Not only Spain, but football won in the European Championship final this morning. They showed that slick, attacking passing football can win games and win tournaments. The boring and dull defensive game, epitomised by the Italians and Greeks, that in recent times has proved effective in not losing games was ultimately outdone by proper and exciting football.

Spain play the Arsenal - and to an extent the Man Utd - way of football, and it was a joy to watch. In the final the Spanish midfield made the Germans look like schoolboys; the Germans could barely play the ball out of their defensive third for much of the match. They only managed to score the one goal but should have scored many more.

Well done to Spain, their win can only be good for football.

Also, if you remember, Spain was one of my picks at the start of the tournament .

This weekend we ended up mainly watching movies and me playing the newly released (newly released in Australia anyway) Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It's quite pathetic that this massive Nintendo game was released in Japan and the USA back in January and March respectively, but it's only been released in Europe and here now. Very, very poor form Nintendo.

I've played through the individual 'Subspace Emissary' missions in the game, and also a few games online. I was excited to play as Sonic, but once he was unlocked i didn't really fancy him too much in the game. He's way to fast, and too easy to fall off the platforms. Surprisingly the characters that i've been most successful with has been Kirby and Meta Knight (I actually won an online multiplayer game with Kirby!). I also have the privilege of having one of the game's characters named after me; too bad he pretty much sucks in the game.

I think i like the Kirby characters because they are easy to control and have good recovering abilities because they can float/fly pretty well.

The start of the weekend saw us seeing Kung Fu Panda on Friday night. It was a pretty good movie that kept the humour throughout, and the Chinese theme and especially music was quite refreshing.

Saturday night after Church and dinner we made a snap decision to see Get Smart. I really enjoyed the movie, it was very funny and actually quite witty. My only criticism would be that it didn't really feel very 'Get Smart'-ish. Nonetheless, as a comedic spy movie it really shined.

This afternoon we also won our indoor game 4-1. Today's win should see us push into the top four for the first time, after starting the the regular season in 7th place out of 8.

We've just come home from a stirring game of indoor. Before the game we were 6th with only 6 points separating the top six teams. Today we played the second team, next week we play the 3rd team, and the week after that we play 1st team.

So playing the top 3 teams in three weeks could decide if we make the finals or not. The team we played today wiped the floor with us in the trials at the start of the season, but today we edged them out in a nail-biter.

We were losing 1-2 at half-time, but we fought back to win 5-4. At times we rode our luck, but I think it was a deserved result.

This weekend i also played through Call of Duty 4 again. I don't know why i did it, but last night I felt like doing it. The awesome graphics and storyline didn't hurt either. So i think I can put that one back onto the shelf now; i'm not really interested in the multiplayer side of it.

I think maybe i'll have to play through Bioshock and Crysis again when I have some time...

Yesterday finally saw the release of Firefox 3. It's been a while since Firefox 2 was released (over a year and a half now), so this has been a long time in coming.

Whilst 3.0 is definitely a significant improvement over 2, i don't really see that it's one and a half year's worth of improvement.

In terms of themes, like the release of 2.0, I initially strongly resisted the new theme. I only had to put up with it because the author of my previously used theme, Winestripe (the 1.5 theme that I had used for 2.0), hasn't - and probably isn't - going to update it for 3.0.

But after using the new default 3.0 Windows theme for the past few days, i've got to say that it's really grown on me. I'm probably actually going to stick with it now.

I've done a general clean up of my extensions and also added a few new ones. I've got to give a special shout-out to the developer of the NoSquint extension for doing some great work keeping it up to date and integrating it very well into the new version (which i'm sure couldn't have been easy).

NoSquint is one of those extensions that provide the most basic of functionality that makes you wonder why the Firefox developers themselves don't put it into the browser.

One of the things that NoSquint enables you to do is to change the new default 'zooming' behaviour of the browser back to the normal text resizing of old, whilst still giving you the ability to 'page zoom'. I'm not a fan of 'full' or 'page' zooming (that enlarges images etc as well as text) as a default for various reasons, but I won't bore you with the details.

The new 'AwesomeBar' also does take some getting used to. I felt that it really only became useful once I cleared my history and cleaned out most of my useless bookmarks.

It also seems that, like IE7, Firefox is coming down hard on certificate errors. In the new version it is quite a few clicks to get past common certificate errors, for example self-issued certificates and domain name mismatches. This is a huge (and quite brave) step, and it's really well discussed in explained in one of the developer's blogs, in an entry aptly titled entry 'To Do: Break Internet'.

I can see both sides of this one, but if it makes domain and website administrators take certificate errors more seriously, then it can only lead to a more safer and secure internet.

But all in all, I highly recommend that you upgrade to Firefox 3 (from Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer ).

Every now and then I stumble upon a website or online service that I think: "damn that was a simple idea, i wish i had thought of that", and consequently ponder the potential money that some other guy on the far side of the world is making off such an idea.

Sometimes that 'something' is a useful service, an idea, or something that is just so plain silly that it's guaranteed lots of people will find interesting or amusing that you can make a killing off advertising revenue.

That 'something' today was GraphJam.

The idea is pretty simple: let people design and produce their own funny graphs and then let them post it on your website.

Below is just one example:



Funny stuff, and i'm definitely now subscribed to it using Google Reader.