U21s VS Estonia

Noel King's first game in charge of the U21s will be remembered as a complete turnaround from the previous game at Tallaght Stadium at this level, a 2-1 loss to ten men Armenia was replaced by a 5-0 win over third placed Estonia. Anthony Stokes delivered an excellent performance throughout as an inside left, scoring twice in the opening half, and providing two assists in the second.

After an opening few minutes where Ireland struggled to retain possession, and goalkeeper Henderson was called on to make two smart saves, the team settled into control of the ball before the opening goal. A smart cut inside from Stokes made some space for a right footed shot beyond the keeper. The second goal came from the penalty spot, Stokes both winning and taking the spot kick. After drawing a tackle from the Estonian full back, the Hibernian striker chipped the ball straight down the middle of the goal and off the underside of the crossbar to double his tally for the night. I managed to get a quick snap of it on my phone here - https://sites.google.com/site/tetsujin1979/Home/StokesPenalty.JPG It's not great quality though, it was at the opposite side of the ground to me and the camera on my phone isn't the best

The midfield of McCarthy, Gleeson and Garvan controlled possesion well in the middle of the park, and linked up with Clifford on the right. The two goal cushion eliminated the earlier nerves, and with the pressure off the central defenders (Gunning and Kiernan) were confidant on the ball. The Estonain right winger had previously enjoyed some space between Clifford and Coleman at right full, but with this space eliminated, his threat was removed. While some of the play was excellent to watch, the opening goal laid the plan for a lot of Stokes' play, despite several overlapping runs into space from full back Nolan, the simple out ball was ignored in favour of cutting inside again and again which was frustrating to watch when he lost possession. Also, a lot of the play from the Irish team seemed to be based around long balls from deep on the right to where Stokes was, playing as an old fashioned inside left.

The second half began in much the same fashion as the first, with Estonia looking to score before conceding possession and control to the Irish. Stokes was again involved in the best moves of the half, and showed some excellent hold up play to set up McCarthy for the third of the night, and the young Wigan midfielder's first at this level for his country.

Stokes was unlucky not to complete a deserved hat trick, a header from Garvan's free kick on the right going just over the crossbar. An audacious piece of skill from the forward led to the fourth goal. With his back to goal on the byline, he backheeled the ball through the full backs legs, before rounding the hapless defender, and collecting the ball to cross. The ball eventually fell to Owen Garvan outside the box, whose shot deflected off Seamus Coleman into the corner. The goal was awarded despite some (IMO legitimate) calls for offside against the Everton player who was withdrawn before the game restarted for Histon's Lanre Onyebanjo.

I've seen some criticism of Cillian Sheridan's play, but he was right in front of where I was sitting for the second half, and he never stopped running, dragging centre halves out of the penalty areas to create space for Stokes and McCarthy to run into. He didn't see a lot of the ball, but in my opinion the team wasn't set up for him to see much possession. He was clearly exhausted when withdrawn late on for Alan Judge, which allowed Stokes to play up front with Judge replacing him on the left.

The final goal was rifled in by Garvan from outside the area, following good work from Stokes again, receiving the ball and laying it off to the Crystal Palace midfielder in space.

The only real criticism (if you can call it that) was that it could have easily been 7 or more. Stokes, moreso in the first half, was wasteful in possession and Sheridan was never directly involved in play. However, when your biggest complaint is that the team didn't score enough goals you know it was a successful night.

A month disconnected from the matrix

I've become a pretty regular user of twitter and Facebook in the last 18 months. According to twitter, I created my account on 24 October 2008 and posted 2075 tweets until midnight 6th July 2010, which is 620 days. That works out at an average of 3.35 tweets a day although I didn't really start using it regularly until February 2009. In the last few months I wouldd say it was closer to 6 tweets a day. Going from that to none at all was a strange experience and gave me some time to think about how social media has impacted on my life. So in the month or so that I swore off social media what was learned? Any great insights? Anything at all, in fact? I did keep notes while I was on my self-imposed sabbatical, so read on.

In the first few days, it was my browsing habits that I noticed the most. While I'd keep track of social media updates during the day, via RSS feeds and email updates, during lunch I check out more content-driven sites (ign, gametrailers, rte, etc) than user-generated content on social media sites. The only reason for this I could think of was that everyone else is at lunch too, so there's less user-generated content to read up on?

Since I was staying away from social media, I soon realised how forcing yourself not to post links to articles, sites, etc makes you realise how often you do it, and how trivial the "share on Facebook" button in firefox/tweet button makes the act of sharing an item with your followers. Since the article doesn't appear in your own news feed on Facebook, it's easy to lose track of how often you actually do share content. As well as that, and to a much larger extent than I had realised, posting something on Facebook, or retweeting, has replaced forwarding jokes, vids, audio clips, etc in email. Think about the last ten forwards you were emailed, and the last ten links you saw in your timeline in Facebook or twitter. Which list has the older first entry? When you're only option is to email out stuff you find interesting, you spend more thought and effort before sending the mail out. Over the course of the month I realsed that you send a link because you think it will interest the recipients, but you tweet/Facebook a link because it interests you.

What I thought was bizarre was that some companies make information available via Facebook and twitter, but is not available on their own sites! For example Phantom FM needed you to be logged in and "like" phantom on Facebook to see the Oxegen track of the day, since I was staying off Facebook, there was simply no way for me to win this. Apart from that, this drives users to Facebook, instead of the company's own site. This can only be counter productive in the long run, Facebook gets more traffic, your site gets none, so you lose advertisers because of low traffic numbers. Facebook is a convenient, easy option for companies to use for competitions, instead of writing up their own competition pages, and including registration, etc, they can just use Facebook connect, and run the whole thing on Facebook's servers. Of course this means that if you don't use Facebook, you can't win.

Using twitter, Facebook, google reader, etc, as new sources bascially provides a central repository for your own customised news source. Without them, you have to go to individual sites to get news. The former takes up your time, whenever a new item is posted at the top of an RSS feed, you stop whatever you're doing to read it, which is a distraction from whatever you were working on, whereas in the latter use your own free time (lunchtime, etc) to browse content driven sites. It still takes up time, but has less of a lasting impact on what you were working on. As well as this, there is much less attention paid to new items in a feed, but when you've taken time to search out an article, it leaves more of a lasting impression on you.

As part of the exile, I removed Facebook and twitter from my browsing history, and deleted the cookies from the cache, so I would have to put effort into logging back into those sites I was avoiding, and removed the echofon pluging from firefox. This had to be repeated on my mobile - Facebook and twitter apps were removed, the shortcuts and cookies were removed from Opera Mobile. Not using those sites made me aware that I use my mobile for browsing more user generated content than content driven sites. But as well as that, I never realised that a lot of the sites I use don't have mobile versions. If content driven sites want to be among the more popular sites accessed from mobile devices, this will obviously be a necessity in future. For now, too many of them think that apps will fill this need, but people will want a simpler transition from desktop browsing to mobile browsing and will find using a mobile browser easier than installing an app. Another consequence of this was that I basically stopped using firefox outside the office, because I much prefer Opera as a browser.

I did still read some twitter feeds during the month, but I never logged into my own account. Something that struck me about "@" replies is that the majority of them are replies to statements made by users. Very few of them are opening statements in a conversation, e.g. @tetsujin1979 Hi, how are you. With that in mind, it might still be some time before twitter does replace SMS. I had thought previously that with the increase in use of twitter to the point of ubiquity, and the addition of unlimited data plans to most mobile contracts, that twitter was a viable replacement for SMS. As for the posts themselves, tweets tend to be what you are thinking about right now, whereas blog posts tend to be the end result of time spent researching a subject. Like this post for example.

As the month progressed, I started to think the difference between Texting/Emailing someone and social networking came down to the difference between asking a person "hi, what are you up to" and telling a crowd of people "hi, this is what I'm doing" and as such using social networking is a much more effective way of tracking who is doing what than mass texting/emailing "what you do this weekend/doing next weekend", but only after it passes a certain level of usage, or adoption. There's no point in posting on Orkut what you are going to do this weekend, nobody is going to read it. Since I did not post any updated, most people were surprised to find out I watched the World Cup Final on the big screen in the Aviva Stadium, and that I was at the opening rubgy game in the same stadium.

Since I had stopped using twitter, I stopped visiting some sites whose feeds I follow (e.g. fourfourtwo.com and limerickleader.ie), but for other sites that I visited regardless of how often their twitter feed was updated (e.g. football365) my browsing habits didn't really change. For this reason, for anyone looking for advice on trimming their number feeds they follow, I would advise you to drop sites you visit regularly. You are going to see the new content when you check the site soon enough.

Since some sites have started using Facebook Connect or Twitter OAuth as authentication mechanisms, logging into those sites automatically logs you into Facebook or twitter. It's convenient, but when you're trying to avoid those sites, it becomes a bit of a pain.

Facebook's birthday reminders are a convenient method to remember birthdays. Unfortunately, I missed Susan and Nichola's birthdays (sorry girls). However, I did email them a few days later when I did remember, and both responded. When a milestone event like this happens, (engagement, birth of a child, birthday, etc) messages can get lost in the clutter, and that's made emails more personal. Similarly, for some reason, I think giving someone your email address is more personal than saying "just search for me on Facebook"

Maybe it's just my friends, but more girls than guys got in contact with me to see if I was ok while I was off the grid. Have to say, I'd be the same. If a guy hears nothing from someone, he assumes everything is fine. If a girl hears nothing, she assumes something is wrong

So that was a month disconnected from the matrix.

Incidentally, the other title choice was "Going off the grid for a month"

What I've missed talking about

Watching the World Cup final on the big screen in the Aviva - http://picasaweb.google.com/tetsujin1979/2010WorldCupFinal - the Dutch tactics, and the result itself. Congratulations Spain.
Casillas kissing his missus on live tv, turnabout is fair play after she asked him what went wrong in the Swiss game
Glenn Whelan's rumoured move to Liverpool
The fallout from the Back to the Future "futureday" hoax from TotalFilm
I never knew the Wu-Tang Clan covered While My Guitar Gently Weeps as The Heart Gently Weeps - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u72nMAIJkno
Creating crowd sourced playlists on songvote.com
Google using youtube to create a documentary on what happened on July 24, 2010 - http://www.google.com/landing/youtube/lifeinaday/
Getting 66.67% in the Shrek quiz on movies.ie
Scoring the team try of the competition in the last game for the Randomers
The acts who refuse to put their music on iTunes: http://www.edibleapple.com/musical-acts-not-on-itunes/
Tony Stonem from Skins joining X-Men: First Class as Hank McCoy (Beast)
Through no action of my own (that I'm aware of anyway) I was awarded the bronze helper badge on twithelpme: http://twithelp.me/profile/tetsujin1979 http://twitter.com/twithelpbot/statuses/18148173923
iTunes randomly deleting 19 albums from my HD (I'm blaming iTunes anyway)
VG Cats's friendship strip: http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=297
Using the phone in my house gave me a headache, because the smokers in my house use it, it's collected carcinogens (sp?) in the mouthpiece and had to be cleaned
Missing Ed Hally's birthday because I was in Limerick (sorry Ed)
Steven Reid retiring from international football. Really disappointed me actually, but I understand why he did it
Prankster's giving Sepp Blatter the most appropriate middle name ever - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/world-cup-2010/7891632/Sepp-Blatter-given-embarrassing-nickname-on-World-Cup-award.html
computer games VS skaters and snowboarders: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVljiwwqwfc
Inadvertently seeing another user's details when creating an account on momentumscreenings.co.uk
Brian Quinlivan getting married - Congrats Quindy
Missing the Hot Press Toy Story 3 screening in Dundrum on the 18th - hope you enjoyed it Phebes and nephew
Getting 64.71% in the Chris Nolan quiz on movies.ie, although I did guess Marilyn Manson (which was correct) and then told it was incorrect
Wonder if these machine gun robots come in white?? - http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20010533-1.html
System of a Down - Toxicity as played by a string quartet: http://www.emok.tv/videos/toxicity-cover-mit-streichquartett-klavier.html
American History X - The Game: http://www.phun.org/newspics/funny_friday/4658.jpg
The new N3 layout moving the bottleneck from the Blanchardstown Village/N3 interchange to the Navan Road/Auburn Avenue interchange. Did the planners learn nothing from the N1/Collins' Avenue junction??
Owen Garvan's proposed move to Palace, now completed. Their first signing in two years.
What if Bebo had a facebook "like" button?
Buckfast icecream?? Are you fucking kidding me?
Thierry Henry retiring from international football - we will never forget
Jenna from Barstool Sports getting well over 5 million views on youtube
Seeing Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders in the Academy. First time seeing a drummer as a lead singer
Missing first thursday night football game since March
The first pictures of Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern. I think it looks ok, the suit is supposed to be organic, and it looks like a nervous system. Not sure about the mask though
Fight Club/Ferris Bueller's Day Off mash up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiMuj85ngEo
Find out who's unfollowed you on twitter: http://who.unfollowed.me/
Picking my fantasy football team for the new Premiership season - David Silva and Joe Cole or Fabregas and Andy Reid?
Just when you think you're going to go into football withdrawal, preseason kicks off
The Beyond Black Mesa, Half-Life fan film: http://beyondblackmesa.com/
Valve releasing Alien Swarm for free: http://store.steampowered.com/app/630/
4chan ruining Rachel Wissner's and Jessi Slaughter’s lives. Because they can.
If Robbie Keane plays in the Champions League for Spurs, is he the first Irishman to play in the CL proper for two different clubs - Liverpool and Spurs
Hasbro release huge new toy AT-AT: http://comics.ign.com/articles/110/1106714p1.html
Steve Kilbane in top 10 Irish players: http://www.the12thmanblog.com/2010/03/top-10-irish-players.html
Civil unions being officially recognised by the Irish State
Noel King being announced as the new manager of the Irish mens U21 team
Pat Dundon's evil twin: http://nyc.barstoolsports.com/random-thoughts/does-this-look-like-the-face-of-a-bisexual-djgay-porn-actor-with-a-british-accent-and-a-lingerie-fetish-model-who-would-smash-a-tattoo-shop-owner-in-the-head-with-a-sledgehammer-at-a-sex-party/
RedEye mini, turn your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad into a universal remote: http://thinkflood.com/products/redeye-mini/
Not sleeping and reading the weirdest stuff on the football365 forum at 3 in the morning
Bohemians' exit from the Champions League at the hands of TNS
First rumours coming out of Namco VS Capcom using the Tekken 6 engine and Capcom VS Namco using the Street Fighter 4 engine
The Pirate Party (of Pirate Bay infamy) launching their own ISP in Sweden. They're not keeping logs of user activity, and thus any record of illegal activity cannot be provided to law enforcement
Getting 76.47% in the Toy Story 3 quiz on movies.ie
Explanation of the Dyson Air Mutiplier: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WNcjkZ6d0w Looks like a video from Ok Go!
Kristen Bell as Harley Quinn (fanart): http://www.cinematical.com/photos/batman-fan-art/990582/
Congratulations Jennifer and Adam on getting engaged.
Former professional footballer Mike Trusson blogging about becoming a FA-certified coach: http://www.grassrootscoaching.com/blog/
Dr Simon Tam, MD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JutAnhS0tB0
After dropping to a 34" waist during the year, I'm back up to 35 or so. 34 is too small, and 36 is too big. Grrr
The facebook terms and conditions statement is longer than the US Constitution
The US Library of Congress is going to archive every tweet from 2006 onwards
Darth Vader robs a bank: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgu2rJfHMCU
Watching The Karate Kid without subtitles. Well, without English subtitles. Ok, it had Chinese subtitles. My old housemate Graham looks disturbingly like the kid Will Smith's son fights at the end of the new Karate Kid film
Seeing Aston Villa play Bohemians in Dalymount Park. Despite it being my sixth or seventh time in Dayler, it was my first time seeing Bohs play there. Quietly impressed with the Bohs keeper, left full, and both Bohs goals. Villa had all the possession but couldn't finish.
Comic-con attendees VS The Westboro Baptist Church: http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/07/22/super-heroes-vs-the-westboro-baptist-church/ Things like this make you proud to be a geek
The DC Universe Online intro is pretty cool: http://www.gametrailers.com/video/exclusive-who-dc-universe/702050
Congratulations Cornelia Horohan on the birth of your first child, Conor
Rangers signing an Irish U19 goalkeeper, Alan Smith, from Crumlin United
Follow up to This Is England, called This Is England '86: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/video/2010/jun/29/shane-meadows-this-is-england-86
Jailbreaking an iPhone declared legal by the US government: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20011661-38.html
Anytime a movie fanboy claims Zack Efron is only in a movie because of High School: The Musical, remind him he started in Joss Whedon's Firefly
After hearing Ava Adore on Phantom, I was inspired to listen to Adore on my iPod for the first time in ages to see if it has improved with age. It hasn't disimproved. Read into that what you will
Getting 81.25% in the A-Team quiz on movies.ie
The CAS upholding the right of players born in Northern Ireland to declare for the Republic, regardless of where they, their parents, or grandparents were born, because they qualify for an Irish passport under the Good Friday Agreement
First there was Sarah, now there's Steven - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/kanye-west-follows-only-one-ndash--but-who-is-steven-of-coventry-2041208.html