The Chinese team dominated the 2008 Olympic Games, winning 51 gold medals, 15 more than second-placed USA.
But the Chinese are not the only ones celebrating. Great Britain finished 4th in the medal count, winning 26 total medals, 11 of which gold.
This is the best achievement by the British team since 1912. Impressive. I've decided to find out how exactly did they do in the 1912 Olympics, held in Stockholm, and found out some very interesting stuff.

The football gold medal for Britain required a 7-0 thrashing of Hungary in the second round, a 4-0 victory over Finland in the semis and a 4-2 victory of Denmark in the final. Not very convincing scores in those times as Finland was also defeated by the Netherlands 9-0 in the third-place match and Russia beaten by Germany 16-0 in the consolation tournament.
Finland, by the way, was represented by its own team, without actually being an independent state at the time but rather the Grand Duchy of Finland, part of the Russian Empire. Interestingly, the Finnish team won 26 medals while the Russian won none.

The tennis competition that featured separate (!) events for indoor and outdoor, saw the British win 6 medals total, including a gold and a silver in the mixed doubles indoor event.
The shooting team won another 9 medals, none of which in the “running deer” events, which did not include shooting at actual running deer, but rather at deer-shaped targets with 3 circles on them.

But no medal was as satisfying as the silver medal in the tug of war event. Yes, tug of war.
5 teams signed up for the competition, but the teams from Austria, Bohemia and Luxembourg failed to appear, and so, for the first and only match, Great Britain represented by the City of London Police clashed with the local Stockholm Police. From the Wikipedia article:

The bout consisted of a best-two-of-three contest. The competition was held on July 8, 1912. In the first pull, the Swedish team steadily pulled the British squad across the center mark. After a five-minute break, the second pull was started. In this one, neither team gained the victory through pulling the other across the line, but after a prolonged stalemate a couple of the London men succumbed to exhaustion and sat on the ground, disqualifying them and giving the Swedes the victory.

Getting away
I'm taking some time off, finally, in the end of September. Been busy the last couple of days thinking up stuff to do and see.
I'll start with a week in Paris (never been), then going to Oktoberfest in Munich (long time dream come true! River of beer here I come!), then to my Brother's in Vienna, then probably move to the warmer south of France and Spain, hopefully do a trek in the Picos de Europa National Park.
Anybody knows of good stuff happening in October in those areas? Also, what are the best places for trekking in Spain?

In the Future Everything Will Be on the Internet
Some tips on planning your travels on the net:
The abundance of budget airlines makes moving around inside Europe on a plane the best option for anything but the shortest trips. Wikitravel have a good list of all the different companies (there are many!). Ryanair, easyJet and AirBerlin have the largest networks. My personal favorite is AirBerlin. A flight will cost you the same or less as the train ticket for almost any destination. Few tips:
1. Besides checking out the biggest three, check also the local budget airlines for the country you're flying to/from. They tend to have the best price. For example, the Spanish Clickair is usually the cheapest for flights to, from and inside Spain. AirBerlin is best for Germany and Austria.
2. Weekends (Saturday-Sunday) are much more expensive, fly mid-week.
3. Check out prices for the day just before and right after the date you wanted, sometimes there are dramatic differences.

A good place to see railway ticket prices and schedules is the Rail Europe site. The national railway sites themselves tend to suck and not show the actual ticket prices.

Airline ticket comparison sites always used to be slow and give shitty results. SideStep which I didn't know about before, works absolutely great, searching the discount airlines as well and giving the best tickets really fast. It also works great for car rentals. Speaking of which, easyCar which I think is the same company as easyJet, are almost always the cheapest and they have really great deals.
easyJet? easyCar? What I really need is easyWoman and easyLife.

A good site to see bus schedules and prices in Spain is movelia.

On a side note, it's really hard to find high quality information on stuff that doesn't cost money, like places to visit, stuff to do, trekking routes etc.
What comes up in searches is either commercial tour operators, very limited information from travel guide publishers (like Lonely Planet) that just want you to buy the book, or information in the local language. Wikitravel, which I thought will really close this market once and for all is actually pretty pathetic and has very little information. I sense a niche here. Hmmm.

Ever wanted to find out what is the search volume on Google for a particular term?
This is very useful for market research, playing around with start up ideas and specific products and features for the web, and plain old curiosity.
Here's how to do it:
Setup a Google AdWords account (20 seconds) and go to "Campaign Management -> Tools -> Keyword Tool":





Tons of useful information to be enjoyed.

Just found a cool feature on CafePress: you can place your Google Analytics tracking code on your CafePress store. Sweet.
Found under "Your Account -> Manage Shop -> Update Tracking Information".

Also, new design - Chuck Norris shirts on Bitzwear.

Update: this wasn't clear enough - before typing in the tracking code in CafePress you should create a website profile for your shop, using the "Add Website Profile" in Google Analytics and typing in the shop's URL (e.g. www.cafepress.com/your_shop). Then paste in CafePress the code generated by Google Analytics.

Before: Best movie ever on IMDB??
Plot: Dark as Batman should be.
Acting: Michael Cane, Garry Oldman and Morgan Freeman - spot on, as always. Heath Ledger - bloody good.
The girl: Maggie Gyllenhaal - WTF?? Suffice to say, I'd almost prefer to have her brother Jake make out with the Joker, Brokeback-Mountain-style, then her. Only good thing is she Spoiler (rhymes with "cries").
The action: Yes!
The bad guy: Oh yes!
Annoying: Look, visitors at the Cinema City: do not laugh as morons when the Joker tells a joke. This is not Die Hard. He's a *sad* clown.
Bottom line: Better than Godfather? No. But motherfucking good.

We've launched the Delver Blog at blog.delver.com (in addition to launching Delver itself, of course).
From my first post there:

Before launching you’re just basically throwing stones at a small target on an imaginary wall in total darkness. You don’t know what you’re doing. The best products (think the PC, the iPod, sliced bread) make perfect sense to us now, but that’s just hindsight. People who developed these products had really strong belief in what they were doing, but that belief was anything but based on facts.

Just as when the body is fighting many diseases, a little cold can be devastating - so is when the soul is troubled by many things, anything negative can bring a person to tears.

This is the image that greeted me this morning on the news channel TV while I was waiting for the elevator in my office building:



It's constantly discussed - why would we make such an unfair trade?
To me, it's very simple, really: two boxes with the bodies of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser are worth much more than 10,000 Kuntars.

To sum up the few last couple of days:
(Warning: self-important farts coming up)

1 Thomas J. Watson once said:
If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.
That sounds about right.

2 There is no way you can really know a person, in a short period of time.
By parallel, there is no way for someone else to know you.
So give up trying to draw them a picture of you.
All you can really do, is wake up in the morning, and say to yourself:
“You’re good. Just do good, and good things will happen”.
And hope for the best.

3 The only way there is in the world to be better is to find one or two people that are actually great, spend as much time close to them, listen and learn.
So the only talents that you really need are:
3.a Spotting great people.
3.b Listening.