Last night England and Portugal duked it out infront of 56k soccer football fans in the quarter finals of the european championship. A 2-2 score in double overtime led to penalty kicks to decide who will battle in the semi finals. Tonite it's Greece vs France and tomorrow the dutch national team meets the swedes.
The action has been fantastic and quite upsetting to former champs like the UK and Italy, both now eliminated from the competition. I think the dutch actually have a shot now at winning this thing!
Back to Iraq 3.0: "Yesterday's attacks may or may not have been the start of a larger uprising. I'm hearing -- from several sources -- that the next five to seven days will be the most dangerous."
No postings yesterday 'cause I left the morning radio show an hour early for a special invitation to take the latest pride and joy of the dutch marines for a test drive.
In Den Helder the radio crew and I, who did the week long live radio broadcast from Irak in february were welcomed on board of Her Majesty's ship De Ruyter.
We had force 10-12 winds but still took her out to the North Sea for a hands on feel what this ship is capable of. They really pulled out all the stops for us, including a fly-by of an Orion and a surface visit from the 'Walrus' submarine. A collection of pictures is here.
Weaponry was quite impressive, the rear mounted 'Goal Keeper is capable of swiveling by radar control to any position needed in miliseconds and fires 4200 rounds of 30mm shells per minute.
The of course there's the rockets, none on board while we were there, but these are pretty nasty bastards. The entire system is pretty much version 2.0 of the Patriot missle system. They can pluck anything travelling at or under Mach 5 out of the air.
The coolest part of the tour was central command. An airconditioned room full of screens that acts as the war room. The radar system blew me away. We were able to track everything from commercial airliners to subs to piper cubs flying anyhewere in ALL of Europe. I was told the system can track the space shuttle with the same ease.
All of the systems were running a custom application on 'off the shelf' Sun Workstations under the Solaris operating system. Although I wasn't allowed to take picture in the command center, I was tickled pink to see that I was able to launch Sun's version of Solitaire right on top of this sophisticated weaponry control.
I hope with all my heart none of this stuuf ever has to be used, but it is nice to know it's there if needed.
Dowbrigade: "Unfortunately, his trajectory took him directly through the power cable for the iBook, which was yanked off the table top, spinnning wildly in the air like a white frisbee, only to land flat on the cobblestone floor. For a moment we stared in stunned silence."
I've been subscribed to the Mars Rover Blog for a while and enjoy the analysis of the hundreds of picture the rover is sending back to earth on a daily basis. Normally I don't go for the blog's little green men theories, but this one is pretty convincing. At a minimum I'd like to hear from someone [@ NASA?] explain the black dots.
Europe has been enthralled with the european soccer championships, which is as much a sporting event as it is a political one. It's kinda like the superbowl of europe, except all countries duke it out over a two week period. Gert-Jan has posted a chart of several country's football soccer psyche.
Michael Moore was on Letterman promoting his movie Farenheit 9/11. Here's a BitTorrent of the segment. (also added as an enclosure for outfitted aggregators)
We had actor James Michael Tyler on the morning show today. He's been in Europe for the past few weeks promoting the final season of Friends DVD. He plays Gunther on the show.
He's also a musician and has a band-thing happening on the side with some other folks I know, like Vivian Campbell of Def Lep and Dio fame. Check out Red Felt Pig.
Yesterday I called in sick for the show, which was a bummer since Kenny Loggins came in for a visit. We met about 14 years ago in the states and played a round of putt-putt golf together. Kenny certainly remembered and passed his message to me in an innovative way, see the picture :)
"The Creative Archive is fuel for the creative nation," said Paula Le Dieu, co-director of the initiative. "It allows people to download these excerpts and be able to edit them and incorporate them into their own creative works."
The 
