It's Friday! (almost)

Its only a few hours away from Friday! What, you may ask, is the significance of this? Well, not much really, other than the fact that it will be the weekend. Yay! Thats about it.... welcome to the first day of the rest of your life. Here are some words of wisdom: Beware of computer programmers who carry screwdrivers.

New Switchfoot and Manic Drive Albums

The Christian music scene got a real treat this past week. The up and coming Toronto based band Manic Drive released their new album Epic this past Tuesday, and are following in the footsteps of other Canadian christian Bands such as Manafest and Thousand Foot Krutch, showing once again that Canada has stuff to offer to the Christian music market. The new album sounds much more "pop" than their previous albums, showing the band's constant evolution.

Manic Drive turned out to only a piece of what was happening Tuesday though, as something much bigger was in store. The San Diego based band Switchfoot, one of the most successful Christian bands to date, came out with their newest album Vice Verses at the same time. The new album has been met with mixed reception, however. Switchfoot is certainly moving forward with songs like Vice Verses, The War Inside, and Selling The News, but falls somewhat short of "revolutionary" in songs such as Dark Horses. Regardless, it has been a busy week, and its a real treat to get so much new music from such awesome bands.

South Africa Crush Fiji

In a recent pool D match, South Africa obliterated their Fijian opponents in a spectacular battle, winning 49 to 3. They maintained excellent discipline and structure; qualities which the Fijians quite simply lacked. Not once did South Africa, the defending World Champions, allow the highly physical Fijian team to get a try. The only points that Fiji managed to put on the board came from a penalty kick early in the game. The outcome was of course inevitable, but despite this Fiji supporters in the stands dominated the stadium, being very vocal about their support for Fiji. Fiji will play a more evenly matched game against their arch-rivals Samoa on Sunday, while South Africa can rest for the moment, after sending a very powerful message to all the other teams.

Rugby Around the World

With the rugby world cup under full swing, let's take a look at rugby around the globe. I came across the graphic here from the website Rugbydump.com. It shows the number of registered rugby players in each of the world cup participant countries, and give an insightful look into the state of the sports popularity.

Canada sits at an unfortunately small 23 thousand.... far lower than our ironically lower ranked neighbors to the south, who sit at 88 thousand registered players. Evidently, number of registered players has little or no bearing on rank; in fact, I would be inclined to say that rank has a larger influence on registrants. But even New Zealand and South Africa, both rugby superpowers, are dwarfed by a Jupiter-sized England, who sit at just fourth place overall.

So, if anything, this chart reminds of one thing: Its not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.

The Rugby World Cup has begun!

The first game between New Zealand and Tonga turned out to be a hard fought game, which the All Blacks (New Zealand) eventually took 41 to 10. The match began with both teams performing their traditional War Dances; New Zealand with the Ka Mate Haka, and Tonga with the Sipi Tau. The respective Haka's set the tone for what turned out to be a great first game to the tournament.

The match was a highly physical contest which saw spirited defenses on both sides. New Zealand continually attacked the Tongan defense, but for the better part of the match were kept at bay. In the second half, however, New Zealand pulled away in terms of points, but in terms of territory, possession, and fierceness, the match should have been Tonga's.

Many more great games to come!

First Post!

Welcome to my Blog!

This is my new blog for my Grade 12 Computer Science course. I actually wasn't aware that this was going to be an E-Learning course.... I knew that there was an option to take it as an E-Learning course, but that that was the only option, I had no idea. So yeah....

Anyways, as of the moment I am writing this, there are 2 days, 6 hours, and 44 minutes until the start of the Rugby World Cup, so I'm pretty pumped for that. I predict that New Zealand is going to take it this year, due mostly to the fact that they are on home soil, and they have a lot of high expectations. Their performance over the past few world cups has been spotty compared to the 2 other Tri-nations (Australia and South Africa). However, since 2007, the All Blacks have greatly restored their image, and they still hold their first in the world ranking.