Feet up!

So Liverpool do the impossible and come back from 3-0 down and win the European Cup, but don't qualify to defend it next year. How come the winners of the Champions League don't qualify for the Champions League, but the winners of the Welsh League do? Haven't UEFA heard of the trades description act? Is being Champions of Champions meaningless?

Congratulations Liverpoool, shame on you UEFA.

UEFA could do far worse than automatically granting the holders entry to next year's competition, it would be a useful automatic measure to allow one more teams from the strongest country into the competition without external wrangling.

[Wed, 25 May 2005 22:41] | [football] | #

Nokia's 770: rule breaker

sofa surfing with the 770

Whatever you think about Nokia, you can't fault them for trying. The new Nokia 770 is one of those niche defying devices, a sofa surfer's delight. The closest competitior I can think of is Sony's PSP games console which has been hacked to provide maybe half of the Nokia's capabilities, and Nokia appear to have thrown their device wide open for developers and users to embrace and extend, compared to Sony's miserly lock down approach.

Interesting stuff and the Nokia backed Maemo project to help commercial and non-commercial developers is at significant odds to Sony's "you want an sdk, you pay us mega-bucks" approach.

It's a long term approach and makes me think of the football match I'm watching: AC Milan vs Liverpool in the European Cup Final, first half AC Milan (PSP) went 3-0 up, second half Liverpool (770) got 3 goals back and looked far stronger, it goes to extra time in a draw, what will happen?

[Wed, 25 May 2005 21:49] | [tech] | #

2005-05-20 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

[Sat, 21 May 2005 06:30] | [linkblog] | #

Sorry Billy-Bob, your email is being ignored...

A bit of a grumpy old man post, but hey, it's got to be better than the normal link blogging.

Maybe it's one of the joys or disadvantages of being a white Englishman living in a predominantly white part of the country - I'm not being racist here, just stating facts - but the vast majority of my friends have traditional first, or dare I say it Christian, names.

Now the spammers don't know this, so the most of my spam email assumes I'm some unlucky fool in the midst Jesusland. Ergo, they expect that I'm the sort of chap who wouldn't be surprised at receiving an email from someone named Wilbur, Woodrow, Alicia, Teal, Traci, Jeremiah, Edgardo, Lorena or Romeo (a random selection of unknown names from my inbox). At best these names have great comedy factor to the English, and some simple whitelisting on sender names should reduce my spam by 90+%.

Now to see if I can persuade SpamAssassin to use this theory, and sorry but if you've got a misspelt or comedy first name you'll probably find your email to me will be heading straight to /dev/nul

[Wed, 18 May 2005 13:17] | [spam] | #

2005-05-16 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

[Tue, 17 May 2005 06:30] | [linkblog] | #

2005-05-13 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

[Sat, 14 May 2005 06:30] | [linkblog] | #

2005-05-05 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

[Fri, 06 May 2005 06:30] | [linkblog] | #

2005-05-03 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

[Wed, 04 May 2005 06:30] | [linkblog] | #

Fresh Cream?

On Friday night BBC 4 had an Eric Clapton special, part of which was a documentary of Cream's final concert in 1968 at the Royal Albert Hall. A few things struck me about this, chiefly how sublimely great and tight Cream were as a band, secondly how superb Ginger Baker was/is a wall of noise drummer, and thirdly how bland everything that Eric has done since then appears in the context of Cream.

Now nearly 40 years on, Cream are playing four reunion concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, for those lucky few with tickets - it's a total sell-out - tonight, Tues, Weds, and Thurs should be very special nights indeed.

[Mon, 02 May 2005 09:59] | [music] | #