So which are YOU cheering for? Team Alfie or Team Chara? I, of course, as a Canucks fan, want Alfredsson to beat Chara. Team Alfredsson also has all the Canucks, and Erik Karlsson, who’s just amazing. Here’s my quick take at which team will win each SuperSkills event.

1. Fastest Skater

Each team sends five skaters (Must include a backwards skater, goalie, and a rookie) to skate around half a lap. The fastest skaters race each other in the final.

My Winner – Team Chara, Erik Karlsson and Keith Yandle are pretty fast puckmovers for Team Alfie. But with Phil Kessel and Marian Hossa, who are dynamite in breakaways, they probably will take this event. And why isn’t Gaborik in this event?

2. Breakaway Challenge

Three players (including a rookie) from each team take part in a shootout challenge where they show off their tricks. Fans vote for their favourite moves. Each player has 3 attempts.

My Winner – Team Chara, This one should be pretty close. All players chosen for this event are all slick puck-handlers and will dazzle the fans in Ottawa. So it comes down to the showstoppers and I think Carey Price will prevail.

3. Accuracy Shooting

Four Styrofoam targets are attached to each of the four corners on the goal. From each team, two players must alternatively pass pucks to the shooter, who tries to destroy all targets as fast as possible.

My Winner – Team Alfredsson, Alfie’s team should win this by a landslide. With Daniel Sedin, Stamkos, and Spezza all capable of going shelf easily, it should be an easy one.

4. Skills Challenge Relay

Teams send in two heats of seven players to compete in a relay consisting of five events:

• One-time passing – Three shooters, one passer, each shooter must score three goals.
• Passing – A passer must complete a pass into six small nets, including three with barriers where the passer must saucer pass.
• Puck control – A skater must puck-handle through five cones there and back.
• Stick handling – A skater must control a puck through a series of pucks
• Accuracy shooting – Refer to Event 3 above

My Winner – Team Alfredsson, This team’s got the aforementioned three skaters who could easily win the accuracy shooting event. Plus the group of crafty puckmovers and deft passers like Henrik Sedin and John Tavares make this team a favourite.

5. Hardest Shot

Four players including a rookie take part in an event where they shoot the puck as hard as possible into the net.

My Winner – Team Chara, The finals will probably consist of Zdeno Chara VS Shea Weber. Weber lost all the matchups with Chara the past two years.

6. Elimination Shootout

The last event puts the most exciting aspect of hockey into the competition – The Shootout. Eleven players (With three goalies plus a rookie) will take participate. Shooters that score move on to the next round, each goalie faces four shots. The event will be over if no one scores in the first round.

My Winner – Team Chara, I may have to give this again to Team Chara because there’s Pavel Datsyuk and Marian Gaborik, who have endless moves. Goalie Henrik Lundqvist also always stands his ground in breakaways.

Let’s see how good am I at this, what is your favourite event? Reply in the comments below!

I was almost finished the exam, and I was working on the trigonometry questions when I realized why all of my work was so wrong. After a few minutes of panicking, I finally realized that our exam invigilator had reset my calculator, and it wasn’t set in degree mode (Why didn’t I check?!). What made it worse is that I only had five minutes to redo every wrong question. You should have seen my face then, remember that meme with the kid madly scribbling on his paper? Yup that’s me. DO ALL THE QUESTIONS. But unfortunately the time went out and I turned in the paper missing two questions.

Ugh! I was doing so well early in the exam too! I aced all the factoring and algebra sections, it’s just the last two pages that totally wasted me! People with midterms coming up, I hope you don’t do something as stupid as what I did there!

Luckily, Planning 10 is just a half-year course. For our final project we’re to make something for an anti-bullying presentation for the whole school to see. So me and my partner, out of ideas, decided to construct posters out of 9GAG memes. It actually turned out not too bad (says Obama), here’s some of the stuff we made, hope you enjoy.

I’ve listed three pages below that I visit the most frequently and eat up all of my work time. Popular websites such as 9GAG and Cracked.com are ignored. If you happen to visit these websites, I hope they stop you from whatever important thing you’re working on.

1. Trust Me, I’m an “Engineer” – A Facebook page that posts tons of funny pics regarding science and math. Tons of new pictures are added every day, just like 9GAG. They range from corny science pick-up lines to hilarious contraptions. Cmon, I know you’ve liked worse pages, this page deserves way more respect.

2. Jared Wunsch and Hans Johnson – These two people are the developers of four awesome comedy sites. They’re still in Beta.

• I Waste So Much Time – Where tons of funny junk are submitted daily, just like 9GAG.
• The Grouchy Rabbit – My favourite of the four, this site teaches you tips on how to succeed in life, such as to-do lists, definitions, and epiphanies.
• Dear Blank Please Blank -  Feeling pissed and don’t know what to do? Write a short letter entry and post it up there!
• Attack of the Cute – Here you can find, duh, more than enough pictures to give you a Cuteness Overload face.

3. The Oatmeal - Probably one of my favourite places on the Internet. The Oatmeal is a webcomic created by the eccentric and wacky Matthew Inman. Of all the links I shared above, this is the best of all. Stuff you can find on the websites include weird quizzes, grammar tips, and blog posts about Matthew’s life in Seattle. Cyanide and Happiness? It’s time to move on.

Hope you liked those links! Happy procrastinating!

Recently I bought The Son of Neptune and finished reading it a couple of days after. I expected to be a really exciting novel and it did not disappoint.

The storyline of the book is similar to the plot in The Lost Hero if you’ve read it. Percy Jackson, the hero of the last series, like Jason Grace, wakes up in his camp’s counterpart and doesn’t remember a thing. He then starts to make new friends (who also have secrets to hide) in the Roman camp, who accompany him to complete a quest to try the uprising of the giants.

Another bonus of the book? Even if you’re already pretty savvy in Greco-Romanian mythology, you’ll probably learn something new in the story.

What’s also cool is that when you’re at the ending and you think that everything’s resolved until the next novel in the series. But no, suddenly another plethora of unanswered questions start popping, and that will leave you thinking about the book and rereading it for a long time. Personally I like this book better because it features Percy, who’s still my hero.

Readers who read the novel, what do you think is the “Mark of Athena?” Reply in the comments section below!

But this year we couldn’t get enough fantasy fun. We were too late for fantasy football (Aww, no Tebow), but we signed up for fantasy basketball and we barely know much about the players. And now we’re playing fantasy golf just for the laughs. Basically you pick four golfers that you think would do the best in the upcoming tourney, it makes up your “foursome” (LOL!). A lot of my friends joined my league, they know nothing, so why not? Sounds like a great year of sports for me!

I guess in January we’ll be playing Fantasy Nascar. The only thing I know are the cars they drive! Did you know their cars are powered by big block 6.4 L (389 cubic inch) V8 engines that kick out 750 to 800 horsepower? They do 0-62 in 3.7 seconds and have a top speed of around 210 mph (338 kph). Ok I’m going off topic, hope you fave some fun with fantasy sports this year! Cheers!

If you guys followed the Facebook f8, you probably heard about the upcoming Facebook Timeline and Open Graph. If you haven’t, it’s one of the two most amazing additions that are coming soon. Right now Facebook is offering developers to use the Timeline feature, so if you want to try it, here’s how!

1. Right now the Timeline feature is only for Facebook developers. So you must be someone writing apps, or at least make Facebook think you are.
2. Log into Facebook, and go to the Developer App, the easiest to go there is search for it.
3. Once you’re in the app, create a new app, this is the part where you’ll have to be verified. Type in any display name and namespace you see fit.
4. When you’re in the app’s main screen, from the tabs on the left, click on the Open Graph heading
   
5. Create a test action, such as “eat a sandwich” or “read a book”.
6. You should be directed to the action configuration page, play around with it, go through all 3 pages of settings, and save it.
7. Head back to your Facebook home page and you should see an invite to try out the Timeline! Enjoy!

The Facebook Timeline is like everything you use in different social services combined. Your profile is now turned into a timeline that tells the story of your life. You can now post statuses on any date since you’re born. Or you can sort all your events, activities, photos into groups within your profile (Any date you want also). You and your friends can browse through your timeline year-by-year, in eye-popping detail. They can even filter the content, such as places and statuses.

Few people understand what the Open Graph protocol is, but they use it every day. That’s because the Facebook Open Graph protocol is neither a graph nor protocol. That Like Button you see in almost every site? Yup, that’s part of it. But instead of just liking stuff, Facebook is adding more “nouns” and “verbs” into their system. Such as “eating a sandwich” or “reading a book”. The objective of this project is to open doors to another set of “social stories” that you can share with your friends.

The Senators are probably trying to forget last season as hard as they can. Losing Jason Spezza and Daniel Alfredsson, the team’s only elite producers to injury left the team stranded and tumbled down the standings fast. The team has a bright future, David Rundblad, Jared Cowen, and Mika Zibanejad can all become solid NHL-ers. But that’s still a long way ahead. This year, the team is in dire need of more offence, it’ll if the top line of Alfredsson, Spezza, and Milan Michalek stay healthy and build up some chemistry. Sophomores Bobby Butler and Colin Greening will have to chip in some goals like they did last year. On defence, the Sens have good skill but Erik Karlsson and Sergei Gonchar will have to work on keeping opposing forwards out. Goalie Craig Anderson will have to do what he does best, carry the team on his shoulders.

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After one month into the regular season, it looked liked the Devils were about to break a few team records for futility. But as the All-Star Break passed the Devils went on an unbelievable run that even put them on pace for a playoff spot. But despite what they accomplished late last year, don’t count on the Devils to improve much this season. If Ilya Kovalchuk returns to his 40-goal form and Zach Parise stays healthy, the Devils will have a powerful first line, but the offence dies from there. Youngsters such as Nick Palmieri and Jacob Josefson will need a jump in their points total. If all else fails, the Devils will have to rely on their strong defence again, which has gotten stronger with the addition of 4th overall pick Adam Larsson.

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The Habs took a step back last year after making a crazy run in the playoffs in ’09-10. However they did take the Bruins to Game 7 of the first round without much of their core intact. This year if the Habs want to contend they need to again be strong on special teams and hope for Andrei Markov to stay healthy. Take a look at the Habs’ winning percentage when he’s playing. Mike Cammalleri should have a huge bounce-back year, he’s done it before. Also expect Max Pacioretty to pick up where he left off after that devastating hit ended his season. Again, if Markov statys healthy, the Habs will have one of the most potent PP units in the league. There’s no worries in goal, as Carey Price is as solid as any netminder you can think of.

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