xsamplex

While playing a game of FIFA Soccer, yesterday, I started to notice that I missed something. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out what I was missing: A referee.

Yes. I’ve been playing the game for the longest time and I finally noticed it. I bet even the ‘professional’ game reviewers haven’t noticed the lack of authority on the game’s soccer field. Sure, the cut-scenes do prominently feature a referee, it’s weird to only see 22 players on the field.

Adding an extra running referee in the game wouldn’t take that much process power, no?

Not related: Hey, somebody over at Microsoft. Your update is broken here. It keeps bothering me for updates for Office products I DIDN’T INSTALL (they came with the laptop, and uninstalling them has frequently failed). So I’m stuck with a product beyond its 30 day evalution grace period, that is now selected by the Autoupdate to be updated. Yeah. Thanks for the fish.

Almost related: After quickly glancing over the access.log in my log folder at Dreamhost, I start to become convinced that the Search Engine war is actually happening in my backyard. Most of the referrers are from the three major search engines: Yahoo (Slurp), Google (googlebot) and Microsoft (msnbot). Google appears to be winning today.

The other day, I was mesmerizing about last year’s trip to the Netherlands. Of that trip, one of the things that amazed me was the fact that we did not have to worry about exchanging all our valuable Canadian bucks into all those different European coins. Despite the problems most Europeans still have because of the devaluation of their previous currencies (Guilders/Marks etc) making life out there pretty expensive, as a tourist myself, I thought it was a blessing for once not to worry about the different coins and banknotes. A German Euro is just the same as a Dutch Euro.

As we wandered from Germany back to Holland (and vice versa), our collection of coins slowly expanded into a mix of German, Dutch, Belgium and France Euros. Which brings me to the Dutch site Eurodiffusie, a site that tries to keep track of the percentages of (different/country) coins European citizens may (or may not) have in their pockets. Browsing throught the country results, one could almost make up the reasons why Belgian citizens would have an equal amount of Dutch/French and German coins. Or that the Dutch are pretty much obsessed with Germans. And the Germans? They’re just like what people generally think of Germans.

Mind you, I said I was making up the reasons of the coin distribution. Looking at the statistical data (the number of volunteers working together), I noticed that there aren’t too many German respondents.

I‘m glad my dad left 2 weeks ago: we’re in the middle of a heat spell, with temperatures way over the 25 degrees and humidity so high, that even the dog has given up trying to follow us around the house. A bit cooler weather would be nice, yes. It’s almost mid-August, you know: bring those hurricanes on!

Earlier this week, we received a card from a younger niece. I’m pretty sure she probably reads this too, so from here, our thanks for sending us the cute card. While my wife has a hard time understanding written Dutch language, it was much appreciated.