June 2006 Archives

All praise the Guardian's minute-by-minute World Cup reports

Tonight's game between Switzerland and Ukraine was truly dreadful - happily the Guardian's minute-by-minute report made it bearable. As did the BBC's public service remit - and concomitant lack of pressure from commercial sponsors - which meant that they were perfectly free to bemoan the sheer unadulterated tedium of the game, loudly and at length. Whereas ITV would have gone to ads and exhorted us to come back for some sort of football mayhem.

(Did I correctly hear the crowd boo the 3 minutes' of added time at the end of normal time, on the presumptive grounds that they wanted the 90 minutes over sooner?)

For some reason, L'Equipe's readership still rate the Switzerland-Ukraine game marginally more interesting than England-Ecuador and Ukraine-Tunisia, and a tie with France-Switzerland. (Spot any patterns here?) I can only assume that they're upping their ratings because of the first penalty shoot-out (which was rubbish - who wins a penalty shoot-out 3-0 after failing to score their first penalty?)

Of the benefits of flexitime

Having packed 10 boxes full of stuff for our forthcoming move (there'll be at least 30-40 more), I find myself with somewhat of a lack of things to do. (Other than play the Sims, which quickly solves most problems involving spare time.)

This is the point where I really enjoy working from home. I can work at comparatively undemanding programming tasks tonight, and build up a stash of hours that would otherwise have been spent idling around, that I can then cash in to watch the football tomorrow ;-).

Incidentally, as I haven't posted about it before, here's the flat we're moving to (the schedule doesn't include the wonderfully jungly garden at the back, including a massive sycamore tree, nor the borderline illegal attic room that may or may not belong to us). No idea how long that link will last, sorry. The entry date is 14th July, a neat reversal of Bastille Day.