Brush Creek, helicopter "landing areas," sheriff controversies, effing wind, that guy living in our White House (sorta), all of that just washes away at a town league hockey game.
Well, not the effing wind, as the effing wind made for white-out conditions during parts of the game Monday, February 19 between the Last Steep and the Brick Oven.
The Brick Oven looked primed for a win with a full bench this time, while the Last Steep had just one sub on the bench all game long.
Yet, despite the lack of players, there was no lack of play by the Last Steep as pinpoint passing, spot-on position play and precision shooting made the difference, skating to a 7-3 win over the Brick Oven.
The Last Steep went immediately to work scoring in the first two minutes as Logan Nittany Lion Demarcus skated end-to-end and through everyone to set up Jack Weise on the doorstep for the goal. Four minutes later Demarcus was circling in and out of the Brick Oven zone like a hippie looking for a nitrous tank in a Dead show parking lot drawing all sorts of attention. Meanwhile, Weise remained patient at the blue line and when the puck kicked out to him, he slipped a low wrist shot through the mess of players in front of the net to put the Last Steep up 2-0.
Brick Oven goalie Jake Red Beren made an incredible glove save to deny the upper corner that brought both teams in to hug him, and one would have thought that, alone, would inspire the Brick to take over the game.
But instead, inspired by their passionate player/owner Sean Hartigan, who was sidelined with a bad hammy, the Last Steep tacked on a third goal. Vinnie Hartigan, who honed his hockey skills playing in the Swamp Hockey League (SHL) outside of Atlanta, Georgia, shot on net. Beren made the initial save, but Ian Havoc Havlick literally crashed the slot to push the puck and Beren into the net for a 3-0 lead.
Ten seconds later the Brick, or rather, Jeff Black, responded to finally break the seal on the Last Steep net and the Brick looked to build on that. They took over the momentum of the game to close out the first period and carried that energy into the second period scoring again as Ben Preston pressed deep into the Last Steep zone and Brian Raftree put on the finishing touch to pull the Brick Oven to within one.
But before the Brick Oven could assemble any sense of a rally, the Last Steep fired right back as Megan Paden followed in on the work of Demarcus to score. Two minutes later, the Last Steep continued its onslaught as Havlick slipped a pass to Hartigan on the far post and Hartigan stuffed it top shelf for a 5-2 Last Steep lead.
Despite the three-goal deficit, Tim Poppe continued to grind along the boards for the Brick Oven and Kent Preston was slicing and dicing through neutral ice. Their efforts paid off eventually as Matt Gutter broke loose and fired a frickin' laser from just inside the blue line to score.
So now things appeared in place for the Brick Oven comeback. Gutter scored, the game was headed into the latter part of the second period and the Last Steep had to be getting tired.
But none of that mattered as the Last Steep capitalized in the final minute of the second period. As the Brick Oven pushed into the Last Steep zone, Havlick slipped behind the defense on the weak side to take a breakout pass from Demarcus and score for a 6-3 Last Steep lead heading into the third period.
Surely we would see a miraculous comeback by the Brick in the third period. But, we didn't. Instead, Weise finished off his hat trick for the night, scoring in the sixth minute, and the Last Steep skated away with the 7-3 win, proving why they are the defending town league champions.


If 2015 hasn't exactly been kind to Chicago so far (nothing like subzero frigidity to ring in the new year), it at least comes with the promise of a whole batch of new music to anticipate. Chicago winters are the perfect time to take a break from playing shows and hole up in the studio; lucky for us, some of the city's most exciting artists have been doing just that. Here's a quick roundup of some of the records I'm most eagerly anticipating this year.
Oshwa spent a good part of 2014's final quarter teasing the as-yet-untitled follow-up to their 2013 debut, Chamomile Crush. The quartet, led by singer and songwriter Alicia Walter, posted a photo of themselves in the studio with the caption "it's coming . . ." on their Tumblr a few weeks ago. On New Year's Eve, the band announced via Facebook that one of the new songs from the album is called "Genie." A new single and its video should emerge this month; until then, here's Walter covering Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line."
It's been more than a decade since Roommate's Kent Lambert moved to Chicago from New York, and since then he's released a steady string of singles, EPs, and the fantastic LP Guilty Rainbow. That album came out almost four years ago, so it's about time new material surfaced from the avant-pop group. Make Like will be released at some point later this year. The band's website currently displays what appears to be the album's cover art rotating rapidly, as well as the caption "2015." Further details remain murky, but keep an eye out for this hard-to-Google band in the coming months.
With a Timbaland cosign and a standout debut mixtape, Tink hasn't been far from the radar of anyone who keeps tabs on Chicago hip-hop. The young rapper put out a protest song the morning after the nonindictment of Darren Wilson last fall, and her video for the song "Around the Clock" dropped a month ago. Tink hasn't announced her first album yet, but she's playing a big show at the Metro in February. It wouldn't be a stretch to think a release date might follow shortly.
Chance promised that Surf, his first album with his band the Social Experiment, would be released before the end of 2014; whether that was an overenthusiastic estimate or he simply encountered some unexpected delays, it's still unavailable. But after Acid Rap, his breakout 2013 mixtape, I'm willing to wait for whatever he comes up with next. Like the two tapes he's already put out, Surf will be available as a free download to anyone who wants it. And judging by the singles Chance and SoX are already streaming on Soundcloud, the record sounds like it'll be a life-affirming blaze of hip-hop, soul, and funk—with a sarcastic snarl around the edges.
Local noise-rock favorites Melkbelly premiered a new single called "A Case of the Krampus" just a couple days before the end of 2014. According to an interview with Loud Loop Press, the song will be out as a seven-inch this month, and then the band's jumping right back into the studio to record a follow-up to last year's Pennsylvania. They're hoping to get it done by the end of the spring, so fingers crossed that the final product will be out before 2016 comes knocking.


We've Released the 'DICOM Reader Plugin' and the 'DICOM Viewer' is Coming. But What is DICOM?
We've Released the 'DICOM Reader Plugin' and the 'DICOM Viewer' is Coming. But What is DICOM?
"We interrupt our usual program for a breaking news special edition," TV channels use to say when some important event bursts out (some really bad events in most cases).
Well, today we are going to make the same announcement, except we bring you some good news.
Doctors and patients alike (in other words, all of us) will very soon have at disposal a new powerful and simple to use, ORPALIS-style handy tool, the ORPALIS DICOM Viewer.
For now, a new specialized plugin for our GdPicture.NET toolkit suite, the DICOM Image Reader plugin was just released and is available for developers.
But let us tell you in a nutshell what this is all about.
In our article about TWAIN, we've mentioned the general principle by which the need for standardization always gets to defeat the "ego" of any equipment producer.
So no wonder that besides well-known common-use standards surrounding us everywhere, there are also domain-specific technical standards like, for example, MIDI in music or TCP/IP in networking.
Similarly, medical imaging has its own norms uniforming technical criteria, all of them being unified under the name DICOM (actually an interesting common point for TCP/IP and DICOM is that both standards have military origins, which might be surprising considering that DICOM is about medicine).
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is a set of standards which regulates all aspects of handling the medical-imaging digital information and is used in medical specialties (like radiology, cardiology, radiotherapy, oncology, ophthalmology, neurology, pneumology, surgery and so forth) as well as in dentistry and veterinary.
Among these standards, one of them describes a particular image file format (having either extension such as .dc3, .dcm, .dic or even having no extension at all) and requires a specialized viewer for display.
OK, so now you will ask why doctors don't just use the plentiness of widespread raster image formats instead of using an esoteric format of their own for their X-ray, ultrasound, fluoroscopy, magnetic resonance, computed tomography and other scary voodoo stuff they make to see what's inside us.
Well, the answer is simple: they have to.
Medical images aren't just some photos; they also need to be most rigorously contextualized.
For example, a photo of a finger is just a picture of a finger for us commoners. But if a doctor has to see it for a medical investigation he needs to know which finger is it exactly, from which hand as well as information about the patient (name, gender, age, antecedents, etc.). He also needs other relevant and must-have pieces of information to keep track of patient's medical history.
And the finger is just a forced, trivial example we've especially used to impact on understanding when compared to, say, a computed tomographic angiography of a zone of the heart.
So perhaps now it starts sounding obvious to you why DICOM format has to include a "Reference Coordinates System" as means for spatial orientation: the image has to be fully comprehensible from the medical science point of view.
To explain another particularity of the DICOM file format standard, let's get back to the finger example and suppose the photo has some color variations because of, say, the settings of the camera.
Nothing to bother for most of us but for a doctor an altered color might just be the mark of an important symptom.
Again we have deliberately used a forced example to ease understanding that color variation has a similar counterpart in grayscale images' significance.
In real life doctors are mainly dealing with grayscale images from either light-emitting computer screens, transmissive films or light-reflecting prints and any given nuance of gray is related to a certain optical density, which is important in image interpretation.
So to provide identical grayscale images, DICOM also includes a Grayscale Standard Display Function; color images have no display uniformization standard as medical images are for the vast majority of cases artificially colored.
To the above short explanations and the importance of a highly specialized-metadata structure and you will start getting a pretty clear idea on the reasons why DICOM has to be so particular compared to common image file formats.
Well, we hope this (far from complete) article shed some light about DICOM image format's reasons to be and its importance.
So whenever you will need to view, annotate or convert DICOM image files or if you need to create an application doing that, no matter if you're a doctor or not, our prescription is to use our products as frequently as possible.
Please note that abusing their use them will do you no harm.
Where and When Did the Symbols "+" and "–" Originate?
Now that's real golf ; way to go , Wilhelm Tell!