We've Moved

I've moved to Wordpress. No new posts here. Come on over!

Season's Greetings

My sincerest wishes for a safe and happy holiday season!

Back at Last

OK, I’m back. Too much baseball, hockey, writing and tech stuff has kept me from blogging for a good long time.

I'm going to try to make it easier for myself and use a new browser called Flock. Flock integrates blogging into the browser itself. It’s build on the FireFox engine, so it’s fast and runs on multiple platforms.

I’m also going to use this space to share more cool links, etc.

I’ll catch up over the coming days.

More for the Resume

A couple of more gigs:

The NCAA news picked up my recap of the Division III national championship game from 2003, and CollegeSports.com ran my latest Division III column.

Glory Days

I’ve got practice this Sunday for my other passion – music. Back in the glory days of high school, I was a member of the Bishop Kearney Marching Kings, which was one of the powerhouse programs in the nation.

We played for kings and popes, and took home pretty much every award possible. I was a trumpet soloist for the Kings, and the highlight for me was our trip to Ireland in 1979. We captured every award there, including Best Band in the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Dublin. Here's a shot of from the newspaper showing us at the reviewing stand. That's me just to the left and behind the baton twirler in the center of the picture.

The music was what made us so special. Ray Shahin arranged the music and directed the band during its peak years. Click here to listen to one of our songs that I was fortunate enough to play a solo. Here's another - our theme song, "Somewhere". Getting to play one of the solos was a huge honor. This last one really shows off all the musicians.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun and was a great experience for me - I have lasting friendships and lots of nice memories. That's all they were until last year when the hundreds of alumni from the era when the Kings ruled (1967-1983) decided to have a reunion. A website was created and things finally came together in a gala in July of 2003.

We had so much fun that some of us decided to dust off our instruments and perform again. Alumni from all over the world participated. The music was posted on the internet and those of us close enough got together to practice. The rest flew in for a quick practice and then the parade.

It was a big deal here in Rochester, with over 10,000 people at the parade. People were literally crying when they heard the songs again - we were shocked at the nostalgia we all felt. An amazing day, made possible by a lot of hard work from organizers and musicians. Here's a pic someone took of me that day:




We have since reformed to play at Bishop Kearney's homecoming in October, and again the people in the stands were wonderful to us. Here's a shot from our halftime show. That's the three soloists out front to the right of the tuba. I am in the middle.



So we continue to practice - a Christmas Concert is planned. I had forgotten how much I love to play.

More Hockey!

Besides my hockey, Matt plays as well. His team, the Monroe County Ice Storm, is off to a good start at 3-1 in conference, 5-3 overall. He’s in a tournament the weekend after Thanksgiving. You can visit his team’s web page here. Yours truly maintains it…in my "spare time".

Hockey Hockey Hockey

Well, it's been a hockey frenzy for the past few weeks and will continue that way until April.

My duties at USCHO.com include a weekly column, plus helping to administer the Division III men's poll which is published in dozens of newspapers and media outlets around the country. It comes out every Monday.

I'll try to keep current on column news. To catch up:

My first two columns of the season was a Division III Preview Part I, and Division III Preview Part 2 covering the top 15 teams in the nation, plus a few more.

Next up was a column on Nichols College, among other things.

Last week's column was on changes to the way penalties are called this season.

This week's column, which came out today, is on how the poll is shaping up so far.

Also, there's a weekly column I do for the online edition of New England Hockey Journal. This week's is on Castleton State, a new Division III program.

Last week was my deadline for my monthly feature for the print edition of New England Hockey Journal.

Oh, and I spent the weekend downstate, broadcasting the RIT vs. Manhattanville College game from Rye, NY. We had some downtime on Saturday and took a train into the city. Very cool.

Whew!

Busy Busy Busy

OK, lots has been going on. It's college hockey season, and that means lots of writing and broadcasting. I'll try to keep up here with posts to my latest columns.

I picked up another writing gig this season, covering small colleges for the New England Hockey Journal. This includes a weekly piece for their web pages and a longer feature for their monthly print publication.

Here's a link to my weekly stories on the web. This week's column is on Division II St. Michael's College. A little tough to get material so far, since these teams haven't started their seasons yet.

Gmail Giveaway

I have three Gmail invitations to give away. Send me an email, and you can have one, while supplies last.

Kid's Catch Up

It's been a while, but we've all been really busy. School's underway, hockey's underway, scouts, remodeling, birthdays, it's been nuts.




Jon played baseball this summer with the Rochester Grays, which played in a 16/17 divsion as 15 year olds. Lots of travel and lots of fun with some kids he's played with for the past three seasons.

Jon decided not to play hockey this year. He's played since he was five at levels from Mite house to Bantam AAA to high school and, struggling in school and having other teen-age interests, decided to hang up the skates.





Matt (12) is still skating, playing for the Monroe County Ice Storm. He played for Greece Little League this summer, making the all-star team and playing until the end of July. In seventh grade, it's all about hockey now.





Tim (8) just started 3rd grade at a new school. He is a Cub Scout and recently adopted a hamster named Jim. Jim doesn't do much but sleep, eat, and well, you know.

I Love Gmail

I got a Gmail account the other day, and I love it. Very intuitive to use, and the 1 GB (!) of storage means that you won't have to delete email for at least a year.

Gmail is still in Beta, but accounts are getting easier to get. Your best best is to try isnoop's Gmail invite giveaway page. Keep reloading until you see some available, and then go for it.

You can still reach me at chris@chrislerch.com. It now routs to the Gmail account.

del.icio.us

del.icio.us/chrislerch

del.icio.us is a great way to share bookmarks with others and between multiple PCs you own. Set up an account and start adding your bookmarks. There's a bookmarklet that makes things easy.

It's a cool way to see what other people are bookmarking - a constant feed of bookmarks being added is available, plus a section of the most popular ones in the database. When you add a bookmark, you get a count of how many other del.icio.us users have that one too.

Here's my list.

Chris Lerch's LTS Blog

Chris Lerch's LTS Blog

Another blog that's just getting started is the one I use for work. I'm encouraging the reference librarians to use blogging to keep their students up to date on what's going on at the RIT Library.

As an example, I started one for my department. It's being updated weekly.

Bloglines | chrislerch's Blogs

Bloglines | chrislerch's Blogs

Do you have a bunch of web pages you check frequently to see if they've been updated? Well, the good sites allow you to subscribe to them using an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. You then use a news aggregator like Bloglines to read the updates. Bloggers love news aggregators, especially since most blogging software can generate RSS feeds. So if you want to see when this blog is updated, set up a Bloglines account (free) and subscibe to my blog by typing in its URL (http://chrislerch.blogspot.com).

Try it! Click here to see the RSS feeds that I currently subscribe to.

Family and Friends - a photoset on Flickr

Family and Friends - a photoset on Flickr

Flickr is a cool way to share photos on the web, and a great tool for bloggers, since you can post right from flickr into a blog. I've put a bunch of family photos that we've either scanned in or taken with a digital camera. Some are almost ten years old while others were taken this summer.

USCHO.com: The Definitive College Hockey Resource

USCHO.com: The Definitive College Hockey Resource

I guess this is a good place to start - USCHO.com is my part-time job, and a sometimes all-time-consuming passion. I've been on the staff of USCHO since the "early" days - 1997 - when USCHO added Division III coverage.

Prior to that, I was covering D-III hockey for the now-defunct College Hockey Magazine, and it was while working the 1996 Frozen Four in Cincinnati for CHM that I met Tim Brule and Lee Urton, who I had briefly interviewed the year before for an article I was doing on cool places for college hockey on this new fangled thing called the World Wide Web. At the time, Tim and Lee had something called "The College Hockey Page" that they put together in their dorm room at the University of Minnesota. In 1996, they decided to make it a business, and USCHO was born. I hooked up with them there, and joined the next season.

USCHO is ever evolving, but there's a core group of writers and staffers that have held things together for the past eight years for very little money and a lot of sweat. It really is a labor of love, and the site continues to grow in terms of users, writers and coverage.

I do a weekly column during the season, plus some news stories and features. USCHO keeps an archive of my past stories and columns.

Some favorties include:

• A four part humor piece, which I guess was a blog before there were blogs.
• A piece on Minnesota's Grant Potulny
• A notebook from the Frozen Four in Buffalo
• A recap of UWS's National Title in 2002
• A column on proposed changes to Division III Hockey that generated some controversy

I'll posts links here each week to my latest column or story, or just check out USCHO.

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! I'm working on a revamped chrislerch.com and I'm envisioning it as a list of links to other places, including this blog, which will be updated much more frequently.

The goal of this blog is:

• To keep friends and family up to date on what's going on in our household, since we don't have as much time as we'd like to to call or see you all.
• To share cool web pages and other stuff that I find.
• To provide some behind-the-scenes material into what goes into my weekly column on uscho.com

You can check back here from time to time, or subscribe to an RSS feed of this blog using a news aggregator like bloglines. com.


See ya!