Massive win: WBA 0-2 City

City travelled to the Hawthorns this evening without a win there in many a year, and despite a win last Saturday, far from in their best form of the season. It was always going to be tough against a side many expect to bounce straight back into the Premiership.

But City won, and in the end won handsomely by two goals to nil against the Baggies. Chris Burke opened the scoring on 18 minutes following his stunning goal on Saturday with another raking left foot shot from outside the box.

The Baggies piled on the pressure early in the second period, before a significant point on 81 minutes when WBA 'keeper Scott Carson was sent off for violent conduct. After the inevitable substitution, new 'keeper Dean Kiely saved Whittingham's penalty, but he made amends with the rebound to seal the points.

This is a massive win for the Bluebirds. It's not just the three points, but three points against the second placed side, a side fancied to go up automatically, and it should instill a huge amount of confidence into a side that has been sorely lacking that in recent weeks.

Another big match on Saturday, when they travel to Middlesborough. Let's hope they can pull off a similar result there.

Up the City!

The Crap Blog Detective: Crap?

I don't know whether to be honoured or offended.

An anonymous individual, going by the the pseudonym of "The Crap Bog Detective" has left a comment on a previous post suggesting that if I didn't blog any more the world would be a better place, or words to that effect.

Having had a quick peek - and that's all, at his blog where it seems his only intent is to slag other people off and see what sort of a reaction it gets, can't say I'm overly bothered by his comments. I'm not either going to bow so low as to delete his comment. It's a free world after all.

If people don't want to read my blog that's fine by me. I certainly won't be joining the throngs (well 24) followers of his blog.

Any DIY astronauts with a few bob going spare?

How's about this then? Fancy being propelled (sic) into space by Virgin? Richard Branson's dream of bringing space flight to the masses (or very rich and famous more like - it's only 6 at a time) comes a step nearer.

This BBC article tells you more. Who's first?

Packaging

I've purchased a couple of items from Amazon recently and been disappointed by the packaging (or not) that the item came.

To be fair to Amazon I suppose, these were sellers selling though Amazon, not Amazon itself, but as the customer, to me it's one and the same thing.

The first item was one of these wind proof lighters. I wasn't expecting any velvet box or anything, but I wasn't expecting it just to be shoved loose into a jiffy bag with the small paper instructions also loose in said jiffy swirling around together.

I've also has an 8GB SD card arrive in exactly the same way today - loose in the jiffy bag. No plastic case for the card or anything. I appreciate that online retailers don't have the overheads of high street retailers, and don't need fancy showcase boxes, but not even a plastic cover for an SD card? Where do they get them from? Do they come in a job lot via a tipper truck an just get piled onto a warehouse floor? Maybe they do.

Website move complete

I've now completed the migration of my cricket club's website from my own ISP free webspace and built in Serif's WebPlus, to a Google Sites website. Everything has gone OK, and I'm quite pleased with the results.

Next step is to set up some other people in the club who can edit it, so everything's not entirely reliant on me.

You can checkout how it all looks at www.dinaspowys.co.uk

Getting better: City 1-0 Preston

Despite alleged strong words and hard work on the training ground, much of the first half of this match had echoes of last week's disaster against Ipswich. Dave Jones made several changes, including altering 75% of the back line from last week.

The first half was very scrappy with few fluent passages of play from either side, although City looked most likely to score. Chopra and Bothroyd both let decent chances go astray.

The second half was a different story though. Gerrard went down after a clash with fellow defender McNaughton and went off for stitches - whilst he was off, City went one up courtesy of a great strike from Chris Burke. Gerrard didn't return, Kennedy replacing him, and then Jones swapped Chopra for McCormack. Chops has looked out of sorts - no goals isn't helping, but when Ledley limped off injured, that sub looked to be a luxury City needed to hang on to. With all three subs made, but a goal up, City were playing the best football they've done for a while, playing with pace and width. Preston were admittedly chasing the game by now, but City unlike several recent performances hung on for the win and a valuable three points.. Two away games now, so perhaps less crowd pressure. C'mon City, let's get a run going.

Up the City!

Mac update

Time for an update on my venture into the world of all things Mac.

So far, it's all going swimmingly well with a few exceptions. I'm getting used to the Macbook Pro which I find to be a very nice machine. That multi-touch trackpad is just a dream to use and I never miss a mouse

Currently my main uses are email, browsing, some (albeit limited) wordprocessing, some minor spreadsheet work, Twittering and updating my Google Sites cricket club web pages. In many ways I guess it's being used like an expensive netbook, but I'm cool with that.

Other than the trackpad, the bonuses for me are a great battery life, a superb screen and virtually no noise operation - fan is almost inaudible, keys are quiet and you almost never hear the hard disk. I still drool and dribble over the design, and luckily, being aluminium that's easy to wipe off.

The ability to connect and write as well as read my NTFS formatted external drive is a boon too - not sure where that came from, but it appears Snow Leopard may have that ability hidden away but not publicised very well. The web is full of people saying they can't without some dark magic, but I can and I'm very glad of it.

There are a couple of things I haven't yet managed to get to grips with, but I suspect that's a matter of time/use.

I need to spend some time with the iWork suite. I'm sure Pages (wordprocessor) has a lot to offer, I just wish I could get it to save to Word format by default - maybe it's possible, I just haven't found the setting yet. NeoOffice can.

I've tried editing some photos in iPhoto without too much joy. I've also download the GIMP, but that looks like it could be overkill. I've got a £50 voucher from my birthday for the Apple Store (we have one in Cardiff now), and I'm toying with getting Photoshop Elements 8 (I have v2 for Windows and like it a lot). Having said that, I'm not sure the Macbook Pro's 13" screen is designed for lengthy photo editing sessions.

One other thing , coming from a Windows background, I wish screens could open up full screen width. By default most screens open up leaving plenty of room either side of the active window. I don't know why, but that irritates me to hell - again, there might be a setting somewhere that resolves that - either that or I have to learn to live with it.

Having the MBP has also seen me make more of a concerted effort to utilise the "cloud". As I've previously noted, I've started to make far more use of the exceptional Dropbox online storage solution, whilst MobileMe keeps my contacts and calendars and email all nicely synced.

With one of the two websites I manage in the process of being migrated to Google's Sites and the other one heading that way, I'm doing more and more stuff in, and via the "cloud" - and it feels good.

Crap: City 1-2 Ipswich

Well this was an afternoon to forget. Freezing cold, wet and windy, and taking on Roy Keane's Tractor Boys, a match I'd long had down as a potential banana skin.

City looked dire all day sitting off the opposition, lacking movement and, it seemed from where I was sitting any desire or ambition.

Even when they went one up courtesy of Peter Whittingham's 13th strike of the season (he'll be gone come January I reckon), there was still a sense that the game was far from over.

In the second half, City got even worse (if that were possible). Enckleman on for the injured Marshall made some farcical attempts and kicking and throwing the ball out, and it looked only to be a matter of time before Ipswich, who were by now having most of the ball, scored.

And so it was. Despite a couple of late substitutions City couldn't get a grip on the game, and Ipswich wrapped it up with their second shortly before the end.

City were roundly booed off for what was a hapless performance. They'd better buck their ideas up and soon or even a play-off place, let alone automatic promotion will be far beyond them

Wheels, tyres and stuff

Tomorrow I'm going to get my wheel alignment on my car checked out. I had some tyres changed last week, and normally these places "urge" you to have your alignment checked at the same time - this time they didn't.

I had the other pair of tyres done earlier this year, and at the time the alignment was done. The result was that my steering wheel is now off-centre - it looks like I'm constantly turning the wheel to the right slightly just to go in a straight line.

There's no vibration or anything, but there is a constant pull slightly to the left. I seem to be getting through tyres at a rate of knots, and my fuel consumption seems to be dropping slightly, so some-thing's not right.

Hopefully I'll find out tomorrow and hopefully (!) it won't cost too much!

Web site changes - Google to the rescue

As regular readers of this blog will know I manage a couple of web sites. One is the Chepstow Male Voice Choir site (my Dad sings in that choir), and the other is the site for my cricket club, Dinas Powys CC.

Over time I've used - and still do, different software for creating and maintaining these sites. Currently, the choir site is done in an old version of Dreamweaver, and the cricket site in Serif's WebPlus X2 program. Both have their pro's and cons.

Dreamweaver is a far more technical program, although my knowledge of HTML is very sparse, and I use very little of the power of the program remaining pretty much within the wysiwyg part, although I have been known to get my hands dirty with code occasionally.

WebPlus touts itself as a much more user friendly program, hiding most technical stuff right away from the user - it can still be a very powerful program if you put the time and effort in, but as you generally go no-where near code (or need to have any grasp of code) the results can be somewhat crude if you don't take care. To be fair, I've been using Serif products for years - their desktop publishing program PagePlus, WebPlus, DrawPlus and PhotoPlus and always found them to be very good both value wise and capability wise.

Either program though leaves me with some dilemmas.

If I'm not at my desktop I can't edit, update or maintain the sites. Even if I'm using my Macbook I'm stuffed as these are both Windows programs and I haven't installed Windows on the Mac - yet.

The other main problem is that only I can update the sites - they're hosted on my personal web space and I'm the one with the programs and files on my PC.

I need a solution that will allow me to edit the sites from anywhere, on any machine, and ideally allow others to contribute. The solution? Google Sites.

I've been fiddling with the idea of this for a while, but am now taking the plunge and am moving the cricket site over to Google Sites.

There are issues - it's not as flexible as Dreamweaver - or even WebPlus, but what it does, it does well, and more easily in many ways than either of my two current solutions. And of course it's free. I get more space than my personal web space gives me (which might ultimately be a blessing in disguise as hosting these sites has ultimately kept me from moving from Pipex/Tiscali/Carphone Warhouse as an ISP and the service from them is frankly getting more dire by the day).

I can (when I'm ready) move my domain name over so people are still pointing at dinaspowyscc.co.uk. I can allow other people access to edit and maintain (use with caution!!)

Have a look and see what you think.

The current site is at www.dinaspowyscc.co.uk

The new site will be at http://sites.google.com/site/dinaspowyscc

Idea Organizer for iPhone

Saw this on Web Worker Daily today, and it might be a useful app for those iPhone users looking for a basic app to record their ideas/notes whether written, photo or audio based.

Idea Organizer is an app for the iPhone that I recently discovered that makes logging those ideas incredibly easy. There are other ways to do what it does, some via built-in tools offered by Apple itself, but no other solution brings all the features and functionality together in the same place.

If you take lots of simple notes, it may be worth a look.