WombatNation

Saturday evening, my wife and I took our niece to see the San Jose Earthquakes play the Kansas City Wizards in a Major League Soccer match in San Jose. It was a thrilling match, with San Jose holding on for a 3-2 win.

During halftime, the team mascot (someone in a ridiculous troll doll like costume with metallic blue and silver hair) and some employees/volunteers(?) hurl t-shirts into the audience. Also, just before the second half starts, some of the players bring out autographed soccer balls and kick them into the stands.

After all but one of the players had kicked their autographed soccer ball into the stands, my niece turned to me and said “Have you ever caught anything at a game?” At that very moment, Troy Dayak booted a ball into our section. It skipped off the tops of the hands of the people two rows in front of me and landed directly in my hands. I sat back down, turned to her, and said, “Yes.”

Alexi and Nicholas were very happy when I brought the ball home for them. Nicholas is quite obviously dreaming of scoring against the dog team with a bicycle kick.

It looks like we’re definitely headed to Germany next summer for the World Cup. My wife had submitted a request in mid-March for tickets for the first round matches in which the US would be playing. We’re willing to go ahead and buy the tickets, even in the unlikely event that they wouldn’t qualify. Given that at least three CONCACAF teams will qualify, the odds are very good that the US will make it through.

FIFA received over 12 million ticket requests for the first draw. After they uncovered a fraudulent attempt by scalpers to purchase tickets, that number was reduced to just under 9 million ticket requests. Still, since there were only 812,000 tickets available for this draw, we were worried that we wouldn’t get selected. The odds of success ended up being 1 in 4.3, since many people were requesting multiple tickets. The draw was held April 15, but the notifications weren’t supposed to go out until the 22nd.

Thursday afternoon, Sandra called the bank that issued the credit card she had used for the order and asked them about any recent charges. I don’t think she’s ever been so pleased to discover such a large charge against our account. Although we haven’t received an official acknowledgment from FIFA yet, the fact that they charged our credit card for the expected amount is pretty good evidence that our luck held out. On the main soccer discussion forums that she frequents, lots of other people have reported already receiving rejection emails.

The ticket series for 13 teams, including the US, have already sold out. After Germany and Great Britain, the US had the third highest total of ticket requests submitted. 72% of the valid applications originated in Germany.

Although there is a common misconception that soccer is not popular in the US, it’s actually hugely popular here. However, a large number of the fans are recent immigrants, and many of them remain more loyal to the national and club teams in the countries from which they emigrated. In most other countries, you don’t get such a wide, and large, mix of nationalities. When the US national team plays a match in the US against virtually any other country, the visiting team is usually supported by a large number of fans, most of whom presumably live here. When I saw the US play the tiny country of Wales in San Jose, even the Welsh managed to attract a large number of their supporters to the game. Because of the number and variety of immigrants that continue to come here, it’s likely that the US team will continue to play quite a few matches in the US where they are effectively not the home team.

Update 4/22/05 9:30 am: Sehr gut! The confirmation email arrived at 1 am this morning!

Technology Review is one of my favorite magazines, but they continue to show a lack of competence with respect to subscriptions. While their overall website has improved from bad to okay, renewing a subscribtion online is still a fool’s errand.

I prefer online renewals, just like I prefer online bill pay. Technology Review has unfortunately outsourced their online subscription management to a company called Palm Coast Data. On the page requesting your email address to begin the renewal process, the following note is prominently displayed.

Please do NOT use the Back Key on your browser. It can cause our application to fail.

Hey, it’s not 1996 anymore. Most web app developers have figured out how to work around the Back button. I could accept their app even losing data from forms if I went back and then forward, though even that isn’t that hard to deal with. But for their application to fail because I press the Back button??

It gets worse, though. The renewal form I received in the mail said I could mail in the form and pay $30 for 12 issues. There was another piece of paper in the envelope that said:

Renew online and receive 2 extra issues for the same price you’d pay for 12 issues.

Given the costs of handling paper renewal versus online renewals, they are almost certainly better off if I renew online. So, of course, I tried to do that. After entering the email address they had on file for me, I got the following “great offer”:

Get 10 more issues for only $34.00

and

And if you renew online today you’ll get an extra 2 issues FREE!

If they want me to renew online, why do they offer $30 for 12 issues for a paper renewal, but demand $34 for 12 issues for an online renewal?

I just finished the basic part of the upgrade from WordPress 1.2.2 to 1.5. One new feature is themes. I may go through a couple different themes before I settle one, though I may also hack on Neuron, the theme I’m currently using, a bit. Overall, I like it, but there are a couple things missing from the old template I used to use. If I end up doing that, I’ll release all my code changes in accordance with the GPL, of course. Unfortunately, the old theme I was using, Silver is the New Black, doesn’t appear to have been ported from a template to a them, yet.

In the meantime, I need to port over all my anti-spam comment hacks, since they have worked so well for me. I’ve had no spam comments in the six months or so since I enabled them. Before that, I was getting about 100 spam comments a day.

As for WordPress 1.5, there’s a lot to like besides the new themes feature. The Dashboard tab is interesting, and the rest of the tabs are better organized. It looks like there is also a new feature for publishing standalone pages to your website, in addition to blog posts. That will make it easier for me to use WordPress to manage my entire site. More later when it’s not nearly 2 a.m.

About a year or so ago, my brother very kindly set me up with a multi-year subscription to The Week magazine. The Week is a weekly (surprise) magazine that takes advantage of the Fair Use provision in 17 U.S.C. 107 that some misguided fools don’t believe exists. Each issue highlights the top issues of the week around the world, often by summarizing or excerpting stories from the newspapers, journals, weblogs, TV shows, etc. that produced the original stories. Controversial news stories often include quotes from journalists with opposing opinions. Seeing the coverage reproduced like this makes the strong political bias of news sources like the Wall Street Journal quite transparent.

While I would never pay money for a conservative opinion magazine like the Weekly Standard, it’s nice to see what some conservative writers are writing about without directly funding them. A common risk for strongly liberal or conservative observers is to have their opinions only reinforced and never questioned by reading opinions written only by like-minded individuals. Fortunately, The Week chooses news sources wisely, so you rarely have to endure quotes from slack-jawed hacks like Coulter and Limbaugh. I’m sure the Left has it’s own set of clueless wonders, but my political leanings probably cause me to see only the right wing troglodytes for what they are.

Maybe that’s a good test for someone who claims to be a Moderate. Ask them to name who they think are the top three well-known, but least truthful, commentators from both the Left and the Right. If they pause in listing names from one side, that’s likely where their bias lies.

Of course, The Week isn’t only about controversial news topics. There are also excerpts from book, movie, and theatre reviews, and even a few choice highlights from tabloids. One of my favorite bits is the real estate page. Each week they pick a theme, like log cabins, houses with a safe room, or Italianate homes, and they show three examples of the best, and usually extremely pricy, homes of that style that are currently for sale. The page also includes a Steal of the Week, which doesn’t typically follow the theme, but is typically a very nice home that is for sale for only a few hundred thousand dollars. From my perspective in the San Francisco Bay area, the Steal of the Week looks like an unbelievable deal. The catch, of course, is that the house is almost always located in an obscure little town far from the major city benefits that I’ve come to depend on.

The Week is a fantastic magazine, and while I really didn’t need another weekly periodical to add to my burgeoning To Read stack, I still read each issue nearly cover to cover. While it’s a relatively thin magazine, it contains far fewer ads than virtually every magazine outside of Consumer Reports.

I would point you to a story on The Week that appeared in the March 21, 2005 issue of BusinessWeek, but unfortunately it appears that you have to have a print subscription to BusinessWeek and then have signed up for the free online subscription.

While I’m not exactly up to date on the state of the art in puppet manipulation, I thought this video of a street vendor making a skeleton puppet dance was pretty amazing. The puppet master does a very nice job at the end of drawing attention to the donation hat. The video is pretty long, but it’s quite entertaining.

Also, it’s a WMV file, so if you’re using Linux, make sure you have the essential codecs installed for a player like MPlayer.

Lately, I’ve been experiencing more and more app crashes when accessing web sites running on IIS. Not that this necessarily means there is a problem with IIS, but nearly every time I’ve seen a web app on the Internet go belly up lately, the stack traces have revealed the app to be running on IIS. Maybe there are actually more websites running on IIS than I thought, or maybe the software for building apps on IIS just isn’t that good. Or maybe it’s the people who choose to build apps on IIS that aren’t so good. Or maybe it’s my dumb luck.

The first crash tonight was at woot.com, which is finally up after about 30 minutes of downtime. The friendly message, which I have now seen on lots of web sites, told me there had been a “Server Error in ‘/’ Application.” To it’s credit, IIS is apparently set up not to display full error messages to remote computers. However, it does tell me how to modify a file on IIS so that the full error message would be viewable remotely. More importantly, it tells whomever is doing a poor job of running the IIS server that they can create their own custom error page, so that their site visitors don’t have to look at their dirty laundry. Just put the following in the web.config file and update the defaultRedirect attribute to point to a more creative error page. Perhaps a page that says “Upgrading to Apache HTTP server soon.”

<configuration>
    <system .web>
        <customerrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="mycustompage.htm"/>
    </customerrors>
</configuration>

To the credit of the people who run woot, the photo of tonight’s special sale item (random crap) was overlaid with the text “Now with 30% more server errors!” If they have to use IIS, it’s at least nice that they have a good sense of humor about it.

The next crash was at a website set up by United Airlines. This site also gave me a “Server Error in ‘/’ Application” message after I tried to complete a transaction. However, it then filled the screen with stack-trace-o-plenty. It started with “System.InvalidOperationException: No font selected into device context at Chive.Pdf.Gdi.GdiFontMetrics.get_FontData()”. It appears that somebody’s .NET classes got all wiggly while trying to generate a PDF file. Thank god I don’t have to write Windows gdi code anymore. What a freakin’ nightmare that was.

Going to chive.com redirected to Codify.com. Chive turns out to be a company in the UK that changed their name to Codify last fall. They make software for extranets. Apparently this software can sometimes generate PDF files. But no PDF file for you tonight, says the PDF nazi. No, only stack trace for you.

Watch the dancing perpendicular hard drive bits groove to disco music in a Flash animation on the Hitachi website. I was quite disturbed to find that I was amused by this animation.

If Google Maps wasn’t good enough to begin with, they had to go and add satellite imagery from their Keyhole acquisition. After navigating around on Google Maps to find a location of interest, click on the Satellite link in the top right corner of the screen to switch to satellite image mode. If you’re looking for obvious landmarks, though, sometimes it can be faster to navigate in satellite image mode.

While similar features have been available from websites like TerraServer for many years, Google does a great job of packaging things in a convenient, easy to use interface. I don’t doubt that there is a lot of wizardry under the covers, but the clever UI still comes off as the most astonishing aspect of it all.