I Met Wayne

Through my association with the Argonotes, The Toronto Argonotes Band and my position as Deputy Conductor in Training I was invited alog with a few other fans to have lunch and chat with CFL Commissioner Mark Cohon and some of the other people in the CFL offices. We all spent a couple of hours with with Mark and some of the other CFL staff eating pizza, seeing the mockup for the new CFL website, getting a sneak peak of the video the CFL is working on to follow up last years well received "This is Our League" and discussing the state of the league and football in Canada. The new video continues in the vein of "This is Our League" with a mixture of the old and new celebrating the history and tradition of the CFL. The new website has a fresh clean design with a strong emphasis on video and will strive to be the place to go for in depth information and highlights for the games. Best of all it's wide and takes full advantage of the wide screen monitors that are becoming more and more prevalent.

We heard about the CFL's plan to do the official challenge replay from the league offices to improve speed and consistency of the review. How the Commissioner's desire is to make sure the 8 (or 9 with Ottawa) teams are financially stable and adequately funded before the league considers expansion.

Everyone we met, Mark Cohon included was interested in hearing what we thought about the wide ranging topics covered in the two hours we spent at the CFL offices. I even spent a few minutes I spent sitting in the power seat at the Commissioner's insistence.
Just before we left we all gathered around the Grey Cup for a groups picture.

Notice the woman in the picture? Her name is Lori and she is the president of the Argonauts Fan Club. I ended up with the Argonotes bass drum sitting in the passenger seat of my car on the way back to the office after lunch. It's position made it easily visible and the large blue A would be instantly recognizable to any Toronto CFL fan. While stopped at a stoplight on the way home with my windows open because of my long dead car A/C the man in the next car over shouted to me "Is Lori in there?", "No she isn't but I had lunch with her" I replied. Before the light turned green he told me that she was his sister-in-law. In a city of 2.48 million people what are the chances you will end up at a stoplight beside a relative of someone you just had lunch with?

In keeping with my recent tradition to write about either websites or Linux I will pass on a useful website that relates to this story. Through some strange cut/paste error I managed to delete the pictures I took at the CFL offices before I got them off the camera. Googling like mad I ended up at cardrecovery.com. I suspect that there is a cheaper alternative but when you have just deleted your priceless pictures of your visit to the CFL offices $46 seems like a small price to pay to get them back. If you ever do something stupid with your digital camera you can download the software and see thumbnails of what you can recover for free. All my now recovered CFL visit pics can be seen here.