soccer madness

It's the start of the beautiful game season! it's actually coming to my 4th World Cup season!! well i watched the 1990 world cup final in a drab affair where germany beats italy. but i didn't know a sh*t about what all the craze was about at that time. my dad woke me up at 3 am in the morning and said, it's the WORLD cup finals. i was thinking to myself at that time, what the hell is the world cup? but anything that has to do with the WORLD certainly has something special. and so, there it begins, my first encounter with the beautiful game.

i was 9 yrs old at that time, and wasn't some kid who played football, and certainly not a fan. however, after spending some effort to keep my eyes open to watch that goal-ess match, i got excited the next day in school, when i realise how many other boys also watched it. it became sort of like the cool thing, something to talk about. talking about football among us kids then were like dissecting a theory piece by piece, with such indepth analysis.
so i started reading about football, following (like every kid then) the EPL...

but then i realised there's not only the EPL in the world. there were many other leagues. but the EPL was the only league shown on TV in this part of the world. and so we got attuned to familiar names in english soccer.

my next world cup, 1994, i was more grown up then, familiar with quite a number of teams, and therefore started to understand the attraction of the beautiful game (why the heck would anyone wake up at 3 in the morning to watch 22 men kicking a ball). it was also during this world cup that i realise, many other non-EPL related teams play more attractive soccer than england! and i also started to realise, england is not as good as they were hyped up to be. (at the time of the writing of this post, it proved right again as england was knocked out by portugal for the 2nd time running.)

even though managers and coaches come and go, tradional football powerhouses typically try to retain their style. For example we associate italy with great defence, brazil with attractive play involving individual skills and ability to score beautiful goals, holland with their total football. Nowadays, these teams also set out to reinvent themselves as the gap between the powerhouses and other teams narrowed. ghana impressed in this world cup with their bold, strong play.

personally though, sometimes things become strange, like with brazil. i think they never get their samba rhythm for this tournament. we only see them playing counter attacking football, not play-making. counter attack is when you patiently defend and wait for your opponent to leave you spaces at the back and you attack them with one swift deadly movement. play-making is when you have a genius to control and move your midfield (like zinedine zidane or zizou of france). the whole world wanted to see ronaldinho show his stuff, but i guess he didn't quite perform because the tactics employed by brazil never really suited his style. Oh well, at least we saw the best of zizou reminiscing the 98 moments again.

Whistler - Blackcomb

I was at Vancouver a couple of weeks back. First time in that part of the world (North America). Actually, i was in Montreal for about 1 week for a conference, CHI 2006. It's the premier conference for Human Computer Interaction and I was showcasing my project there. It's about chickens, and this system allows you to remotely touch your pets through the Internet. We used chickens because they are such badly treated animals. Some dude has actually shown that by touching chickens, you give them pleasure and therefore increase their welfare. So we extended this conclusion by building a system that allows you to touch your pet wherever, whenever. Pretty cool eh? :) you can check it out by googling "poultry internet".

Oh I intended actually not to talk about the chicken project, but about the picture above. So as this is my first ski experience, I couldn't help but took a picture with the dude sitting beside me. He was friendly enough to be photographed. He seems like an experienced skier but maybe this is his first time in Whistler too. And by the way, Whistler-Blackcomb is the world's no. 1 ski resort and is the venue for 2010 Olympics. I didn't plan for this trip, but as I was transiting in Vancouver with another friend for 2 days, we thought, what the heck, might as well venture to somewhere new. So we asked around a bit, and found out that hey, we can actually ski even though it's near the end of spring now.

Skiing is tough, mind you. It certainly looks easy to TV, but first thing you learn is to climb uphill and there is just no friction available for you to rub your ski on, and you tend to slide downhill. So what you do is you walk like a duck, but sideways... And imagine now you are wearing a shoe sized 50. yeah... your 2 feet tend to clash. but going downhill is fun... way fun... you tend to feel like the speed is throwing you off balance, but once you get the hang of it, it gives you the speed thrill similar to roller coaster. but maybe slower. but a word of advice, train up your stamina if you intend to pick up skiing. now i understand why it is called a sport!

Oh did I mention also it was the first time I experience real snow? It's funny, they're not as soft as I thought. Perhaps it's due to the late spring season. Heard that fresh snow are much softer. Anyway, they feel like ice kacang. hard... the local kind, not the taiwanese kind. but this kind of hard snow is good for making snow balls. when you whack the other person, it feels kinda painful.