IMS_Blog

Been meaning to post this for a few days, so at least I’ve finally gotten round to it! During the Euro 2008 Turkey versus Germany semi-final the pictures were lost for some brief times, thanks to a storm. Fine, even in the twenty-first century it sees we can’t overcome a simple storm. What I found more interesting was that after a brief pause the BBC had a voice over apologising, and then during a second interruption blaming the storm. Which got me to thinking—obviously that voice over was live, so do they have a “voice over man” on twenty-four hour call, just in case? I know they have programme links but I’d sort of assumed a fair few of those were recorded (maybe not I suppose, in case things are over running), and there may be things like news flashes (I know I’ve seen at least one news flash, but I can’t recall what for and, more pertinantly, whether it was the news presenter making the announcment), the question remains, what does he do in the meantime?? Does the voice over man sit watching TV all day? Is he forced to watch the BBC? Is it one man per channel, or several men, or just the one? And how does one get such a cushy sounding job?

The idea of playing an extra game, abroad, away from the fans, with the top teams seeded is not only a typically money grabbing manoeuvre by those with passion not for the game but the pounds (or dollars, or whatever their local currency is) it can generate. It is also an affront to the integrity of the competition itself, calling into question its very fairness in a way which cannot go unanswered. Sign the petition now.

Top of the league, said we are top of the league

Read the rest of the post on Diary of a Fan

When looking at a league table it is occasionally useful to see the home and away form (number of wins, draws, etc) split up. It’s almost always useful to view the totals though. I’ve hence never understood tables which leave you to do the mental adding yourself, inevitably forgetting some of the numbers. soccerbase.com is one such table provider. Well, I’ve fixed things with a greasemonkey script.

Quite an interesting write actually. I got to use XPath (there’s a nice wrapper function) and had to wonder about finding computed styles of an element, until I discovered Gecko gives a nice easy way.

Now what can I do…

That. Was. Awful…

Read the rest of the post on Diary of a Fan