One of my childhood heroes the great Evel Knievel has sadly died after a long illness! He escaped death on countless occasions during his life time of daredevil stunt riding but couldn’t dodge this one.
I think I still have my Evel Knievel motor bike set in the attic at home.
Evel in action:
Somehow I doubt John Delaney or anyone in the FAI reads this blog but if, by some odd stroke of luck, they chance upon my wee corner of the blog o’sphere I want my message to be clear…
Do not hire Terry Venables as ROI manager!
We’re sick of chancers and second rate managers! The Irish fans deserve a proper manager.
You only need to look at Terry Venables CV to tell that he is not a good manager.
- He was sacked from Barcelona
- he was sacked as chief executive with Spurs
- he was hired only as “coach” of England and had to leave the job in ’96 because of his dodgy business dealings
- he was with Portsmouth only 11 months and when he left they were bottom of Division 1
- he was with Palace less than a year as the club went into administration
- he was with Boro for just over a year and in fairness probably helped them avoid relegation
- he was sacked from Leeds with the club heading towards relegation
- and now he has been sacked as England assistant manager
He may have international experience, he may have managed some of the biggest clubs in Europe but he sucks as a manager. Just ask any Leeds United fans!
Edit:
p.s. Roy Hodgson’s contract with Finland expires at the end of the month. Ahem!
A couple of bloggers have commented on U2′s inclusion of the previously unreleased Red Hill Mining Town in their latest DVD, some aren’t impressed.
I care not. Naff 80s, I fucking love it. So here it is, Red Hill Mining Town, de vid.
Let’s go down on Red hiiiilllllll!
I’m a bit peeved off with the Sligo Cunty Council at the moment. Herself, the better half, got a fine for littering … 150 spondulics. Let me be clear, we’re not the type of people to be throwing rubbish anywhere. We pay over €12 each week to have our rubbish carted away.
With the absence of any clear information on the ticket the best we can guess is that the fine relates to when herself dropped bottles off at the bottle bank. The bottle bank was full so she left the bottles beside it assuming they’d be collected. Now some will think she deserved the fine but I’ll wager as many people will think it’s a logical enough course of action to leave the bottles at the bank if it’s full rather than be carrying them home again.
Anyway Sligo Cunty Council accused her of “illegally dumping refuse” and fined her €150.
It’s a bit fucking rich of Sligo CoCo if you ask me, considering there’s streets in Sligo strewn with litter which look like they haven’t been cleaned in a year. It’s a bit fucking rich of Sligo CoCo if you ask me to fine people for dropping off bottles at the bottle bank if they’re too lazy to get the bloody bins emptied. It would be no harm if Sligo CoCo got off their civil servant asses and cleaned the streets of their town rather than fining people for trying to recycle their bottles.
Buggers. I’ll get my revenge yet!
Below is “Waiting For The Guards“, the first film (of three) just released as part of Amnesty International‘s unsubscribe campaign.
Worth watching whether or not you agree with Amnesty’s work.
Amazon’s new electronic book reader Kindle, despite having just been released on November 19, has sold out already. Is this just a case of people wanting to be cool by buying the latest gadget?
To be honest I think the design is crap. Whatever about the functionality I’d find it hard to pay $399 for something which looks like a kids V-Tech computer.
If I was going to get an ebook reader I’d at least go for something stylish like Sony’s Reader Digital Book or the Cybook Gen 3.
And that’s a big IF. I hate reading long text from a screen. I think I’ll wait until they invent lcd screens with the look and feel of paper.
So with England’s miserable defeat to Croatia and NI’s expected exit last night and the poor aul Scots losing to the iTalians last week it obviously means none of the “home” nations, as some call ‘em, will be taking part in Euro 2008.
It’s a sad state of affairs really. What has happened to soccer on these islands at all?
While the Scots and NI played quite well throughout the qualification round they just weren’t good enough at the end of the day. Wales are sadly just shite, sorry Rhys. In the case of Ireland (ROI) and England I believe there is little excuse for not qualifying. England certainly have good enough players to create a strong team and in Ireland’s case while our players are hardly world beaters we had a very easy group with only 1 decent team (the Krauts) to compete against so failure to qualify from our group is inexcusable!
It’s difficult to know what needs to happen to turn things around. Without talented soccer players it will always be difficult but at the present time our biggest problems seems to be with management and with the tired old attitude of “ah but sure we’re a small country …”.
Steve McClaren and Terry Venebles are now available but I really hope to fuck that John Giles (who has been given the task of interviewing prospective ROI team managers) & team come up with a good solution this time after the failure of the last 3 management choices!
This summer it looks like I’ll be supporting Antonio’s team but the tournament will hold little interest for me as none of the 5 teams (6 if you include Finland) I would normally lend my support to will be at the tournament other than as spectators.
I’m beginning to think we should be focussing on other easier sports!
They can’t even turn on the fecking Christmas lights up North without some sort of trouble breaking out. What are they like!?!
p.s. name the tune/singer in the heading.
Whatgo?
This caught my attention when I was surfing through c|net news recently. According to c|net “Bango is trying to make it easier to get content onto your mobile phone” and since I love myself so much the idea of being able to read my own blog when mobile really appeals to me :-/
“The way it works is that a user puts the icon or “button” on a Facebook page [or any site really], which then enables friends who visit the page to get photos, music clips, or other files that appear on that page on their handsets.”
According to the Bango homepage however…
“Get people paying for your mobile content and services immediately from their mobile phone anywhere in the world”
Not that my content is worth paying for but I’ve always liked the idea of having a website for mobile users, it’s just that I don’t have any content which would appeal to mobile users.
Still out of curiosity I reckon it’s worth a test…
Edit:
Test 1 … Opera mini browser not supported! WTF?
Test 2 … hint: don’t forget the http://
Test 3 … Following registering with wap.com you get a link to the site you’re trying to visit.
After downloading 77kb I canceled the download and at that stage it had downloaded almost the entire page anyway though styles/layout etc were a mess. The content was certainly readable but as a webmaster I’d feel bad offering that as an option to visitors. I’d much prefer to serve a separate site specifically for mobiles. It may certainly suit those who wish to charge for their content but this idea of using it with Facebook or blogs is nonsense IMO.
For comparison I went to Raiméis using Opera Mini. It downloaded the page in only 28kb WITH images and gave me a fully styled rendering of my blog (with javascript!) and although the rendering wasn’t perfect it was damn close!
Opera Mini is class all the same!
I just noticed that Firefox 3 beta 1 was released yesterday. The new version is based on the new Gecko 1.9 rendering platform which has had some serious work done on it. Other changes include added security, increased ease of use and improved performance i.e. they’ve gotten around to addressing some of the memory leakage issues.
I’m going to hold off installing it until the official ver 3 release (my geek rating has just plummeted); has anyone given it a test drive yet?