We took a quick one day trip to watch the ultra-overpriced friendly match between Real Madrid and Manchester United in Houston, which happened last night. This is what a good father must do with two soccer-crazed boys.
Fortunately the game was entertaining and the two goals were extremely high quality. Seriously, look at that bicycle kick.
At NRG stadium.Nathán, ever present in all happy soccer occasions.
This is the first time I see Manchester United play live. But it’s the second one for Real Madrid: as we all remember, I watched them get their butts royally kicked back in 1990 by a much superior squad.
The main event. The match with the highest demand for tickets out of all 64 matches including the Final.
We stopped at Lusail Mall before the game.
Lusail MallNeed to pack some calories before the matchPaco PalenciaSee if you can identify Jaco and Nathan in the crowd (hint: it’s easy)Simón and Zamorano
This was one of the most attractive games for us. It was a good game but unfortunately not very spectacular: 0-0. Al Bayt is both the farthest (about 1 hour drive) and the most beautiful stadium we’ve visited. It’s made to look like a Bedouin tent, impressive.
Located next to the Khalifa Stadium, this is a brand new and very impressive museum. Like many other things – it was eerily deserted – but is a definite recommendation.
It took an eternity to go through the extremely buggy app. And it took an eternity for them to arrive over mail. But we finally – and just 2 days before kick off – receive the very last and most important Panini stickers for our album.
They sell for a lot of money in the black market. Best of luck.
With this post, I am proud to announce Polla Qatari 2022. This is the fifth FIFA World Cup pool / game / quiniela in a row I’ve organized and the sixth polla overall (since I did Polla América 2007).
With a little over 36 days until kickoff, I think this can be the best and largest polla ever!
I do this for fun and for learning. I find that it makes me enjoy the tournament, which is exciting on its own, a lot more. And my friends do as well. And I find that it forces me to play with corners of the software worlds I don’t get to use at work.
But it is a lot of work. The code is 100% custom written by me. Back in 2006 I wrote the original polla in a few coding all-nighters. Since then, every polla has started from the same codebase as the last one but goes through a lot of work and improvements on each iteration.
For this year, I had pondered a big rewrite using Python and microservices and other cool newer technologies (I do this for learning, remember?) but adulting (those pesky children! that pesky job) got in the way. I ended up reusing the same old codebase which actually required a lot of work to get back up and running with the latest versions of PHP and MySQL.
I set up Docker, Docker Compose, and hosted the code in a private GitHub repo. I’m using a package manager for dependencies. This is a nice improvement on my workflow and makes development and deployment a lot easier. It should make the code easier to maintain. And after getting it all working I made many small and big improvements both internal and external.
I am adding a few new features to the game: Winner selection, filters.
There are three things all readers should do right now:
