End Of Level Boss

Blackout fronted up to the court last night with a very undermanned line up of five. But just as we were to hit the nets one of the five got called away in an emergency leaving us with half a team! Luckily the guys at Hooters are such a sporting bunch that they lent us two of their own players, leaving them one short themselves. This proved to even things up immensely. So with that out of the way Blackout were sent into bat first.

Brett & Mick were in first and after a couple of hiccups involving a run out and being bowled out they finally went on to make 26 valuable runs. Mark and Brian were sent out next and we managed to rack up a respectable 36 runs with no wickets falling. The two borrowed players went out to score 21 runs with a loss of three wickets. Bart was asked to stay on to bat again and the Hooters called on Brian to come out and face the music one more time. With the last pair we score 19 runs. So all up a pretty solid performance just managing to sneak over the century with 102 runs.

Fielding was tough. Holes in the field meant we were stretched to save any runs off the net. It wasn’t until Grumpy’s bowler, Peter C, we struck with two quick wickets but it was too late to win the skin. Their second pair smashed us but in all fairness it was our extras that killed us as all up in that partnership we gave up 28 runs as the majority of no balls and wides were in the Power Play overs. Richo reappeared at this point and it seemed that having that extra player on field had an immediate effect. Richo was unlucky not to get a hat trick and everyone else had a good result with their overs from here on. So we managed to win the last two skins. A special mention here goes to Mick who despite blowing his first over (19 runs off that Power Play over) he composed himself to comeback and had minus 10 to reward his blitz attack.

In the last over we were so close to winning the match it hurt. We only needed two wickets to win as we were defending 102 and they were on 107 at this point. However it wasn’t meant to be as they walked on with 14 runs off the last over to seal the match. This leaves us with only a few rounds left to keep onto our third place on the ladder and next week’s bash against the Spartans will need a full squad if we are to have any chance.

This is more of an update than a blog. I just read today that Microsoft are no longer producing MS Money. This was a program I switched to after having used Quicken as it offered easier access to your financial info through your pocket PC or Palm. So to hear that they are chopping it is a bit sad. But understandably so, they are axing it in an effort to narrow down it’s focus as it faces continuing challenges from Apple and Google in ways that have never been so threatening to the monopoly.

MS are also axing Digital Image Suite which should upset a few folks out there but let’s face it, Photoshop is king in that department. But one loss that I think must be hard for MS is to say CAIO to MS Encarta. This was a product of there’s that you could tell Bill Gates himself was really behind since CD-Rom’s first started becoming available to the everyday PC user back in the early 90’s. I remember using MS Encarta to sell some PC’s back at the Gamesmen as there was no real internet to use as a selling point back in 1995! But now with Wikipedia.com being everyone’s first choice for 99% of the info they want you could see Microsoft’s reasoning.

Yes I know. Hardware is the actual device. Hard to stream it down the phone lines to your device. But what if you didn’t have to? What if the functions you needed were able to be just added on via a download? Well it’s already happening. I currently have an iPhone. It, like many other smart phones, does games (fairly well), makes calls, takes photos and has a map app. I also have a Pocket PC for GPS in the car. But I don’t like having to lug the two around. I’d happily give up one to have only one device. Well, TomTom just announced that they’ll be selling an iPhone adaptation of their software and also a stand to mount the iPhone on your windscreen. Big deal you say? Well actually it is. It’s a very important leap in a lot of ways.

GPS in a Smartphone is not new. But what is different about this is that the iPhone was once a GPS enabled phone unable to do turn by turn. Apple addressed this and corrected it with a patch. Yeah I know they don’t like that term but that’s what this is. So what we have is a piece of hardware being changed by a software download.

You all by now probably have a video camera? Also a dedicated digital camera? Home phone? Laptop or PC? But the way things are going these items won’t be needed. You’ll just have the one device that does the lot… well! If the iPhone had a 12MP camera with 10X zoom and the ability to tag every photo with GPS data, face recognition so you know who’s in each shot plus it could get you home thanks to GPS turn by turn directions… you’d want that right? Not to mention be able to watch TV, record shows, get email… you see where this is going right?.

The next 10 years is gonna get very exciting in this way. We’ll be seeing more advances in gadgets and how multitasking they can be. In the meantime the next update for the iPhone (3.0 OS) is to be released next week on the 17th June 2009. It’s biggest update feature is the ability to gain turn by turn directions with the GPS among other things. TomTom haven’t specified when their app gets launched but it’ll be in the US summer which is another way of saying in the next few weeks. Will be interesting to see how other GPS manufacturers (a term that may in itself become outdated) react to this.