Lots of blogworthy stuff lately so this might be a big one.

Firstly to football: As you may remember, due to the current Arsenal stadium having just finished its last season, they were selling the seats from the stadium to any fan that wanted to by one, which me being a massive Arsenal fan, i did.

Today unfortunately, i got this email:

Dear Lucas Costi,

It is with great regret that the Club announces that we are unable to sell any Highbury seats to you. We have been informed that all of the Highbury seats, apart from the Directors' Box, the dug outs and the Executive Box seats, contain very small amounts of the toxic metal cadmium. The seats are completely safe and are not a risk to health when located within a stadium, but it is understood that if the seats are stored inside and used regularly over a long period of time, there is a slight risk that very small amounts of cadmium could be released.

Although being a very small risk, the Club is not prepared to put any of our supporters in this situation, and having also received a directive from the European Commission, unfortunately we cannot sell any Highbury seats for individual domestic use.

It is very frustrating for us to be told that we cannot offer you your seat at this stage as we have all worked very hard, well into this week, to try to make it happen, but the fact that there is a very small risk is enough reason to stop us from releasing them to individual supporters. I would like to take this opportunity to apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.

All supporters who have committed to purchasing a Highbury Seat will be fully reimbursed within the next five days. The Club will, as planned, make a donation to the David Rocastle Trust on behalf of all purchasers and would also like to remind supporters that the sale of the Highbury pitch and the Highbury Auction will go ahead as scheduled. Further information on these can be found via www.highburyauction.com

The following transaction has been successfully refunded:

Reference Number: AFC-S-XXXX
Seats Total: 1
Total Amount: 29.99 (1 x 29.99)

Yours Sincerely

Keith Edelman
Managing Director

Not happy. Not at all. I wasn't planning on using the seat as a seat anyway, I was planning on framing it. Sigh, hopefully i'll be able to get some other good stuff at the online auctions anyway, but i'm not holding my breath. If Arsenal win the Champions League next week (which i'm hoping they will), i expect all the stuff in the auctions (in June) will triple in value and far exceed anything that I might be able to afford.

Elsewhere, many probably know how pleased I was when Man Utd star Wayne Rooney injured himself the other week. It was good seeing him injure himself for real after he dived to win a penalty that ended Arsenal's unbeaten run last season. Anywho, you'll notice something peculiar in the recent photo of him (centre) below: look at his injured foot...

See something familiar? If not, then you may need to refresh your memory hehe. Both me and Wayne (nicknamed Shrek, by other football fans that don't like him, striking resemblance!) had almost the same injury, a broken metatarsal in our foot. It seems to be the in-vogue injury of late for European football stars, everybody seems to be going down with them. A few years ago the fashion was the good old cruciate knee ligament injury.

To geeky news: I finally tried out the new beta program released by Google. It seems as though Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are all going out and buying up relatively small companies which sell modestly popular software products, and then releasing the products free of charge to the general public under their respective banner. The latest Google release is a program called Sketchup, a 3D drawing program.

I tried it out, and it's insanely easy to use for a 3D drawing program. Here's something I whipped up in about 5 minutes:

In real news, the Australian federal government released their budget yesterday. You know you're getting old when you're watching and Budget and commenting on it. I suppose this is my first year with a proper full-time job and a home loan, so i've been watching this (and interest rates!) with a watchful eye.

It was a bumper budget, full of tax cuts, super reform, and grants; and this year isn't even an election year! Needless to say the government had a field day against the opposition in question time today.