Category: Personal

I am a Glasgow Rangers fan. Have been since the day I was born, I just did not know it yet!

The past few years have been torture for any Rangers fan but I believe this year has been the worst so far. We successfully navigated the lower two leagues with relative ease and 50k watching in Ibrox every other week.

Everyone knew that this season was going to be difficult. Hearts and Hibs being in the championship adds an extra dimension to a league that was already going to be challenging bit let’s face it, the wage bill at Ibrox should be making these games a cake walk.

There are a few shining lights out of the whole thing though.

Lewis MacLeod is one of the best Rangers prospects I have seen. He’s the best player on the park right now and I hope he stays fit and stays at he club.
Nicky Clarke is fast and has an eye for goal, the missed him up front against Hibs and will be glad when he comes back
Ian Black gets a bunch of stick but he is consistently getting talked about a man of the match and I agree.

Kris Boyd was a beast for us before he left and I respect that but he is not firing right now. Take him off and put Clarke and Templeton up front. Their pace and ball skills will get goals and scare most defenses.

Mohsni is a liability but that’s ok if you pair him with a decent defender. Zaloukas looks composed sometimes and downright scary at other times. I don’t know how hearts did not leak goals. He’s not had much game time though.

The most scary thing about rangers right now is not on the park, it’s who is running it. Ibrox is a ghost town compared to other years as plenty of fans are boycotting the games. The club managed to blow all of the IPO money with some of it being dubious at best.

I would really like for Rangers to be like Hearts setup where the fans own the club and there is a fan group that decides matters. The club is never going to be a European giant if it stays in Scotland, the money is not there so any business owner is doing it either for the love of the club or, like the most recent set of management, to make money. I believe making tangible money is impossible so the owner and the well being of the club are at odds.

Hopefully a true rangers fan (where is Dave King in all of this?) steps up mad does the right thing.

I know that this is primarily a technical blog but I have hobbies outside the software world. As Scott Hanselman says, follow the whole person

One of them is following football (soccer) and especially my home team Glasgow Rangers. They have been through a turbulent year with some of it being deserved and some..not.

Today a tribunal decided that although Rangers used EBTs without informing the Football Association their punishment should be a fine rather than getting stripped of titles. This seems like a fair decision to me and I am glad that yet another cloud hanging over the club is being lifted.

For too long now matters outside I what happens on the pitch have dominated the newspapers in Scotland. After the dust settles from this decision it’s time to start watching the beautiful game without interruption again.

Ofcourse for it to be beautiful our defense needs to stop leaking goals!!!

Back to work!

A bunch had been said about Yahoo, more specifically Marissa Mayer, changing their policy on Remote workers. I am sure that it was done for reasons that made sense at the time but it is the wrong call.

I have worked remotely for almost 8 years now after working in an office for 8 years and I can say this, in most areas working remotely wins. This is especially true for software companies where we use online tools for collaboration.

From my perspective most people working remotely do longer hours and are hyper aware of making sure that they get their work done. If some people in Yahoo have not been doing their job then they should have been fired regardless of working remotely or not.

Making people come into an office sounds like a knee jerk reaction to me. Breaching contracts or at least promises in the process is just wrong.

Microsoft, Facebook and Google are just about to get some good employees and Yahoo deserves it.

Sitting at a desk for hours a day is not the best thing for your body so in the past few years I have been doing Crossfit at a local gym. It’s been good. The workouts are great and I am much healthier than I was 2 years ago.

When you get in that community people look after each other and help one another during workouts. They also encourage you to try out the huge array of races and competitions there are every month.

With a bunch of friends my wife and I decide that we would do the Spartan Race in Miami. We all know that we would not be the fastest doing it, far from it. We just had one goal: finishing.

The furthest that I have ran is 5k on road so doing 8+ miles on rough terrain with 20+ obstacles was always going to be interesting.

Things looked pretty good up until just after mile 4 during a climb of a cargo net I could feel my calfs (both of them starting to cramp). I got up and down the cargo net just fine but not long after that (probably near 5 miles) both legs cramped on me at the same time. It took a good 15 minutes of gentle persuasion to get them to the point that I could walk again.

After that it was a LONG 3-4 miles walking and doing obstacles to the finish line. I am glad that I did the race and that I finished but it’s shown that I need to do more running. I found the obstacles easy enough (Crossfit trains you for that) but 8+ miles running especially trail running is just not in me right now.

We all still had fun and the beer at the end never tasted better!