mattwhite.me

ronaldo again!

ronaldo… who’d have thunk it?

well, england are out of the world cup. we got beaten by brazil this morning
2:1. the game was pretty dire all round.

i stayed in london last night so that i could get in to the office in time to
see it. i was up at 5:30 and so, it seemed, was the rest of london. it was a
very strange experience seeing massive queues outside pubs at 06:00.

not sure who to support now. brazil aren’t looking particularly good but then
nor is anyone else. maybe spain?

as you may know i commute daily from ipswich to london on the trains. i’ve been
doing this for two years now so have seen some fairly bad delays on anglian railways.
these were worst around the time after the hatfield rail crash when my normal
75 minute journey was increased to 2 hours plus each way… not much fun.

i have got to the point now when i don’t get particularly worked up unless
something really stupid happens, like last night. i caught the 17:30 which was
almost an hour late (that’s 100% late!) because it was too hot. i mean, it’s
not like we weren’t expecting some warm weather during the summer.

i can forgive trains breaking down and overhead power lines breaking as just
“things which happen”. but every year during the first few hot days of the
summer it’s chaos and then again when it gets cold everything breaks. in the
end i am left with the feeling that anglian just like to try and keep us on our
toes and let us know who is the real boss!

england got through to the quarter finals of the world cup yesterday. a pretty
darn convincing performance as well – 3:0 against denmark.

i’ve had a relaxing weekend watching football and barby’s. but it’s back to
work tomorrow 🙁

i have recently subscribed to 2 different software quites. from ibm you can get the developerWorks toolbox while microsoft offer actionpack

in both cases you get a pile of normally very expensive software for gbp300 and
gbp200 respectively. imho a good deal.

england got through to the second round of the world cup yesterday. it was possibly the most boring
game of football ever but that hardly matters.

it’s a very strange competition as the two favourites, france and argentina,
are both out already. it makes it difficult to see beyond brazil who seem to be
on fire. if we beat denmark on saturday, we will have to face them in the
quarter-finals. but it would be good to even get that far.

apart from the footy things are going to be pretty quiet for the next few weeks
as far as i can tell. i’ve got no plans for anything particularly exciting,
work is just really ticking over. it might be a good chance to relax for the
summer. my big concern at the moment is the state of the contracting market which is meant to be
getting better but i know of several good people struggling to find work still.

if anyone can explain to me why the department for the environment and rural
affairs should be able to see all my e-mail and web activity then i would be very
interested. otherwise i think it’s time to dust of the the old pgp keys!

i know that americans are not renowned for their understanding of irony but to
believe an article in the onion is just a tad trusting

we have just beaten argentina in the world cup. there are many reasons why this
is great but two are that it’s revenge for 1998 when we should have beaten them
and that we are now pretty certain of getting into the knockout phase of the
cup…

come on england!