The team will be the top affiliate of the NHL Dallas Stars. In April 2008, the Iowa Stars announced that they would no longer affiliate with the Dallas Stars. For the 2008-09 season, Dallas made agreements to send their AHL prospects to four different teams. AHL teams which the Dallas Stars sent prospects to include the Hamilton Bulldogs, Iowa Chops, Manitoba Moose, Peoria Rivermen, and Grand Rapids Griffins.

FYI:
The Iowa Chops used to be the Dallas Stars affilliate AHL team named the Iowa Stars until the Dallas Stars announced that they would be associating with the new AHL Texas Stars. The Iowa Chops have now signed with the Anaheim Ducks.

A few more of the critical parts for my GTO to Monaro conversion came in. I originally ordered the VZ Monaro front bumper kit from JHP in Australia. They were really great to deal with - professional, friendly, and really helpful when I ran into some basic issues. The only downside to using JHP was that I had to pay a 3% conversion fee with my credit card company since the charge was in Australian Dollars and my credit card company is American Express and thus uses US Dollars.

I decided I would try to find a US based company to purchase the rest of my Monaro parts. I did a little research and found TopShelfPerformance. I ordered my badge kit and side-marker repeater light kit from them. It look a really long time to get the parts from TopShelfPerformance and it's a pain in the ass to try to get a hold of them as they never answer their phone calls, so I called up JHP and ordered my rear bumper insert from them even though they were $20 more expensive. Once I called them and placed the order, it turned out they were actually $50 cheaper at JHP than TopShelfPerformance (I guess the AUD:USD conversion swung in my favor).

The moral of the story is JHP is great and if you are looking at ordering from G8 to Commodore or GTO to Monaro conversion parts, I would highly recommend you order from them.

You can see the pictures of my GTO to Monaro conversion in progress at the following URL: GTO to Monaro 

Like many companies in the world, my company has a focus on the Continuous Improvement Process (CIP) and we have multiple "belt" programs. The "belt" program parallels that of karate to some degree. We have Yellow Belts, Green Belts, Black Belts, and Master Black Belts. In this blog post, I'll talk a little bit about my company's CIP program and where I fit in so far, but I won't get into much detail on any of the tools.

Our Yellow Belt program gets you introduced to the program and gives you a taste of what six-sigma is, what tools are used in the CIP world, what Lean Practitioning is, etc. The trainers try not to go into to much detail, but they give you a good overview of a lot of the tools and try to hit the key points on some of the easier tools to understand, like 6S and 7W (aka. Muda). The yellow belt class is a good way to get people interested in improving things within the organization. It helps people think about things they may have normally taken for granted and gives them some ideas around tools they can use in their area.

We closed on our new house Friday, September 5th and moved in unexpectedly on Thursday, September 11th! We originally planned to close on the 4th, but delays from the Seller's bank caused a 1-day delay on the closing of the house. We bought the house that we wanted in Valley Ranch, but were negotiating with the bank and were unsure we were going to come to terms that we could both agree upon by our set closing date.