Well, its Firday. And believe it or not, I am actually posting before a whole week has gone by since my last post...just barely.

Probably the biggest news was that Elly came back on the 21st, and we celebrated her 15th birthday on Wednesday. We got to see my Mom twice this last week, as she came over on Sunday to check email since her cable interenet was apparently taking a day off...it came back on later. We called my brother George, who is the Executive Director at New Jersey Future, for his birthday. We saw here again for dinner on Elly's birthday. We'll see her again tomorrow and Sunday as well.

We'll get to see Mom again tomorrow when we have dinner at her house. My uncle Sherman, former professor of Shakespeare at Princeton, Rochester and Wesleyan, is in town with his wife, Anne a professor at University of Pennsylvania. Anne has some events to attend here in Cleveland, so Sherman is bowing out of the social events to come have dinner with us. Sherman was a Professor at Wesleyan while I was there and I like to think we got close. Regardless of what Sherman thinks, he is one of my favorite people. Well, actually so is Anne and the rest of their family.

Anyway, will see Mom again on Sunday and probably Monday. Ken has his first soccer games with the U14 Travel Team for the Mayfield Soccer Club. Of course, all three of Mom's sons played soccer, partially influenced by her father who played for the Glasgow Rangers, and then emigrated to the U.S. to play for the Bethlehem Steel Soccer club. So Mom likes soccer and must be pleased to be able to one of her grandkids play. Of course, my brother Dan's kids all play. In fact, they are currently in the UK for his daughter's games. I am not clear on the details but it appears that her soccer club is off playing some UK teams, so they took the whole family. Nice. Anyway, Mom is coming to see Ken's games so we'll see her again.

One of the nice things about being back in the U.S. is the chance to see family alot more than we did than when we were in Japan. Heck, even the phone calls are more often since its substantially cheaper. In fact, my sister Harriet called Elly to wish her a happy birthday.

Other than than, I spent the week playing around with a bunch of systems. Drupal, civicrm, sugarcrm, etc. I installed XOOPS, played around with OSPI's new website, and set up a survey for a customer using phpESP. Pretty much dead easy to set up a survey using phpesp. I dropped in a whole bunch of modules for Plone, testing out new features and functions for a new site I am planning. As part of that, I added ATGoogleMaps and added a map here at neohawk. I intend to start adding more markers over time. I have been having an ongoing, online discussion with Takanori Susuki as he gets ready to develop 0.6 of ATGoogleMaps.

Last night, I finally was able to get a jabber server up and running. I had one in Okinawa, but it went away in the move back to the U.S. I was having problems with jabber 1.4.3, and jabberd2, so I went with eJabberd(drupal site by the way). Unfortunately I have not yet successfully implemented the gateways to MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ and IRC. I will get there though.The nice thing about ejabberd is it supports virtual domains so I can use the same server for my various domains. Iishf your interested, try registering with jabber.neohawk.org using your jabber client. Or if you already have a jabber account somewhere you can try adding robataka@jabber.neohawk.org to you buddy list. If you do add an account, please realize it may not be permanent as I continue to finalize configuration and adding plugins to it. I will try not to delete anybody who does register though, just no promises.

I also spent some time following this thread over at BFD. My gut reaction was much along the lines of Jim Kenny's reaction - partnering with Starbuck is a good marketing move, but when I actually read the article I saw the same thing another commenter pointed out. It is only being rolled out to ten Starbucks in the Cleveland area. My initial assumption was that it was a national campaign, hence I liked the idea. But only 10 locations in Cleveland? Hell, I even checked out starbucks.com's press release pages and there was nada, nothing. Of course, I have no problems with them partnering with Starbucks or anyone else for that matter. I would also imagine that with the cleveland.com article,BFD discussion etc., I would assume that CMOA will also eventually partner with local coffee shops. What I'd rather see though is a nationwide agreement, hell even Internationally. Wouldn't it be great to have my friends in Okinawa see a CMOA poster in the Mihama Starbucks.

The other thread I'll be watching with interest is this one. But I gotta say, BFD seems to have gotten even more active over the last couple of months. Maybe its is problems with my memory, but there seems to be alot more animated discussions going on over than I remember. And I particularly like the new tech postings by Douglas Carver. Kind of replaces Henry Gomez's Tech Link blog.

Wow, I was just going to do a quick post and look at what drivel it turned into.....

I don't know if you have noticed, but Ken Hawkins is bloggin!

We'll see how long it lasts, but for now writing a blog entry is part of an agreement around playing games on the PC. Also, I built a PC for the kids out of old PCs, so they don't have to fight with Arisa to use the PC.

Updated the links to the blogs mentioned...they worked but were not correct.

Wow. Just found this. Brian over at Case posted that he had been funded to attend Pycon 2007(Congrats!), and there hidden in the comments was Clepy. Clepy is a user group for Cleveland area python enthusiasts. So I headed over to their page and what to I see but a plone-site(delicious, magnolia list here)!. Clicking around their sites, I see that they meet monthly at American Greetings and have various speakers. The mailing list is a google group, and they have a trac server. Very cool

And here I thought I was like the only one whom used plone in the Cleveland area. But what from I can tell, there are 57 people in this group(google). Need to get Ken to take a look in the context of his Python Programming Project. Wonder if he would be interested in attending one of the meetings. I am.

Quick update: Check out Brian's geopy, which " makes it easy for developers to locate the coordinates of addresses, cities, countries, and landmarks across the globe using third-party geocoders and other sources of data, such as wikis." Cool, downloading it now.

There is a new team in town.

The Cleveland City Stars

Ken is going to be excited since he really likes soccer! I am too actually. You can check out their website.

Hattip to The Cleveland Leader which mentions that this was announced by the USL on December 15th last year. I don't know if this was in the news, but I certainly just saw it thanks to Cleveland Leader.

The Mayfield JVB team played the Medina JV team this morning at nine. Needless to say, my son Ken is on the team. The Mayfield "JVB" team is made up almost solely of freshman at Mayfield High School. There is one exception to that rule, but as a general rule all the startes are freshman.

Today's game was the second time this year they played the Medina JV team. The first game was one of two games where Ken played forward and the one he got a hat trick in and they beat 4-3. (He as since been moved back to defense).

Ken started as right back and had a good game. He switches back and forth between right and left back. Since can use either foot equally as well, the other defenders are either lefty or righty. When one gets tired, the other comes in and Ken switches sides.

Today, though, down 1-0 with about 10 minutes left, the coach switched the formation from a normal 4-4-2 to a 3-4-3 formation to try and tie the game up. When he made that formation change, he moved Ken to sweeper and the normal sweeper to left back. Which really suprised me, but shows that he has some confidence in Ken.

To be honest, Medina played better and Mayfield struggled. In particular, the forwards played badly. In the case of one player, it was less that he played poorly than when they go up against other JV B teams he is faster than the defenders. So he kicks it and outruns everybody. The Medina defenders were faster than him so he was effectively neutralized. One reason that Mayfield was able to beat them in the first game is it was one of the two games Ken played forward. The way he plays is to show to the midfielders who can run through for a give an go. It worked very effectively last game(It didn't hurt that Ken scored a hat trick, either). But since Ken was on defense, they didn't have anybody up top who could control the ball.

Medina was robbed of a goal that would have made it a 2-0 game. On a corner kick, the goalie missed the ball, and a Medina player took a shot on goal. The Mayfield defender reacted with a handball, not quite getting the instinctual raised hand out of the way in time. Even so, the ball hit the back of the net.

The refs called a foul, gave the Mayfield player a red card, and negated the goal. Medina missed the ensuing penalty kick. While I don't think this call was "wrong", it was poor judgement. All calls are judgement calls, and the ref took a goal away from Medina.

Instead, Mayfield was able to score a goal with a minute twenty seconds left to play. It was a beautiful bicycle kick from one of the previously mentioned ineffective forwards. It is the first time I have seen that live in a game. TV yes, but never live. It was pretty. But again, Medina had reason to be upset. To me, and another guy who had a better view of it, it looked like the Mayfield player was offsides. The other guy did say that the ref was right there looking at the right spot, so he is assuming the ref saw something that we didn't. Regardless, the goal stood and the game ended in a 1-1 tie.

While the refs calls went our way this game, the kids never gave up even in a game where they were struggling. They fought to a tie, moving them to 9-2-2. The two losses coming to straight up JV teams, both powerhouses(Strongsville and Mentor). Their other tie was the first game of the season against Nordonia's JV team, a team the subsequently beat 6-0.

9-2-2. Not bad.

What's up. It's been a while, eh.

I have been busy at work on 1) a new site for a customer, and 2) learning as much as I can about Django. I've got a couple of updates on Planet NEO too, and thought I'd catch up on a couple of different items. First up, the wrap on the Mayfield High School freshman soccer team season.

During that time, Ken freshman team finished with a 9-3-2 record. Their last game came against the Berea JV team. It was a good game, that unfortunately ended 15 minutes early due the fact the field had no lights and it was too dark to see. They lost 2-1, but took a significantly more number of shots against Berea. The first Berea goal was a fluke in the first 30 seconds of the game, the second one was nice goal that took advantage of a breakdown in Mayfield's defense.

The Mayfield goal was real pretty. Ken at the time was playing center midfield, a first for him. Mayfield took the ball up the left side, and somehow Ken got it down in the corner. He juked one guy along the end line and put in a pretty cross back to 18 yard line, far side. Ari, coming of the bench as normal, placed the ball perfectly low and to the right corner. Picture perfect volley. In fact, it was so well done, I didn't think it was Ari, but rather Anthony - the one being a not-very-good-player and the other one of the best on team. I feel real bad about this, because I walked right by Ari after the game and didn't say a word to him. It wasn't until later that I heard, from Ken, that it was Ari who scored. Sorry Ari, that was a great goal. Picture perfect. It was Ken's first and only assist of the season. Ken ended up with 4 goals and one assist on the season

While the freshman team season ended there, Ken was one of 4 or 5 players from the team that moved up to regular JV for their final two games. Ken played in both games, but played on defense again. The JV lost both games. But thing of greatest concern to me, was watching the JV play. The frosh played Nordonia JV twice this season - they tied them in the very first game of the season 3-3, and then beat up on Nordonia in the second game 6-0. The regular JV team played Nordonia(not one of the games where any of the freshman played), and came away with a 0-0 tie. While it can be said, "on any given day", the reality is the Frosh team was a better team. The regular JV, of course, are older meaning they are bigger, faster, and stronger, but the team is bad. Pure kickball. I've seen u10 teams play better than they do.

Unfortunately, it's the coaching. From what I am hearing, and as far as I have been able to observe from watching both the JV and Varsity games, is that this is the way the teams are coached to play. I should note, that when I played at University School in high school this is pretty much the way we played, and we went 14-2-2 my junior year and 12-4-2 my senior year. But as I like to tell Ken and co., I was really the last round of "bad" players. When I grew up there weren't the travel teams or the premier teams, etc. I started in 7th grade, played the fall season and that was it until the next fall. That's all we had. So we weren't very good actually. My senior year though, some of the sophomore's coming in did play the travel/premier teams and you could tell. Their ball handling and passing was much, much better. But the "kickball" style worked for us, and we would have had an even better record if our leading scorer hadn't missed three weeks with mono.

So the kickball style for this particular JV team is kind of understandable. Overall, other than a few players, the players just are not very good soccer players. Unfortunately, though, the Varsity also plays kickball. And the players on that team are not bad. In fact some of them are very, very good. And it is an absolute waste to watch the team play kickball. I have even heard rumours of mumbling amongst the best players about the style of play, mumblings that they may not play next year because playing that style isn't fun for them. And I would have to agree.

So watching Ken and the other couple of frosh play on the JV team made me very nervous. Particularly Ken. He easily fell in to the 'just kick it' mode. Which is understandable since that is what the coaches were teaching, and Ken has only played for a little over a year. But the frosh team, the starters in particular, can really play well, moving the ball side-to-side, passing back and around, give and go's and long ball when appropriate. But I am concerned when these kids move up to JV next year, because I think the coaching may kill all of that excellent play style.

Today, is the start of the Winter 2007 Session I Soccer at the Alliance Sportsdome in Valley View. Jeff is coaching again, and I'll be assisting. We are missing a couple of kids from the JV B team since they are playing other sports, but the core group is there.

Yesterday, Ken broke his right leg. He broke the tibula about an inch or two above the ankle.

Ken was playing a Cobras game at the Sports Dome in Valley View. In a melee in the goal box, he got scissor-kicked by the keeper. At first, we all pretty much thought it was a bad bone bruise. At half time we pulled him over to the spectator side of the field, got his leg propped up and put some ice on it. Ken was reluctant to go anywhere since it hurt to move, so we watched the rest of the game.

As I got the car pulled around, a couple of the other parents helped carry Ken to the car. We took him to Hillcrest where they took an x-ray and sure enough, it was no bone-bruise, but a break. Ouch.

Ken is out for a minimum of 6 to 8 weeks, not including any rehab he's going to have to do to get his leg back in shape. Besides missing a tournament this weekend, he's going to miss the whole second half of the winter soccer session for both of the teams he plays for. And he was also trying out for CASA, which is now probably not in the cards either. Ah well..