bring on the trumpets

Best advert on tele at the moment… ha ha ha,  trumpets!

motd: sky sports 1 v setanta sports

With the forthcoming arrival of Sky to our new place, the majority of folk know (those who are into sport, especially football anyway) it isn’t worth committing your cash to the dish without a sports package. As money is still a bit tight the full Sky Sports package (containing Sky Sports 1, 2 and 3) has been ruled out - as it stands at £34 per month.
This leave either Setanta Sports (containing Setanta Sports 1, Setanta Sports 2, Setanta Sports News, NASN + plus yucky Liverpool, Arsenal, Celtic, Rangers, Golf and Racing UK channels) or one individual Sky Sports channel (either 1 or 2, as Sky Sports 3 is a bonus when both the other channels are purchased).
As Sky split their football coverage between the two channels, with Sky Sports 1 getting the majority of Premiership games and Sky Sports 2 getting the majority of Champions League games (I’m not too bothered with the League Cup games, will just grab the highlights or see any mouthwatering matches in the pub) I’ve got a big decision to make.
With the majority of the football I’ll probably want to see is in the premiership, as there are more games, I’ll put forward Sky Sports 1 against Setanta Sports in the big showdow to decide which will make it to my shinny new Sky+ box. Any Chamipons league games that I do want to watch that aren’t on ITV’s schedule, ill just either pop to the pub or go visit my folks

The verdict follows after the break…

sky+ me = smiles

Not long got off the phone to Sky. Thanks to their introduce a friend offer we have a shinny new Sky+ box on our way for this Saturday all for free (apart from the silly installation fee).

After moving house from an area with a perfect freeview signal to one so poor that everytime a Pigeon even looked at the aerial we lost signal we thought it was time for an upgrade. Virgin Media would have been good but as well as little Freeview, we also have no access to cable in our new little market town. Don’t have broadband with BT so BT Vision was scratched off so went with good old expensive Sky.

Cons: Having to give up our Unlimited Cineworld memberships (should make my movie reviews fun) so we can afford $ky.
Pros: Potentially getting Setanta Sports (or maybe Sky Sports 1).

must be something in the air

I don’t know what it is about the end of Summer/beginning of Autumn, but i find myself returning to this blog with all the enthusiasm to give it the attention that I originally intended for it.

This renewed interest was partly fired up when i decided to pay it a visit. Once the page had loaded I noticed that the Google Page Rank tool on my browser’s toolbar wasn’t the normal greyed-out that always previous accompanied my weblog. It had green on it! After being virtually neglected for the past three quarters of a year, it somehow (in the magic that Google and the Internet works) gained a Google Page Rank of 3.
Partly due to that I’m giving my blog another shot. Since back in November ‘07 I’ve changed positions at work (both location and role), bought a house (admist the crazy horrible state the housing/mortgage industry is in), started playing football again (after many years just watching it on the screen and occasionally in the stands at the Kassam) plus crazy other stuff (maybe?!!?!) I’ve hopefully got plenty to write about.

So now I’ve got a new desk at work, and seemingly finding myself more bored at lunch (and the 3/10 encouragement) I’m returning to this blog!

Gonna include (hopefully) a lot more content, a new Reading festival review, gig reviews for MGMT and The Subways, film reviews (including a very belated Dark Night one), of course footie, gaming  and gadget news as well as lame/fun/annoying/delightful moments of my day to day life (cue sarcastic ‘wow’ let out from the reader).

journeyhype

After grief at work I’ve decided to post this to see if the massive telling off that’s is due is actually fair:

This is just a test to see how quick between a blogpost being posted and Google picking it up. I’m using the term journeyhype to search for it??

Fingers crossed?!?!

decisions, decisions…

After I promised to look at the new iPods way back, probably a few months ago now, here’s a post checking out the new iPod Nano against some of its competitors.

I’ve been looking to upgrade my first generation iPod Shuffle for some time, and after using my Sony Ericsson Walkman phone (with 4Gb memory stick) as my default personal music player for a while now, I think its time I caught up again to the rest of the market.

What I’ve shortlisted is the new 8Gb Nano, Microsoft’s 8Gb Zune and Creative’s 16Gb Zen vPlus. They each have at least one strong selling point that appeals to me, so I’ll have to look at the details to separate them. Ideally 16Gb is perfect for me, will easily hold enough music and as I’m not planning to watch videos on these small players I don’t need a crazy amount of space, i.e. iPod Classic 160Gb. As Creative are the only ones to offer a 16Gb it quickly gets my interest. The iPod Nano is stylish and amazingly small, although it is the only one I’ve seen in the flesh, as it is currently the only one available in the UK. Plus I already use iTunes, so very importantly there will be no annoying transfer of files needed. The Zune is pretty exclusive as none of their models have been released in the UK yet, so it has that going for it - it’d be pretty cool getting it out on the train/bus etc whilst everyone else listening to music is doing so via the usual iPod.

where did it all go wrong?

Wow, who could’ve seen that coming, England failing to qualify for the Euro championship? Well tbh we all should’ve, but now its happened we need to look forward. What needs to change? The managment, the players, the sytem? Well the answer has to yes. And one of these issues has already partly been addressed, as this morning, unsuprisingly the FA sacked Steve McClaren.

One major problem is the mentality of the players, too many of them seem to be expecting their name on the team sheet (stand up Frank, Wayne, Micheal and Rio, although there are others). This was partly address belatantly when Lampard was dropped and Barry was given a chance, but the problem is wider than just the old Lampard and Gerrard debate. The new coach whoever he is needs to bring in fresh new talent. Players who are desperate to be given a chance, who will do their best to prove what they’ve got on the biggest stage, not these big time charlies who expect to walk into the side.
Though this is harder than expected as most English players sadly aren’t first choice players for their club team, and the only way I can see this changing is to introduce a foriegn player cap, something like 5/6 players in each first 11 has to be English or something like that?
We need big changes, both short and long term to at least get somewhere to fulfilling the tabloids and those fottie fans who pretend to know about the game (you know the ones, they treat the last 4-6 pages of the Sun as their bible, those who sit in the pub shouting at and putting down each England player who comes close to the ball, the same people who think that they could have done a better job than every England manager in their football lifetime (though some decisions down the years have been a bit hard to understand).

Roll on the 2008 ‘Home Nations Championship’

england v austria/croatia

With the probably insignificant match against Croatia following the friendly verses Austria, I thought I’d post up my choice selection for the two matches, although the choice of quality players was pretty short. Maybe calls for a limit of foreign players from Coppell, Ferguson and Gerrard should be listened to, apparently on the weekend just gone, of all the players featuring in the premiership only 88 were English, the others (over 200, can’t recall the exact number?) foreign. Surely can’t be that healthy for the English national game?

With Rooney out, I’ve gone for Crouch and Owen. After Hargreeves yet again pulling out with injury, it has allowed Barry to keep his well earned place with Gerrard in the centre and of course Joe Cole on the left. I’ve decided to leave Beckham out and instead start with Wright-Phillips, to try and take early advantage with all of his pace and energy.
The defensive line was hard with so many injuries. I’ve ended up with Brown, Richards, Lescott and Ashley Cole, though with all respect I wouldn’t have the greatest amount of confidence for this back line. So you’d think with this pretty much unproven defence that I’d choose some experienced shot stopper between the sticks. Nope. I’ve gone with Carson, I feel he deserves a start, and at his age some major experience at this level could do him a world of good!

Match prediction: England 3 - 0 Austria, England 1 - 0 Croatia

another monday

Where did the weekend go? Monday’s suck…

will be backing posting soon (hopefully)!

ipod - the new generation

Last week Apple unvield a new iPod lineup which caters for just about everyone. Over the next series of blog posts I’ll be reviewing each model and coming up with some sort of a verdict, in a very breif probably informative way…

…stay tuned!