It was a hat trick by Pavol Demitra on free hat giveaway night. Watch the video [WMV] from Friday night’s game in Los Angeles and take cover!

After a close game earlier in the week the “first place” Rangers got blown out by first place Carolina... and though Eric Staal had a goal early, he wasn’t the huge offensive factor you’d expect with a 5-1 score. Instead it was Kevyn Adams with his first NHL hat trick.

But enough about that ugliness, here are some hockey links from around the web the last few days:

• Author of blog Off Wing Opinion got invited to watch a game with caps owner Ted Leonsis (hmm.. if I started writing about hockey more do you think the Dolans would notice? nahh)
• I came across Battle of Ontario this week after seeing a link to their coverage of Tuesday’s game. Tossed in my regular reading list.
• Also in regular rotation after launching a month ago The New York Hockey Report—a downloadable video based hockey show.
• And lastly, rewind to the beginning of the week for this story from the Daily News on Tom Renney

Hot on the heels of their Google Analytics announcement (which is now hooked up and running on ChunkySoup.net for eval purposes) Google has launched Google Base the [re-]classified ad [and other content] search site. I think. Unlike other Google product this one seems to fairly indirect about what its supposed to do:

Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content that we’ll host and make searchable online. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle, Google Base and Google Local.

Um, and? Maybe they just haven’t finished with the copywriters yet… (pokes JP).

Well, if you’ve got some time check it out for yourselves, but it looks to me like this one needs a little more time to bake.

P.S. to you business oriented folks the Analytics site has some companion articles up on traffic driving and conversion that are worth a look.

P.P.S. Sorry about the post title, its bad, I know, but I couldn’t resist.

On the subject of favorites, I’ve been using Bookpool.com for my tech books for years now. I dig the no frills thing and their regular sales are even better. This month its 47% Off all O’Reilly titles.

Now… to figure out what titles don’t I have yet.

My long time favoritest Mac browser¹ is getting ready for a the first stable release in a looong looong time. In reality the nightlies and alphas have been stable for months, and I’ve been using it for my daily surfing for some time, but with the upcoming stable Firefox and other Mozilla releases they’re planning on a 1.0. Here’s the announcement.

¹ Hard to pick favorites when there are 83 of them