Last week The Scottish Premier League had a proposal for a second division accepted. With the creation of this new league there would be 22 teams spanning the top two Scottish leagues. The plan was initially proposed over two years ago, and at the time was stalled due to objections from the SFL, the other governing body of the Scottish leagues.
Personally I think it’s a bad idea. The top league in Scotland, the SPL, still needs a lot of work so introducing a second league within the current flawed system seems foolhardy. At the moment the SPL splits in half with 5 games to go, meaning for those remaining games the top six teams play each other, and the bottom six teams play each other.
The problems arise when the 7th placed team ends up finishing with more points than the sixth placed team at the end of the season. Yet because of the split they remain in 7th place and as such receive less money for their final league place, and less in gate receipts because they are only playing the bottom six teams in the league. Coupled with the split, there is the ridiculous scenario where teams play each other at least three times per season, and in if both teams finish in the same half of the league, four times. This is before the possibility or them meeting in either, or both, cups. Madness!
If the SPL want to bring more teams under their jurisdiction, then a far better idea would be to expand the current SPL. In my opinion, the league should be increased to 16 teams, with each team playing the other twice. Once at home, and once away.This makes each game all the more meaningful. The split should be removed from the league and the person that came up with that stupidity should receive a forceful slap. This would mean teams play a few games less each year and allow a break in winter, where almost every season games are postponed, causing a large backlog of games to be played when the weather in Scotland allows. Then, if this is a successful change, the league could be expanded to 22 teams.
One thing I’ve complained about to friends, and anyone else who’ll listen when we start talking about football, is that Scotland isn’t big enough, or rich enough to sustain four separate leagues. Two leagues would suffice. Bigger and stronger footballing countries than Scotland get by with only two top flight leagues, which are much more entertaining, and much more competitive.
The top league would have 22 teams, and the second league twenty teams, or even expanded that league to 22 teams too. This would mean that more teams in the top league would benefit from playing at the larger stadiums, against the bigger teams. This would make the league stronger as a whole, and probably making it a more interesting league to watch.
I’m not the only person to ever voice this opinion, and I find it completely baffling that the Scottish ruling bodies don’t see the damage their doing to the long term future of the leagues, and football clubs in Scotland.
We don’t need an SPL2, we need a working SPL!
For those of you who don’t know, I started a tech related blog over at SiliconSouls.com a while ago with my good friend Lance. It hasn’t had the attention we had intended when we started it because we’re both busy guys, and other things got in the way. We’re starting to get the ball rolling with it again, and yesterday Lance talked about the Internet Blackout in response to a crazy copyright law introduced in his native New Zealand. Instead of writing about it here, why don’t you all go over to SiliconSouls.com and have a read for yourself.
This has been a week from hell!
During the evening on Tuesday work contracted a virus called Kimchi-B. It isn’t supposed to be a massively damaging virus, but it tore through the office like the plague. Pretty much every Windows PC, and server in the office was infected, and it had completely nuked around 85 of those pc’s. The virus is a polymorphic, executable virus. That essentially means it tags itself onto every .exe file on your pc and infects them. Unless you catch it early enough it corrupts them so badly you have no option but to wipe the machine and start from scratch.
We had the honour, (if you can call it that), of being the very first recorded instance of the infection in the world, and the first company to call Sophos. We were unlucky enough to have a fault in our Anti-Virus server the day before this virus hit the wild, and that opened the door for it to do what it wanted. Annoyingly it infected an exe on the file server that everyone connects to, and because of this, spread through every machine so fast that it had done 90% of the damage before we could do anything about it. Due to the fact that we were the first people to report it, we were in the unfortunate position that there was no real documentation on disinfecting the virus, and had to rely on our brains, trouble-shooting skills, and the super brain power of a few consultants we drafted in to help us contain this thing.
Essentially, because of this virus wrecking our network, I’ve completely lost track of everything else I had planned this week, and I honestly can’t believe it’s Saturday evening already. I wish I could say I have Sunday off, but there are a few things left to finish off in the office tomorrow, which hopefully will get done in enough time to let me have something of the evening to relax, and prepare for the millions of user questions I’m going to get on Monday.
It looks like next Saturday is going to be my only day off work in 18 days, since I have to work next Sunday. I’m tired now so I don’t know how I’m going to cope when it gets to a week on Wednesday, and I’ve only had one day off. I imagine I’ll want to sleep for a week or two, or at least do a lot of lounging in front of the tv. I doubt I’ll get the chance, since even without this nightmare I seem to be busier than I’ve been in years. That’s a good thing, and I’m glad that it’s the case. It’s just that one day to recover would be very welcome right about now.
Due to some serious virus related issues at work I haven’t had a chance to go to the cinema this week. As a consequence of that there will be no movie review tomorrow. Unless the world falls apart around me again next week there will be a new review on the 1st March.
Today was one of the worst days at work I’ve had in a very long time. It’s days like today that make me wish I’d never gotten involved in IT at all, and had taken up a career as anything else. Anything!
Within the first hour of the day one of the buildings server rooms had gone into a slight meltdown because of a dodgy aircon unit, cutting the power to all of the servers, and bringing them crashing to the ground. However, before that could happen our anti-virus server somehow managed to pick up a virus, which it then proceeded to pump out to almost every desktop client in three offices, before going mental itself and pretty much falling over.
Our day was a busy one. Two of the guys went around removing the virus after we’d got our server room back up and running, and I spent pretty much my entire day rebuilding our anti-virus server on a new virtualised server. When that sucker is completely finished I’m taking a snapshot of it and storing it somewhere very safe. Screw going through this scenario again.
It was around six thirty this evening that I realised I hadn’t had any lunch and was on the verge of overdosing on caffeine, when we came to the decision to finish up for the day. I’d say about 90% of the work repairing the complete nightmare of a day has been done, and I just have to fix a few clients who are now virus free, but having issues seeing the new anti-virus server.
These days in IT don’t come along very often, and if I’m being honest, I’m surprised it hadn’t happened before now. That server had been on a list to be rebuilt since the start of the year, but because of office moves, and the fallout from that it was put off several times. Even though these types of days are quite rare, the simple fact that one issue can be a nightmare, (AV server pumping out a virus… oh the irony), but that issue can be so compounded by a completely unrelated but just as major issue, can make the IT industry something of a nightmare profession.
Don’t get me wrong, it has it’s good days, but I’m pretty sure they are just as rare, if not rarer than the bad. Most of the time it’s just annoyance, and… well… meh days. The days that aren’t rubbish are usually the ones where you are able to get your teeth into a major project and make decent headway without the world falling apart around you. I’m hoping there’s going to be more of tose kind of days in my near future. Otherwise you may find me standing in our server room going to town on anything nearby with the heaviest sharpest thing I can get my hands on.
Either that or I’ll be wandering around, coffee in hand, gibbering like a fool. Just like every other day.
