As I start this post its 8am here in Portland. I have been up since 5:30AM. Its Saturday morning! Only 1 reason… World Cup Soccer! I just finished watching the England vs. Paraguay match. It wasn’t an amazing match, it was not particularly high scoring ( not like the Germany vs. Costa Rica game, but when is there ever a game like that ) but its the first soccer game I have gotten to watch in High Definition on my TV. Although I only have my local broadcast channels in HD, all of the games of this 2006 World Cup are being broadcast in HD. I think that is amazing. But that is not why I think soccer will change the world. (see I already got sidetracked).

Here in Portland, OR we have a NBA basketball team. I don’t respect them enough to name them in this post. I don’t by tickets to the games, the only time I go is when I can get seats in someone’s box. I am forever and constantly disgusted by the attitude and performance of our players, on the court and in their personal lives. They play the game for ridiculous sums of money, and I honestly believe that for most of them it’s the only reason they play. Long ago they lost the drive and love of the game. When the game is over they all hurry to the locker rooms, and then get in their expensive cars and retreat to their mansions. It’s a very rare occasion when you see them interact with the crowd (unless starting a fight), autographs are almost impossible because they would rather sell merchandise that they have signed. The basketball players in Portland are worthless.

Here in Portland we also have a soccer team. The Portland Timbers. I pay to go to most home games. I love soccer. I love it more than any other sport. So it’s not surprising at all that I buy tickets to the Timbers but i wont for our basketball team. This last weekend we had our first home game against the Seattle Sounders ( our rivals) and I had plans to go. The morning of the game we were headed to my young nephews T-Ball game. While getting ready to go I realized it had been a while since I had a chance to spend some time with the older brother of my young nephew. I asked my wife if she thought it would be ok if we tried to kid-nap him. I made plans to pick him up after the t-ball game and bring him to our house to spend the night. I wanted to take him to the soccer game. My nephew is a traditional sports player, Football, Basketball and Baseball, just like his dad, his uncles (except me) and his grandfathers. He played soccer when he was younger but as he grew up it became more appropriate for him to start practicing football (American not Futball). Anyway, it was at this game that the real epiphany about soccer happened for me. It was a great game, we shouted for out team. We shouted at the refs. We boo’ed the other team. It was great. And for the first time his life I saw my nephew act truly passionate about something. He had so much fun. And I think I know why it meant so much. We didn’t just watch the players in this game and cheer for them; we had our hearts in that game as much as the players did. And the players knew it. Every time they scored a goal they ran the perimeter of the field and did high-fives with the fans they could reach. If you are not a soccer fan I think its important for you to know that a soccer field is as long as a football field including the end zones, and wider by 150%. And they ran that distance celebrating their triumph with their fans. We scored 3 goals that game.

When the game was over and the Seattle sounders made their way off the field, the timbers gathered up in the middle of the field. After a quick talk with each other, they then procedded to walk another lap around the stadium. This time as they walked the clapped. The Portland Timbers took a lap around the field to cheer their fans for supporting them so well through the game. They did not flee the field and hurry away from the venue. They stayed and made sure that everyone at the game knew that they appreciated them for coming out and supporting them. I thought this was amazing. But the part that made it really meaningful for me, is that my nephew noticed. After coming out and enjoying this game with me, he got to experience what its like to be appreciated as a fan by a player. It was great and I feel blessed to have gotten to share that with him.

This morning after the Germany vs. Paraguay game was over I saw another neat thing. When this game was over the players from the two teams went around and shook hands and shared hugs with the members of the other teams. It was this act that prompted me to write this post. Seeing that and remembering the experience my nephew and I got to share last weekend, made me want to post here about how much I love this game.

I am tivo-ing all the games. My family rarely watches TV live. We always skip commercials. I have found however that during the soccer games, i tend to watch commercials. I love the messages they send. For instance (this is a commercial so keep your grain of salt handy) the Gold Coast has been in civil war for like 20 years. This world cup is the first one they have qualified for. The head of their government called a truce between the 2 sides of the war, because a country divided makes for poor fans. In another of the commercials they show us scenes of people (adults and children) all over the world in small groups juggling and passing the soccer ball.

The only real message that I have pulled from all these commercials is this. Even though we are all different, different countries, different religions, and different colors of skin. We all have a common tie. We all grew up playing soccer. For some of the older generations in the US this may not have been the case, but I believe this has changed in the current day. Soccer is a competitive sport. But I see more sportsmanship and camaraderie between opponents in this game, than I do between team mates in most other US sports.

And although there is certainly the possibility that as Soccer becomes more popular in the US, it will become just as corrupt, and the players as controversial as the other American sports, I choose to hope for another outcome. I hope that the ideals taught through soccer will help to make the coming generations more tolerant of the differences in people. I hold out hope that although we may compete in many of the things we do, in the end we are people and that we can appreciate each other for that.

She watched it with me while I laughed and when it was over she told me it made her sad. It made her sad because that means there are other girls out there in the world that have to deal with that shit too.

Did anybody else share this video with their spouse and get a similiar reaction? I think we might need to create a suppport group.

But just for giggles I thought I would share this link to my site on this day in 2001. Have fun! I was coaching my nephews soccer team, and we had just gotten our first dog. Its amazing how time goes by so quickly.

Ps. Check out these other famous sites as well Sean Corfield and Ben Forta

I dont travel alot, but in the last year I was excited to see that i
could get wi-fi at all in the airport.  But in some of the places
it was as much as $25 for the day.  Its a little high for
somewhere I am going to spend as little as a couple hours in.

Anyway, rest assured if your travels bring you through portland, you
will be well recieved!  Internet, email and IM await you when you
land :)

I am willing to bet this may be the largest firefox logo yet created!

Take a minute to fill it out. You might find something out! :) 
But if you are not in the mood and just want to see what the outcome
could be, click here to see the possible oses and the funny personalities they represent.

And Just to get you all interested, I was Amiga OS.

INTO OUTER SPACE!!!

Yes thats right, they are planning to beam a bundle of ads into space on May 15, 2005.  "WHY:
It seemed fitting for craigslist users to
be the first to beam internet postings and classified ads into deep
space."  Not only are they planning this, but they have already
succesfully launched 138,179 in conjunction with the Atlas launch at
Cape Canaveral on march 14 1005.

So dont delay! post your add today for a chance to have it viewed by peoples of other worlds!

Bash.org is a site that people can post funny transcripts from irc chats to. A formal warning: Some quotes may not be work appropriate, nor kid safe!

But by the time I have spent 5 minutes reading from the top 100 list, I am ROFL and crying like a little girl. And sometimes I need that :)

But that was not always the case. When I started doing web work my world revolved around Yahoo! They handled my mail and calendar, my groups and addresses. They helped me see the web as a useful place (its not just about porn and Identity theft). I think without the efforts they made in making the web a friendly place for new comers, we would not have such a high acceptance rate for net usage. I even remember when yahoo was just one page. And I am thankful for thier vision in seeing what the web could be.

My wife sent me this link today. It is the Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web. This is a great Flash application with hightlights 100 moments of the last 10 years related to the internet. I think its really cool.

The site in inspired by 10×10. This is another flash site which has similiar cool effects, but its about live news. What it does is every hour it scans RSS feeds of several leading international news sites and it assigns weights the results of the top news stories to get the top 100 terms along with images to represent them. This is all done programatically with no human intervention. So what you get is a 10×10 grid of images that reflect what is the highest rated news around the world.

I am amazed by the wonderful things we can do by sharing information. I think that open sharing is going to be the only way that we can proceed beyond the problems we have in most aspects of our technology world right now. But even beyond that, I think the cool factor of what can be done is just amazing.