Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

Man-U 4, Celtic 0

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That. So. Rocked.

Manchester United vs. Celtic

Phil and I bailed from work a little after 7pm, caught the bus into town, and got off just about four blocks from Seahawks Stadium. Walked in, and found our way to our seats — which, as you can see from the above shot, were incredible! About thirteen rows back, practically right on the goal line. Even better, the entrance that the teams came out of to get on the field was directly to our left — there were a few too many people in the way for me to get a really good shot of them taking the field, though. Still, just being close enough that I could clearly see their faces was great.

Turns out that Seattle is definitely primarily a Man-U town. There were definitely Celtic fans in the crowd, but the roar every time Man-U scored or prevented a goal was pretty telling. The game itself was almost schizophrenic, though. Celtic played a very offensive game, and Man-U couldn’t seem to keep the ball out of their side of the field for the majority of the game, but the few times they did manage to push the ball down the field they scored almost every time. Their goalie, though, did an astounding job for the whole game — while the defense was good enough that Celtic didn’t get too many shots, he didn’t let any of them get through. Just gorgeous to watch.

In the end, Man-U took the game, four to nothing — a total shutout. There was also an announcement midway through the second half of the game that the final attendance tally was 66,722 people in the stadium! Blew my mind, and apparently that was record attendance for the stadium, too! Kind of funny when a soccer game creates more of a draw than the local sports teams do — but then, this was one hell of a soccer game.

All in all, one hell of an evening. While I’m sorry that Phil’s girlfriend couldn’t make it…damn but that was fun!

Update: Writeups are already posted on the local news sites.

BOO-YAH!

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My manager just came up to me and handed me a ticket to the Man-U/Celtic game tonight! Turns out his girlfriend has to cancel, and since we were talking about the game earlier…

…I’m in.

Too.

Freaking.

Cool.

See y’all after the game!

Ah, the memories…

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Robert Scoble:

Kookaburra asks “will Longhorn eat RAM?”

My “official Microsoft approved answer”: too early to talk about minimum or recommended requirements. We probably won’t talk about minimum requirements until right before launch.

The answer I give my friends after they get me drunk: “yes.”

The rest of his answer is worth reading, where he explains his answer a bit more in depth, without running afoul of the Powers That Be at Microsoft. Still, this got me thinking about how much I miss the days when computers weren’t as powerful as they are now. Not because I’d like to go back to the days of 286’s and Motorola 68000 processors (ick), but because the limited resources forced programmers to weigh features against bloat, to code for small sizes as well as functionality, and so on.

The first computer I owned was a Mac Classic, with 1Mb RAM (that’s not a typo — one megabyte) and no internal hard drive. My senior year of high school, I did all my papers on that machine. I had two 1.4Mb floppys: one with System 6.0.7 to boot the computer, and one that had Microsoft Word v4 and every paper I wrote that school year.

Let me stress that: one floppy. Microsoft Word and every paper I wrote in a school year.

I miss that.

You know, as it stands right now, I won’t buy Microsoft Word. But if they could dig into their archives, pull out the source code for Word v4 for Mac and update it to run on Mac OS X, I’d pop down cash for that in a heartbeat. Best damn word processor I ever used, mainly because it was a word processor, not a over-priced, over-featured, kludgy, pain in the ass piece of bloatware with every conceivable feature tossed in merely because it could be.

But that’s just me.

English

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English is the preacher’s language, because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say.

— Garrison Keillor

Boy, ain’t that the truth. I know I talk like that. Sometimes I blog like that, too, though I try not to do it on too much of a regular basis. ;)

I found that quote through Doc Searls.

Is the day over yet?

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Today is just dragging on, and on…and on. Woke up with a bit of a headache, and it hasn’t gone away all day. Not enough to be extremely painful or debilitating, just enough to sit a couple inches behind my forehead and make sure that I don’t forget that it’s there. Urgh.

On the bright side, work is slow. On the down side — well, work is slow. I’m the only one in the department tonight, there’s nothing overly pressing coming down the pike, and I’m bored out of my mind. Hence this otherwise pointless post. I’ve bounced around some of the TypePad blogs on the recently updated list, randomly hit a few other sites, and so far, everything has completely failed to catch my attention. Just one of those days, I guess.

Okay, enough of this. Back to pretending I’m paying attention to work.

Maybe.

Convert Kmph to Mph

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Note for Americans, that the speed is kilometers per hour not miles. To convert you multiple by 5 and divide by 8 then add 32 less the number you first thought of and then cross out the answer and write “really fast for an old car” or something like that.

— Jon Wright, in Blog Roundup

Turn down the heat!

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On the bright side, the weather has been absolutely gorgeous all this weekend. On the downside, I haven’t wanted to leave the apartment — once temperatures hit the mid-80’s to 90’s, I’m quite content to lay in a near-comatose puddle on my bed. ;) However, this being the weekend for the Bite of Seattle food festival, I couldn’t very well stay indoors in the shade all weekend.

The Seattle Center fountain

Prairie had come in to town to visit for the weekend, so Saturday morning we got up around 11, wandered downtown to see Pirates of the Caribbean (which rocked — more on that later, most likely), then walked from the Temple of Avarice to the Seattle Center to wander around the Bite for a while. As I mentioned above, it was gorgeous weather, so Seattle was out in full force. Lots of people, and at times a little overcrowded (does nobody ever pay attention to where they are walking at these things?), but aside from that, not bad at all. I even went out and soaked myself in the fountain — and boy, did that make the sun more bearable for the rest of the afternoon!

The main field at Seattle Center

After grabbing some food and finding a seat in the shade to eat, we each grabbed an ice cream cone, and sat down at one of the music stages to watch The Retros play — if the name hasn’t given it away already, they specialize in 80’s pop, and are a blast to see. We finished our ice cream about the same time they finished their set, and, deciding that we didn’t really want to risk sunburn any more than we already had, we hopped on the monorail and came back to the apartment.

The rest of the weekend was spent mostly here at the apartment, resting and trying to avoid the heat as much as possible. Movies were watched, laundry was done, and not much else. Which, as far as I’m concerned, makes for a perfect weekend.