Nigel McNie

I busted my ankle playing futsal on Wednesday. I had an x-ray today, which established that while there was no fracture, it probably would have been better from a healing point of view if it was one. The ligaments are well wrecked now. I'm getting by on painkillers so I can walk. But I think this is the end of my soccer playing days for quite some time.

I'm a bit gutted about this. I like playing soccer, it's a good release after a hard day's work. But now I'm out for weeks or months, and won't ever be able to play to full potential. It feels like somewhere I crossed a barrier, where my body lost the ability to heal fully. Right now, I want that ability back.

While I'm beginning the journey to old age, a dear friend of mine is going to be finishing it soon. I went to visit him today, in hospital. He was asleep, the first time I had seen him that way. He looked so frail. It made me appreciate the fact that I would still be able to run for a long time yet.

Get better soon, Hugh. You've still got a few things to teach me, even when you are asleep.

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I feel like an old man. We played in an all-day five-a-side soccer tournament on Saturday, and I was shattered after it, but even worse I still felt sore the next day! That's never happened before. I must be getting old.

The tournament was great fun. Teams played a game then sat one or two games out for resting. There was a round robin, then the top four teams from the two leagues played off in a tournament to find the winner. Our team, the Old Ladies from Picton (of course!), finished second equal in our group; my brother's team, Lollipops Playland Wonder Kids (!) finished top. Sadly, we didn't make it past the quarters and they were eliminated at the semis.

I think our strong result in pool play came partly because we had PJ the ninja for some of the day, and partly because we've played together so much that we know how five-a-side works, and know how we all play together. We managed four wins, a draw and two losses.

Ups and downs, in no particular order:

• I got sunburned ears.
• We effectively scored four own goals
• We still scored quite a bit more than we conceeded
• We knocked out a team of angry players through smarter play
• We got revenge on the team that beat us in the quarters last year
• Peter's team beat us [1]
• I got five goals
• Technically, second highest goal scorer was the dreaded [own goal]

Thanks very much to Sportzone for organising it (largely on behalf of BNU). I hope you guys win the right to lease Nairn St. Park year-round.

We continued the good form this evening with a win over who I thought was going to be a better team, until we out-thought them. Not that it's good to win grading games - they might put us in a tough division! :)

[1]	They're like bloody Brazil I swear. No defense, but you can't score enough to keep out the magic they're doing on your goal!

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It's funny how things can sometimes have a habit of fixing themselves as fast as they were broken. My bike was fixed the Friday before last - some kind of dodgy wire or connection apparently - and now it's running fine again. My laptop battery turned up what you might call "a month early" - or maybe they were just playing games when they said it would be a month late. Either way, Dell are still lying bastards when it comes to batteries. And we found a new flat, so we're moving out of the city in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, work charges on. We've made heaps of improvements in Mahara just recently, in areas such as authentication, usability, help, internationalisation and views. 1.0 is shaping up quite nicely, in fact. Just recently I fixed/improved the authentication API so that an LDAP plugin written by Howard Miller of the University of Glasgow works just fine with Mahara. I've also been debugging the SSO from Moodle, and come across what might be the cause of the random failures of SSO to function. I have patches for this for both Moodle and Mahara, so hopefully when they're merged it should be the end of SSO problems. I took some time to improve the logging of SSO errors in Mahara too, so hopefully any future problems won't be so hard to find.

In the meantime, Richard and Clare have been rampaging through a swathe of usability improvements. There's now a new sideblock giving details about the logged in user, a language changing dropdown for logged out people and an improved 'My Views' page, among many other changes. A lot of the work for 1.0 is about making it easier for first time users to get a handle on what an e-portfolio is, and giving them lots of instruction on how to create their own views. You can have a play with all the fancy new stuff on dev.mahara.org, by the way.

Mahara has now also made it into Debian. 0.9.0 is currently in Testing, while 0.9.1 is in Unstable. I'm the maintainer, which means I get my own page on debian.org :).

Mahara also has its first publicised security vulnerability. Amazingly, it looks like Secunia actually did a little bit of their own research into the vulnerability, which makes a change from their standard behaviour. If you're running 0.9.1 there's no need to fear, and the likelyhood is that nobody has bothered to exploit the vulnerability anyway.

And finally, in soccernews, The Superback Strikers managed to pick up a trophy on Friday for winning last year's tournament. PeterB got us into the final with the very last kick of the game, then we won the final on penalties [1], before racing to Petone in order to play our normal scheduled match.

[1]	Well, penalty. It was golden penalties, I saved their first effort then put mine away. We were in a hurry!

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