LTS

You should shop at AJ's Beer Warehouse.. on Clay Road in Henrietta. Huge cold beer selection, better service, and better prices that Beers of the World. I think you are thinking of World of Beer. That's a bar with a lot of beer.. one in Syracuse too. Beers of the World is a beer store in Rochester. It has history but in my opinion has been surpassed by many other bottle shops in the area. It's part of Angotti Beverage which is also in Batavia. That said... I've heard nice things about World of Beer.

It's tough. I saw the news this morning and it hit me pretty good. In years past it would have hit me harder but I've grown away from football quite a bit and a lot of it started when Van retired. It had nothing to do with him retiring mind you, but being 17-21 during a run of 4 straight Super Bowl losses really changed my outlook on sports and football especially. That said, his calls are my primary memories. I worked in a sporting goods store (Laux) through high school into college. I routinely worked Sundays and as such we always had the radio tuned to the game. As would be expected around those great years there were few to no customers traveling the malls during a Bills game. There was no traffic, people were home. So I had plenty of time to dust the shelves, rearrange inventory and listen to Van Miller paint the picture of what was happening on the field. Thought the great Houston game was not on television the crowds were still quite light. I suspect people still held out hope and were listening at home. As half-time hit and it was apparent the Bills were going to lose the foot traffic in the mall picked up volume. In the days of no cell phones word didn't travel as fast but I remember the air in the store as the Bills began scoring. It seemed that someone was always running out into the mall and yelling they scored. Every time that happened more and more people seemed to appear. Being situated right inside the mall entrance we also were a first stop for many shoppers. Perhaps they were just checking in to see how the game was going. By the end of the game the store was loaded with people. The atmosphere was unbelievable and the radio was cranked. All we had were each other and Van Miller to call the game. That's what I'll remember. There are few left these days. The regional broadcaster is being phased out as the national contracts are available to be streamed across any screen at any time. There are a lot of great play by play announcers who do those national games but none of them are tuned to deliver a message to a particular geographic area. They are stripped of their fandom and their emotions are engineered to deliver excitement regardless of the teams playing. Announcers like Van Miller had an entire fan base flowing through them. He lived in our community and channeled that energy into his calls. That's nothing any national voice could ever capture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSgfGKhYKu8

I would also scratch Buffalo Trace from the list purely on the "underrated" tag. People I know speak rather highly of it. I need to branch out more. :) Evan Williams is on my list. I should actually write these down or at least pull up this thread when I am at a liquor store.

There are quite a few pepper beers and none of them are Ed' Cave Creek Chili beer. There are much better ways of making them than slapping a pepper in a bottle. Ballast Point Habanero Sculpin is an IPA. Horsehead Hot Jala-heim was already mentioned. Rogue does make on. You'll find ancho chillies in quite a few beers as well. But that's only a hint of spice. There are also beers that use black pepper (many times in a saison). You could get Ghost Face Killah. That's a ghost pepper beer. Not sure how the beer is.. I use ghost pepper sauce sparingly at times but drinking a beer tainted with it would not be for me.

Cigar City has no true distributor in Rochester. We see Jai Alai from them every once in awhile when the distributorship that is owned by the people who own AJ's Beer Warehouse go on a run downstate and bring some up here. I don't think anything else sees wide distribution and certainly not in this area.

Saw Wooten play on the SMV Thunder tour stop at Jazz fest a few years ago. Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, Victor Wooten.. one stage... no words to describe that awesomeness. And yea.. George put on a helluva show.

Thanks for pointing it out. It was a great read. Always some interesting things that come out in those.

Totally unplanned but saw George Clinton and Parliament last night in Rochester. Great time.. great music, entertaining crowd to say the least. $5 ticket. Worth it. Victor Wooten plays in a few weeks but I'll be out of town. sigh.

I hit'em up.

It's a horrible decision. I would have considered going but I have a pre-existing commitment to help run the championship games for a youth baseball tournament. So, no chance of me driving in from Rochester. However, it'd be nice to some of the game. Oh well.. I guess I will have to go out with my wife instead.

We don't need a law for this. We need consumers and constituents to uphold their responsibility. Fans make the owners rich. Fans also elect public officials. If enough people want to support a team and enough people keep electing officials who will cater to the whims of these teams then it should continue to happen. I like to posit this test to people. What happened on the last Game of Thrones episode (or insert some other popular show, or Sabres prospect camp)? Now, what happened at your last town government meeting, state government meeting, etc.? Which are you better equipped to answer? I'll hazard a guess that television and the Sabres win out handily and until that's not the case...

Even in his avatar I swear RJ looks angrier than he did a week ago.

Jack announced his number... It is...

Sure, I think you can say they'd be hungrier going forward, but even just missing should keep them hungry and by just missing they do have a shot at the top 3 in the draft. Unless this team somehow is near the top of the league near the trade deadline there's little chance Murray is buying. This entire season is tweak mode.

Semin is Russian. As I see it... there is 1 Russian left in the Sabres ranks. I don't think Murray is even answering the phone if Semin's agent calls.

But picked up on waivers removes all control he has over where he ends up. He's still constrained to go to whatever team that wanted him. For what it's worth we've seen NFL and NBA players talk about not playing hard at times. We've seen players pull themselves from a game when "injured", we've seen teammates question each other when they don't return from injury. We've seen athletes straight up talk about how they are preserving themselves from getting injured because they have a future to think about. I think the mentality that professional athletes can never look out for themselves over the team is incorrect. And traded removes his control as well. I'm just saying, there were times last year when we wondered how Hodgson could be so bad. We had seen him play the season before and he was much better. So, I'll be curious how he does this season. He's not the talent he had been projected to be but I don't believe he is as bad as he was last year either.

So.. they could improve 40 points and still not be in the playoffs. They'd be winning more, in the game more, but still not be in the playoffs. Remember, they were so bad that a winning culture could still be developed without making the playoffs. 94 points last year puts them in 10th just behind Boston. That's 20 more wins in the season.

You want me to email him? I coached his son a few years ago. :) I'm not going to though. No need. It'll be whatever number he wants it to be and if it's above 30, 49, 55, 65, 82.. so be it... I think the only number that would be out of bounds should be 69. Hell.. I don't even care if he wears 99. Everyone wears 9 and 4 and there were some damn good players in hockey history who wore those. :)

I think it's fine if they miss the playoffs this year. In fact.. Murray is probably gearing up for that 9/10 spot and just missing. He'll probably laugh his butt off if the Sabres end up in the top 3 when that happens due to the changes. On the other hand.. if they squeak in at 7/8 then he'll be praised heavily. Either way.. win.

Umm.. you are missing what I am saying. Assumption: Hodgson doesn't want to stay in Buffalo. He doesn't like what his role will be. Assumption: He believes there is a 95% chance he'll be bought out anyway. (Murray didn't give him that horrible contract). Since the team was already going to suck. He's simply not going to try very hard. Why not do the little bit extra it might take to make the buyout 100%? Why? 1. He doesn't want to be in Buffalo. 2. He was going to get bought out anyway. 3. If he's bought out, he's not going to get any kind of good contract offer. He's on his third team in a short time frame. I'm not saying he was out there shooting the puck into his own net. I am saying that he gave up on the season and didn't even bother trying. He pushed the right buttons with Nolan to get himself reduced playing time. Reduced chance of injury, get through the season, get bought out, move on. All he did was assure it. Because what's the alternative? He plays well enough that Buffalo keeps him? Think about it. If he performed well enough for some other team to sign him to a contract worth even half of what he was getting from the Sabres do you really think the Sabres would have bought him out? I don't. Everyone is hung up on he's throwing away this money. If I was him, I would have assumed it was already gone.

He's too small. He'll never be successful. Loved watching him play. All the best to him.

He did. But he did sign another one. As I worked through all of this more... The initial thought is.. he wants out of Buffalo. There's already a solid chance he is going to get bought out. His contract is a dog and the end of the this league year presents the best chance of this happening. He knows this, everyone knows this. The other thing he knows is that if he's bought out he's likely to NOT receive a long term contract from anyone else nor will it be much money... at first. So, you try a little less harder than you can because.. you want to assure the buyout gets done. Then you hit the UFA market, you don't have to worry about signing a 1.5m year deal because you are still getting paid by the Sabres. Perhaps you have multiple offers, perhaps you don't. But you sign that 1 year deal like he did on Nashville. Let's say that he really has potential and can shine in Nashville. Next year he'll be on the market again and likely able to choose a location that he wants at a decent dollar amount and he'll still be getting paid by the Sabres. So, for 1 year of trying a little less harder, on a team that was already not trying hard. He assured himself of the opportunity to perhaps earn a solid contract after this upcoming season. And hey.. why try hard anyway on a team when you are pretty certain you aren't going to be around anyway. Always fun to think about.. the solid news is... he's gone. He's following the Derek Roy tour.. although Hodgson started his tour in Vancouver.

So.. quick primer. Uncompressed HD video is 18Mbps. Everyone uses compression, so you'll do just fine with 15M. The gaming thing is a different story. it depends on the games. The biggest impact to your gaming experience will be latency and packet loss. The second biggest will be any limitations or contention for bandwidth on your upstream as it is usually lower than your downstream and your system will likely send a lot of data to the gaming server. Latency - how long it takes the information to arrive and packet loss (how many packets have to be resent or might be lost for good) will impact the efficiency of your network connection. This is why some network connection types are absolutely horrible for gaming, no matter what you do. Still.. when it's all said and done.. 24/3 should be fine for you as long as you don't have a ton of connected devices using a lot of bandwidth.

Good call on Pittsburgh trying to up the value of the franchise before it begins to decline.

It's a dry tank though.