I recently moved into a new apartment, so I’ve been doing a lot of unpacking lately. This unpacking also includes a number of boxes I’d had packed up and stored in Boston for a while, some of the boxes had even stayed packed for a while when I was still living in Boston. I think when you take your entire (material) life out of cardboard boxes you see a bit of who you are. I already know soccer is and always has been a big part of my life, this image might do a bit better job of highlighting that to others.
In this picture are a few different generations of Adidas Predators going back to the Predator Manias (I even have a few older pairs somewhere back home in North Dakota) as well as the the Nike R9 chrome Mercurial Vapors made for the original Ronaldo (those boots are painful to wear, but they sure are light). This is probably a bit over $1500 worth of gear, but it all got very good use…
VMWare Fusion Unity and Windows Live Writer for awesome client blogging on my Macbook
So I know this setup is a stretch for most people, but it’s something I’m pretty happy about. I’ve previously written about the fact that I think Windows Live Writer is awesome, and I still do. In fact my recent revival on the site is largely due to the fact that I recently installed a fresh build of Writer at work to post and revise, as well as test and help weed out any bugs/failures.
Previously I’d said that if I could run Writer on my Mac to do my blogging, I would. Well now I’ve made that statement a reality. I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate virtualized under VMWare Fusion 2. On my virtual machine I installed Windows Live Writer (Wave 3) and when I run the application in Unity mode it works almost exactly like a native Mac application.
It looks something like this:
[update] I happened to forget the disclosure I had intended to include. As I am currently employed by Microsoft, it’s likely that my opinion on anything involving software will be interpreted as biased. While I do work on the same team as the people that make Writer and I know plenty of them, this site has absolutely nothing to do with my job or employer. I’m under no obligation whatsoever to talk about software, I just happen to like Writer. It’s a simple application with a well defined purpose which I believe it accomplishes quite well.
Yesterday, Sounders FC announced their list of protected players from the upcoming MLS expansion draft, here’s a list I think is at least as equally interesting. Here are all the players on Seattle’s roster not listed as protected going into Wednesday’s draft.
| # | Name | Pos. | Age | ht | wt | status | pre. club |
| 28 | Terry Boss | GK | 28 | 6-3 | 205 | S | New York |
| 16 | D | 22 | 5-11 | 165 | D | Wake Forest | |
| 1 | Chris Eylander | GK | 25 | 6-1 | 185 | S | Seattle |
| 2 | Michael Fucito | M | 23 | 5-9 | 165 | D | Harvard |
| 26 | Taylor Graham | D | 29 | 6-4 | 190 | S | Seattle |
| 15 | Stephen King | M | 23 | 5-8 | 153 | S | Chicago |
| 9 | Sebastien Le Toux | F | 25 | 6-0 | 165 | I | Seattle |
| 24 | Roger Levesque | F | 28 | 6-2 | 174 | S | Seattle |
| 27 | Lamar Neagle | M | 22 | 5-11 | 165 | D | UNLV |
| 23 | Sanna Nyassi | M | 20 | 5-8 | 145 | D/I | Seattle |
| 7 | James Riley | D | 27 | 5-10 | 150 | S | San Jose |
| 20 | Zach Scott | D | 29 | 5-11 | 175 | S | Seattle |
| 12 | Nathan Sturgis | D | 22 | 5-10 | 150 | S | Salt Lake |
| 8 | Peter Vagenas | M | 31 | 5-8 | 157 | S | Los Angeles |
| 5 | D | 25 | 6-2 | 185 | S |
Kansas City |
Possibly the biggest name on this list is defender James Riley (who started 27 games this season at right back). Others listed that saw a the pitch a fair bit are Sebastien Le Toux (who had a 2 goal, 2 assist game towards the beginning of the US Open Cup but didn’t score much in the MLS campaign), Roger Levesque (who scored the winning goal in the US Open Cup final), Sanna Nyassi, and Peter Vagenas.
It would seem Riley is the most likely Sounders player to be at risk of being selected by Philadelphia, as he’s a defender with good experience. This of course will depend on Philadelphia’s defensive needs and the availability of good defensive talent from other teams.
As far as I understand the rules of the draft, Philadelphia can only take one player from Sounders FC and may not take any at all. I would prefer the latter.
I went to the MLS Cup final last night at Qwest Field. The game had it’s ups and downs, but any match that ends in penalties is interesting. I have a few thoughts I’d like to put down at some point in the near future, mainly “Why it sucks to be David Beckham” and “A “List of things every ignorant American should know about football (soccer)”. I won’t supply a report of what happened at the game, you can read the MLS Cup final game report for that, the reporters are professionals after all.
For now I leave you to ponder, what is going on with these awkward posed photos MLS has on their website. They look like strange, forced senior pictures for old dude professional athletes. Personally, one thing I think American sports do really well is post championship celebrations (think Michael Jordan holding the NBA Finals trophy, with a cigar in his mouth, soaked in champagne.) These post-MLS Championship photos are nothing like that, and don’t really cut it.
Also, to Real Salt Lake fans, good work traveling to the match to support your team, congrats on the win, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re tone deaf.
Suggestions for future writing/discussions are always appreciated 
This part of the celebration however, was done pretty well.
Since I’ve entered the new (to me) world of client development, I’ve had to re-learn a lot of very basic things, such as what some commands are. At times it leads to unintended geek humor…
campo [11:19 AM]: is the command k in ntsd a stack trace?
tesh [11:19 AM]: yup
campo [11:19 AM]: k
tesh [11:19 AM]: lol
I knew balloon boy had become the talk of the internets, but I didn’t realize he became the new street thing. I found these stickers posted on a sign at a bus stop in downtown Seattle.
My brother and I used to love Goober when we were kids. The same peanut butter and jelly sandwich in half the time…
Anybody else eat this stuff?
A couple weeks ago a team I played on had a game at Newport Hills Park in Bellevue. I thought the game was on turf, boy was I wrong. This is what we were greeted with. A pitch of pure mud. This was sloshy, liquidy type mud also. With each step your foot would sink between two and four inches into a puddle of dirty water and this stuff. It was actually pretty absurd that the league even schedule a game on this, they should have rescheduled or canceled the game without question.
The condition of this surface basically meant that every touch had to be an air ball struck about as hard as possible. And with pretty much every kick you got a reminder that this stuff also smelled and tasted absolutely wretched as it was tossed into your face off of somebody’s boots.
I suggest you dribble up the middle…
The end result looked something like this (and pretty much guaranteed those white shorts will be ruined forever…)
A lot of things happened that looked like this play times about a million:
I just logged into twitter and was greeted with this graphic informing me that I’m part of the Beta group for a new retweeting experience.
It looks like Twitter is trying to clean up how retweets are displayed by linking to the original tweet, and simply placing the original tweet in the stream of your followers.
This seems cool because it might help with nested retweets by allocating all retweets to the original user, and when you find something that has been retweeted interesting you’ll be able to link back to the user that originally made the tweet without any hassle. Then you’ll be able to check out their page/bio and decide if you want to follow them. Another cool thing about this is that I don’t believe Twitter created the notion of retweeting (I’m not sure) but it’s cool to see the service embrace a standard originated from within the community.
The biggest downside to this (aside from the fact that I don’t retweet very often) is that this graphic tells me nothing about how to use this new retweet feature. Do I still just copy and paste the tweet prefaced by RT? Can I just type RT @mager to just retweet @mager’s most recent tweet? (That would be an awesome feature by the way).
I think Twitter just made it even easier for tweets to become viral, but I wonder how many people might not even notice this feature because they consume their tweets using third party clients rather than the Twitter web interface.
[updated]
I found the first retweet to show up in my timeline. Rather than showing up as a tweet from a user I follow it shows up as the tweet from the original user with their user name and icon with a little note telling me which user I follow retweeted it. This is pretty much what I expected, and it will be nice because rather than having tweets from 5 different users retweeting the same thing, I will just see the original tweet with a message saying it was retweeted by those 5 people I follow. This means Twitter has a great way to tell exactly how popular a specific tweet is, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that ability involved in a future business/revenue move in the near future.
Another downside I’ve realized is that you can’t add your own thoughts or a comment about a retweet. It looks like you have to follow up with another tweet if you want to comment about what you just retweeted. Now I’m envisioning tweet pages with hundreds of comments about 140 character messages that spark huge debates…
France qualified for the World Cup today, and I’m sure every Irishman alive is filled with rage. Henry got the assist, but the play appears blatantly illegal. That said, Henry is going to play in the World Cup, something many, many people would do many, many things to have the chance to do in their lifetime. What would you do to play in the World Cup? Would you use your hand to keep the ball in bounds?
