We flew to Natal (a short one) just to see the city and the Greece vs Japan match. Nice stadium, underwhelming soccer.
During the day we took a ride on a dune buggy.
Tag Archives: brazil2014
Random photos
We arrived to Natal a few minutes ago. It was quite the adventure. It hasn’t stopped raining since Mexico played Cameroon here. Bit we are safe and sound and have decent internet in the hotel lobby.
Some random stuff from my phone:
Trash can with forbidden items outside of the stadium. VUVUZELAS!
During the layover at Manaus on the way to Fortaleza.
This is not Memo. This is me outside the stadium before the game.
We go to the same hair stylist.
Brazil vs Mexico photos
Nice match today. Incredible vibe. I was hoping for a win so that I can tell my children, and their children, and their children that I was there. Alas, not this time.
We Mexicans were vastly outnumbered but could definitely be heard. An interesting thing happened: the “cheer” Mexicans do when the opposing goalkeeper is about to do a goal kick was promptly learned and imitated by the Brazilians. Is this going to be another “Mexican wave”?
Here’s a cool panorama of the stadium:
Before the storm
Brazil-bound
First stop: Miami
Packing went well:
People kept staring at me at the airport. Rudeness? Racism?
Mexico vs Cameroon
Never mind that it was IMPOSSIBLE for me to find tickets for this match, the stadium is half empty (I’m a pessimist). Screw FIFA.
Half time in, the referee already screwed us three times – he must have bet Cameroon wins in the polla.
In any case, here’s the half time picture, from Austin TX.
Polla Brasileira 2014
The World Cup fever keeps increasing, and I’m about to make it better:
Announcing Polla Brasileira 2014. I have run other successful pollas (note: under definition #5) before. What made them so much fun is that instead of using some manual management tool such as paper, email, or Excel spreadsheets, I went through the trouble of developing a full online system from scratch which made everything very real-time and interactive. Back then I wrote the system using PHP and stored all the data in plain text files – no database. It was simple and limited, but it worked.
They were a huge success:
- Polla FIFA 2006: 81 participants
- La Polla América 2007: 69 participants
It wasn’t all fun and games though. The Polla is known to cause health issues on some of the participants:
When I decided to cancel the Europolla 2008, soccer fans were disappointed:
This time, Polla Brasileira is back with a vengeance and it is better than ever. I’ve been making some massive improvements to the system, working through nights (as I said, the Polla is known to cause health issues). Amongst them:
- A proper login/account system. You can now stay logged in to the system, change your information, use Gravatar, email verification, captcha… This is a huge improvement over what I had. I’m using code from The PHP-LOGIN project and they will get a donation.
- Security enhancement: Passwords are stored only in hashed/salted form – nobody, not even I can retrieve them.
- Security enhancement: We are using SSL so all the information is transmitted securely. You may not care about the NSA knowing what you predict for Croatia VS Cameroon, but your passwords are transmitted too.
- Responsive layout. When we last did the polla, there were no iPhones – Blackberrys ruled the world and they were only useful for texting. Now the website should scale and display nicely across all your devices. Try it out!
- New and improved look.
- Full use of MySQL. No more plain text junk, we now have a proper database system. This is a gigantic back-end overhaul and has been worth it so far. I’m using code from ezSQL and they will get a donation.
- Facebook page replaces the forum and news sections. Last time we did the polla, Facebook was not popular… Go and Like it!
- And many other enhancements across the board.
Doing the polla is a lot of work for me, but it would not be possible without the support of my friends helping out:
- Moi, CSS guru
- Eva, treasurer
- José Antonio, SQL consultant
- Shlomit, proofreader and hasn’t divorced me
- And everyone else who’s helped in one way or another…
You can register now!
Panini World Cup Brazil 2014 sticker album
I know I’m a little late to the party (only 32 more days!), but I finally started my 2014 World Cup sticker album. Progress is slow but steady, and you can track it here.
