Two hours to go and I'm feeling a tad apprehensive about England's opening game in Euro 2004 against France.  Whatever happens we aren't going to win or lose the tournament tonight, but a hammering at the hands of the Arsenal boys would be hard to take.

On paper, the French side looks phenomenal - their team sheet reads like a fantasy international 11;  Henry, Pires, Viera - and the incomparable Zidane, surely one of the greatest players ever to strap on a pair of boots, all in the same team.  And after their dismal showing at the 2002 World Cup finals, they will feel they have something to prove - they will be right up for this one.


Personally, I'd be delighted with a draw, and we'll be lucky to get one.

UPDATE: 38 minutes in and a clinical Becks free kick meets a lethal Lampard header - it's England 1 0 France!

That's the first goal France have conceded in twelve games.  I'll be surprised if the French don't bag one before full time, but now a draw looks much more probable and victory seems possible - particularly since Henry is having a poor game.   Rooney is playing a blinder.

UPDATE 2: 64 minutes gone.  If the man in the blue number 12 shirt in the first half was an impostor, the real Thierry Henry has, unfortunately, turned up for the second half.  The French have been all over us like a fake tan - but we've defended well so far.  Rooney starting to get a bit emotional and aggressive and I won't be at all surprised if he's sent off.   At times the French are looking a little rattled themselves, memories of 2002 obviously playing on their minds.

UPDATE 3: Still England 1 0 France, but there are 6 minutes to go and if you ask me, this game is still on a knife-edge.  The French look as dangerous as the proverbial leopard with a machine gun.  At the very least, though, we've got our draw.

UPDATE 4: Or perhaps not.   Zidane scores from an inspired, exquisite free kick; a minute later they've snatched the winner from a penalty; victory from the very jaws of defeat with two goals in the dying minutes of the game.  Unbelievable.  Game over.  I feel ill.  England 1 2 France.

Polling Day for local elections all over the country yesterday: I didn't vote.

It's often suggested that a failure to vote represents a kind of passive vote for apathy.  It's not always the case.

Traditionally a Tory voter, I certainly wasn't going to be one this time after their explicit support for BLiar's part in the criminal aggression against the people of Iraq.  A few years ago I might have considered voting UKIP, but since the events of September 11th 2001 (or rather since the inept, murderous US foreign policy reaction to them), I must say I've warmed considerably to the European Idea, finding myself much more closely aligned with the stance taken by our European partners than that of our own government.

I wasn't going to vote Liberal Democrat; I find Charles Kennedy to be lightweight, shallow, opportunist and pedestrian.  His speeches and contributions to debates remind me of student politics.

I looked through the Green Party's website and found myself in agreement with a lot of what I saw there, in particular their position on Iraq - but unfortunately I also found a lot of air-headed, business-phobic nonsense: I simply couldn't allow them to claim or infer approval for that with my vote.

RESPECT, the 'Unity Coalition' which has, commendably, expressed vociferous opposition to the war in Iraq, is in essence an old-fashioned hard-left socialist party, campaigning not only against the war, but also against privatisation and deregulation, both of which I'm strongly in favour.  No chance of a vote there, then.

But despite having taken no active part in the elections, I couldn't help feeling gratified on finding out that Labour had received a hammering.

A very warm day here in the miserable Midlands, the warmest I can remember for a couple of years.

I was woken this morning by an inquisitive wasp which presumed to enter the window I left open last night.   An old colleague of mine once consumed a large quantity of magic mushrooms harvested from a golf course, fell asleep and woke to find a four foot bee navigating his bedroom; fortunately my own insect visitor was considerably smaller.  Still fairly irritating at 5 AM though.

I watched some of the coverage of the D-Day commemorations over the weekend.  I recalled that two decades ago, it was decided to make the 40th anniversary of D-Day a huge spectacle, since it was thought that many of its participants wouldn't be alive for the 50th.  But it seems that quite a few of the old soldiers are still around twenty years later and I was quite touched to see them marching proudly in their medals, reliving their memories.  At a time when the armed forces of Great Britain and the US are driven by the malice, vanity and greed of cynical politicians, instruments not of liberty or justice but of chaos, exploitation and destruction, the achievement of their predecessors 60 years earlier seems doubly noble.

I've tinkered endlessly with the format of this page today.  I started off by changing the format and the position of the date for each entry (I think it's more readable at the top), then I removed the left-hand column, and I've experimented with various permutations of background tiles and banners.  I created the banner using The Gimp (a top-notch Open Source image creation/manipulation package for those who don't know).  The radiating concentric circles were a bit of an accident, the result of applying a radial blur filter to some text!  Anyway I'm quite happy with it at the moment so I'll leave it the way it is for now.

I might make this the front page of jamesgibbon.com - after all, there's plenty of space here for links, and the existing front page looks a bit crap anyway!  (especially in IE, and sadly the Windows victims still outnumber the enlightened).  If I do, I'll add a horizontal navigation bar under the banner.

UPDATE: this is now the front page, as you can see.  I will work on a navigation bar over the weekend (although as yet, there's not a lot to navigate) .. anyway in the meantime there's a hastily knocked up navigation box at the top of the right hand column.

What a great toy this has turned out to be :)


James

I've given the Network+ revision notes a facelift.  Previously they were based on frames; I've modified them to use fixed position elements instead, in conjunction with a javascript include file so I can make changes to the navigation element without updating every file.  Not sure how IE will cope with fixed elements, I seem to remember it doesn't support them.

As I type, England 1 1 Japan.