A Team who break the rules

del.icio.us Tags: rugby , world cup , england

For 4 years the England rugby union team has not played up to the standard they set themselves in the 2003 world cup - even at the start of this years tournament they looked like a shadow of their former selves. But yet somehow, someway they have made it to the final - almost in secret.

People keep blathering on about how they've achieved nothing yet and are only here by grace and favor - but how many sports teams could come back from a 36-0 thrashing .to beat some of the best teams in the world in less than 3 weeks. Very few I would hazard!

England faced a very dark time, especially on the knockout stages. They didn't sh9ow any instant improvement or tournament winning style. What they did show was a refusal to be beaten by default and a massive desire to prove critics wrong. Most of all they finally seemed to want to win the damn thing.

With our usual humility even us Brits are still writing England off. Even the sports writers are predicting narrow Springbok wins. But tellingly no one is predicting a run away South African win, such as the teams' previous meeting would suggest. As David Hands writes in the times today, England are a team that "don't seem to know when they are beaten".

Against Australia we should have been thrashed, but we came out much stronger (if still struggling), the magic wasn't quite there and the Aussie's were formidable opposition but it was a start. In the end it came down to luck and a bit of a coup.

The France game seemed a bit more hopeful in the light of such improvement. Indeed they were nowhere and would have had a thrashing but for 3 terrible English mistakes gifting them their 9. After the astoundingly good first minute try it promised a magical match that never materialized. In the end it was a brilliant tense game but still not perfection.

So we have the skill and the gritty determination, today we need that magic and sparkle that makes a cup winning team. It would be like a fairytale for a team that was written off as outsiders after 4 years of hopelessness stepped up to the plate and said "yes, we are the best and can prove it".

Today England face a fitting finale, the team that handed them their drubbing just a few weeks ago now are all that stands between them and immortality.

Win or lose, this is going to be a fantastic game.

Valve kill 32 man TF2 servers.. but what is next...

This was posted on the HLDS mailing lists (list.valvesoftware.com) a little while ago today. It made me laugh for a bit but it also made me think a bit too.

Read it and see...

Hello, Let's run a book on which servers Valve will randomly filter out next, without even so much as the decency to tell us.

1) Australian servers. Let's face it, it's those pesky Australians who are so far up Valves sweet asses it must be embarrassing for Valve. Those Australians need to be taught a lesson to counter balance all of that Pacific rimming that's going on.
2) Servers that have an unusually high number of players with 8 digits. Come on let's face it. The 8 digit crew are all noobs, snotty nosed teenagers and haxors.
3) Servers outside the Western United States that have an unusually high number of players with 6 digits. If a server attracts the old and wise, they're community is going to be too smug.
4) Servers running FF.
5) Servers that sends the player into a different world where there is 1000's of custom skins and the admins have been sad enough to invest 500 odd man hours into creating a work of art, not to mention the modding communities whose total output dwarfs anything that has come out of Valve.
6) Servers that attract the top players. C'mon something has to be wrong, they're all hacking.
7) Servers that attract too many noobs. No scrub that, they're all in Washington State.
8) Servers that are running that new plugin, which lies about the total number of available slots.there's 32 slots but 24 are advertised!!!
9) Servers with unsuitable chat language for minors. 10) Servers with 2 slots, passworded, that say "Valve doesn't listen to server admins" as their server name.

Right. That's my list. Odds anyone?

Fact is Valve killed off 32 player servers by filtering them out of the master server list (as far as I follow it). IMO that's fine - it is hardly a killer blow to any servers and it's their choice after all! But the amount of craziness this move invoked has been staggering. I mean are Valve REALLY likely to start picking and choosing which mods (or types of mods) are allowed to run and filtering out servers running "unauthorized" ones?

Dammit they provide and API and SDK to allow people to make mods -they are not going to kill any off (unless of course they do serious damage - in which case such a move is understandable).

Plus how the hell will they pick out specific mods and kill them off? It would be a stupidly difficult task - and not one they are going to undertake (it's not as if they are Valve servers - you can do what you like with it!).

So yet again we get silly hype and scaremongering and Valve get a load of bad press in the server admin community. Sure they're not perfect and their updates do often break things or make silly changes. But give them a break - the service they provide is pretty damn fine considering they are still churning out game after game and, despite regular massive breakages, the engine is fairly stable and very powerful.

Why cant we all just enjoy the game for once???

(And I STILL haven't had time to buy and Orange box GRRRRRRR I'm running 7 TF2 servers and I'm not able to play any of them - THAT's a problem!)

A Law unto Himself (Murphy's law review)

del.icio.us Tags: TV , Drama , BBC

One of the problems with being a film buff is that TV drama is just so much less interesting nowadays - it has non of the gloss or realism a film has, nor the immersion you can get from it. Luckily those of us in this situation have the BBC to save us. Murphy's Law has from the start been gritty, gripping and engaging TV that rivals some of the best movies in it's genre.

For those who live under a stone the show follows Tom Murphy, an Irish undercover cop (in England) doing deep cover work in dangerous situations. In the latest series he is less of a field agent and more of a manager - at least he starts that way, things soon take a bad turn and he is back doing what he does best: kicking ass.

Of course the series is really made by James Nesbitt who is a fantastic actor. He brings realism to quite a hard role - he has to be hard, gritty AND show a soft side - all without it looking corny. And he pulls it off, just. It is wearing a bit thin by this series - they have been trying to build character depth since S2 but have done it in a very hazy and complicated way. In a way this enhances the mystery of Murphy but at the same time just confuses you. Many of the support characters and people in his life do not carry from series to series (and even episode to episode) and he seems to have so much 'history' he should be 400 years old.

Despite the shakiness Murphy's Law is still some of the best TV all year, we can forgive the mild plot holes and the occasional corny scene in light of the fact that it grips you from start to finish and leaves you wanting more. Thumbs up to the Beeb!