kierandelaney.net

Senderos & Arsenal For The Title?

Posted by Kieran - 27/09/07 at 07:09:45 am

Phillip is one of the most frustrating players I have seen play at Arsenal - mainly because he can play well, its just the other 20% of the time where he gets caught out and looks awful.

Now i find it hard to argue with the big man Wenger, everything he’s done has been genius - the cole/gallas + £5m swap that left us with Clichey, Henry being shipped off before his pout exploded when a fellow player decided to pass the ball to one of his other 9 teammates etc. But I think the jury’s still out on Senderos. Too often in big matches he makes glaring mistakes.

Sure - look at his performance against Newcastle and he was strident. Even in the Champs League he was solid and made an effective partnership with Toure. But in the Premiership, he just seems out of sorts - is it that opposing teams in the league do their homework better? The ammount of teams I’ve seen trying to go directly through Senderos is on the rise - so it can’t be only me that identifies him as the weak link at the back!

Anyway - the point of this was to say well done (you wouldn’t have thought it) and well played. A much criticised player is Senderos - I just hope he can build on appearances like this and cut those woefull mistakes out of his game.

An interesting thought (606)-

Granted he is strong and ok in the air and does have some moments of genius (e.g. his clerance of the line yesterdy), but every time our defence gets caught out he always seems to be the cause (i.e not marking properly, or getting caught out by a ball over the top), he does not seem to have good ball control skills (terrible passign ability) and he is not the fastest defneder in the world. Indeed his demolition at the hands of Drogba in a previous season shows that against top class forwards he cannot cope.

I think though, as stated in the replies elswehere in that article - Drogba destroyed most centrebacks last season!

I think Senderos is currently a good player, but not great like the rest of the team around him - if he steps up to the plate though, Arsenal have a real chance of causing an upset in the league.

Speaking of which - the one thing that has kept me cautious about Arsenals great start to the season is the possibility of injury to Cesc Fabregas, and the African Nations taking two or three of our first team regulars away. However on the strength of Tuesday night, it appears Arsenal have the depth/strength of squad to cope with that. 9 changes to the weekend, and a team of essentially 2nd string players and we still beat Newcastle - and it wasn’t just the victory but the manor of the victory - the team were still (and did) trying to score in the dying minutes - such was the hunger and the belief.

I can honestly see Bendtner/Edaurdo slotting in for Van Persie/Adeybeyor and there seems to be an entire midfield waiting to burst through to the first team.

And then there is Gallas to cme back from injury…. the futures looking bright in red and white!

The Top Four

Posted by Kieran - 23/09/07 at 09:09:09 pm

From the Gooner - echoing my sentiments exactly - I’ve been telling people the same thing for weeks….

Let’s get the spuds out of the way to begin with - at the beginning of the season, Tottenham had the best chance out of any team of breaking into the top 4. However, i predicted before the first game of the season, that the same back five as last seasons leakiest defence would hamper the hopes of the rest of the (undeniably it pains me to admit) talented team.

The thing is, Man U fans have been quoted as saying Chelsea are their main rivals. I was really surprised by this, because I though United were going for the title, not 3rd place!

Yeah (possibly prematurely) I’m writing Chelsea off. They are 8 points behind Arsenal, with an unlicensed manager with their two best attacking players injured and the rest who don’t want to play. The real test for Chelsea will be how many stars leave in January. Anything more than the inevitable departure of Drogba and Chelsea’s season is hamstrung. Its poetic justice to see Cole play lackluster football with a team of misfits each week, whilst Clichey helps cement the grin onto Wengers face each week. All i hope for, come November is a 2 - 0 win, Gallas and Clichey to score.

Arsenal are deservedly at the top of the Premiership, as they are at the moment the best team in the Premiership. They have the best midfielder in the world at the moment, and he is guiding them to a strong position in the league. Unfortunately, they have not played anyone of real contention, only Spurs who are now residing in the relegation zone. We’ll see the real Arsenal when a) they play a big team or a hard team away b) when Cesc gets injured. Hopefully, Diaby and Flamini will step up, or Gilberto - there is plenty of strength there, if not quite the class of Fabregas.

Man United have had a poor start to the season. But like a good team, even though they are not playing well, they are winning. Importantly, they take their lucky breaks when they get them, and take their goalscoring chances. They should contend the title indefinitely unless it falls further apart from them - today was the first time they’ve scored more than one goal in a league match since April I think - they picked a great game to break that duck.

Liverpool looked the business in the first 3 games but after the international break, they have struggled. Benitez tried to rest his big-name payers, mainly Torres, and they have failed to score in the Premiership ever since. If they play Torres, the most creative and best of Liverpool strikers, they should regain their winning touch. Either way, they still look better value than Chelsea.

It’s interesting that comparing the four teams against the same four teams last year, they seem to have changed personalities. Chelsea now are playing like Liverpool, losing away games against mediocre teams, losing to United and drawing away from home, as well as ruining their title hopes in the first few weeks. United have been winning without playing, like Chelsea last year. Arsenal are scoring bags of goals and playing beautiful football that wins matches, much like last year’s United. And finally Liverpool are failing to score against small teams, such like Arsenal last year, who failed at Emirates so many times.

Also - check out this article - a great piece of writing highlighting the relatively unproven abilities of “the great one”.

All Hot Air

Posted by Kieran - 21/09/07 at 07:09:46 pm

I’m really liking the idea of going to a hot air balloon festival to take some photos. That probably sounds boring, but some of the images I’ve seen on Flickr are absolutely amazing.

Balloon Festivals are a popular place to watch balloons fly. There are hundreds of balloon festivals around the world each year, with the majority occurring in the summer or fall. Not only will you get to see balloons up close, but most festivals have other attractions like entertainment and food, making a festival a great family outing. Some festivals allow spectators to walk amongst the balloons, while others may keep spectators away from the pilots and crews. Be prepared to get up early, since some of the flights are likley to take place at dawn.

Looks like the season starts next May (something to do with the rain so I’m off - i don’t suppose anyone else is interested?

Samiam - Dull

Posted by Kieran - 20/09/07 at 01:09:41 pm

This is probably my favourite song. Well, at least my favourite song most of the time.

Samiam - Dull

• Dull - Bass Tab
• Dull - Guitar Tab

Photgraphy Page

Posted by Kieran - 19/09/07 at 07:09:33 am

I have finally managed to find/integrate/implement a photography section for this site - ironically one of the first i came across but dismissed.

FAlbum is a concise little plugin for Wordpress, which connects to your Flickr account and displays all of your photos, comments, and data in sets and by tag. I originally shied away from FAlbum because the user support and documentation are very very sketchy, and it looked a little ott for what i wanted. However, my play with Flogr was fraught with difficulty - and in the end, downloading the largest image on flickr to make it half the size seemed like a waste of bandwith and time.

So i just checked out FAlbum quickly, and without much styling, it worked first time. Its as easy as inserting one line in a blank template file and creating a page from it. Easy! It didn’t look too bad at all, and with about 30 minutes playing with the css, i’ve managed to intergrate it into my site perfectly. In fact - wordpress in conjunction with FAlbum seems almost the perfect backend for a blog with photography. Let flickr do all the hard work, and you only have one gallery to maintain!

The beauty of FAlbum is the organisation of my photographs - set, images etc including comments from flickr and a link to the flickr page of each photo.

The only thing i don’t like is the inability to link to the tag cloud seperately, as its a really useful way of browsing photographs by keyword. Although there is probably a workaround for that, like setting up a page and making it link to the tag cloud page.

I will be putting up the style and integration instructions soon, because as i said before, the documention wiki is full of empty space and tumbleweeds!

Double Standards In Football & Spurs Being Shit

Posted by Kieran - 16/09/07 at 10:09:45 am

Firstly, its been quite an interesting thing to realise that it isn’t just gooners who are sick of spuds and their very weak grip on reality. They show no humility whatsoever and hype themselves up so much you could be forgiven for thinking they’d actually won something. Other then the award for wasting 16.5 million, I can’t see them winning anything for a while really. Oh, and may I be the first to congratulate Darren Bent on backing up his fighting words this week with a superb performance to match - what a scuff.

I’ve been getting sick of “we’ll finish top 4″ spurs - the worst record last season for clean sheets, and the most goals conceded by any team who wasn’t actually relegated - thats not top four form, especially if your £40m strikeforce can’t score half as many goals you concede.

Top of the league though for Arsenal, with a game in hand. Get in.

Also, i read this -

Should Jose Mourinho be punished for his touch line behavior in the game at Stamford Bridge today?

A few weeks ago, Martin O’Neill was sent to the stands for complaining to the referee as they walked off at half-time about the amount of time awarded in injuries. He was sent to the stand, rightly, and apologised profusely after the game.

Wenger has been fined twice for moaning and walking off with the referee and questioning a decision.

Yet today against Blackburn, Mourinho very vocal throughout the game towards the referee, and also chased the fourth official with his TV monitor and threw it down in protest at the linesman’s feet, then waited for the ref and linesman after the game and spoke to them again as Paul Jewell did last season which he got punished for.

Will the FA treat him in he same way as other managers after this match as he has not been brought to book over the card waving incident at Newcastle, nor the Graham Poll game.

If Martin O’Neill, Wenger and Jewell etc get the book thrown at them, then why not Mourinho…..am I missing something?

Ten Four. I also noticed that the only thing Schevchenko managed to hit was another players head.

Farewell - Isn’t This Supposed To Be Fun?

Posted by Kieran - 15/09/07 at 10:09:10 am

Being released by Epitaph this month. Synths. Sugary sweet melodies. Powerchord power pop. Soaring chorus. Lyrics about robots. Motion City Soundtrack? No its Farewell and given the previous short 6 sentances they’ll suffer. Because ultimately, although this album is an entirely different prospect to the latest MCS LP, it will inevitably be lumped alongside them.

Tracks like “Eighty Eight” sound like The Appreciation Post, all smart sass and a moog hook that doesn’t just get inside your head, but grates the brain for days. Even my collegues have started humming it, and they haven’t even heard the song. Sing Baby comes across like Warning era Green Day (Misery in particular) before gleefully pissing in the face of the “circus-pop” played by P!ATD. Opener Start It Up reminds me of TGUK, will a delicious positive sentiment, whilst First One On The Blog takes the Fall Out Boy blueprint (smart self knowing lyrics (about the internet as well), layered backing vocals, musically sounding like the Stereo) and makes it sound dirty, without the Mariah Carey vocal operatics.

Its varied then, but in some places becomes a bit forgettable - 13 tracks seems a little overlong, they could easily have cut away two or three tracks and been contenders for release of the year. Easily. Anchors Away for example adds nothing (except some admittidly interesting plucked strings in the background).

So, whilst it falls short of where it could have been (removing the two or three superfluous tracks and a dropped verse here or there) this album is already a firm favourite, referencing loads of my favourite bands but not copying any of them - you can’t pigeonhole this, and one or two tracks aside, this is fresh and different enough to be special. Its just a shame of the shadow the release has fallen under.

Listen on Myspace

Flogr & Max-Width/Max-Height in IE6

Posted by Kieran - 14/09/07 at 06:09:36 pm

This post is old - it only took a few days for me to find a better alternative.

In trying to find a decent photo gallery for this site, I have considered many different options, including a standalone gallery, a wordpress plugin, a link to Flickr etc. None of them seemed appropriate for one reason or another. For example, i want the photos on my site because i don’t like the layout of Flickr for the uninitiated (family members often end up on photos of Alaska “how did you get there?!” etc…) but i didn’t want a standalone gallery (maintaining two galleries?!) so the best idea seemed a way of integrating Flickr into this site. There are a few ways to do this from a flash based flickr slideshow (too limited) to about 20 Flickr/Wordpress plugins (most of which are overly complicated or expect you to insert photos manually etc).

However, i eventually stumbled upon Flogr - a Flickr powered photoblog. Its perfect. Its standalone in that it will be separate enough from the main blog, but easy to link to and from. It will show my photosets how i want, it makes use of Slimbox (Lightbox clone) and it even shows exif data and comments for each image!

The only trouble i had, which in my opinion is the only drawback is the fact that on the front page the image pulled from Flickr is the largest available. I read there may have been problems for non pro-account users, and also the “fix” is (imho) flawed. The “fix” is to limit the max width and max height of each image, which is not great for two reasons.

1. The user will still have to download the large image which is resized by the browser. It doesn’t affect me, its Flickr’s bandwith after all, but it will slow down the experience for users on a slow connection.
2. Max-width and max-height don’t work in IE6. I know a large proportion of web users still use IE6 (my parents and relatives, who I actually want to view this blog for example).

In turn, there is a “fix” to force IE6 to do something similar to max-width/max-height, although you have to be careful because you have to make sure IE6 only resizes the longest side, or you get all sorts of squashed shit going on

.photo {
max-height: 500px;
max-width: 500px;
height: expression(this.height > this.width && this.height > 500 ? '500px' : true);
width: expression(this.height < this.width && this.width > 500 ? ‘500px’ : true);
}

Anyway, this aside, Flogr is brilliant, and well recommended over the similar Satellite.

Gravitational Singularities

Posted by Kieran - 13/09/07 at 06:09:48 pm

The two most important types of spacetime singularities are curvature singularities and conical singularities. Singularities can also be divided according to whether they are covered by an event horizon or not (naked singularities). According to general relativity the initial state of the universe, at the beginning of the Big Bang, was a singularity, or single point. Another type of singularity predicted by general relativity is inside a black hole: any star collapsing beyond a certain point would form a black hole, inside which a singularity (covered by an event horizon) would be formed, as all the matter would flow into a certain point (or a circular line, if the black hole is rotating). These singularities are curvature singularities.

Smoke Or Fire + 1bit Audio Player

Posted by Kieran - 09/09/07 at 07:09:18 pm

So a good friend of mine has written a really handy Wordpress plugin (well, its a lot more than a Wordpress plugin actually, but thats how i use it. It can be tailored to any website) called 1bit Audio Player.

1 Bit Audio Player is a very simple and lightweight Adobe Flash MP3 player with automatic JavaScript insertion. It’s main purpose is to act as a quick in-page preview for audio files you link to from your website or blog.

The player can be easily installed as a WordPress plugin or used stand-alone in any website. Small audio players will than automatically appear next to any MP3s you link to.

One thing I’d really like to do is share my love of music with people and help spread the word about artists I love, in the hope that you might like them too - and this plug in will help me do just that! One band that i rediscovered today whilst on the way back from Ikea (shelf shopping woo!) is Smoke Or Fire. I’ve still not managed to catch these guys live, I missed out the last time they came over for Deconstruction Tour.

Their record label sums up the latest release, although Smoke Or Fire are far less gruff than the bands mentioned in comparison.

The second full length release from this Boston, MA four-piece and the follow up to 2005’s Above the City. Gritty, melodic punk/hardcore for fans of Dillinger Four, Avail and Hot Water Music.

Try Melatonin (click on the speaker icon) courtesy of 1bit/Fat Wreck Chords.