YellowHandMan

Ronnie to the Rescue

Champions League Group Stage 5/6 (27 Nov 2007)
United 2 Sporting Lisbon 1

A brilliant freekick by Ronaldo in injury time won us this game, and the group. Given the strength of the other likely group winners (Barca, Real, Milan, etc), that could be priceless, and it's also good to be playing the second leg in the round-of-16 at home.

We'll be able to send the kids to Rome for the meaningless last game, and rest everyone for the Scousers on 16 Dec.

Ralf issues McLaren declaration (from BBC Sports)

Ralf declares his interest in the McLaren seat...the man is obviously delusional. I guess he has one obvious qualification - he's definitely slower than Hamilton and thus Lewis would be the clear number one.

Oops

EPL 14/38 (24 Nov 2007)
Bolton 1 United 0

Not a disaster, but certainly a disappointment - and three points carelessly dropped. We could have saved at least one point, but Tevez missed an open goal from four yards.

This was one of those Fergie lineups that has you scratching your head. Why start with both Carrick and Hargreaves, when Anderson was available and has been our best central midfielder this season? And was Ronaldo fit or not?

After looking good in some games, Hargreaves is starting to look a bit overrun by the pace of domestic football, especially against the more typically English teams. Carrick seems far more well-rounded, although he may lack the engine that Owen has.

McLaren appeal rejected

So it's finally over, and Kimi is confirmed as (the rightful) champion. Of course, McLaren are still whining that they want 'clarity' about the fuel rules - hasn't it been enough in the past to ask Charles Whiting for a clarification, as they did in Australia at the beginning of the season over Ferrari's moving ballast? That would've been a much less difficult procedure than this appeal - of course, that wouldn't have come with the possibility of stealing the title...

McLaren deny seeking title in court, despite their lawyer arguing otherwise (from Autosport.com)

More hypocritical, two-faced bullshit from McLaren. Apologies for the strong language, but I've just had enough of their nonsense. I'd have a hell of a lot more respect for them if they just came right out and said that they are bitter about the spy scandal, and now want to get their revenge by snatching the title away in court - or at least muddying the waters so that they can say "we wuz robbed" to the legions of Lewis fans.

I don't know why they feel the need to sugarcoat everything. Lewis moves to Switzerland, and it's because he needs privacy, not the tax implications. They appeal, but it's to clarify the rules, and if Lewis conveniently becomes champion, it's just incidental.

Having gone from an all-time high of $192 to $152 in four trading days - a loss of approx $40 or 20% - AAPL is now poised to open at $175+ today - which would be up $20 since start of trading yesterday.

Somebody - not me, unfortunately - probably made a lot of money playing this bounce.

Just got a bunch of DVDs (Transformers, Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 5, Days Of Heaven Criterion Edition) and Blu-rays (Spiderman Trilogy, 2001).

Really, there aren't enough hours in the day. It doesn't help that I'm sick and that Ryan monopolizes the TV most of the time, anyway.

And the Blu-rays I'm really waiting for are still to come - Ratatouille, CE3K, ID4...and finally, Bladerunner. Sigh.

Bento : First Impressions

OK, I've had some time to mess around with FileMaker Bento, and my reaction is...ho-hum.

Basically, it's iWork's long-lost database app, except somehow it ended up getting released by FileMaker instead. If I wanted to be uncharitable, I'd guess that it didn't get included in iWork 08 because it simply wasn't good enough.

Schumi quickest in testing return (from Autosport.com)

Why am I not surprised?

"I think there is a guy called Michael. It looks as though he's got a talent. He will make his way to F1," joked Red Bull's David Coulthard.

Filemaker Bento

I'm surprised I hadn't heard a squeak about this project, but it sounds fascinating.

According to the blurb on the very minimalist preview page:

"Bento organizes all your important information in one place. So you can manage your contacts, coordinate events, track projects, prioritize tasks, and more — faster and easier than ever before."

However, judging from the screenshots, it appears to do more - providing templates for home inventory and other household databasing needs.

As a longtime Filemaker user (I did my wedding database on it, for example), I really like the way they've consistently made databasing easy for the rest of us. Bento seems to promise to be even simpler, and the idea of a personal database program, for handling contacts, personal media, etc. is an interesting and long-overdue one, but I'm curious to see just how powerful and useful it is. Is it just a glorified PIM, or much more than that? Can it be used to implement GTD (something that Mail's built-in to-dos fall miserably short of)?

Anyway, there's a downloadable preview available, that seems to be close to final (since the app itself is to be released in January 2008). No time to try it out tonight, but will kick the tires in the coming days.

BTW it's Leopard only.

My first (negative) impressions of Bento are in this post.