Last Wednesday I was watching Bosnia versus Portugal, a qualifying game for the 2010 World Soccer Championships in South Africa. The score was 0-1, and it was not a very good game. At that point the commentator mentioned that the situation in another match was interesting, so I switched the channel to France versus Ireland.
When I switched the score was 0-1, which would have meant a penalty shootout to decide the outcome. As it was clear that Ireland were the better team, I hoped that they would go through. The fact that I have a dislike for french soccer teams probably also increases my support for any team that plays France.
There was no score in the regular time, despite a very good opportunity for Ireland, so the game went into extra time (2 x 15 minutes). Towards the end of the second overtime, the unthinkable happened. I was so outraged that I started screaming, waking up my wife and cat. Watch what happens:
This is an absolute disgrace. Period. IMHO Henry should simply be suspended from playing in the World Cup. Period. And BTW, when is soccer going to start living in 2009, and adopt video replays for crucial situations?
But the bigger question is this: what if your son or daughter is a young soccer player, and idolizes Thierry Henry? Would you be OK for your kid to have a role model who demonstrates that it is OK to cheat?
And don’t say the referee did not give a foul, there are numerous sports where a foul is acknowledged by the player. In snooker e.g. a player will say that he or she has made a foul in 99.99% of the cases. At all levels. I do it all the time, and there are countless examples of pro players doing the same.
Why can’t soccer players act the same? Talking about fair play is fine, but acting on it is much much more important.
Yesterday I finished Twitterville by Shel Israel, and it has been a very exciting read. The whole book is filled with intriguing stories about how people and companies are using Twitter to connect and do business, or raise money for charity.
But it was the very last chapter that surprised me. It is called Global Neigborhoods and talks about how Twitter can contribute to world peace. At first this sounds like a grandiose claim, but if you follow his argument it makes sense. After all, the more we know about one another, the customs, the language, the culture, the more difficult it becomes to enter into conflict. And if Twitter can help the citizens of the world to connect and get acquainted, then tweet away.
A couple of months ago I decided to try out Last.fm. After the short trial period, I quickly decided to make my account permanent, and start the paying service at 3 EUR / month. So far I have been very happy and satisfied with Last.fm. If you do not find your choice in the categories, you have a problem, or very, very, very specific tastes.
And the more I use the service, it got me thinking on my future music consumption. With so many services around that stream music, there has to be enough out there to satisfy any music need(s). On top of Last.fm, I can think of Pandora, Spotify, Tunify and there are many more.
So, what if I never buy music anymore? No more CD’s, no more iTunes, Beatport, Stompy or Traxsource downloads? Can it be done?
Let’s look at the places and moments when I listen to music:
Work: that is easy. I have a home office (iMac) and when I travel for Sun, I have my laptop with me at all times.
Vacation: can be a bit more difficult. Most hotels will have internet available, but unfortunately not yet for free. And most of the time quite expensive.
Travel: as with hotels, most airports will have wi-fi. And increasingly the same applies for airplanes. And even if not possible, I always will have my iPod with me, which has enough music for several long-haul flights. Just the battery will not last.
Car: usually I listen to regular radio. But apparently the 4G-connected car is around the corner, so picking up my Last.fm stream will soon be possible whilst driving as well.
Conclusion? It seems possible to never purchase music anymore, but use one (or more than one) of the various streaming services available.
What do you think? How do you listen to music, and would it be possible for you to rely on streaming services?
My wife is expecting twins. Until 2 weeks ago everything was going great, and then she was diagnosed with pregnancy diabetes. Fortunately, nothing too serious as she does not have to inject insulin. She needs to be careful about what she eats, and needs to check her sugar level 7 times a day.
Unfortunately she also has a nasty cold and infection to deal with, and our general practitioner prescribed antibiotics to help her deal with that. The side effect of those is that her sugar levels increase after taking them. So yesterday we got the advice from the hospital to monitor the situation and contact our general practitioner if the levels remain too high.
This morning we found another very high sugar level, so I called our gp to explain and ask him whether he could prescribe sugar-free antibiotics. He told us that there is nothing to worry about, that her sugar level would be higher from being sick, nothing to do with the antibiotics. Now we know that is not true, because she was sick all of last weekend, and her sugar levels never rose above 110 on average. The levels after taking antibiotics were above 138 all 3 times (120 being the maximum allowed).
As I told him we received advice from the hospital to ask him for a new prescription he replied as such:
Then let the hospital solve the problem, I am not giving a new prescription.
*Click*
That was it, end of conversation…
We contacted the hospital who advised us to continue taking them (as they are really needed to fix the infection), and come back next week for a checkup.
So in the end, he did not have to do anything, but how about showing some professionalism and respect for your patients, who depend on you for medical advice? He is not seeing us again, that is certain.
Today I had to part with one of my childhood items. I sold the 1972 Williams Jubilee pinball machine that my parents bought me nearly 30 years ago, because I was putting too many coins in the machines at the play hall.
Would I have preferred keeping the machine? Absolutely! But unfortunately there is no room at our current house, and not in the new house that we are building either.
Is there something that you had to give away, or sell, that you would like to have kept? Leave a comment to share your story.
Shortly thereafter my blog was listed as a follow up story on TechCrunch. When Mashable mentioned the same fact, I entered a comment on their site, linking back to my blog post.
The effect can be seen in the graph below:
Some conclusions from this graph:
Apparently I blog every other day, will try to make this every day in the future
Getting a reference on TechCrunch and commenting on Mashable gets you traffic. Re-emphasises the importance of both sites, and their respect and trust in the community
Star Trek was way ahead of its time. What if Google is as well?
In today’s world we can celebrate so many anniversaries these days, but this one is close to my heart: this week marks the anniversary of The Cage, the pilot episode of Star Trek. Being a Trekkie, and owning all episodes on DVD, it has been an important part of my television-viewing life. And there have been many young people inspired to go into engineering, due to the cool science (fiction) in the show.
The show also showed the first instance of wireless communications, namely the Communicator. When the show aired in the ’60s nobody had heard or seen any mobile communication devices for every day use.
And there is another cool Star Trek invention: the universal translator. To quote the wiki entry:
The universal translator (also referred to as a “UT” or translator circuit) is a device used to decipher and interpret alien languages into the native language of the user.
This was an obvious play from the writers to make it easy. Any alien race could speak English all of a sudden. But what if we can apply the same technology on earth, in the year 2009? Would it not be amazing of I can read all text on the web in Dutch, and if I write something in Dutch, it would appear as English, French, Russian, Farsi? And I can go on with hundreds of languagues.
Could Google be having this in mind with Google Translate? At the moment it is limited to text or web pages, but what if Google Voice would be standard on each mobile phone? Implanting a device into a person is for the moment maybe a step too far, but who knew we would be openly talking about our every day life on a web site, say 50 years ago?
Finland is the first country in the world to mandate a 1 megabit connection as of July 2010, and a whopping 100 Mb connection by 2015. That is quite impressive, and a giant step in the right direction.
Society is going to move more and more into an online world, and if people are left out, we will have to face a society where you have those that are online, and those that fall back. Going forward a broadband connection should be available to everybody, either at reasonable prices, or maybe even free?
Now all that we need is affordable computers for all. Who will be building those? And what would change in the world if all countries followed Finland’s example?
Posted by Marc Dierens 
