Random Musings - Day #310

I read somewhere that Kimiko Date Krumm won a WTA event at Seoul. Big deal, you say for the Japanese. But the girl was one day short of 39 when she won and even more amazing she had taken a 12 year break in that time. Only Billie Jean King has won a tournament with a greater age.
Serena Williams was on the Jonathan Ross Show and interestingly enough her book was barely mentioned and yes the US Open fiasco was discussed briefly. I am surprised no-one mentioned her namesake Robbie was on the show too. Williams versus Williams again. ;)

Random Musings - Day #307

Rested up. I saw "This is it" and generally impressed with the dancing and singing. It was a wee bit long but other than it was great. I mean I wish I could move the way the way he did when I am 50. Of course I'd rather be alive at 50.
Talking of dance and singing, catch this cartoon video of "I feel good" and there's an interesting mashup of britney and bobby for "My prerogative"

Interesting to see how the team of Andy Murray and Laura Robson fair as they are confirmed to represent GB in the Hopman Cup.

It's true, the most expensive train ticket in the UK is over a grand

Random Musings - Day #265

Looks like another belgian tennis player is coming out of retirement. It's Justine Henin. Women's tennis has suddenly got a whole lot interesting.

Talking of trying to make a return, former world #4 Sebastien Grosjean is playing in native France but his world ranking is less than most at just #1147.

Meanwhile in Toronto, spotted that former 90s dance starlet, Emjay is doing (what seemingly now is an annual gig at Wayback Wednesday.

Game of the day... go to Holland, for a Dutch Cup action between Haaglandia and Excelsior Rotterdam. The game was 4-4 after 90 minutes where Excelsior had been 2-0 and 3-1 up but needed a last minute goal to take the match into extra time, where they proceeded to concede two quick goals to go 6-4 down. But they clawed themselves in a penalty shootout which they won 7-6.

Random Musings - Day #258

Patrick Swayze lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. As too did Keith Floyd.
Juan Martin del Potro upset the Fed Express to win the Men's US Open. Now only out of the top 5 ranked players in the world, only Andy Murray hasn't won a slam.

Random Musings - Day #256

One last thing on "kill-you-are-you-serious-gate". The foot fault given by the judge was wrong, at the very best debatable but in that situation on a 2nd serve and at a pivotal point in the match, she should have been given the benefit of the doubt. I am not sure if Serena could have 'challenge' that. It's probably something hawk-eye couldn't be used for. But it's true, Serena should have never reacted the way she did and did no favours in her following press-conference.

Pixie Lott is new #1 with "boys and girls". David Guetta at #2. Jay-Z and co at #3.

Random Musings - Day #255

Unbelievably, Serena Williams erupted on a line decision at 15-30, losing the point which made it 15-40. Consequently, she confronted and abused the line judge and earned a penalty point, which gave Kim Clijsters, the game, the set and match.

I didn't know that a supergroup of divas is forming for Christmas. Here comes the (old) girls features the talents of Lulu, Chaka Khan and Anastacia. The first two are coincidentally in the Thank you for the music concert in Hyde Park.

Apparently, you can disable LMHASH with nolmhash value of "HKLM/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/Lsa". This is opposed to the previously mentioned "LMCompatibilityLevel".

Don't forget the port numbers and ascii table

Random Musings - Day #213

Well that's it for the John the baptist of British ladies tennis as Anne Keothavong messes up her knee and misses the rest of the year. She's done really well to be the first women to make top 50 for a long time and with the future looking promising (i.e. Laura Robson and Heather Watson), there's possibly better to come. I fear Keothavong's ranking though. She'll probably fall outside the top 100 as a result. Look what happened to Maria Sharapova. She fell from being #1 at the French Open 2008 to being out of the top 100 after a long term shoulder injury in March 2009.

I didn't know ladies golf was... cool? Apparently Natalie Gublis, a winner on the LPGA tour has been on FHM. I've only really heard of Michelle Wie who I thought would be dominating the sport by now.

I've been looking at tents as I have to go a conference in a field. go-camping is a good start. But having a head-scratch about tents. I've seen reviews and those tents that claim to be 2-man tents should be for 1. Likewise, 3-man tents should be for 2 and 4-man tents should be for 3, etc. The lightest tents are the quickdraw ones but are notoriously hard to put away. This video shows it can be easily be put away given a good technique.

Random Musings - Day #187

187 is numeric code for murder. as opposed to Dial M for murder. Like Dial M for Murder, it is a movie too. And 187 Lockdown were a garage act from the 90s.

Serena Williams won the Wimbledon title and I like the t-shirt, she was wearing at
the press conference. It said, "Stop staring at my titles"!
Roger Federer won his 15th grand slam and his 6th Wimbledon title. He has seen by his peers as the greatest now as he surpassed Pete Sampras' record of 14. Federer's stamina won in the end. The final game was the only game that Federer won on Roddick's serve.

Random Musings - Day #175

With the second transformers movie out, Megan Fox is once again centre stage. Personally I don't think she is all that. She is pretty but she is hyped to the tilt. There was a big deal she said she was bisexual.

Novak Djokovic recently had to save 5 match points before winning a tennis match. But this begs the question what is the most match points saved in a match.

Apparently there's a device that is used to prevent breasts from sagging over time. It's called the kush and ladies place it between the boobs at night and this is meant to work. Insert your own double entendre/sexual joke here.

Random Musings - Day #142

Gatorade
I was told because of its replenishing properties, it's original purpose was a cure for the old hangover. Apparently, Gatorade is available in the UK. But I've failed to see anywhere. It's far popular in North America where my favourite is the grape favoured edition.

Tennis
You can get your latest tennis score at tennis.com. Been following Anne Keothavong the last few months. She's been playing well enough on the LTA circuit to get into the top 50. Unfortunately for her, she's drawn world no.1 and well rested Dinara Safina.

Private Prosecution
I find it funny that someone has decided to personally give Jacqui Smith a private prosecution

Google
Just to show how reliant the Internet is on Google, there have been couple of instance where the Internet has grinded to a halt due Google servers going down. The first occasion last week was due to routing mistake. This affected all Google services. Now a lot of websites use google analytics for instance and as a consequence those websites were performing slowly. Another outage took down most news-related sites down for 15 minutes. Not clever.
Also Gumblar is on the prowl!

5 C's
Car, Career, Cash, Condo, Credit Card?

Random Musings - Day #96

Lincoln
Currently in the Cathedral city of Lincoln. The Cathedral itself is on a hill and fortunately I am staying on the hill at the Bailhouse hotel, which has amongst other things an outdoor heated pool (though I did check it was rather cold) and free wifi. Mind you, my room doesn't some of facilities mentioned on the website (e.g. dvd and tea facilities). The restaurants and cafes in the Bailgate seem upmarket than the ones down the hill in the city centre. In fact there were a couple homeless people sitting outside shops. So quite the variety there. I went and ate at Fourteen and had a lovely soup and sausages/potatoes.

Who is Bill Bailey?
In nearby Nettleham, there is the Bill Bailey Memorial Playing Fields, which is home to non-league Nettleham FC. I was thinking surely this can't be named after the all-round funny guy/troll/klingon Bill Bailey. He's not dead yet. Sure enough, it isn't. Bill Bailey was born in Somerset! Another amazing fact is that Axel Rose is also known as Bill Bailey.

Home Office Porn
The Home Office website had a link to a porn site caused by the fact the external link's domain expired and got bought by a different dubious company.

Solaris
0xdeadbeef (which is can be a hex value if you wish) looks like a good place to gather and demonstrate vulnerabilities with Solaris systems.

Tennis
Looks like Laura Robson may have suitable competition in the years to come in the form of 14 year old Madison Keys won on her WTA debut.

Random Musings - Day #49: (Dubai #1)

Airplane
I have theory about turbulence. I think there is a much more pronounced effect on the back of the plane. I imagine grabbing a fish by its head, the rest of it goes all over the place. A bit like a plane in turbulence.

Belarus
I loved to do a remix of Sash's Ecuador and call it "Belarus!" "BELARUS!!!"

Airport
Interesting that I didn't get any questions at passport control, they just scanned my passport through and that's it. Also both Dubai and Bahrain airports have free wireless Internet access.

Bus
There are lots of buses about. But looking on the Internet, there really a site that lists out where/when to get buses to locations. Here is a list of bus services. Here is a list of routes from the airport.

Exchange rate
I would seriously think twice about changing up front in the UK. I got an exchange rate of 4.65 dirhams to the pound. However in Dubai, I got 4.97. Worse than that if you go to the mall of Deira City Centre, you can get 5.14. It's disgusting...

Costs
2 bus rides (4d)
Internet Access (4d)
Concierge (10d)
Tennis (50d)
Costa Food (36d)
KFC (20d)
BK (16d)
2 bottle of water/apple drink (4d)
Travelling
I walked around and attempted to get from Deira to the Aviation Centre. I went over both the floating bridge and Al Maktoum bridge.

Tennis
Finally I got to the aviation tennis centre at 7:30pm, which still gave me a chance to watch a couple of matches.
I kind of hope there would be price reduction because of the late session. No, still had to pay 50 dirhams.
They had started second session and I started watching with Jelena Jankovic serving to stay in the first 5-2 down.
She lost the set and looked outclassed by Kaia Kanepic. Jankovic quickly went 4-0 down, mostly due to her hitting forehand drives long. But Kanepic started to miss her first serves badly and double-faulted a few times as Jankovic played a fair bit better. She got back to 5-5. But Kanepic broke her Jankovic one more time to win the match. The second match was between Serena Williams and Jie Zheng of China. The score didn't really reflect an entertaining game as Williams came through 6-4, 6-2. The time of the match was interesting nearly 90 minutes! A lot of the games were tightly contested albeit mostly on Zheng's serve. It was fairly even the first set but I couldn't see Serena been broken. She served a 200kph fault. Zheng reminds me a lot of Justine Henin, small but very gutsy in more than holding her own in rallies.
Also I saw former England footballer and racehorse trainer, Mick Channon in some court-side seats.

No moths/mosquitoes
One thing I have noticed there are no mosquitoes at all. I saw one moth whilst watching the tennis.

Sex
It's funny I was watching Mr & Mrs Smith and they cut out the love scene after the massive household fight in my hotel. Whilst outside my hotel, I see a number of ladies of the night loitering about the street corner outside my hotel. Just where exactly have I booked my hotel this time. Well I supposed it's not a hostel. Talking about my passport, they wanted to hang on to my passport for my stay at the hotel. That's not a common thing, is it?

Random Musings - Day #16

Lemon! Lemon is a fruit but it's no ordinary fruit. U2 made a song called Lemon (accompanied by a strange video). That was 1993. This is 2009 and now the makers of weebl and bob who did the anchor spreadable cow ads at one time, have entered the lemon game.

Best things in life are free. Yes you can play tennis for free! Well in the UK, you can.

Coulsdon is where I have been today on work assignment. Coulsdon is on the Surrey borders of London, slap bang on a major A-road (A23). It is a small town and arguably it's a bit of a sleepy town (aside from the A23). There doesn't appear to be a lot to do there. Mind you there it is steeped in history. There's a running club and even a chess club.

Coulsdon also have a rotary club and I've always wondered what exactly is a rotary club. I've always assumed it had something to do with boats and rowing simply because the word sounds like that and I've been to a rotary club before, which features rowing and boating. But in fact, a rotary club is an organisation that bring together business and professional leaders to provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and help build goodwill and peace in the world.

Well I checked out the DLR extension to Woolwich and wow you really can go places from Woolwich. In a mere 5 minutes, you are at London City airport. A journey that used to take at least 45 minutes before this development. It takes 20-30 to get into Docklands. I went to Canada Water and that took me half hour even accounting for changes from the DLR to the jubilee line. I can actually see Woolwich developing fast when the credit crunch is over, before the London Olympics.

90s Useless Fact of the day: Swedish solo artist Meja had a hit with "All about the money" in 1998. However, she started her music career as a vocalist for Swedish dance outfit, Legacy of Sound who had a US dance hit with "Happy". Her website is at www.meja.net.