If Xavier Rush isn't the first choice for All Black number 8 after last night's trial, I'll be stunned. He shat all over his opposite number. Byron Kelleher was dissapointingly inconsistent, Reuben Thorne was invisible, while Joe Rockocoko seemed to be well below his best, going AWOL on a number of occasions, especially during kick and chase moves.
The Probables were, on the whole, rather poor - they chucked the ball around fairly aimlesslessly and seemed to have the lack of discipline and structure for most of the match that has plagued All Black sides. When they tightened up during the second half, especially after Merhtens came on, they looked like the actual All Black side. Until then they looked like a bit of a rabble. The Possibles seemed to be far tighter and more competant.
That said I wonder to what degree the different styles were a case of selectors' orders to work up a good contrast, and have the Possibles play a more English style as good practise for the Probables in the forthcoming test.
It's kind of sad that the Incredibly Strange Film Festival has become more or less an arthouse film fest with a handful of slightly off-kilter movies. Otherwise gems like this would be coming to a cinema near me!
A fine piece by John McCain. The fact that Bush was elected Republican candidate ahead of this guy really makes one wonder if stereotypes about inbreeding among elements of the Republican base (the mid-West, the South) are based in a firm reality.
Is Sir Clive Woodward a graduate of the Sir Alex Ferguson School of Deportment for Coaches?
The last few weeks have been, if not Coding Heaven, a reasonable approximation thereof: they have been the fun part of fixing someone else's big pile of disaster. It's the sort of activity that allows one to Feel Like A God and, in this case, compose wonderfully baroque SQL that will hurt those who gaze upon it. Composing a SQLnomnicon, if you will.
Now, however, I'm into the dull part of the whole business, the tedious work of grooming through steaming mounds of code to effect the more minor changes. One source of pain is the use of the MCM View; it acts a little like a JSP include, but more like the old Vignette TCL COMPONENT call. The main difference from a standard include is scope: the include is isolated, so the code is full of multiple declarations of objects. Convert from view to include and you've got an afternoon of faffing about with "already defined" errors. This is not my idea of entertainment.
If the code was captured in a tool like Eclipse, a lot of the grunt work could be eliminated with the automagic refactoring tool. But it's trapped in the Vignette source mismanagement system and it's largely useless IDE[1], so one is left with banging rocks together for this sort of work.
Oh, and Russell Brown is as good as ever, if understated. What frustrates me is that there will be no-one being similarly blunt in any of the mass media: why are we letting a bunch of people who facilitated child rape lecture us about sexual morality?
[1] You may think that CMS Explorer is the answer to this question. If so, please hand me your drugs.
As we all know, it's never necessary to check return values, prepare exception handlers, or otherwise take steps to have your code behave sensibly when values might not be what you expect. Data is always correct, especially when your database schema was prepared by the Database Bunny ("Data modelling is hard! Constraints are hard! Referential integrity is hard!").