The first game ended today as a 3-1 loss to the world champions Italy, and it was a good game for the most part. Scrappy, stop and go football with the possession changing frequently as both teams went head on with tackles. However, it was a loss to the US. It was expected to be a loss, as the Italian squad had rebuilt since the debacle at Euro 2008, they brought back the world cup winning coach and got a few new faces that are pretty good, including an American.

But that’s not why I’m writing all this. I’m writing all this because I’m a bit upset with Bob Bradley as the coach for our team, and I’m a bit upset with one of the players on the squad as well. I don’t think we’ll do well at all in any major tournament without some real talent in coaching.

The US has been playing pretty well for quiet a while, and its gotten pretty solid at scraping out results, against good teams and bad team, home and away. It’s also gotten pretty good at wiping the floor with rubbish opposition. It’s been like this for a very long time, probably all the way since 1998 when Bruce Arena took over. He was able to stabilize the team after the 1998 debacle, and get some winning form to the nation’s team. However, there’s always been one thing lacking. That one thing is Style.

The US has no style of play. It’s all individuals that work their magic, and sometimes it works and we get a decent goal. But it’s never the same kind of goal over and over, or a well worked goal.

Sure, that might be because the strikers in the country are no good, but I’m not quiet certain that’s what the problem is. We have good strikers now, they can score from anywhere. But because we don’t have a style of play, it gets lost, and only found in the players individual flares.

What I’m really looking for is a stand out style of play. Lets take for example a team that we all know has a style. Arsenal. Arsene Wenger has stamped his authority on the team with a special kind of progressive attacking style that the team never sways away from, no matter what the score is, no matter what the condition is. When you turn the telly on, and you see Arsenal playing, you know you’re going to see high possession – high speed – high passing games, and generally, a lot of goals (for or against doesn’t matter). Barcelona plays in a similar style too. Germany plays a distinctive style as well with pin point passing as its signature.

So why cant the US have a style? Better yet, why not adopt on of these styles? Is it too difficult to do, is it so special that only Guardiola, Wenger, Loewe, Beckanbaur or Klinsmann know? If so, fine i accept that these coaches have special ingredients. But guess what, some of these coaches are available, including one that lives 15mins from the USMNT’s base camp.

No more excuses, i want a style for the team, and i want it now before the 2010 world cup.

This means that Bob has to go. He’s a good coach, for scraping out the wins. But for a country that’s do dominant in CONCACAF, i’m expecting the team to blow out rubbish opposition with lots of goals, not just 1-0′s and 2-0′s and 3-0′s. Some of the opposition we play in CONCACAF are comprised of part time players, that aren’t even considered professional. Surely we’re good enough to get 6 goals against them, right ? I think its because we have no technical direction. Arsenal would wipe the floor with some of the CONCACAF nations, with its reserve team.

As for the team itself, i think its more or less fine. The backline is decent, its good enough given the talent pool. The midfield is also alright given the talent pool. We’re weak up top, but almost every other country is weak up top (no, i don’t include Spain or Brazil in that list of “other countries”).

What i do think, is that Landon Donavon is done. He’s had more than a 100 games to be a leader, and he’s just not up to it. Sure’ he’s a great player when playing for games that don’t matter, or a game vs Mexico on home turf. But beyond that, he’s useless for the USMNT now and he needs to be dropped ASAP. It’s dragging the team down trying to find a spot for him. Just like how Aragones dropped Raul for Spain in 2008, USSF as a whole, has to drop Donovan to progress. I also think that FIFA should put a cap on international caps for a player. I think that number should be 100. Play for the country 100 times, and you’re done. No more. Do not pass go.

No more Landon please. Thank you

Thats it.

Done.

Just came across this gem of a KB from Microsoft, which happens to be pretty recent as well. I had a customer with a x64 Win2k3 installation where NTBackup would just not run. It hung on Preparing the Volume Shadow Service, and never did and simply died. This KB outlines the exact issue and fixes it. Not sure if the patch is needed, but it could just be that the Registry key is needed.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913360

You may come across an entry in your event log’s on your domain controllers that reads something like this:

2009-05-11 11:23:13 Local0 Critical

Pre-authentication failed:

User Name: TNLT1$

User ID: %{S-1-5-21-343818398-813497703-839522115-3620}

Service Name: krbtgt/techienetworks.com

Pre-Authentication Type: 0×0

Failure Code: 0×19

Client Address: 10.X.X.X

This appears to be common to all newer Windows operating systems that are Vista and above (including Windows 2008 Server). This from what i understand, is related to UAC and the need to do some kind of “pre authentication”. Never the less, there is a fix for this.

You will need to install the ADSI Editor on your domain controller. Once you have that installed, open up MMC (start -> run -> mmc) and add in the snap-in called “ADSI Edit”

Once you have it added to your MMC, right click on ADSI Edit, and click “Connect” and click “OK” to connect to your domain. You will then need to drill down into DC=<DOMAIN,DC=com, CN=Computers.

Here you’ll find a list of all the workstations, and servers joined to your domain. Look for the machine giving you the event log message, and right click, go to properties.

Within the attributes section, look for “userAccountControl”, and check the value. If the value is below 4194304, then simply add 4194304 to the value. For example, if the value is listed as 4096, then make it 4198400.

That’s it.

Dear Kieran,

I watched with great anticipation today, to see Arsenal go through to the final with two splendid goals. However, it all got upended because you slipped in the 8th minute, and J.S Park notched in a goal.

I am writing this letter to say that its ok, nobody (especially me) blames you, and you are the 2nd best left back in the Premier League, after Clichy.

Yes, what i’m saying is that its not your fault. Even Clichy could have slipped. It was just not meant to be. In fact, J.S Park should have missed it, but sadly he didn’t.

I can tell that you must have been heart broken as you didn’t make it out the tunnel for the second half.

You should cherish the fact that you took C. Ronaldo to the cleaners in the first leg, and use that to build your skills upon, and be the next best left back in the world I support you on this.

Here is a reminder.

Thank you for your efforts, and continue the hard work.

Note to myself about this easy to make muffin recipe

Ingredients
1 Cup Sugar
1 Stick Butter (Room Temp)
4 Small OR 3 Large Banana’s
1 Egg
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 Cup flour

Method
Start oven at 350F
Cream together the sugar and butter
Mash the bananas, but not completely. Leave it lumpy
Add the banana’s to the mixture
Integrate the flour into the cream mixture slowly and don’t over mix.
Pour the mixture into muffin tray, and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until golden brown.

A Quick note, mainly to myself about how to disable the Windows firewall on Server 2008 Core

netsh firewall set opmode mode=disable

Techie Networks is proud to announce the release of TNWinLog, a syslog agent for Windows servers. This free utility can be found here and attaches to your server’s event logs and forwards any new entries to a syslog server, such as Kiwi Syslog.

TNWinLog is free to use by anyone.

So this is kind of cool. Microsoft’ Windows Live Writer appears to be able to post straight into WordPress blogs. If this post works, then i think thi is a great free product that will help people immensely. NO more having to open web pages, and send up boring attachments via form uploads and things.

Update: It does work, and it appears you can go back and edit the posts as well. I’ll have to see how the categories can be assigned. Undetermined, there’s a category section below the main text editing. Very nice Microsoft! Very nice!

I’ve ran into this a few times, where i’ve started building console/windows apps in Visual Studio 2005/2008 and the development machine i’m running on, doesnt have permissions to execute programs from a network share and access (for example) the registry or a sql server. The solution is to tell .net that its ok to let things running from that network share, to access the registry or sql server.

The normal, and proper way to do it is using the .net 2.0 SDK and tell it the paths which are allowed full trusts, however, the .net 2.0 SDK isnt fully installed with VS2k5 or VS2k8, and thus you are stuck.

No more, type in the following, replacing <PATH> with either a drive\directory or a \\share\directory and you’re set.

caspol -m -ag 1 -url <PATH> FullTrust

Update: easy quick way to let your local servers get fulltrust

caspol -m -ag 1 -zone intranet FullTrust

Austria are still in the tournament after a lucky decision in their favor in the dying moments of this game.

In a way, you can call it justice. Poland were awarded a goal that was clearly offside in the first half. At the end of the 2nd half, in stoppage time, Howard Webb awarded a very soft penalty to Austria, who used the opportunity to tie up the game.

Nothing else really happened in this game, except we did see that Austria do have some shooting boots. But i doubt they will poise any problem to Germany in the final game, which Germany have to win.