Plymouth Argyle played Real Madrid last night in Kapfenberg, Austria; and lost to the Spanish team; but it certainly wasn’t a poor performance from the Devon team. Plymouth managed to contain Real Madrid for much of the match, breaking up their fluency of play, and even managing a couple of goal scoring opportunities for themselves. Madrid didn’t put out their ‘superstar’ team, but still fielded a strong side, so Argyle should feel proud of themselves, only conceding a single goal and that was from a penalty conceded by Lillian Nalis in the 75th minute. So all in all, it’s been a good pre-season training trip, scoring twelve goals and only conceding two, so that should give Argyle and their fans a boost going into the new season. I have to say that I am quite impressed with Ian Holloway, he seems to have a very sound football mind, playing much better tactics than predecessors Pulis and Williamson, and has already brought in a number of players to strengthen the squad, so I am hopeful for the new season, aiming for a top 10 finish this coming season, anything else would be a little optimistic in Holloway’s first season in charge!
Orange has recently released it’s free broadband service for mobile customers that have a package costing £30 or more per month. This was because of Orange’s acquisition of Wanadoo, but there are downsides, for example; the 2GB per month cap, which isn’t very much when you think about it! But here’s the crunch, because of this venture and the lack of interest in 3G technology Orange has started charging for stuff that used to be free, e.g. itemised billing, and delivery receipts on text messages. Also the phone insurance that costs you £5 per month on top of your monthly ‘line rental’ fee, if you should make a claim Orange will charge you a £15 administration fee. Read the full story on the Register.
Now its time for another (long awaited) episode of “The Potwashers”; twice this week I have been accused of lying. Obviously I wasn’t too happy about this; as I know damn well that I wasn’t lying, why would I? First thing was in relation to the dishwashing liquid that was always empty in the morning despite there being more than quarter of a container full when I left the previous night. They didn’t directly accuse me of lying, but insinuated it, saying that it doesn’t empty itself does it, which it obviously doesn’t, if the machine and power is off, there is no way that liquid can flow upwards without the aid of a pump! It turns out that the cleaners have been using it as a floor washing solution, a very expensive floor washing solution at that! Second thing was on Thursday when I was accused of not mopping the floor on the third floor, despite doing it before going down to the second floor to help out for the remainder of the day. This came about because by the time the offending chef came back from his break the floor had already dried, I don’t splash loads of water everywhere like some other people that work up there. OK, it didn’t look that clean, but mopping is insufficient as the floor needs to be scrubbed with a hard brush to get most of the crap off the floor. Years of neglect has caused this ground in dirt effect, and the fact that it hasn’t been swept properly in ages (nothing to do with me, I only work up there once a week) has just pushed all the bits of food and the like under units, and turned into horrible slimy stuff. I managed to get much of it up, but come next Thursday it will be the same, it simply doesn’t work if only one person cleans properly; but I doubt things will change soon!
I am a complete and utter prat! You may have noticed that my recently played RSS feed has been coming up with strange characters lately. I found out what the problem was, it’s to do with the page encoding, seems that ISO-8859-1 doesn’t understand some of the UTF-8 characters in the feed. So I had to change the whole page encoding to UTF-8, which meant that some of the ‘Word’ characters weren’t understood by UTF-8, so I had to seek them out and replace them with compliant UTF-8 characters. Which went well until I thought that there was some bizarre caching issue that wasn’t reflecting the changes; but in actuality I hadn’t downloaded the last two months archive, but didn’t realise that when I deleted the contents of the archive directory and replaced it with my local copy, and now I have lost the last two months of archives. I have Emailed 1&1 Internet to see if they can restore the directory to what it was at the last daily backup, so the fate of the last two months rests on the shoulders of 1&1 Internet. If they can’t help me, then there’s nothing I can do; I feel annoyed with myself for making such a schoolboy mistake, I should know better than to leave it months between backups of the whole site; wish I just left it now!