So the Euro 2008 tournament is nearing its end. There have been so many exciting matches, surprising outcomes and great stories in this one. It's even better than the last one and much much better than the World Cup. As with the world cup we made a bracket. This one is a little more computerized. As you can see I'm in last place. But it was real close. I chose to back Romania as the dark horse for this tournament and I would have been at least somewhat vindicated. In a close match with Italy the score was tied at 1-1 and Mutu was awarded a penalty but Buffon somehow saved it ending the match in a draw. Had Mutu scored Romania would have advanced at the expense of Italy.

I didn't expect Greece to completely flame out because they won the last tournament but may be if I followed football closer it would have been more obvious. A team that completely blindsided me is Russia. Though they lost their opener against Spain, they defeated Greece and then Sweden in convincing fashion and in a surprise to everyone completely overwhelmed Netherlands. Early in the tournament Netherlands looked like they could win the whole thing as they defeated Italy and France - finalists of the last Euro Cup - 3-1 and 4-1 respectively. Can Russia defeat Spain in today's match and pay back for their loss? It doesn't sound nearly as impossible as it did before the tournament.

The other story of the tournament was Turkey. The team that just wouldn't die. Down 1-0 to Switzerland in a match played in torrential rain they came back to win 2-1 after the rain stopped, scoring the last goal in the last minute. They came back in a similar way against the Czechs scoring 3 goals in the last 15 minutes of the match. The match with heavily tipped Croatia went without goals for 118 minutes when Croatia scored. But a minute later Turkey even the score and beat the demoralized Croatians on penalties 3-1 with the Croatians missing two penalties and shooting one into the goalie. However, these victories came at a price for Turkey. Going into the semifinals against Germany they could only field 14 players due to injuries and suspensions. Nevertheless they dominated the Germans who were one of the favorites to win the tournament. Turkey opened the score for the first time in the tournament but could only hold onto their lead for a few minutes. Nothing new for the Turks who despite advancing this far have only lead the score for about 5 minutes the whole tournament so far. Germany scored one late in the second half but as expected the Turks came back. It was 1 minute away from regulation time when Lahm put one in and Turkey had no answer. If only Turkey could take advantage of a few more chances and Rustu, their goalie, didn't make a few crucial mistakes! The Germans always seem to make it somehow despite not playing very flashy football. They always seem to play just well enough to advance, taking advantage of some weakness, like set pieces for Portugal, to score goals.

The Spain - Russia match begins at 2:45 today and I will be rooting for Russia to win.

I got a car a couple months ago. It's a Honda Fit. I like it for its small size. It can look a little boxy because it's quite tall but that means more interior room. It drives pretty well, it feels like it sticks to the road. Given these qualities it's a breeze to parallel park. The brakes are very sharp and the acceleration is fine though I don't need that too much driving in the city. The soundsystem is very nice though that is because I got the Sport version. The Sport version also comes with paddle shifters which means you can drive in clutchless manual mode without taking your hands off the wheel. You can still use the shifters in automatic mode for engine braking for example. I am pretty satisfied with this car. The only thing that I am not very comfortable about is a more limited view to the sides and in the back than I am used to in my old Subaru though it's pretty comparable to other cars out there.

I am planning on taking this car for a road trip to this year's Detroit Electronic Music Festival and going from there to Montreal for the Mutek festival, stopping in Toronto along the way. The car gets 34 mpg and I may be able to get a little better with cruise control set on 55. Even at $4.00 a gallon that puts the cost of gasoline for the whole trip slightly above $200.00. About the cost of a round-trip ticket to Detroit. Too bad I am going on this trip alone.

Update: The total cost of gas for the trip came out to $197. I traveled 1877 miles with an average fuel expenditure of 41 mpg.

Sometime last month was the 10 year anniversary of an mp3 hitting my harddrive for the first time. I suppose I was near the front of the wave, the new digital generation. I got into mp3's even before I bought my first CD.

I've been aware of mp3's since mid-97 but I preferred Real Audio for its immediacy. Downloading a 128kbps mp3 on dial-up would take about half an hour. Real Audio was instant. But I guess at some point I wanted to listen to a song without being online. That song was The Orb's Toxygene. In those days the place to get mp3's was IRC. I hung out in #electronic-mp3 on DalNet but occasionaly popped into EfNet and other channels.

Some people would run bots that sent a text file listing their mp3's and the more advanced ones would allow you to download with a command and manage the queue. Others would just share through asking and responding to requests. Since so much time was taken up with waiting for downloads to complete there was a lot of chatting going on, not necessarily related to music and a community developed. The biggest prize was discovering a good FTP site advertised somewhere. Though many had ratios some allowed leeching. A notable channel was #sour that served as the homebase to the eponymous drum'n'bass release group.

Napster hit around 1999. I was slow to change at first, clinging to the tight-knit club. But it began falling apart even before Napster and that only hastened its fall. The convenience of searching thousands of users was just too great. That didn't last long. By spring 2000 Napster was all over the newspapers and you could smell that it won't last long. Many other Napster clones would pop up but it was something completely different that overshadowed them all for me.

Audiogalaxy was brilliant. It used a web-based interface and a special download client. The download client couldn't be controlled directly and it forced you to share which ensured high availability of music and fast speeds. It treated all tracks as separate so it wasn't ideal for downloading albums but for individual songs it was great. They had groups and even editorial content and it's thanks to Audiogalaxy that I got my first exposure to punk, 60's psychedelic rock and techno. The fact that tracks were sorted by popularity served as a good guide to essential material. Of course being so open meant that it wouldn't last long. I think it was taken down after a little more than a year.

My next tool was Soulseek (or slsk as it became known later). It was geared toward electronic music and was a decent replacement. Though there was a long stretch of time where search was pretty broken, it served my purposes. But new avenues were springing up. The blog explosion brough mp3 blogs serving quality, curated tracks. Bit Torrent started gathering speed. And that brings us to present day.

I don't use Bittorrent because the communities around it seem too strict in their ratio policies and because it's hard to take advantage of Bittorrent for less popular music since you do not have several people downloading it most of the time. Usually it's pretty much a one-on-one communication. MP3 blogs proliferated and it's quite easy to find a lot of music using mp3 blog search engines such as Hypem and elbo.ws. Another change was the growth of album oriented mp3 blogs backed up by such file hosting services as Rapidshare and Megaupload.

The funny thing is that file hosting/sharing sites similar to them were all the rage in 2001 or so and used to share music. But didn't last and mostly disappeared for a few years. Another avenue of getting music for me is also reminiscent of old days. Using YSI (you send it) threads on forums to request and share music. It's almost like IRC of old days except using the web instead of direct connection. In some ways it's more backward.

I guess around 50% of my musical exposure has been through downloading albums and individual tracks in mp3 and about 30% more has been in the form of mixes served as mp3's. It did cause me to buy music but mostly that has been in the form of used vinyl records and complemented my mp3 listening rather than displace it. It is great to be living in this digital age where so much music is so easily accessible.