Woa.. Wigan looked pretty decent today, especially their goalkeeper Chris Kirkland. Excellent reactions. It's a pity that Liverpool disposed of his services as he would have made an excellent backup to Reina I think.
My faith in Yossi Benayoun has definitely been rewarded as he scored another lovely goal in this game. He is definitely someone who can come off the bench and offer the spark of innovation/creativity.
We dominated the game for large stretches but Wigan was resolute. Excellent defending plus excellent goalkeeping meant it took quite a while to break them down. I hope that our success in this game bodes well for the rest of the season.
We really need to be able to consistently beat the teams that we should beat (those outside the top three) if we are to have a hope of winning the League this year. If you look at the last couple of years, the team winning the league lost five (5) and drew (5) of 38 matches in 2006, and lost five (5) and drew (4) in 2005.
So that's our target. We've already drawn three times in seven games and so we can realistically only afford two more draws for the rest of the season. Of course, we were screwed in the Chelsea match but no one is likely to remember that at the end of the season.
So the count from last night was:
Had to really work to jam three carriers and two traps into the Q. The world's fastest kitty transport, hah!
I learned how to give draw blood, manage a feral (a pillowcase is the trick), and administer the FIV test. Not that I'm practiced at it, but it's likely a good learning experience.
So that makes, in two days, 21 cats rescued. Fortunately, they were unlike last summers cats in that they were a hell of a lot easier to capture. I have another 8-9 to pick up next weekend, and the farmer will take back any that we cannot turn - thankfully.
It was heartbreaking to see all the young cats at MEOW in cages last night. All really sweet and friendly with no homes to go to.
Pisses me off something fierce.
Seems like I'm back in the cat rescuing business. I helped my good friend Betty last summer in her efforts to rescue a lot of neighborhood ferals and ended up adopting two, Brownie and Bandit. I think she rescued something like 25 ferals last summer.
A neighbor's farm has recently been over-run by kittens because they had a number of unspayed moms. Last night one of the folks from MEOW drove up from Seattle to our farm and picked up 7 kitties and two moms. Today I'm picking up another dozen (yes, a true explosion of kittens at the neighboring farm).
With any luck (and a couple of traps) we can get the situation under control and stop this from happening again.
Under the heading of "How stupid is that?" comes my latest interaction with DirecTV.
I called this morning to add the Setanta channel - they specialize in international sports broadcasts. Notably Premier League games (Liverpool is on today!), Rugby World Cup, etc.
Ok.. their Web site is messed up and won't let me subscribe so I call them and bypass the phone tree (saying "operator" many times in a row 'til they give up).
When I get the guy on the line, he is hard to understand (somewhat broken English) but I finally get him to grok that I want to see in my Channel Guide only those channels to which I'm subscribed. This is something I can do with the competing Dish Network satellite system.
Not an option.
So I have to go through all 1000 channels and select manually those channels to which I'm subscribed and build a custom guide. This could literally take a couple of hours.
They should shoot the damn PM (after drawing and quartering) who designed this system. Or the VP who said "but we want our customers to see everything we are offering" more likely. Idiots. They are "working on the problem".
Seems like its been a problem for at least four or five years now. I could likely code the solution in an afternoon.
Very frustrating but something I'll likely have to do since I cannot abide constant reminders that I cannot watch something because I haven't subscribed to it. I have the Premier package (all NFL games, all movie channels and Setanta) and there are still some 300-400 channels I cannot view.
I'm going to need a couple of bottles of red wine to get through this task, I can tell.
Very interesting. I was just watching the Beeb and they were talking about both Gaza and the Golan Heights. So I thought I would check them out on Google Maps. My hypothesis was that I wouldn't be able to zoom in too closely because Israel would have objected to a high level of detail because of security concerns.
I think I'm right. I can get a pretty high level of detail (down to 50m) in downtown Beirut, down to about 100m in Gaza and Golan, and no closer than 1km in the area bordering Gaza (where terrs might try and exfiltrate the strip).
Fascinating how geopolitics has such an obvious feedback loop with the information we are presented. Rarely is it as clearly demonstrated I think.
Ouch.
What can I say of that display against FC Porto?
Maybe I should be rejoicing that my team can play absolutely horribly, as well as play with only 10 men for the last 30 minutes and still match a team as obviously talented as FC Porto.
Our midfield was non-existent - I really wonder what those two brilliant England games took out of Steve Gerrard. With no Xabi Alonso to sub in I really wonder why Rafa didn't put in Benayoun. Personally, I would have altered to a 4-4-1 with Voronin or Torres up front after losing Pennant to a red card. That would have let us keep our shape and still play on the counter.
But, credit to both Rafa and Gerrard (team captain). They admitted they were sh*te and promised to do better. I certainly hope so because that level of performance won't even get us out of the group stage.
I don't remember seeing the original but now I have to.
A good friend and I saw the movie after work yesterday (finally) and found it very enjoyable. It had all the old cliches (except a standup gunfight): stagecoach robberies, pursuits on horseback, evil railroad types but brought a few new things to the table. A nuanced performance by Russell Crowe made Christian Bale's understated performance (which was very good) seem pallid in comparison.
Catch on the big screen. It'll be worth it. It's not Unforgiven, but it's one of the better Westerns to be produced since the heydeys of the '50s-'70s.
I just had a chance to watch Highlander: The Source (caution: spoilers), a made for TV movie done by the SciFi channel. Now, I'm a big fan of the TV series - first-rate and it got better as it moved from season to season. It could have had a much better wrap-up but I figured they were leaving it open for some movie follow-ups.
But not this.
It had it's moments but it was overly dark (literally), had very little plot to tie it together, literally no drama, and a very weak romance. Besides adding some special effects in the fighting - never seen in the show and thus quite odd - it was a very lackluster film. One wonders why they did it.
Maybe it was too poor for a cinematic release so they just sold it to SciFi. A real pity as I had hoped for a good extension to a really good series. I can only presume the leads had no idea how bad it was while they were acting in it.
The director/writer should have been shot.
Here in Seattle, there is a particular regional lingo. We don't talk about rain as being an occasional thing, we talk about sun being occasional (as in my friend's blog "Cloudy, Chance of Sunbreaks").
There is also a "distraction slowdown", seemingly worse here than in most places I've lived. Someone might be simply stopped at the side of the road, looking at map and it will cause a 1/2 mile backup.
Things haven't changed much from when I lived here in the '70s. The traffic was really bad then - made worse by asinine toll booths on one of the only two bridges across Lake Washington. Since then, the city population has grown pretty dramatically and there have been no significant freeway improvements (other than a couple of part-time HOV lanes).
Stats say that it is the second or third worst traffic in a major American city (depending on whose survey one listens to).
And they don't plan to improve the freeways. No new freeways are being built, expansions of the bridges across Lake Washington are occasionally discussed but never acted upon, and it gets worse every year.
Thank the gods I made the point of living close to work this time. Darn well worth the extra cost.
So this iTunes fiasco goes further than I thought.
I should have thought of this given how much business-related IT stuff I've done in the last couple of years.
There is no ability to purchase music from another country.
That's a bit of an overstatement - made for effect. If you have an address
and payment vector in another country, you can use them to buy from that country's iTunes store.
But I cannot buy, for example, a tune from the Australian iTunes store while listing my residence and payment method as being in the US.
So the group I wanted to buy the music off (Gotye) is unavailable in the iTunes US store. So I'm screwed.
Basically, this is the record companies acting as a cartel to restrain trade. Exactly similar to the video market.. in that one cannot buy a DVD in another country (the dastardly region coding) because of restrictions placed by the studios on when and how they release a movie in a given geographic market.
Since music rights may be held by different companies in different countries we end up with this mess.
I want to spend money to buy a record company's product but I'm not allowed by their rules to do so.
How stupid is that?
Interesting that it took Apple's dominance of the music market to surface this interesting tidbit. I'm not sure that it comes up quite so easily in other circumstances (less obvious).
Wow, what a difference a team makes.
Seriously, having a team that works together is so much better than having a team of prima donnas who don't. Leave out Steve Lampard, Phil Neville, and David Beckham and you have a much more dangerous team.
Who would've thunk?
Seriously, the 3-0 beating of Russia wasn't easy. They threatened a number of times - their left wing linkup and general play was very good. They are quick and inspired. And they were soundly beaten. The scoreline probably flatters England, if truth be told, but it was an excellent display of what a talented and inspired team can do playing together.
I would have put them against any team in the world on the day. I, for one, want exactly the same team to take the field through the Euro 2008 finals. The only difference might be the striker - hard not to play Wayne Rooney if he is fit and on his game. That said, who could sit Michael Owen if he continues to play as well as he has.
He may have lost a step but his tactical/positional nous is still with him. He seems to be in better places and not having to rely on his speed and turning off the shoulder of the defender as much.
I dislike Mclaren. But whether by accident or by design, one has to admit that he has played a very good team the last two outings.
This one definitely got by them. I was looking for duck fat to make some pommes frites and I got pointed to Amazon Gourmet by Google. Ok, so I go to the store and start reading the reviews.
I find this amazing one!
(5 stars) Great Stuff!!!!, April 19, 2007
By malfouka "malfouka" (SF East Bay, CA) - See all my reviews
My boyfriend is a huge fan of duck. He loves it. Roast duck, Duck a L'Orange, chicken-fried duck, Duck Varsovia, braised duck, Duck Chow Mein, Duck-n-Dumplins, Duck in Claret, etc... you get the idea. Anyway, we were cuddling in bed one night and he said, "I picked up a tub of rendered duck fat from Amazon.com and it is really tasty stuff." I said, "Oh yeah?" And he said, "Yeah. Let me get it and let you try it." So, one thing led to another and we ended up using it, you know, intimately.
Woooo! We'll never use K-Y again!
No bloody comment. Don't know how long it will last up there but 6 out of 7 of us have given it a "helpful" rating.
Damn, damn funny.
Wow.. I was listening to my Pandora radio station (cool idea, btw) and heard some music by an artist named "Gotye". Ok, so I like it well enough to explore more of their music and ask Pandora to load up iTunes and search for this artist.
Zip results.
So I Google Gotye, find out they are a new band from Oz, and they have a MySpace page. I go to MySpace and there is a reference to something called "the Australian iTunes store".
Bugger.. I cannot believe that Apple is so stupid as to limit access to music to certain markets! I was able to click through, and sure enough, iTunes was able to change my location to Oz and I found a nice album of their music.
Haven't determined whether I can purchase it just yet but it's ridiculous that but for serendipity (and my diligence in search) I would have missed the fact that there are other stores for iTunes.
Egad.. now I need to go see what's in the British store as well..
A shout out to my England peeps for the game against Israel. :)
A heck of a good game, and fun to watch. Even though the broadcast at the local pub crapped out during the middle of Wright-Phillips goal it was the first decent match I've seen Mclaren's team peform.
Interesting to note that the pairing of Gareth Barry and Steven Gerrard in the middle seem to work very well and that we finally have a good (speedy) pair of wingers playing well. I begin to think that it absolutely essential at the highest level of the international game and if we can just keep Joe Cole from drifting inside we'll do well. Ashley Cole and Micah Richards look like our fullbacks for the future.
All in all, the weakest point of the team now seems to be Rio Ferdinand. I'm happy with the Owen-Heskey pairing up front and we just need to find someone to pair with Crouchie to have two good lines.
Tomorrow's game with Russia should be very interesting. We should beat them handily but if our organization is poor or we allow them to dictate the tempo, I expect we will suffer for it.
Big difference between Russia and Israel.
I'm looking to put my Sirius Starmate ST2 unit into Eva on a more permanent basis. I'm going to make a plate to fill in the dash cubbyhole (just put a bid in on a used cubbyhole so I don't bugger the original) and then wire it up to have the iPod input, and possibly a three-way switch to switch between Sirius, iPod, and CD changer.
It'll be a good amount of work to make it look neat but I'm determined to not add anything that looks like a hack to the refined Boxster interior.
I took Eva to the autox on Saturday. I confess I was quite nervous - worrying about hitting cones and if they would take a toll on her bodywork.
Fortunately, I didn't hit any cones in my four runs. I had to borrow a helmet (note to self - buy one this week) because my old bike helmets are too old. Pity.. they had nice paint jobs. Back to the standard white for now I guess. In any event, the course took a bit less than a minute to run - I would imagine the average speed was about 35-40mph. I was told it was very technical for how fast it was..
We had 114 cars in three run groups. Started at 9am and finished about 4:30. I had a whale of a time and will be going back for the remaining two autocrosses of the year. My class winner (S3, which is basically an unmodified Boxster S with road-legal race tires) ran it in 53-54 seconds I believe. My two best times were 62 seconds.. so a long way back. I think I will fairly easily pick up 3-4 seconds with just experience of how the car handles and brakes. I was told that since I never activated my ABS I wasn't breaking hard enough - thus not driving fast enough.
I would be quite happy if I could get to 57-58 seconds on the next autocross and maybe down to 55 by the final one of the year. That would be terrific progress. I hate not being competitive.
Oddly enough, my tires really didn't heat up until the final run. I did notice that I was using them all the way to the edges though, so I'm fairly sure that my cornering speeds were good. I think I just have to work on obtaining a higher top speed and braking more quickly.
I did notice that the winner on the day (all times) was a modified 914 driven by Greg Fordahl, who apparently is a former SCCA national champ. I got him to sit passenger for me and give me advice as I did a run - very useful.
All in all, a great day. I think I'll wait until I'm within a second of the class winner before getting any race tires though.