Here is a helping video.

My eyes are still trying to decide if they’ve been abused.

Caution, animated, but not entirely sure if it’s safe for work.
Though I wouldn’t let any children watch it.

This is a referee who hates south africa, bafana bafana, and playing fair.
Last night’s game (RSA v URU – 16/06/2010) was a display ofthe worst refereeing I have ever seen.
First, Suarez was OFFSIDE. He should not have been there in the first place.
Second, Khune had barely touched him, Suarez was already going down BEFORE the intercept.
Awarding the red card, in my opinion, should hopefully kill your shot of refereeing at the final.

And to add insult to injury, you award a penalty to Uruguay, which had to be defended by a keeper who hadn’t even warmed up yet.
If that is not playing favoritism. I don’t know what is.

Khune, don’t apologise. You were awesome.

Before was a heavy clunky full http version. It is now a shiny awesome lightweight thingumajig.

Enjoy!

I scratched my head, looking about for something to write about, prefereably up-to-date and IT related.

So I decided I want to write about the FIFA IT Backbone. Nothing. Nobody is handing out that information, presumably due to security considerations. Back to the drawing board. Then it struck me(hopefully I won’t have a bruise), I was forgetting the star of the show.

The very thing that millions of people have paid to see.

The very thing that holds our attention.

The soccer ball.

Without it, there is no world cup, no FIFA, no soccer!

The exact birth of the game (or equivalent) is lost in the mists of time, though the earliest reference I could find was 255BC (Ts’in Dynasty) in ancient China. Though the birth of the game was long before that.

The greeks, romans, aztecs and egyptians also had similar versions of the game, and all used, to a greater or lesser degree, the same thing tokick around.

The first soccer ball was, unsurprisingly, a severed human head. Indeed, in ancient medieval times a whole village would play against another village (seems like a good idea teams got limited to 11 players on the field then) and they would then try to kick the aforesaid head to the opposing village’s town square. However there were no referees back then, so fights were common place and just as entertaining as they are now.

From kicking around human head we progressed to kicking around pig bladders. I know, I’m disappointed too.

This was widely accepted, especially by those who were about to “be the ball” as coaches say now. This was used world wide until after 1000AD when the pig bladders were covered with leather for better shape retention.

In 1836, Charles Goodyear patented vulcanised rubber (which was an extremely enduring technology, for many older houses still have braided vulcanised rubber insulated wiring, much to an electrician’s lament) and 19 short years later, in the year 1855, the vulcanised soccer ball was invented. An original football from 1863 is still on display in the National soccer hall of fame in Oneonta, New York. This was an inflatable similar to a basketball.

The first rubber bladder for a football was invented in 1862 by H J Lindon. He also claimed to have invented the rugby ball, but never filed for patent.

Progress for soccer balls has been slow since, until the discovery of latex and other materials such as nylon, kevlar, synthetic leather, polyurethane and butyl. Nowadays the soccer ball is an intensely scientific object, with everything including amount of bounce carefully  controlled and monitored. No longer just a fitting to see which pig’s bladder feels most comfortable to kick around.

And one more fun fact for you:

Adidas has been the official maker of FIFA Match Balls since 1970.

This took me about half an hour, took 3 min to render (An age in computer time, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you lol)

But the result is priceless.

For those of you “not in the know” about the mysterious character Cassie I keep hinting to; He is a coworker with infinite patience

and a big heart. Cheers to Cassie!

Cassie’s Website

Hope you enjoyed

As Admiral Ackbar would say:

Quick intro; My name is Stephen. I’ve been toying with writing a blog for a while, not for anyone else you understand, but more of a place for memories, code and assorted odds and ends that I want to keep, kinda like that piece of string that might be useful one day.

I’m an assistant technician at Ultimate Linux Solutions, 22 years old, have a cat named Tigger (although he tends to look at it the other way around) and I am in love with the greatest girl, Laura. I don’t much care if that was too sappy for you. If you don’t like it, don’t read it.

This is not going to be some diatribe of my life and a factfile on me, although many of the things I say will end up giving you a clue of the sort of person I am, and the things I like dislike. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll try to fill in as many blanks as possible (a remote back up of memories if you will) before I start on any blogging of the future. I doubt this blog will be as active as I’d like, I’m just too busy to do any serious writing, but this will be fun. Normally a shy person to strangers, it will be an adventure to stand on my soapbox and cup my hands to my mouth and give the big “hello world!” For once, lets give voice to the phrase that is used by more programmers starting a new adventure into a new language than anyone else.

echo Say “Hello World!”