ESPN Season Starting Power Rank has them in 27th, behind Calgary and Edmonton.

SBN Season Preview the Atlantic Preview written by some hack had them in last.

CBS Sports Season Preview had the Islanders finishing dead last in the East

The Hockey News had them in dead last in the East

Puck Daddy Atlantic Preview had them in Last

NBC Pro Hockey Talk had some great quotes about the Isles:

2. Which team will finish last overall?

JB: New York Islanders. Glaring weaknesses in all areas.

MH: Columbus Blue Jackets. The Central Division is loaded; they’re going to get slaughtered.

RD: Columbus Blue Jackets. I hate being predictable, but I can’t think of anyone even remotely close to CBJ.

JY: New York Islanders. The rest of their division is a meat grinder and they’re ridiculously young.

JOB: Columbus Blue Jackets. On paper, it doesn’t get much worse.

Sports Illustrated Atlantic preview had them finishing last

And their first power rankings of the season had them in 28th

Looking back at this, the greatest irony for me is how many people mentioned Rick DiPietro’s injuries while ignoring that Nabokov is on the roster. Also they felt fine predicting a big season for the Flyers despite Bryz’s insanity.

Chase Thomas, OLB, Stanford

Linebacker from Stanford, he has experience playing in the 4-6 bear defense and sets the edge very well. Does everything good but nothing great. Watching the Notre Dame tape he looked unblockable, but then tired out. Plays well in coverage and run support. I feel he can be a Mike Vrabel type at OLB, he’s gonna get 5-10 sacks, but he’s not a freak like Aldon Smith. He plays the run very well, he’s an average 3 down backer.

Pros: Does everything well. He is a leader at Stanford, while being versatile and can play OLB in both 3-4 and 4-3 schemes.  Has a good motor. Good one on one moves in pass rush. Can drop back and cover a TE or RB. Smart football player who can excel against the new running QB due to his lane discipline.

Cons:  Lacks the speed to be a freak at OLB. He’s not the type of kid that will flourish t the combine, I believe his 40 time will suffer. Is helping to produce sacks enough to help out the Jets?  Also vs Notre Dame seemed to get winded chasing around the QB, and made some good plays that could have been great if he had made the tackle.

Overall: This kid is what the jets need at OLB. He might not be the answer, but you put him in the Brian Thomas role and this kid will flourish. He’s going to get 85 tackles 7 sacks and play all 3 downs.  Hoping he falls to rounds 3-5 because I think the combine will hurt him. At the worst he will dominate on special teams, but I expect him to be a Vrabel type and at best Clay Mathews.

Dion Jordan, OLB, Oregon

Extremely athletic with a very long wingspan and has a good build to him. He will flourish at the combine, but I’m not sure the game film backs it up.

Pros: He’s a superior athlete to the point that a lineman should rarely block him when he rushes the passer. He’s very much like Jason Pierre-Paul or Aldon Smith in that way. He’s very good when he gets to scrap down the line. Any time he’s in pace and gets to use his speed he’s dangerous. Sheds blocks pretty well and when he drops into coverage he’s not a liability.

Cons: His game film and measurables just don’t match up. Maybe it’s because he’s raw but watching him vs USC I was shaking my head because I had trouble finding him. He’s also got to develop pass rushing moves. It was like watching an Aaron Maybin clone. Every time trying to run around the lineman and getting pushed out of the play. Also when running misdirection at him he was completely fooled. He’s definitely  a project.

Overall: I see why scouts salivate over this kid because the motor is there. The measurables are there but he needs to be coached up. He’s a classic bust or boom type prospect. If he’s taught how to rush the passer, hes easily a top 5 pick. I believe he’s a first rounder and I like him more then Barkevious Mingo. Worst case scenario he’s out of the league in a few seasons. Best case hes got the tools to be like JPP or Aldon Smith, but buyer beware and as a Jets fan I don’t know if I’d like us to pick him.

Philip Thomas, Safety, Fresno State

The reason I looked at Thomas is that he stood out at the senior bowl practices, and his DB coach McDonald was just hired as the Jets new DB coach. I’m sure there interest and McDonald will be able to give the scouting staff his two cents. The first thing you notice about Thomas is he’s always around the ball and he’s aggressive, something I love from safeties.

Pros: Very skilled player whose not afraid of contact. He can come up and make a play in the run game, but also play the pass very well. He’s a great blitzer something Rex loves to do and could make an immediate impact with the Jets blitz heavy defense. He’s also ball hawk who had 8 ints and 3 sacks and it shows his versatility. I’m hoping the jets can draft him this year.

Cons: The reason why Thomas isn’t a lock for the first round is he’s sometimes a little too aggressive which makes him miss tackles. Against Oregon he missed two huge tackles, which led to a TD. He also had a barely missed one vs Boise. He’s got to get better at controlling himself. I think the combine is huge for him because I feel he’s more quick than fast, which can hurt his draft stock. His speed isn’t elite and he won’t be able to make up for that with his aggressive style.

Overall: I’m sold on this kid. I feel like he can be a great safety in the league. I wonder where he gets drafted though. I can see as high as round 2 and low as round 4, depending on combine results and how scared off teams are with the tackling. But best case I see him as a Laron Landry type the way he defends the run and his intense style but much better in the ball hawking department.

It’s a level I’m never going to forget. The 5th underworld/dungeon or whatever you want to call it in the original Zelda. It had a secret area you had to navigate,which to get into and through was surrounded by a bunch of stronger darknuts. For those not familiar with the game, darknuts were knights who you couldn’t hit from the front and you had to hit from the sides and back. Their spastic movements made this really tough, especially in these rooms considering blocks made it tough to maneuver. Oh yea, hits from these darknuts would take off 3 hearts at a time, which was pretty big.

For my dad this was too much. For two nights he stayed up cursing and screaming at the TV all night. He told my mom it took him something like 12 hours to finish the two rooms. Since he knew I was right behind him in the game, that I would be doing that level soon. So he couldn’t wait to find out how long it would take me to do it. When I got to the area I breezed through it, and a few days later my mom asked me and I told her I had finished it.

That weekend my dad found out from my mom, and he didn’t believe me at all that I had finished the level in under half a hour. He actually made me go back and play the level again so he could watch me beat it. Apparently he never thought of using bombs on the darknuts. He also complained that I cheated by using bombs, but that has more to do with his ocd. Thankfully my mom defnded me and said I didn’t cheat and he stormed off.

After that he never really played the NES that much. At one point he bought a joystick controller because he complained that the directional pad was screwing him up. That lasted for one day before he threw the controller into the wall. His ocd continued though. He used to claim we were cheating at games if we didn’t beat everything on screen. Don’t forget these were the days of the NES in which enemies would respawn if you moved offscreen. There were games that took me days to beat instead of hours cause I would try killing everything instead of running past it.

But it seems like instead of letting the customization which youtube allowed to continue, google has slowly but surely been removing such options. Now though, youtube all looks relatively the same (even worse, most youtube producers do their videos in an identical manner) no matter what page your on. The bigger problem though is the newest site design, which basically makes youtube look like google video did.

It’s bigger though then just google making youtube look like a google site. The whole internet has a tendency to look the same currently. Go to any video game site, sports blogging site, etc… and they seem to have all the personality removed and the same design in. Just the other day I was checking out wrestlecrap.com and they’ve switched their site design. Sure they needed an update, but the old style had heart and personality. Now it’s just cold.

The reason that most of these sites seem to use the same design? Usually because someone comes up with a design that gets the best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and gets the best results from google searches. Since traffic from google is so important, everyone wants to capture it. So not only is google turning seemingly everything it touches into google clones, but then it forces websites to change to stay alive.

Back in the day, you had a website because you were passionate about something and you wanted to share that with everyone else. That’s how it always starts. But as soon as people start making money, everything changes. It’s no longer about the passion or wanting to share with the world. A website that has personality should get more hits then the same design over and over, but it doesn’t work that way. So you can go to any website builder, pay such and such amount and get the same design.

Money in the end robs the passion out of everything. It’s the unfiltered passion for things that is half the fun of the internet. But when you find yourself forcing that passion, or even worse just doing something for the money it’s never going to work.

Hopefully in the next few years we’ll see a change. We’ll look back at this time at the internet and SEO and moneyfying everything and be like “Jez, that wasn’t any fun”. But the reality is that as the internet becomes a way to make more money, more big corporations are going to be investing in it and their sites. Those sites will have name recognition and get traffic just from that, but there won’t be anything interesting about them. They’ll be soulless husks who exist simply because traffic makes money.

The internet is slowly ending its time as the Wild West of the Computer Era. There is unfortunately no turning back because there is no way to turn off the money. These heartless sites that are all clones of each other are most likely going to slowly beat down everything else in their way. We are witness to the slow but sure strangulation of the internet. And by we I mean the 3 people that will actually read this post.