Saturday 22 May 2010

The Football League Play-Offs

It's currently 3.38pm, we're 38 minutes into the championship play-off final between Cardiff City and Blackpool, and so far it's the team from Wales that are leading 2-1 in the glorious sunshine of Wembley stadium.

Scratch that, Blackpool have just equalised, it's 2-2 now. This pretty much encapsulates what the play-off system is all about. It takes four teams whose seasons might otherwise be over, and injects some interest into the last few weeks of the season for them. This game has so far been an end to end affair with each team giving as good as they get.

It's now 3-2 to Blackpool with 46 minutes gone...

A friend of mine is a Nottingham Forest supporter. He recently complained to me that the newest member of the English Premier League family will either be Welsh, or a club with a three sided stadium. Sour grapes you might say, especially since it was the club with the three sided stadium that knocked his beloved Forest out of the play-offs this season.
In truth this is regularly one of the best games of the season, and not just because the winner gets a place in the English Premier League and all the financial bonuses that come with that (approximately £90m). It's a day out, it's the sort of thing that years later you can tell people you were there.

As of this moment Blackpool look as though they will be in the Premiership next year, if the championship didn't run the play-off system they would have been 9 points short of 3rd place and have nothing to play for. Is that fair on Nottingham Forest who finished 3rd this year? No, but it makes for a much more entertaining end of season and gives 6 sets of fans across 3 divisions a memorable day out at Wembley, a place that is hard enough to get to with the premier league's dominance of cup competitions.

On a side note, the Champions League Final should never have been moved to a Saturday, now i have to wait until Monday to talk about it around the water cooler...

Robinho

Friday 14 May 2010

If i can be serious for a moment...

If skype is to be believed then i want to wish a very happy birthday to Evan O'brien, the owner and creator of fromheadlockstoheadlines.com.

I had the honour of appearing on one or two of the early podcasts to come from that site and have always known Evan to be a friendly and genuine guy.

If you're reading this then i hope you had a great day.


Wednesday 12 May 2010

Elections, negotiations, resignations and coalitions - Why a hung parliament may have been a blessing in disguise.

It seemed as though it would never end, then at approximately 7.25pm yesterday it all got interesting.

Gordon Brown, who had resigned as Labour party leader just the day before, announced that he would be resigning as Prime Minister with immediate effect. At 7.25 he held a brief meeting with the Queen where he resigned and left the way clear for David Cameron to form the next British Government. This has been seen as a cynically timed resignation as Brown knew that although the Liberal Democrats would not form a coalition with his party, they had yet to hammer out a deal with Camerons' Conservative party.

Cameron however was undeterred, and at 8.30pm last night the Liberal Democrats voted in favour of a coalition with the Conservatives which would leave them in a strong position to influence the future governance of the United Kingdom.

Cameron has been magnanamous in his appointments of a new cabinet with no fewer than 5 Lib Dem MP's being given positions in the new cabinet. These aren't minor positions either, My personal favorite Liberal MP, Vince Cable is now
Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. This isn't quite Chancellor of the Exchequer as i had hoped, but it is still a very prominant role, having been previously held by master of the dark arts himself Peter Mandelson.

The developments of the last 48 hours or so have had a rather strange effect on me though. They have left me rather enthusiastic about the future of British Politics. With a coalition of Lib Dem and Conservative parties in power certain compromises have had to be made by both. The Conservatives have had to accept that political reform is something that has to be looked at and have now got the benefit of access to the Lib Dems brightest stars when appointing cabinets.

I don't care who you voted for, if you kept an eye on British politics, and economics in the last 2 or 3 years Vince Cable should have been your preferred option for Chancellor. I voted for the Conservatives and i wanted them to give him the job even if they got a majority!

This could well be a glimpse of the future too. If a system such as proportional representation is installed as the new election format for the UK then we will be getting many more hung parliaments in the years to come, this in turn will force reasoned discussion and compromise between the parties, and hopefully result in better decisions and a more open mindset from the politicians that rule this country.

Proportional Representation also has one more benefit. How many people think at election time "well my vote doesn't matter, how can one vote make a difference?" Well under PR every vote is worth the same, unlike the current past the post system where in my constituancy David Kendall came 2nd with over 11,000 votes, votes that counted for nothing. Under the new system those 11,000 votes would be added to all the other votes cast for a party. If a party gets 50% of the votes, they get 50% of the seats in parliament. Simple isn't it.

Anyway, this election may have dragged on, people may well have gotten sick of listening to the news reports around it, and many might well ignore politics all together until the next vote comes around. But for me this election has been the start of something new, something (dare i say it) exciting. I voted for change, now it's time to see if it's change for the better...

Robinho

Tuesday 4 May 2010

Thank You Microsoft!

For the last few years I've been slaving under the yoke of a ruthless dictator who forced me to do everything it's way and constantly proved to be a pain in my arse. It's name was Windows Vista, and it started out so promisingly...

When Vista first arrived it came with some fanfare, it was a departure from XP, it gave you little windows showing you each program as you hovered your mouse over it, it had see through windows, it could do anything you could think of. Unfortunately it was also slow, power hungry and the least intuitive OS that i have used in many, many years.

Way back when (about 4 years ago i think) i had a Toshiba Satellite with Windows XP pre-loaded on it, it was a great machine and did everything i wanted it to, but it's newborn sister Vista had me getting all broody for a new OS of my own. Ever the pragmatist (and skinflint i might add) i decided to resist Vista with it's attractive menus and pointless bells and whistles since my Tosh was a single core machine with only 1.5 Gig or ram. This was fine for XP which happily ran on much less resources than those in my Laptop, but for Vista it wasn't nearly good enough.

Fate would, however, play a cruel hand to me sooner than i would like. One night while wasting some time on YouTube my beloved little Toshiba made a horrifying noise and froze. It never worked again. It would boot up and you would get as far as the loading screen, but then the screen would go black and nothing worked. Eventually i would suck it up and accept that i had to buy a new laptop, so off to Ebuyer.com i went.

My search for a decent value for money Laptop was a short and fruitful affair as i soon found a Samsung R60plus for sale for around £350.It was a dual core, it had lots of RAM, It came with a years free subscription to Panda Internet Security (which i would highly recommend to anyone reading this) and best of all, or so i thought at the time, it came with Windows Vista pre-loaded.


The first few weeks and months were fine, the laptop was quick and did everything i wanted, but soon the cracks began to surface. The snazzy interface was all style and no real substance, it took forever to boot up and shut down, setting up networks was still a pain in the posterior, yada yada yada. I invested in more RAM, taking the Samsung up to a very healthy 2.5 Gb, which resulted in much faster opening and closing of programs but didn't tackle the main problem, i was running out of space. I can't quote specifics, but lets just say that my Samsung was advertised as having an 80Gb HDD but once Vista had finished setting up i had less than 60Gb.

Why, you might ask, have i taken you on another random journey into my past dealings with two now defunct OS's? Well i finally got on board the good ship Windows7 today and my god how things have changed! First things first it was out with the paltry 80Gb HDD and in with a new 500Gb HDD, this gives me much more space for program files and should allow me much more flexibility when it comes the time to launch my new podcast and music projects (keep reading the blog to find out more). Next up came the change to Windows7, quite possibly the most painless install I've ever witnessed. Everything was made so simple and easy to understand.

Having messed around with the new OS for a couple of hours i am massively impressed, everything in the 8 second adverts works perfectly, 7 is much less resource hungry than Vista both in terms of memory used on the Hard drive and the amount of RAM taken up in general use. when i initially turned the system on not only was it lightening quick compared to my previous OS but it automatically searched for any drivers that i might be missing and installed them when i shut down. I'd expect this to be true of previous OS's too but only windows centric drivers...

I've been toying with getting 7 since it launched, and now that i have finally taken the plunge i am more than satisfied with the results. It's good looking, easy to use, less resource hungry and much faster than it's older sister Vista

Microsoft actually made an OS that's intuitive and does everything that people asked for off the back of their last effort? Surely not?

Surely yes!

Robinho

Sunday 2 May 2010

Date Night

The new comedy vehicle for Steve Carrell and Tina Fey hit British cinemas recently and on Friday night i had the chance to see it along with a few friends.

Date Night follows Phil and Claire Foster during their once weekly dinner engagement after which the film is named. Due to the fact that they always go to the same place and eat the same thing both feel that their relationship, and marriage, might be in trouble. In an attempt to shake things up Phil decides to take Claire to a new and highly exclusive Seafood restaurant and after taking another couples reservation are mistaken for The Triplehornes, who have been blackmailing a mob boss. The next hour of the film follows them on the craziest date of their lives as they attempt to track down the Triplehornes and clear their names.

Carrell and Fey, the stars of two of US tv's biggest sitcoms (The Office and 30 rock respectively) certainly have chemistry on screen and thanks to their tv projects they're well versed in comedy acting too. You instantly get the feeling that these two could be a married couple and the parents to two young children.

The supporting cast are strong as well, Mark Wahlberg,William Fichtner , James Franco, Mila Kunis and Ray Liotta all lend their considerable talents to the film in a range of roles that fit them perfectly. All the above actors felt perfectly cast, they slipped into their roles and never had me thinking of them as anything other than the character they played. James Franco and Mila Kunis especially deserve praise for their turn as Taste and Whippit, the couple who the Fosters were mistaken for and set in motion the events of the movie. Wahlberg also takes some credit as the sudo-Bond character Holbrooke, who helps the Fosters in their quest to find the Triplehornes.

The set piece scenes in the film are both funny and original, the thrill a minute scene involving an Audi R8 and a New York yellow cab springs to mind immediately, as does the Fosters' daring escape by boat from the henchmen that have them held at gunpoint. The script is entertaining and funny, giving every character their fair share of the laughs while not falling back on the same old tired clichés that so many of these films tend to.

The film may be titled Date Night, but don't let that fool you into thinking that it's a typical chick flick with a few laughs thrown in to keep the blokes awake. This is a comedy first and foremost, it makes no qualms about the fact that it's main purpose is to make you laugh, and laugh hard.

Robinho