The Netherlands v. Russia

The Dutch have been the hottest team of the tournament so far, easily winning all 3 group stages matches in the brutal “Group of Death” (France, Italy, Romania).  Russia secured a place in the Quaters after finishing 2nd in Group D, behind Spain, by handily beating Sweden on Wednesday.

It’s the 41′ and the play has been fairly even.  Each side have had a few scoring chance.  Russia has had the most chances, although some have been long range shots (30-35 yards).

Since starting to type, the Netherlands had an edge-of-the-box chance but the shot was straight at the Russian keeper.  It looks to go into the half drawn at nil-nil.  I see at least two goals during the second half, and hopefully it won’t end in penalty kicks like yesterday’s match Croatia-Turkey match.

Hello all.

It’s been many days since my last post.  I have excuses, but my best reason is laziness (but you already knew that)

Right now, I’m embroiled in a Microsoft Ticket/Case.  Upgrading Team Foundation Server 2005 to TFS 2008.  Let me tell you, if you have the opportunity to wiggle out of buying this product, then take that opportunity and hold onto it for dear life.  This product also helps prove my adage: “Buy Microsoft so you can get support.  Get support because you bought Microsoft.”  We’ll see if this putting this phrase to print

Back to the present.  I am on call No. 6 (being generous, probably 10) with someone in India (a fine country I’m sure, I enjoy the food immensely), which is the start of call that will probably last 5 hours (35 hours total on the phone, again, being generous).  My case has just been transferred to a new person, who is not very familiar with all the troubleshooting I’ve done with my buddy Vimal.  This case has been going on for 3-4 weeks and we’ve retried steps in teh Microsoft-certified instructions many times over.  Now that I have a new person on the case and we are retreading old ground and getting nowhere.

The problems all started when someone at Microsoft said, (paraphrasing, don’t sue me) “Hey, let’s integrate Source Code Control, Reports and Documents for a Software Project.”  Problem is the TFS designers decided to use all these separate components as is and paste them together.  So, TFS is really: SQL db for source-code, Sharepoint Services for docs and SQL Reporting Services for reports.  Now when you upgrade one component (see previous posts on the subject if you interested in sleeping) other components ‘break’ or don’t work how they used to and the MSDN Forums aren’t much help.  SOOOOO, you get to call MS$ support, which you have to pay for, and then wait for someone in India to remote in and solve problem, give or take 3-30 days.

Thank goodness I decided to use a virtual environment to do a 2005 to 2008 test upgrade.  But, we are still unable to recreate teh working production environment, after 3+ weeks.

And that is where we sit, working on getting a working duplicate of our production server up and running.

I have no faith in the production upgrade, thank goodness for music (next time more fun: Sasquatch Festival ‘08)