school, my mother’s brother and cousin were two of Kerouac’s best friends, and after both of them died in World War II, he memorialized them with mentions in "The Town and the City", a book about Lowell.  Later in life, he came back to Lowell and became close friends with another uncle and married Stella Sampas, another of my mother’s cousins.    If you’ve never read Kerouac’s "On the Road", I can only say that it’s one of those books that can change your life.  It did mine

Check out this amazing goal by Alex Ovechkin 

Despite a growing confidence in the online medium, I’m still amazed by the number of people who think it’s safer to keep something in the real world — whether family photos, tax documents, or music CDs — than to preserve it online. My father, for example, always kept cash in his house, because he trusted those green pieces of paper more than his credit card or bank account.

Despite a growing confidence in the online medium, I’m still amazed by the number of people who think it’s safer to keep something in the real world — whether family photos, tax documents, or music CDs — than to preserve it online.  My father, for example, always kept cash in his house, because he trusted those green pieces of paper more than his credit card or bank account.  In reality, however, the safest place to store your family’s important documents — whether photos, papers, music, or financial statements — is through a secure online data storage solution.  Even keeping it on your hard drive or burning it to a CD raises physical risks like damage or loss from theft, fire, hackers, or viruses.  Of equal concern, an article in PC World last week pointed out that a burned CD only has a "relatively short lifetime of between two to five years" before it begins to degrade.  Keeping your photos on a secure server such as AOL, XDrive or Google, however, ensures that they will last forever. A lot of people have talked about the power of broadband to create an "always-on" world, with instant access to information.  I think of equal importance is the ability of broadband to create an "always-there" world where all of your e-mails, photos, songs, and documents are available from any computer at any time.  The real challenge will be convincing consumers to shift their thinking from the misperception of physical "solidity" to the new reality of very permanent, but less solid, online storage.

During the hockey season I write a regular column called "The Owner’s Corner" for the Washington Capitals website.  Click here to read the latest edition.