The news of the impending demise of Leeds Utd. has brought me over all nostalgic. I am old enough and was living in the right part of the country to remember the manic, and entertainingly prejudiced, rantings of one Keith Macklin on Yorkshire TV as the backdrop to Messrs. Sprake, Cooper, Reaney, Madeley, Charlton, (bite your legs, Norman) Hunter, Bremner, Giles, Gray, Lorimer, Clarke & Jones kicking all and sundry off the park on a regular basis. But without the villains there can be no heros, in particular the Chelsea and Sunderland teams that deprived Leeds of the F.A. Cup whilst they were in their pomp. Jim Montgomery’s performance for Bob Stokoe’s Sunderland would have been legend on Wearside, no matter what team he had produced his cup final performance against, but because it was against Leeds it was celebrated to all ends of the country. That was long in the past and they are a different team now but as far as the personalities associated with the club, how many will miss the financial ineptitude of Ken Bates and the managerial inadequacies of Denis Wise outside the metropolitan confines of Leeds?

Not mine I must make clear. It was my son’s 18th earlier in the week and a party was organised for tonight, at least I assumed it was, judging by the number of invitees that turned up maybe it wasn’t. Next time I’ll book a telephone box to hold the party in. Not bothered about the money, although it could have been spent more memorably with the clarity of hindsight, or all the space taken up as the considerable quantities of beer, lager, alcopops and soft drinks, party type food etc. started to take over a considerable portion of the house, just as well as most of it is back where it was earlier in the day, but a little sad that, whilst it’s always good to know who your real friends really are, the night of your 18th birthday party is probably not the day to find out that they are not quite as numerous as you might have previously imagined. Seems to be shrugging it off OK at the moment, hope he’s just as phlegmatic when he wakes tomorrow.

Alex Rodriguez, owner of the 2nd largest contract in sport, $252m over 10 years, having given up top spot to the beloved Beckham, has finally started delivering the numbers to match this gargantuan wedge of cash. He is on pace to break all manner of records for April baseball, home runs matched already, one short of the RBI total, multi-base hits, batting average and slugging percentage are right up there with the best here has ever been in the sport. Yet the strange thing is that there is not that much surprise, his ability to deliver this level of output has not been in a great deal of doubt, but this is April and if the Yankees are not playing ball well into October, with A-Rod contributing significantly, this current performance will not just count for nothing but will be seen, by Yankee fan, as yet more reason to hate A-Rod even more. Ain’t a sporting life strange?

Google is my favourite search engine, not much of an endorsement I know, which probably why they don’t pay me fabulous sums for saying so, but nevertheless true. I have always resisted the temptation to put my name and pseudonyms in there as it seems rather narcissistic but, in a moment of weakness, I ventured out there to see what could be found and it’s surprising stuff, not shattering but surprising, and this is just the stuff that’s on the surface, so what might be there if a little more effort was put in? It seems that anybody can find out my stats for projects run through BOINC, that I bought House, Season 2 through a well known online store, and wrote a review of it on their site and that 10 of 11 viewers of the review found it useful, which is quite gratifying but just wait until I get my hands on the other miserable bastard. Of course there are links to other reviews I have written on there, links to postings on various bulletin boards for many and varied computer issues and even an indication that someone subscribed to, or tried to subscribe to, this blog via iTunes?!

Nothing there that is sensitive or embarrassing, people might think I’m a bit of a flake for running SETI via BOINC, but that’s their problem not mine, and I am more than happy to tell people how much I love ‘House’ but it does make you wonder if you shouldn’t create a new and random profile for every last online subscription and record it on a high tech piece of paper stuffed in the back of a desk drawer, or does this just lead to paranoia?

…..to all those baseball players whose careers have suddenly and inexplicably gone in the tank. I know they are going to have time on their hands at the moment and just might treat themselves to reading my blog so thought it best to fes up, it was me, I picked you in my fantasy team and now you all seem to be screwed. Sorry. Carl Pavano; injured, Jason Schmidt; injured, Mike Matheny; retired, Alfonso Soriano; injured, B J Ryan; injured, Tim Salmon; retired, Felix Hernandez; injured, Hideki Matsui; injured, Lew Ford; injured. C’mon you pussies, don’t you think it’s time to man up here, put your physical and psychological well being and multi-million dollar careers aside for a moment? Don’t you understand my self esteem is at stake here, you’ve all only got to get through the next 150 games or so and then you can get yourselves sorted. Is it really asking so much?

Still nothing to gripe about with the iPod, seems to do everything I expect of it and a lot more I suspect. Battery performance seems to be around the advertised figure of 14 hours, certainly not more but not significantly less either, if you stop a file that you are listening to and open another, when you go back to it, it starts at the place you left it. This was one of the gripes I complained to Philips about as some of the podcasts I listened to were close on three hours long and if you stopped and the player shutdown, which it did after about 30 mins, then you couldn’t do this, nor could you fast forward to roughly the point you left it at. Sound quality is fine on the podcasts I’ve listened to so far, but that’s not much of a test as the quality of the recording is quite variable. Haven’t played any MP3 or AAC files so the jury is still out and having an extended lunch on that one. Not quite so happy with iTunes though. Since installing the software I’ve had at least 4 BSOD, hadn’t had a single one since doing the last install of Vista, about 6 weeks ago, so hoping that Apple will get this ironed out pronto. Have been delving about in iTunes and found that the podcasts that I can subscribe to are not limited to those hosted on iTunes so catching up on all the stuff that’s not in the store, Major League Baseball, Tekdiff and a few others.

A friend tells me that 15% of all iPods fail within 12 months, (this is what friends are for!) but it’s not the failure rate inside 12 months that bothers me, that’s within the guarantee period, it’s the rate between 13 and, say, 36 months that I’m more interested in.

Overall I would give it 8/10 and that would go to 9½/10 if iTunes gets sorted Never give 10/10, not even to Bo Derek despite her billing, I’m just a curmudgeonly bastard!!

Disappointed to hear the call for Fletcher to be canned and alarmed to hear rumours that he has already resigned. We lost a game of cricket yesterday and we got arses comprehensively spanked doing so, but look at our ranking. I know ranking isn’t everything, that’s why the game actually gets played, but we have not lost to anyone who we should have beaten, whilst conversely we haven’t beaten anyone that we shouldn’t have. The one day form of this team over the past two years does not merit a place in the final four, the rankings tell us we were not going to reach the final four, why are the cricket media surprised therefore when we don’t reach the final four and, in failing to do so, it then becomes a cause for presenting Fletcher with his walking papers? I don’t think there is an international coaching job going that Fletcher would not walk into if he were on the market, so why are the media intent on putting him there? I have heard so much from the media, and continue to hear, that Vaughan is the best captain we have had since Mike Brearley, and I agree, yet he was unable to extract a performance from the team and he was on the field, how is the coach supposed to exert more influence, from the pavilion, than his captain does on the field? England have never been a great one day team under Fletcher but whilst we perform at test level that keeps us at our current ranking, or better, he remains the man for the job until the end of the summer program at least.

Having ditched my Philips MP3 player, and should anyone from Royal Philips Electronics of The Netherlands, Portable Entertainment section be reading this then fuck you very much and goodbye, I find that Apple have brought down the price of their iPod to the sort of levels that I paid for the Philips, so I bought one and I have to say that the experience, I’m sure that’s how Apple would want it described, ‘experience’, and that I haven’t just purchased an overblown MP3 player but ‘bought into a culture of multimedia solutions’ is pretty much all that the advocates of this device claim. It meshes well with iTunes, would have been a bit of a surprise if it didn’t I suppose, and seems to do everything very smoothly, synched podcasts already on the PC, once I had pointed it in the right direction, charged via the USB connection and transferred much quicker that the Philips although it was supposed to be USB2 also. Purchasing music, audio books and video, if you can really watch something on a screen with a 2½ inch diagonal, looks to be a piece of cake. Haven’t found all the podcasts I want via iTunes yet but it seems that I can continue to use Doppler Radio for the time being and have the iPod synched to the folder used by Doppler. So that’s great then. It’s just that I haven’t actually, er, played anything on it as yet so there is every likelihood there will be a rant forthcoming in the next few days about sound quality or battery capacity or some other unforeseen gremlin.

Have to mention that the buying experience wasn’t quite everything I expected. Went to Comet for 10.00 this morning, turns out they don’t open until 10.30, OK my problem, should have checked, but when I went back there at 10.30 found doors still closed whilst all the droids stood around listening to their head hype meister bang on at them, in full sight of myself and the other customers waiting to get in, until 10.35. Not very professional, still it was a nice reminder of the shit I left behind a couple of years ago.

to bang on about really, which has to be good news I guess because I usually have something to whine about when I do post. So that’s great then, I’ll get my coat. Well, there is the small matter of the unavailability of the system for taxing vehicles online, but even that is fairly hard to whinge about bearing in mind that it’s saving me the £2.50 fee for paying the Govt. £46 to tax my bike. Just how does that work? Any capital costs incurred in setting up the system will be recovered no doubt when the next contract with the Post Office is negotiated as I’m sure they will reduce the number of offices which offer this service, there will be less paper pushing at DVLA and less fraud. Well there would be if the system had greater than zero availability, maybe I’ve just been unlucky but three times now I have been unable to get into the system. However, given the record of Govt. IT projects I suspect it’s just another SNAFU, supplied at great expense by the likes of EDS, Siemens, Accenture, Crapita etc. etc. But why should we care, after all it comes out of Gordon Brown’s own pocket doesn’t it? I’ve had dealings in the past with both EDS & Crapita and most of the time you weren’t aware of them but for that 0.1% of the time when their systems fell over you were well and truly screwed, there was no recourse and no alternative, no fall back system. The vehicle licensing is a minor inconvenience but Passport Office and other Home Office projects and the NHS are a different matter yet these same providers continue to show an insatiable thirst for public funds whilst demonstrating critical inability to deliver the technology.

Right, that’s it, I’m really pissed off now so there’ll probably be more later.

Time to vent a little spleen, although I’m a little uncertain of the health benefits of a ventilated spleen, but never mind. Let’s name names at the outset, Philips Consumer Products, buzz phrase ‘Sense & Simplicity’, perhaps someone could tell me how this coincides with my experience? I posted in the middle of last year that I had obtained an MP3 player which had relieved me of the onerous task of listening to the same old sound bites and spin which I had theretofore been subject to via the radio news medium, I could now listen to podcasts on astronomy, military history, bike racing, Kermode’s film reviews, Fighting Talk, etc. etc whenever the wind up from the radio became just too grating. But now Philips have put an end to this because they have told me that they are not, despite indications on their web site to the contrary for months, planning on patching the MP3 player to be used with Vista and Windows Media Player 11 and can, laughably, only suggest that I use the ‘recommended’ operating system, Windows XP. Either that or I could use it as a doorstop I guess. No, hang on, I could buy another new PC, but not so new that it comes with Vista installed, and hook up my MP3 player to that. Blimey, the answer was there staring me in the face all along, how could I have been so stupid? Well clearly I was that dim buying from Philips in the first place as I already had a DVD recorder from these incompetents that was crap. So that’ll be £170 pissed up the wall on my behalf by Philips but please feel free to drop round anytime the corporate coffers need a bit of a boost, pop your hand in my pocket and cut out the middleman, clearly I won’t be expecting even the semblance of goods or services in return for this mugging. Bastards.

I would be absolutely fascinated to see what it was that these clowns used as a business model and what the brief was that it was produced in response to. It must surely have been understood at the outset the nature of the beast that they were going to have to deal with in order to make their investment pay? The NHS is now a very fragmented service and the uptake of all the high end services that Patientline bolted onto the package they put into hospitals in response to the original brief were always going to be subject to negotiations with each individual PCT and the outcome of these discussions was never a certainty because the cash strapped PCT’s were going to have to stump up significant wads of cash either directly for an end to end service whereby Patientline took the hospital records and transferred them on to their own hardware to make them available on their bedside units or the PCT’s had to pay for the records to be put onto their own hardware and then served to Patientline’s system. Either way the likelihood of this occurring ranged between Bob Hope and no hope. How did they get this dreck past their bankers? The income and expenditure curve always looks the same in these plans, just the timescales differ slightly; there is the initial capital requirement for hardware and installation, which shows as a big dip, and then after about 2 years the income grows exponentially. And that’s it, and their bankers signed up for it! Doh!

And now these imbeciles are left with no option, because no one uses any other service to any significant degree, but to fleece, even more, the people who use the service which I suspect was the major component of their original brief; the telephone. I can get 1 hour duration free calls evening and weekends from B.T. for about £12 p.m. ringing in to speak to my aunt who was in hospital a little while back would now get me about 24 minutes via Patientline, Offcom have stepped on the mobile phone companies to the extent that I can get 900 minutes for £26 p.m. with Patientline that would equate to about 53 minutes. So let’s call this what it is, one of two things; exploitation of vulnerable people or blackmail of the government to have them subsidise the basic service in order to cross subsidise the extended services that are little used and were provided by Patientline outside of the original brief. Either way this sort of behaviour has a name.

Why are we unable to accept we have achieved a satisfactory outcome to a difficult situation? Why do we have to see the resolution of the Iranian situation, with regard to the captured servicemen, as a zero sum game in which there has to be a winner and, therefore, a loser? This is not how diplomacy works. Here is the position as it stands right now; following a confrontation between several dozen armed personnel, between whom there may have been limited ability to communicate, in uncertain territory, all are back where they belong and not a drop of blood has been shed. No admission of fault has been made by either side in the dispute and reports indicate that new lines of communication have been opened between the two countries concerned and if this means that these communications are between pragmatists the prospects for meaningful discussion on other matters of mutual interest may result in future benefits for all concerned. Where is there any loss of face in this scenario?

There may need to be a reassessment of the rules of engagement, but maybe not given the outcome, there may need to be a review of the force structure, can old A/S frigates such as HMS Cornwall satisfactorily protect personnel carrying out their duties away from the vessel? However these are military and political issues, the diplomatic issue was a success, not a triumph, that was not necessary, it was a success and that was required and achieved.

Clearly I share the pleasure at the return of our marines and sailors and despite the absence of the emotional response seen in Iran over the affair there has been great concern shown in the media and much, hopefully sincere, hand wringing by politicians of all hues. But it does strike me that all this coverage and concern is in marked contrast to the response seen when an announcement is made that one of the armed forces will not be returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. I make no judgement about the political posture of our armed services being present in these places but just note that they are there at the bidding of our government, and therefore by extension, us, but now the media has begun to treat the sad news of another death as a just another integer to add to the total. I understand that it may well be inappropriate to solicit comment from grieving relatives and therefore the scope for media comment is more limited and I am not looking for the media just to use the news as a peg on which to reiterate it’s position on the whole affair but it would be good to know that the relatives of the casualties are receiving, at least, the same level of support and comfort that has been evident in the last 10 days for those who were held and should now be on their way back to their families.

Don’t watch a lot of Premiership football but just been watching Villa vs. Everton, pretty mediocre offering all told, the one question it suggested to me is, what is it that Andy Johnson brings to the game that makes him first choice England forward? In three games now he hasn’t looked like scoring or setting up anyone else, he’s not even the best leader of the line on his own team tonight, Vaughan looks much better.

Anyway, on to more committed and less well paid sportsmen. A couple of great WSB races from Donnington over the weekend, Toseland showing he has the balls and talent to go further in the sport and could have an impact towards the top of Moto GP, if he’s given a chance, and everything suggests that the championship will not be decided until late in the season, with Haga, Biaggi, Bayliss, Toseland and Corser all looking like they will be in with a shout when push comes to shove. Maybe Xaus will have something to say, maybe not as a championship winner but taking points off those who think they will be.

Think this qualifies as day of the year so far. On holiday today after staying up to watch the opening game of the 2007 Baseball season, pretty good game, no surprise to see Tom Glavine pitch a good one for the Mets, should get his 300th win before the season’s out. The Cards have to be just a touch concerned as Carpenter’s control seemed a little awry when he needed it most but I don’t think he is going to be the greatest of their pitching problems this year. Pujols walked twice but otherwise failed to make solid contact. So that kept me up until about 4.15 a.m. A little sleep and then out on the bike for a jolly round the neighbourhood. Not too hot, not too cold, the tarmac seemed to be a little cool still but a good hours ride. I was so enamoured of the whole day that I thought I would make an assessment of what I need to do with the bike and things then got a little dismal. I’ve known that the shims need doing for a while and the oil & filter need a change. But the bottom end is a little fluffy, so plugs will have to come out, front brake pads will soon need changing, do the brake fluid at the same time, chain always needs lubing but it needs a little adjustment also and it feels like the cush drive is on the way out. Still, made the most of it today but it looks like Easter is going to be spent doing things other than ride it. Bugger.