It’s nice to see the Arse score 3 goals but you almost needed medication to get through some parts of this one. It was a meaningless game and it was clear that the two goals we scored away were going to be enough but you can’t avoid formalities. 3-0 the final score with everybody on the squad taking their turns at being everything from brilliant to lazy. Eduardo finally got his first real goal with Arsenal and lay there like he had just won the Champions League - it’s just the group stages pal! He’s never been there before so his excitement is justified.

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Due to a family emergency, I’ll be on hiatus till at least August 30th.

So you’ve been working away at your development job for God knows how long and there’s no end in sight to your misery. There’s no chance of moving up in the company and although your bosses like you, they don’t think much of you. They’re happy with what you’re doing as long as you do it quietly, deliver in the whereabouts of your deadlines, show up to the company picnic and stay out of any real decision making. You’re taking up more and more responsibilities over the years but your pay is only being raised by a paltry 2% while the cost of living is going up by 5. You know you’re being fucked but are too lazy or incapable of doing anything. So what do you do? You change your title of course.

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It’s terribly hard for me to look past Jens Lehmann’s antics in goal so far this season but despite him doing everything he can to help us lose, we’re still doing quite OK. Chelsea, Man Utd and Liverpool have all dropped points and we’re keeping pace and have that all so meaningful “game in hand” in hand. And getting a point at Blackbrun wasn’t all that bad of a result. The early season is showing all the signs of a tight race and Wenger assesses that we’ll be in contention all the way to the end:

“It looks like it [the league] will be tighter. We have only played two games of course. I am confident we will be up there but with whom I don’t know.”

I don’t know how many points Lehmann will cost us this season but Wenger has to step in and take some action. Either Jens is just playing nonchalant (which is completely not understandable) or he’s just lost it. It’s probably the former and maybe Wenger should just bench him for a couple games just so he can get his head screwed on straight. Fabregas offered some tin-canned sympathy for Lehmann but you almost have to be a saint to not be peeved at crazy Jens. Lehmann just said that the English side are “mentally weaker” than the Germans. Some jokes just write themselves.

William Gallas’ first stint as captain is over because of injury, he’ll be out three weeks which will open the way for Kolo Toure to be captain and for Philippe Senderos to make a bid for the job. Gallas had played well in the first three games and despite the defense looking leaky against Fulham he did a commendable job along with Toure in clearing dangers. I don’t like him being a captain but he’s been a good center back so far.

David Dunn “hit back” at Wenger by basically agreeing with him about the ‘a desire for violence’ comment by basically saying they have to play like that to make up for the talent difference between the two sides. He’s an idiot but Arsene doesn’t do us any favors by complaining about the physicality of our opponents after ever game. As the Arseblogger points out, we’ve started to hit back at physical opponents and it’s awesome to watch Fabreags kicking people around. Wenger shouldn’t talk about this nonsense in his post-game interviews and just let his players do the talking on the pitch.

The fallout from the crazy Liverpool/Chelsea game which saw Liverpool get robbed of two points is Rob Styles being suspended for seeing what’s not there and denying he gave yellow cards when there is clear HD video evidence to the contrary. There’s also some story making the rounds of Beckham and Wenger giving the photographers “their moment”.

Not much else going on in Arsenal Land. Grab the feed.

Just got back from a weekend wedding trip to Kansas City which forced me to miss Arsenal’s first slip of the season and Lehmann’s second fuck-up in as many Premiership games. Arsenal Clips has the highlights, there’s also a nice little pack by FootyTube. Really disappointing to see us drop two points so early in the season against a team we should handily beat. My hate for Lehmann right now is only surpassed by US Immigration at Toronto airport.

Also missed was the Toronto FC/Chivas clash which saw TFC go six straight games without scoring a goal. When I said ‘Season Over’ a few posts ago I got flamed on certain discussion boards. I’m not i-told-you-soing but I told you so.

Finally, coming back from Kansas City at Toronto airport I see a big tall black dude and he looks familiar, it’s Chris Bosh. All I said to him was “Hey, Chris” and he’s like: “Hey, what’s up man”. Judging by where he was picking up his luggage, he was coming from Las Vegas. I snapped a pic without security looking:

So you work hard on your blog to try to get people to read it, you beg Arseblog to link to you, you put up highlights etc etc. Turns out I’m wasting time because I just realized looking at the WordPress Dashboard that all I have to do is create a site and put up some Flickr porn and booyeah! you make it to the frontpage of WordPress.

I also worked up a new header for the blog. It’s a work in progress but at least on first glance it appears like a sports blog.

Later.

Missed the game, Sopcast never got going. I hate Canadian TV for not showing this. Moving to England.

• Sky Sports Report.
• Arsenal.com Match Report.
• BBC Sports Match Report - Wenger post-game interview
• ESPN Soccernet Match Report

Here are the goals:

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THIS IS MADNESSS? THIS IS SPARTA!!!!! More on that in a bit but first:

Gilberto is pisssssssseddd!! I’d be too if I was vice-president of a country and the president died and somehow my secretary got the presidency. It’s easy to see why Gilberto is perplexed and confused at why he was passed, no, stepped over for Gallas. Common sense really, he was the captain when Henry wasn’t last year so one would naturally think he’s be the primary candidate. But Arsene Wenger defends his decision:

“William means he has to be an example everywhere, not only on the pitch - but off the pitch as well and he is right. I do not know how he behaved at Chelsea - but this year he is a very positive influence. I was pleased with his attitude and the way he took on his role.”

Also, because he’s French. C’mon, Vieira, Henry and now Gallas. Je fais seulement le capitaine français de personnes. Gilberto’s a professional and his play won’t be affected by Wenger’s greatest blunder. But deep down somewhere in his Brazilian heart he’s probably thinking what the hell is wrong with Arsene and whether Arsenal really values him the way he might have thought they did.

The Champions League starts on Wednesday away to Sparta Prague. I figure it’s going to be an easy win for us unless we decide to shoot straight at the goalie again. We’ll be without Eduardo da Silva who has been ruled out because of a nagging injury. We’re 4/5 favorites to win, I thought the odds for us to win would be a little higher. According to Soccernet, Arsenal are expected to field an unchanged side from the one that beat Fulham.

Lawrie Sanchez finally got himself a TV and watched the replays of the Fulham game and admits he was wrong in calling us “simulators”. I’m guessing he saw how Hleb almost had his leg chopped off in the first half and figured all was even at the end of the day. There’s also a video of Tony Warner talking about the game on the Sky Sports website but damned if I could understand a single sentence. Is that even English? One last note about this game, it’s funny how Arsene Wenger says the difference between this year and last year is that last year we wouldn’t have found a way to win this game. See, to me that’s just plain bullshit because as great as Hleb’s goal was, it easily could’ve been saved if he a) had shot to the right or b) Warner had dove to his left. Wenger should just say, “Hey, we shot straight at the goalie and hope to do better”. That would be a much more believable story.

But the story of the day has to be the scum getting crushed by Everton at home. This is after spending £40 million in the summer and after Darren Bent claimed they were destined for real European football. They’ll probably beat Derby in their next game but after that it’s time for successive thumpings at the hands of Man Utd. This made my day.

Here’s an article titled Gallas galvanised by extra responsibility. It talks about Gallas’ overnight change from discontent fullback to heroic captain.

I hope to have highlights from the Sparta Prague game barring any network problems. Get the feed, it is sophisticated.

The mailing lists were never easy to read through but if a man put his mind to it and used the delete button swiftly enough you could actually get something out of them and maybe even find a reason to stay on. But ever since everybody in North America cheaped out and started sending all the work to India the mailing lists of every major product have been polluted with the Sanjays and Prashants of this world asking questions that make me wonder why the hell we’re sending out our prized projects to these seemingly incompetent people.

Granted they come cheap but even so judging from their posts and having worked with them on a couple projects I still haven’t found a singular reason why I should trust them to write a simple POJO. Their unaccountability on their mailing list is appalling, I wouldn’t want my company being represented by some dude who’s asking the struts-user list questions like these and putting their company name and his title at the bottom. This just tells me you’re an idiot and have no clue what you’re doing.

I realize that I’m generalizing and that there are always exceptions, but if you Nabble through the Maven, IBatis, Struts etc user lists you’ll encounter posts which make it apparent that the author has the most rudimentary knowledge of the product and of software design and is just hoping to get by. This theme is prevalent across most mailing lists leading me to believe that this is a widespread disease which effects the outsourcing industry. Given the apparently skill level of the people working on these projects, one can only surmise that the quality of work being done in those countries is subpar. Also, posting your resumes and asking for H1 visas on peoples blogs does not help your credibility nor does it showcase your skills. Again, it just makes you look like an idiot.

Here’s an exercise: try posting an ad for a development project on Craiglist and ask for a quote. What you’ll end up getting is tin-canned emails from India that list Gupta Inc. as knowing EVERY SINGLE LANGUAGE AND DATABASE PLATFORM EVER MADE. Then follow up with a random one and actually talk to their “Project Manager” and you’ll notice that the email was just a bunch of bullshit and you’re dealing with a two-man operation run out of a basement on a Pentium II.

Lately I’ve met an increasing number of people who are “managing a team in India” and work for a company with an accent in it’s name. These are the new managers the IT industry is producing, usually they’re in their mid-20’s and consider their new “manager” role a promotion. But when you’re managing narrow-minded developers getting paid the minimum wage and communicating 95% of the time over MSN, the work that’ll get done will reflect the circumstances and talent of the people involved. Software development is an industry where geographic location hardly seems to matter but when we’re communicating requirements, design and expectations entirely over chat, things are bound to get lost in translation. My point? You can’t oversee a project if you’re thousands of miles away, especially if you’re dealing with a guy who’s trying to scrape by. This whole system is flawed and annoying, both from the manager’s and developer’s perspective.

As long as you can tolerate their nerdiness and smell you can generally have a conversation with another North American developer and talk about a wide range of languages and tools without too many awkward moments. Not the case with slave labor. I visited India a couple years ago and had a chance to speak with some developers working at India’s second richest bank. The first think you notice about these people is how specialized they are. If they have a Java job, that’s all they know. Nothing more. Java. Java. Java. If they have a Perl job, it’s all about Perl and they’ll write everything in Perl and not even consider anything else for any reason. The mentality seems to be to get the job done as the lowest price and as fast as possible, nothing else matters. Fair enough, but I just don’t see the price of the work making up for the lack of quality and the general fuckedupness of the process.

And yes, I’m an Indian.

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The scoreboard is indicative of the events of this afternoon. Joey Melo registered our first shot on goal at about the 55 minute of the first half. If that doesn’t tell the story how about a 21(11) - 3(0) shots on goal disparity. But let’s leave statistics aside for a moment because they don’t tell the whole story. There is no stat that measures how bored and tired Lombardo must’ve been waiting for ANY sort of service. Our midfield couldn’t even put together 3 passes without either turning it over through a bad pass or getting tackled. A really disappointing game for everyone including Reda, Braz and former NYRB Dunivant. Our back four caused no discomfort to any NY player and we’re lucky the scoreline is only 3-0 because NY missed some golden, golden opportunities to really shit on us.

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This game brought back some painful and familiar memories. It looked like all the optimism of the preseason was about to get two-flushed down the toilet up until the 83 minute mark. Now it might appear like Tony Warner had an unbelievable game but we’re Arsenal and we’re in the business of making average goalies look great, so we did that again. We created 36584 chances in this game and probably should’ve scored on 12587 of them, but it’s good for us we managed two.

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