This is not a football blog, but...

High point of the night for Porto fans:

41 minutes - Jose Veiga gets to his feet to celebrate Benfica's goal, slips and falls

Sad really.

Blog Journalism

Last weekend's FT had a nice long article on blogs, asking the question, "Will blogs replace traditional news media?" After a rather tortuous set of examples and anecdotes, the conclusion was "No."

For me that's rather obvious.

Just looking at the mix of blogs out there, the author skipped over all the classwork blogs (2), spam blogs, diary blogs (9), travel blogs, advice blogs (2), photo blogs (1) and others that I couldn't classify (3), to concentrate on current event blogs (3). (The numbers are classification of 20 blogs found by hitting the "Next Blog" button 20 times - where have all the spam blogs gone?)

These 15% of current event blogs are basically regurgitation of information taken from other blogs, or from traditional media. Look! I'm doing it too! Quite frankly, what can the amateur journalists write about if they have no time to go out and gather news. So we can't replace the news-gathering function of the media - we'll have to make do with writing opinion columns, gossip columns or just plain plagiarism. The professional journalists can sleep soundly, for now.

OMG - I'm beginning to sound like Bev Trayner!

Embarrassing Performance

As a long-time Liverpool fan, I borrowed a scarf and went to the match yesterday, thanks to my colleague and Benfica fan who got me a ticket.

It was an embarrassing performance. If Benitez wanted a draw, what was wrong with 1-1? If I had been watching at home, I would have given up after half an hour.

The second half was better entertainment. Liverpool never deserved to win, preferring the Italian approach. At least the better team eventually won.

For me the men of the match were Luisao and Riis - two defenders, which sums up the excitement level. The only high point was the goal. The low points were Luis Garcia's yellow card after only 20 seconds and Beto's challenge on Sissoko. Both were worth red cards, but it seems that UEFA has eased off on the referee's this year.

Now I have to wait to see how Liverpool turn the scoreline round in the home leg. It was a dead certainty for me, now I only give them a 60% chance.

Netcabo: so far so good

Despite my initial fears, the change from ADSL to Netcabo has been pretty smooth. The only problems have been:

• the self-install kit would never have worked without a call to the technical help desk. The carrier frequency required was not pre-programmed in the modem or on the CD. This was solved, first-time, by a 12-minute assistance call.
• the connection does not recover after a power failure because the modem has to boot before switching on the router. That's not the end of the world.

Connection speed is fine. Only 15 minutes of down-time in a month (that I detected).

As for software problems - Sitemeter seems unable to detect my owns visits, to exclude them from the hits statistics and two weeks after the move started reporting my hits as Netcabo in Porto, which is definitely not where I live.

Now TV Cabo, that's another story. Fox, Eurosport 2 and Motors TV were all part of the Cabovisão base package. TV Cabo's base selection is not to our taste - we'd dispense Gigashopping, M6 and Parlamento. Can't win them all.

Moving House

The long-awaited move took place on January 7. Since then I have been writing to companies, telling them.

My UK bank, Lloyds TSB, replied with 3 letters, to my old address. "Strange", I thought. They wrote to my wife, telling her I had requested a change of address on our joint account. Fair enough. Then they wrote to each of us, individually, to advise that they would process a change of address, to be sure that we knew about it. I'm impressed by the security.

My Portuguese bank, Barclays (Portuguese "entre aspas"), made do with a fax but requested proof of the address, i.e. a copy of a bill. Not very logical for two reasons:

1. They financed the construction, therefore know perfectly well where it is.
2. I had no bills at that stage - even the bills for the new house were being sent to the old one!

Different countries, different cultures and concerns. I'm happy to be able to make do with the lower level of security.

Atlantis by David Gibbins

After the disaster of the last book received as a Christmas present, this was a great read.

The book, in the fashionable "historic reconstruction" style, manages to mingle archeology and adventure with terrorism, with a good dose of history, plenty of classical and biblical references and even a strong storyline. Its 364 pages positively raced by, the only problem being the need to put the book down occasionally to get some sleep.

In an imaginary world inhabited by stereotypes, the main negative points are the sometimes excessive technical details given to real-life weaponry and some fanciful technologies.

Overall, a very good read. Recommended.

Sour Grapes, Mr Salgado

Ricardo Salgado's interview, "live from Marrakech", was a real case of sour grapes. Was his interview so important that a camera crew was justified in flying to Morocco? No, as it turns out.

He had just seen a major investment increase in value by 20%. Sour grapes must imply that, even so, this increase is not enough for him to sell at a profit. Maybe he should review the original investment decision.

He has no controlling stake. Who is he to say that the bid for PT is undervalued? If PT is so clearly undervalued, why doesn't he present a higher bid? Can't raise the money? I guess we all have our limits, eh! Wrong strategic partners this time, I suppose.

Who wants PT?

So France Telecom has apparently joined with a Spanish bank and a prominent Portuguese businessman to bid for Portugal Telecom. It's a nice set-up, which defeats the "Portuguese ownership / golden share" argument and seeks to shut out Telefonica of Spain.

There's certainly plenty of value to be extracted, given the ex-monopoly power wielded shamelessly and the inertia in PT's customer base.

Of course BES may react, to make things even more interesting, though they will need to find a partner with cash. We shall see...

Out-of-control Fans

Strange Co Adriaanse didn't claim that the damage to his car was carried out by under-cover Benfica fans. Surely they would be the ones to take offense to his driving a Peugeot, with a nice big lion on the grill.

After this weekend's performance in Leiria, I wonder what Ronald Koeman drives...

Ota Airport (3)

Sapka said I was uninformed about Ota - shame the comment was attached to the wrong post. I've been looking up some more information, to address that problem (sarcasm implied here).

Ladecima's blog presents some interesting statistics.

Maybe Sapka's the one who's politically motivated.