Getting to watch our own domestic football live in the UK is very difficult.  You have to pay stupid money to Rupert Murdoch and even then you only get live the 1 game they deem will be the most worthy.

Well Footie has been brought back to the people thanks to p2p streaming.  Sure the quality is only average, it’s tricky to set up and you have to wait an eternity for the stream to start but even so, a desperately obsessed fan is going to be in heaven.

Theres about 5 popular p2p streaming apps and you need all of them because you never know which is going to be used for the particular game.  You can download them all here but the likelihood of the page being taken down is probably high, I don’t know what the legalities are.  Search for the likes of “TVAnts”, “PPMate” and “Sopcast” if that page is down. They are all for windows, but work OK in parallels.
Once you have the software, you need a community to give you links to the games when they air.  There’s a good forum called Streaming-lounge who will do that for you, check the day of the game.

When launching a channel my advice is to wait, wait and wait some more.  None of the apps seem to give you much indication whether or not you are connected to anything and it can take a good 10 minutes before you have connected to enough peers to get the live stream going.  Also, once you start getting a picture, it will be choppy and cut off a lot for probably a further 10 minutes.

Another thing is that most of these channels are from china and other asian countries where they are big english football fans and get all the games (unlike us).  So a lot of the channels are in foreign.  There is often though an international english language channel amongst them, it’s always a case of trial and error to find the english one.

Well I’ve had a downright annoying week, so I let myself have a week off blogging duty. Last Saturday was the main culprit, I think i’ll put it in a list in order of events.

1. It was always going to be a sucky day because it was the day we had to return from our little holiday. You know what, even though it was only devon, not the most exotic of locations and not even abroad, it barely seems a holiday if it isn’t abroad in this day and age of cheap travel. But d’ya know what it was one of the most enjoyable weeks i’ve had and its all because of Eddie. Holidays with dogs are soooo gooood! It’s worth getting a dog just to go on holiday with them. So yeah, I was quite down at having to leave.
2. Being in the car for such a length of time isn’t much fun for a dog so we made stops at every service station on the way to give him a potty break and stretch our weary legs. At one such break I noticed something in the fur on Eddies forehead, it was sort of a faint orange small pea sized thing and when I took a closer look found it to actually be attached to him. Then I noticed it had legs! I was horrified! I didn’t know at the time but it turns out it was a tick, would you believe I’ve never seen a tick before? You don’t tend to see them in this country and what with the the heatwave at the time. I almost died though, I was shaking and all sorts was racing through my head of what diseases it might have passed to him and it was quite close to his eyes so I was all OMG what if it makes him blind?! Eddie was no use at all, he hadn’t brought it to our attention, no whimpering or anything, it could have been there for days. I cursed nature and all her evil insects.
3. We made an early start so that we would get home in time for the england game, we only just made it, immediately having to grab a beer and jump on the sofa, no time to unpack. Oh and wasn’t I so glad to have made the effort? Yeah. Never liked rooney. Twat.
4. I’d missed my wholesome iMac, and straight after the long long punishment. 120 minutes + penalties of slow torture I figured I’d say hello to him (lol most people call their mac’s her’s, not me I guess). I knew that during holiday apple released 10.4.7 and some other paraphernalia so the first thing I did on logging in was to check for software updates and tthere was a ton of the bleeders. They downloaded quite swiftly thanks to 10Mbit cable and installed one by one, but half way through the actual 10.4.7 (intel) update it failed, telling me its kept the update so I could try again later and would I like to restart for the others to complete. Sure I guess, and it did and it sadly passed away.

All that suckiness in one day can’t be good for ones health, surely suckiness should be spread a bit more thinly, not all thrown at you in one go. Regarding the mac thing, what happened was that it would boot to the login screen fine but afterward only part of the menu bar appeared and that was all, no dock or clock or even most of the menu. And the beach ball span indefinitely. Even the force quit menu wouldn’t appear when doing its keyboard shortcut. As luck would have it (the only luck of the day) enough of OS X was working for File Sharing to have started in the background and I was able to log in via the iBook and get my files off. It took me the rest of the day and most of the next to get all my stuff off though, I’ve just way too much stuff. And with the spare 240GB HD still out of action I haven’t got 1 big storage device to backup onto. I had to do it piecemeal style onto a spare 60GB HD (doesn’t even cover my MP3 Collection) and what’s left on the iBook, neither being quite enough and so had to resort to a load of cdr’s as well. Took freaking forever and its so messy having to do it bits like that I’m always worried I’ll have missed something.

It’s inconclusive but I’m 75% sure the update failed and fucked the os up because of my Vista misadventure, that is, having deleted the EFI partition and causing a little confusion to the partition tables. I knew it would come back to bite me, but I was hoping it would happen after my 240GB Backup HD had been fixed.

Oh yeah here’s a little warning. After erasing my drive and re-installing the OS I wasted about 6 or 7 hours because I had chosen to format the drive as case-sensitive. As seen as all Unix based OSs that I know of use a case-sensitive FS I figured it would be best and a no-brainer option. Well it turns out that Case-Sensitive was only introduced with Tiger and is incompatible with some software. Thing is most of my software worked fine, it was only after installing Adobe CS2 that problems started, none of the Adobe apps would load, they’d just bounced in the dock a split second and buggered off. I had not a single clue what was going on and it was only after trying out a million different things, reinstalling the OS another time and spending what felt like hours staring at google not getting anywhere when I discovered the Case-Sensitive FS issue.

Reinstalled yet again without caseness and everything was fine. So, thanks apple for not being arsed to put some kind of warning into the install dvd. Humph. Actually I was quite surprised to discover that OSX hadn’t been sitting on a case-sensitive FS all this time. I’d always just presumed it was, I figured only windows was crap enough not to be.

Been forgetting to blog again, I really am hopeless at this. I fell asleep a while back and awoke with major pollen overload. I feel sooooo crappy. Also been feeling quite anxious today, with no apparent reason as per usual. Stupid mind.

Last Monday Eddie had the snip. Poor guy’s been feeling less of a man… how can he be a man?..he’s only a 11 months old. Anypoop, when he came home he was still drowsy from the anaesthetic, and he was like this for the rest of the day. He seemed a little confused and he kept looking at me with eyes that read “Why am I so tired? i’m scared! ”. He kept making the most adorable wimpers all day too and my heart really bled. Awww. His ball sack… or what used to be a ball sack, its just a sack now… looks revolting, it went all multicoloured, different shades of bruisey-brown and bloody-red. I wanted to post a photo but someone may have been having lunch when they saw it, plus I’d like to respect Eddies privacy… Well how would you like your balls posted on a blog?

Saturday was wonderful. Went up to my brothers, which despite the cost of trains these days is really easy to get to from here, I can just catch a train from sheffield, and just hop on another train at leeds station to horsforth. Leeds has quite a nice little local train service. Um what was I saying. Oh yeah, so I got to his in time for the FA Cup Final, which was one of the most rollercoastery footie matches i’ve ever watched. My brother being the more important than life or death type where liverpool is concerned was all over the place, and for the majority of the match it looked as if I was going to have one hell of miserable trip to see Radiohead in blackpool later on that day. Then in the dying moments Gerrard being the genius that he is (and he should so captain england) scored a most amazing goal with cramp and all manor of nagging injury’s going on getting the team into extra time. Then extratime went by and the bubbly west ham fucked up royally on penalties. Woohoo.

So we just had a few minutes before we had to set off for Blackpool with a smile on our faces. Gosh Blackpool is such a dump nowadays. Or maybe it always has been. Radiohead played the Winter Gardens which turned out to be a super duper place for a gig, with a big bar all the way down the length of the ballroom, what more could you want? Views were a bit restrictive though, i dunno if it was the venues fault but i’m sure they don’t have the stage elevated quite high enough, well I’m small and my views at standing gigs are poor at the best of times, mostly seeing heads and shoulders but this was worst than ever, and it wasn’t as if I was a long way from the stage, in fact I was pretty close to the front. Getting near the front is a feat in itself at a radiohead gig ‘cos their fans are total obsessives, they queue for hours beforehand just to guarantee getting to the front, seriously the only gigs I’ve been to that have had queues around the block have been radiohead ones, they’re nuts. Their new songs are fantastic, they sound kinda dirty and bassy but with angelic melodies of the bends/ok computer style period. Oh and the set for the tour is wonderful, they have these screens behind them that are like shards, and they project feeds of them playing from different angles, but they warps and saturate the footage in different ways, it has a really freaky 60’s psychodelia look to it, and it sure hell is a lot more interesting than just a big video screen. The most amazing use of the set was for the opening part of ‘you and whoes army’ where Thom sat at the piano with the cameras zoomed right into his face in a fishbowl lens type way and he occasionally did feaky come closer hand gestures that looked generally scary and personal. Gosh, still an awesome band.

The pic from the gig isn’t mine. It was the best I could find on flickr but it still doesn’t do the set justice. Um, should probably give credit but i’ve closed the page now. hah.