gambitch - now available in blue

Wednesday, October 08, 2003

First, the news column.

Television giant BSkyB has sold its entire stake in Manchester United to two Irish racehorse owners. Those interested in the details can read the report here and, very soon, in other business news carriers. The purchase means Magnier and McManus now own close to a quarter of United's stocks.

It looks like the club's supporters are a little uneasy, but I don't really have comments about this, since I am unfamiliar with the business side of things. All I want is for the club to keep on doing well and retain the spirit that it has embraced all these years. Anything but becoming another Chelski.

In other football news, Rio Ferdinand's drop from the England squad for the big game against Turkey has sparked a potential player rebellion among the Three Lions camp. It would be grossly upsetting if England lost so many players in such a key game just because Rio Ferdinand was dropped, for disciplinary reasons more than anything else. It wasn't as if he failed a drug test - he took and passed another one within 48 hours of the original test time, and he did plead forgetfulness rather than some malicious deliberate attempt to skip the original test.

But I don't entirely like the players' decision to threaten England's chances to qualify automatically for Euro 2004 on account of one player. Rio Ferdinand may be important, but I'm sure his replacement Matthew Upson isn't entirely rubbish either. If England were to lose Becks, Sol Campbell and perhaps the entire Manchester United contingent - the Nevilles, Butty and Scholesy - that would be too many gaps for Sven to fill, and team morale would dip horrendously. It's within the players' rights to be upset over the FA dropping Rio, but holding the whole country to ransom just doesn't sound like the right way to resolve things.

And now something a little more personal.

I've been doing a little thinking. I reveal very little of my life out here on my blog. I don't say who I am, I don't say where I am, so I end up covering up so much of my life that it appears to defy the whole idea of writing a blog - at least by most people's conventions. Sure, I'm within my rights to choose what to reveal and what not to reveal, but sometimes I feel stifled by my own artificial rules.

Then again, the only reason why I go this private - going to great lengths to leak very little apart from what my friends already know - is so that I don't become some kind of celebrity. In real life I'm already too much of a celebrity anyway, so perhaps I need a little bit of proper, private space where my celeb status can be forgotten and discarded.

Think about it. What would Tom Hanks' personal blog look like if indeed he kept one?

gambitch [ 1:51 AM]

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

My still-quite-new laptop is a trusty Compaq with respectable machine specifications and fantastic external design, but there is one significant problem with it - the version of Windows XP that appears to come with it.

Actually, there's nothing particularly wrong with the WinXP itself. The problem comes when I try to get the laptop to run old games, mostly those written originally for the pre-Win95 days. It would appear that the version of WinXP that Compaq got has horrific DOS emulation, because the WinXP running on the PC at home - not a Compaq - seems to give me no such problems where DOS emulation is concerned.

Unfortunately, the home PC is not exactly my property. In fact, I get very little time on that machine - much less than I would like, or perhaps even need. But what can I do?

gambitch [ 1:42 AM]