Jim reports a problem when trying to use the weblogger bookmarklet in IE5 for Windows. I'm not entirely surprised since I've only tested this in the Mac version of IE5. Has anyone else tried this out on a PC? Did you get it to work?

PS I'm not really a javascript/browser-scripting guy either, Jim ;-)

England are out of Euro2000

I didn't catch the demise of England in real-time last night since I was travelling back home on a train at the time. But, I knew the score with about 15 minutes to go before the final whistle courtesy of mobile-phone toting passengers travelling by train back to England B-}

After arriving home on the final leg leg of my journey - by bicycle - I had just missed the last-minute penalty that assured Romania of their place in the quarter-finals. There are going to be a whole load of happy Scottish football supporters today ;-)

By all accounts it was another lacklustre performance by England and they didn't deserve to progress to the next round. Quite simply, they had been beaten by better teams. [Silly idea: perhaps software should be evaluated by knock-out competitions that test fitness for purpose. That way, software that works best would be successful rather than...]

British != English

I feel sorry for genuine English football fans. Not only have their team been knocked out of Euro2000 but they have been tainted by the actions of English hooligans that have been running riot in Holland and Belgium. Over 1000 hooligans have been arrested and deported back to England.

A BBC radio news report of the shenanigans of these so called English football supporters caused furore in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales when several times it referred to 'British' football hooligans. Angry listeners from these countries complained to the BBC who later issued an apology. This is especially galling for Scottish football fans - The Tartan Army - which has an excellent reputation for good behaviour when following their team to games in Europe.

German calls on Europe to ban British visitors

Scots should be banned from mainland Europe during major footbal tournaments because of England's troublemakers, a German politician said last night.

Gerhard Schmidt, a vice president of the European parliament, called for all Britons to be barred after England supporters rampaged in Brussels at the weekend.

This is totally unacceptable. Why should genuine football fans - of any country - be tarred with the same brush just because a small minority of English fans cause mayhem. It's not as if all the other teams' supporters have behaved in an exemplary fashion. Sigh!

Another reason to be rueful over ticket sales computerisation

Following on from my observations yesterday about the downside of computerising ticket sales at the local train station it transpires that passengers that have been purchasing the weekly first-class return ticket to Edinburgh have been undercharged by £7 per ticket - £32 instead of £39 - for the past two years. This discrepancy was only discovered after the introduction of the new computer system. No attempt is going to be made to recover the arrears but the new (correct) price comes into effect from next week. 'Reasons to be rueful are two' to paraphrase singer Ian Drury.