The Houston Aeros are a professional ice hockey team in the American Hockey League. The team plays in Houston, Texas, at the Toyota Center. They are the AHL affiliate of the NHL's Minnesota Wild.
The Houston Aeros were an expansion team in the International Hockey League in 1994. The team's name is a homage to the Houston Aeros of the World Hockey Association in the 1970s, one of the teams Gordie Howe played for in the WHA. The Aeros were the second IHL team to be named after a WHA franchise, the first being the Phoenix Roadrunners; unlike the Roadrunners, who used the same logo as their WHA predecessor, the IHL Aeros used a new logo, a bomber flying over the team name (essentially their current logo). The Aeros would defeat the Orlando Solar Bears to win the 1999 Turner Cup, following an impressive 54-win season.
The Aeros were one of six IHL teams to join the American Hockey League (AHL) in 2001 when the IHL folded. The AHL version of the Aeros would go on to win the 2003 Calder Cup; they would reach the 2011 Calder Cup finals as well, but lost to the Binghamton Senators. They are the AHL affiliate of the Minnesota Wild. They will affiliate with the ECHL revival of the Orlando Solar Bears for the 2012–13 season.
Houston ( /ˈhjuːstən/) (Alibamu: Yosti ) is the largest city in the state of Texas, and the fourth-largest city in the United States. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the city had a population of 2.1 million people within an area of 656.3 square miles (1,700 km2). Houston is the seat of Harris County and the economic center of Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown, which is the fifth-largest metropolitan area in the United States, with 6.08 million people as of July 1st, 2011.
Houston was founded in 1836 on land near the banks of Buffalo Bayou. It was incorporated as a city on June 5, 1837, and named after then-President of the Republic of Texas—former General Sam Houston—who had commanded at the Battle of San Jacinto, which took place 25 miles (40 km) east of where the city was established. The burgeoning port and railroad industry, combined with oil discovery in 1901, has induced continual surges in the city's population. In the mid-twentieth century, Houston became the home of the Texas Medical Center—the world's largest concentration of healthcare and research institutions—and NASA's Johnson Space Center, where the Mission Control Center is located.
Chad Rau (born January 18, 1987) is an American professional ice hockey player. He is currently playing with the Minnesota Wild of the National Hockey League (NHL). He was selected by the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 7th round (228th overall) of the 2005 NHL Entry Draft.
On May 17, 2010, Rau was signed as a free agent by the Minnesota Wild to a two-year contract. He was assigned to play for the Houston Aeros at the start of the 2010–11 AHL season.
On January 21, 2012, he scored his first NHL goal in his first NHL game against Kari Lehtonen of the Dallas Stars. On February 19, 2012, he scored his second NHL goal in his fifth NHL game.
Joseph A. "Josh" Fisher is an American computer scientist. He is a Hewlett-Packard Senior Fellow. He worked at HP Labs from 1990 through 2006 in instruction-level parallelism and in custom embedded VLIW processors and their compilers. Fisher retired from active employment at HP in 2006.
Fisher studied at the Courant Institute of NYU (B.A., M.A., and then Ph.D. in 1979), where he devised the Trace Scheduling compiler algorithm and coined the term Instruction-level parallelism. As a professor at Yale University, he created and named VLIW Architectures and invented many of the fundamental technologies of ILP. In 1984, he started Multiflow Computer with two members of his Yale team. He won an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984, was the 1987 Connecticut Eli Whitney Entrepreneur of the Year, and in 2003 received the ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award. Fisher coauthored Embedded Computing: A VLIW Approach to Architectures, Compilers and Tools, published in 2005 by Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier.
Dan DaSilva (born April 30, 1985) is a Canadian professional ice hockey winger currently playing for EHC Olten in Switzerland's National League B.
DaSilva played major junior hockey with the Portland Winter Hawks of the Western Hockey League (WHL). In 2005 he was named to the WHL West Second All-Star Team.
On October 11, 2005 DaSilva was signed as a free agent by the Colorado Avalanche who assigned him to play with their AHL affiliate, the Lowell Lock Monsters.
After three years within differing Avalanche affiliates, DaSilva signed as a free agent with the Worcester Sharks on October 24, 2008. In the 2008-09 season, he split the year between Worcester and ECHL affiliate, the Phoenix RoadRunners.
On September 17, 2009, following a training camp with the San Jose Sharks, DaSilva failed to earn a contract but was re-assigned to remain with affiliate, the Worcester Sharks. In 72 games with the Sharks, Da Silva finished third on the team with 21 goals and recorded a career high 53 points. After recording 8 points in 11 post seasons games, Dan became Worcesters franchise leader with 18 post season points.