Category: Personal

What seems like a long time ago but is really less than two and a half years I went down to Pasadena for one of the first Ruby on Rails classes from Mike Clark and Dave Thomas of Pragmatic Studios. While there I met Michael Hartl, at the time working as a consultant at CalTech and IdeaLab but interested in doing his own thing soon.

We kept in touch and I was very happy last Summer when the book he co-authored, RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails, came out.

Michael and his good friend Long Nguyen continued working the book’s ideas on social networking and in December were selected to participate in the Winter 2008 Y Combinator program for startups.

Insoshi is the product they’re creating. The vision is to create a complete open source social networking platform, a Facebook in a box to put it crudely. The programming language is Ruby on Rails running against MySQL or SQLite by default; Rails has taken a bit of a battering in the last few months but for certain types of web apps (including this one!) I think it’s still a great choice.

At this stage, less than two months after the initial developer release, Insoshi is very basic: profiles, friends, private messaging, forums, blogs, activity and mini feeds. Even so the structure is solid, with a strong application design, and Long and Michael are clear about the feature roadmap while remaining very open to community feedback.

I’ve set up a development instance and hope to contribute some user experience improvements based on what I’ve learned from Glen Lipka, Marketo’s guru. The co-creators, by their own admission, are much better at coding than UX/UI so this seems like a good area for me to add value.

A friend of mine is now at an Israeli startup called Toluna, a web service where anyone can create polls and opinion topics at no cost. What you create can be embedded in a blog, as I’ve done in this post, or hosted on Toluna.com. Either way the results are tracked for you.

Members can earn redeemable rewards points from a list of well-known partners and participate in prize drawings. So far the members and partners are mainly in the UK but I’m told expansion to the US is imminent.

Here’s my first Toluna poll:

Anyone who knows me knows how I’m voting.

I really have never understood the arguments against same gender marriages so today’s ruling from the California State Supreme Court seems both logical and right.

All arguments against this change come down to religious, emotional or straw man fallacies:

1. The Bible says its wrong. Not being Christian or particularly religious in any mainstream sense I’m probably not qualified to say if it does or doesn’t, though the evidence of which I’m aware seems weak. Either way, the First Amendment precludes this argument from having any legal standing.
2. Gays, lesbians and bisexuals are sick and need help, not support. You are entitled to your opinions but until you can produce substantive evidence, that’s all this is.
3. Tradition says marriage is one man and one woman. Yeah well, until 140 years ago tradition said one could own slaves in this country, until 90 years ago only men were qualified to vote and until 40 years ago interracial marriage was illegal.

Did I miss any of the major arguments supporting this outdated position?

The Court acted to overturn a ballot initiative passed in 2000 making the one man/one woman standard state law.

By the way, six of the seven Justices are Republicans and Gov. Schwarzenegger has already said he would not support reversing this ruling by amendment

Even so, I have very little doubt that before close of business today there will be nutjobs groups filing papers with the State for an amendment to the Constitution overturning the ruling.

One can only hope that a majority of voters in this state will recognize that their calendars say 2008, not 1508.

We’re in New Jersey for the weekend, celebrating Mother’s Day, our nephew Jake’s 3rd birthday and our 5th wedding anniversary with my parents and my sister and her family.

After a few days to recover from last week’s stress we’re back seeing available properties which may meet our needs and budgets. Our Realtor did send over an interesting house, this time one which needs no serious work, and we’ll see how that goes.

What I’ve been thinking about this week, in the aftermath of ContractorGate, is how differently people view expensive and inexpensive purchases. Houses and cars compared to, say, food or toiletries. People have completely different, conflicting mental models about the two types of buying.

One reason some people still get the dead tree version of the local newspaper is the coupons and circulars stuffed in the Sunday edition. TS1 does it for us and if she didn’t I would. Saving 50 cents here and two dollars there seems meaningful to us, and we look at other small items, like movie tickets and restaurant meals, the same way. Not that we eat at KFC rather than Fresh Gardens…

Then you look at big ticket deals: houses, cars, fancy vacations. Forget 50 cents or two dollars, for these deals the marginal discussion is over hundreds or thousands of dollars. Even computers almost reach this level.

Let’s say you see a home listed for $865,000 and it meets your lot size requirement, quality is good, location suits, plus you expect to spend $60-80k getting the house from 1480 to about 2000 square feet. The back and forth:

• You offer $805,000.
• You originally thought $800k as a starting point but maybe the seller would be insulted
• Seller isn’t insulted but comes back at $849,000. (Ooh, that’s too much!)
• You counter with your final, best offer at $818k
• Seller says nothing less than $840k and you say, okay, not from us and done.

Notice in all this back and forth the numbers move at increments of thousands. Lots of thousands.

How many coupons do you have to use and bottles of vitamins and minerals do you have to buy on sale to make up for that?

A tip o’ the fedora to Rob… though as seven of these are sequels, updates or remakes I wonder about American cinema.

Iron Man	May 2
Speed Racer	May 9
Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull	May 22
Kung Fu Panda	June 6
You don’t mess with the Zohan	June 6
Mongol	June 6 (limited release)
The Love Guru	June 13
Get Smart	June 20
Wall-E	June 27
Wanted	June 27
Hancock	July 2
The Dark Knight	July 18
The X-Files: I Want To Believe	July 25
The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor	August 1
Pineapple Express	August 8
The International	August 15
Babylon A.D.	August 29

So straight after I published last Saturday’s epistle our Realtor called to see if we were interested in any of a few listings he sent over. There were two of interest, three bedroom/two baths though both on the small side for our taste, but we met him in the afternoon to see them.

(Ed. Note: I misunderstood the situation regarding that bid last week. The listing agent did respond, with a verbal no, and told our’s the seller’s bottom line was about $840k.)

The first was a short block in from Central Expressway with a large sound barrier at the rear helping keep the noise level down. About 1350 sq. ft., IIRC, in decent condition with a corner lot large enough to support perhaps a 500 sq. ft. expansion. We’d seen another home from this development the Saturday before which had been expanded a few years earlier, providing a good model of the possibilities. However at an asking price of $878,000 plus probably $80-100k for the work, compared to a list of $935,000 for the one already increased to 1990 sq. ft., made us keep looking.

The second was over near Middlefield Road on a quite little street around the corner from my first apartment in Mountain View 11 years ago. (11 years, that’s hard to believe.) This house was smaller, officially 1150 sq. ft., and 57 years old, but the corner lot is 6300 sq. ft. with lovely wall of bushes just inside of the sidewalk on boths side and a next door neighbor which recently added a second floor. The house has a nice big kitchen, high ceilinged, that it shares with the living room.

This house also had a ‘bonus’ room. That is, many years ago someone essentially enclosed the patio to create a 19′ x 9 1/2′ room whose outer wall was all windows. The room was done, as best we could tell, without permits! Everything comes down to money, I suppose, but that seems like a foolish decision to me considering the possible complications in case of fire and so on. Anyway, getting the room up to code will cost ~$10,000.

The price was right, TS1 and I thought: $723,000 but we offered $710k and the seller settled for $712k. We were under contract!

And under the gun too, with only seven days to clear the contingencies. The seller had done termite and property inspections recently, turning up no red flags, and the mortgage broker we’d used previously said even in this market we could get approval.

The tricky bit for us was getting a realistic handle on the price of adding 610 sq. ft., refreshing the kitchen and master bath, and bringing that extra room up to code. The first two contractors who came out to look at the property felt they could do the job and certainly the zoning would support even more enclosed space if we liked, but neither wanted to give us an estimate.

In my fantasies we got the work done and dusted for $90-100k. $800,000, more or less, and we’d have 1900+ square feet of up to date living space. The third contractor went by Thursday morning with our Realtor and they called after to give us a verbal estimate of $110-120,000. A little tight for us but doable, and with the clock ticking we decided to give the go ahead for the bank to start the appraisal and approval process.

This is when reality began to intrude on us. First the mortgage broker told us that her bank currently classifies Mountain View as a distressed market(!), so instead of putting 15% down and keeping more cash on hand for the construction we had to go with our original intent of 20%. Even tighter but getting nervy.

Then Friday morning the contractor faxed the written estimate. Ka-boom! as they like to say on KFOG. Instead of somewhere in the $110-120k range as he’d told us, this one was $137,400. His explanation was bringing the extra room up to code was $10k and removing the ugly, massive red brick fireplace and chimney from the wall between the kitchen and living room $6200, neither included in the verbal.

But this estimate explicitly didn’t include plans and permits: another $10k. No plumbing to where, down the line, we could add a third full bath in the new master bedroom: another $5k. No refresh of the kitchen or existing baths: $25-30k or more.

So not $137,000 but really $180,000. Whoa! That’s a whole ‘nother story. And everyone I spoke with about this emphatically told us that whatever the contractor tells you, add 30-50% because invariably there are overruns and unexpecteds.

Enough. We sadly had no choice but to cancel the contract and pull out of the deal. Too much stress for me, I can tell you that, and so we’re taking a break from the hunting for a couple of weeks.

Of course if some really attractive house comes on the market…

But hey, all the cool kids are doing it.

Here’s mine, from my work MacBook*:

MacEto:~ blazar$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5dt%s n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
23 ls
18 curl
14 cd
11 ssh
10 ps
6 svn
5 open
3 rm
3 ping
3 kill

* Yes, be jealous, I have a MacBook at work. Cool bosses.

TS1, the Big guy and I turned out to see Peter F. Hamilton, one of my favorite SF authors, at Books Inc. in downtown Mountain View this afternoon. Peter read a few pages from The Dreaming Void, took many questions and then signed copies of his books.

Hamilton was very good natured, I’m sure he’s heard all of the questions we asked dozens of times over, but for sure wasn’t at all surprised when the first (by me) was has he finished The Temporal Void, book two of this trilogy, yet. Unlike earlier appearances promoting TDV, today he could give this answer: “I emailed it to my publisher Tuesday, just before getting on the plane here.” Sweet!

TS1 snapped a couple of pics with her iPhone when I got to the head of the signing line:

I had the British Commonwealth edition of this novel and mentioned being excited to find it while we were Down Under, months before the US publication. Peter asked where in NZ we visited and, after I answered Auckland and Queenstown, told me that he really liked Queenstown and Randstown in this novel is based on that lovely little vacation spot.

Three years have passed since TS1 and I sold the townhouse over on Gladys Ave, apparently not a terrible choice as Zillow’s estimate of the current value is $25,000 less than what we got. The last few weeks we’ve been going out with a real estate agent to see what’s available.

Our requirements are straightforward:

1. Location: Mountain View, preferably within 1.5 miles of the Castro St./California Ave. intersection so TS1 can walk to work. I’ve lived in MV for eleven(!) years and she for nearly six and we’re happy and comfortable with it.
2. Size: 3 or 4 bedrooms, 2 or 3 baths and a minimum of 1700 square feet one or two levels. Bedrooms must not be cramped and the master must comfortably fit a king size bed.
3. Lot size: This is not a big deal for us, we’ve seen a few nice homes with not too much yard space, though more is of course better.

You’d be surprised how much new construction is laid out on three levels, resulting in terrible, and frequently cramped, floor plans. Also quite a few one or two level, 3 bed/2 bath homes under 1400 square feet, also far too cramped. Pretty never makes up for this.

We looked at several homes in the Whisman Station development. I was impressed with the general quality and we considered bidding on two. Now just over 10 years old the homes seem to be holding up well and the HOA fee is just $105 a month, compared to about $350 we paid three years ago on the townhouse (and I was president there so I know the budget was lean).

Two houses did meet our criteria: 653 McCarty and 711 Sierra Vista. Both are smaller than we’d like but have very large (for Mountain View) lots, meaning we could expand them. McCarty was our first choice and, having been vacant and on the market for over 200 days with no offers, we thought a very low offer would entice the absentee owners. Sierra Vista needs much less work and has a larger lot, but has only been on the market five weeks with the owners still living in (so motivated but not as much).

TS1 and I met with our agent, Devin Ruiz, Monday night to go over the latest information he had from the listing agents and help us crystallize our thinking. We decided to sleep on it, make some calls Tuesday to get expert advice and meet Wednesday morning to fill out the purchase offer paperwork.

Tuesday lunchtime Devin calls with the news that, after 200 days with zero bids, someone else came in with an offer on the McCarty property that the trustee felt was good enough. He didn’t reveal the price nor try and get us into a bidding war.

No worries, really, as we were happy to go after the Sierra Vista property. The location wasn’t quite as good but the house was in better condition, including a recently redone kitchen, and sits on a bigger lot. TS1 especially liked the spacious fenced in side yard as great to have for the two dogs we plan to get after settling in to the new home.

So we wrote up an offer. Money was a bit on the low end but we felt the right amount given the state of the market, terms were otherwise standard and even a bit generous on the contingencies. The owners countered with a higher dollar amount than I expected, inadequate termite and property condition contingency (considering they hadn’t done either inspection, which is unusual here) and a request to rent back for 30 days after closing.

Devin advised us to respond with our final, best offer. On Thursday afternoon we did, agreeing to the rent back, raising our dollar offer $13,000 (still quite bit less than their counter) and restating the standard termite and property condition contingencies. The offer expired last night (or yesterday noon, I’m not quite sure).

I was surprised–shocked, I tell you!–that we got no response at all to our counter-counter. Rejection is one thing but not to get any answer strikes me as strange.

We’ll just have to keep hunting.

The 2008 release from my favorite mystery novelist Harlan Coben is due in the next couple of weeks and he’s pushed a nice little teaser video to YouTube:

Betting this title is some kind of children’s story? Nah. The 2001 novel by Australian author Nick Earls would go whoosh right over the heads of any five or six year old by focusing on the complex social and emotional interactions of the main characters. Though they’d definitely get at least some of the humor, such as the point of view character’s primary work responsibility being to dress up in a huge chicken suit and dance at the street to attract business to Ron Todd’s World of Chickens.

Phil is a med student in Brisbane wearing the chicken suit part time to bring in some spending cash. His best mate Frank works the stove when not plotting his next female conquest, which he does regularly and far more successfully than Phil. Our boy is burdened by a conscious, Frank not so much. The lovely Sophie Todd, Ron’s daughter, rounds out the WoC night crew and inhabits Phil’s fantasies.

World of Chickens turns on what happens when Ron makes Phil his new confidant, Frank becomes Mrs. Todd’s plaything and Phil, er, entertains Sophie with tales of his imaginary girlfriend Phoebe. He justifies this as necessary to hold his feelings at bay while she dates the (never seen) Clinton but complicates things by giving his fictional female the same name as his mom (who teaches one of Sophie’s university classes) and not reporting any breakup before Sophie spots him on a real (sort of) date.

Frank causes poor Philby no end of complications as well. Not having a conscious seems to be working well for Frank but the gears in Phil’s inner courtroom get good and grounded the more he tries to be a good pal and keep confidences. Ron Todd and the real Phoebe put in a few loose bolts as well; the latter’s reaction to an innocent–at least on Phil’s part–photo is just awesome.

I got this book during our trip to Australia after having read one or two of Earls’ earlier novels during my 2000 vacation there. For an American, I think you have to make a few allowances for the kind of things writers take for granted, like local knowledge and language, but overall would give this a thumbs up.

recommended

I wasn’t going to post about the passing this week of Arthur C. Clarke, the last surviving member of the Golden Age triumvirate of science fiction along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but this memoriam from Edward Rothstein in the NY Times, For Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically, was just too lovely to let pass.

I gobbled up the novels and story collections by these masters, finishing nearly all by my high school graduation, and choosing a favorite of them would be very, very difficult. If you put a gun to my head (though why would you?), I’d probably say Asimov by a thin margin due to his mysteries and terrific non-SF books on science.

Despite overlapping in time and acclaim, these writers seem fairly distinct in their voices and expectations. Asimov was the political liberal, valuing the effort and ability of individuals within commonwealth framework but certain that, at the end of the day, we do need a strong guiding hand; the multiple Foundations working behind the scenes as well as the role of unaging robot R. Daneel Olivaw across so many of his books makes that clear.

Asimov was proud to have been president of the American Humanist Association and his fiction showed this, consistently featuring men and women working together for the good of all. Even with help sometimes necessary from outside agencies. One of his early novels, and a personal favorite as it was one of the first novels I read, The Ends of Eternity, typifies this thinking: the protagonists work for a police-type organization that works to prevent changes to the timeline after time travel becomes practical in the 27th century.

Heinlein was at the other end of the spectrum, coming close to facism in his late ’50s/early ’60s novels before moving over the line to unabashed individualism and libertarianism. The former is exemplified by his 1959 novel Starship Troopers, which was nothing like the recent movie except at the most basic plot level, and the awesome story collection The Past Through Tomorrow, released in 1967 but whose component stories were published between 1941 and 1959. Most people point to 1961’s Stranger in a Strange Land as the watershed in Heinlein’s career, and I suppose it was, but for me the great work of his “mature” years was the (fictional) Lazarus Long biography Time Enough For Love, released in 1973.

Clarke, as Rothstein writes, was not really concerned with the conventional political spectrum along which Asimov and Heinlein worked. Instead, despite deeply disagreeing with conventional Western religion, he was interested in the mystical and life-shattering prospects enabled by massive technology change, whether the technology be hard or soft. That is, what fundamental changes will developments such as faster than light travel or accelerated biological evolution bring?

Consider his short story The 9 Billion Names of God; in it, an order of Asian monks bring their centuries-long task of writing down all the permutations of the secret name of God to conclusion by using an IBM computer. Pencil or silicon, it’s technical assistance either way to the monks, and with the final variation on paper the stars above being to wink out.

My favorite Clarke novel is 1953’s Childhood’s End. Friendly aliens come to Earth and help create what seems like Paradise, with no more war or disease or crime. There is a price to be paid, there always is, and the cost is that eventually no more babies are being born. The last generation evolves, guided (or driven, as you prefer) to a different level of existence as beings of pure energy.

All three were towering creative minds and their variety was a key reason why the ’40s and ’50s are known as the Golden Age. Now that they’ve all gone from this plane it feels as if a big star in the night sky has set forever.

So Amazon sends me an email this afternoon to announce a contest with a grand prize (excuse me, “GRAND PRIZE”) of a trip for two to Honolulu with two tickets to a Jack Johnson concert there in late April. I’m not much of a Jack fan but, hey, a weekend in Honolulu, where we’ve never been, on someone else’s dime appeals to me.

I click the link in the email to hit the contest landing page. Instead Amazon shows me the page of rules, with a pretty image of Mr. Johnson at the top to click to enter:

What do I get after the click? A 404! “Looking for something? We’re sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site”

Let’s see how well Amazon’s web monitoring does, if they notice either the error from the 404 and send another email (either to all recipients or, since the URLs are personalized, to me) with a correction or, even better, this blog post.

According to Reuters, President Bush said this morning he had no regrets about the unpopular war in Iraq despite the “high cost in lives and treasure” and declared that the United States was on track for a major victory there.

Back in the land of reality, where thousands of young Americans are dead and many times that number permanently wounded and scared, and more than 100,000 Iraqis are still dead, the financial markets are voting with their boots on how smart this war’s been. They look at the map and see Afghanistan in shambles, with the Taliban and Al Qaeda making their way back to power not only in their own country but threatening Pakistan as well. Right, Pakistan, the country with a few dozen nuclear bombs.

Ben Bernanke and his pals at the Treasury may be doing their best to bail out Wall St. but after a brief run up the market figured out that maybe that $1 trillion-plus Bush has spent on the war might possibly have been better spent on real issues instead of a vain attempt to avenge his daddy’s honor. Some estimates–rigiorously done, by real accountants and economists–put the cost of the war at over $25,000 per American home. Of course the Administration wasn’t willing to raise taxes and pay for this trainwreck honestly, no, they borrowed the money so your kids and theirs can be paying for this when the get old.

But look out Ben, there’s a liquidity trap lurking around the corner and it wants to mug you like a meth addict jonesing for a score. You can try jumping in with both feet to bail out the hustlers on Wall Street, even get help from the guys down the block at Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, but my Magic 8 Ball says “Too little too late.”

The Democrats, despite all their talk, are little better than belligerent co-conspirators; they’re politicians so why should we expect anything else? Nancy Pelosi and her pals have been in charge of both houses of Congress for more than 12 months now and what exactly have they achieved?

I don’t care if Bush vetoes every bill they send him. Where are those congressional committee investigations the pundits were predicting when the Dems won the House? The ones that would bring to light all the lies and frauds perpretrated by the Bush Administration. Instead they went straight for the standard diversions, like the recent televised hearings on steroids in baseball. Because Roger Clemons, he’s the guy responsible for all the ills in America.

No, my friends, we’re five years down the road and no safer. Heck, we’re mostly lucky the terrorists aren’t smarter and more ambitious than they’ve shown. Bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still large and in charge, Hamas and Hezbollah are still attacking Israel, China’s thumb is still pressed on Tibet’s neck, the banks are melting down, Elliot Spitzer fell over his own hypocrisy, lines at airport security checkpoints still add at least 30 minutes to air travel and George Bush still thinks he’s winning the war on terror.

Sorry to those of you who missed out, though there can’t have been too many since the big room at Fenwick & West’s conference center was packed. Udi Manber is VP Engineering at Google, responsible as he put it for the quality of search results.

Udi’s presentation was titled Here’s what I say, now give me what I need and he did talk about how his team approaches that problem as well as the shear scale of delivering good results to millions of people daily in less than 100ms.

He gave some examples of how the Search Quality group analyzes what you and me type in that little text box, and how after 20 years of exploring search he’s come to understand that in many cases we simply don’t put in a good query. The meaning of good here is unambiguous and having sufficient context. An example of his for this was the search “how many calories in a pound?” We look at it and see the most likely explanation is related to diet, so about 3,000; the algorithms, though, assumed it was a request for mass to energy conversion and gave 9,000 trillion (i.e., E=MC²).

Manber also looked at the other side of the problem, which is that there isn’t always enough information to give a good result. That example query was “Top 20 Names in Peru” and while there was a page that at first glance gave a good answer, and was the first result shown by Google, the page was not the right one. But Google, as he pointed out, doesn’t do much in the way of content creation (hosting on Blog*Spot and YouTube is not creation) and can only show what’s out there.

All in all, lots of good information and not the least because the audience asked some interesting questions. Thanks Udi!

Next month is another great speaker (thanks Tanya), Charlie Kirschner of AIPAC (Americn-Israeli Political Action Committee), who’ll give us a look at how the omelettes get made in Washington. Join us on April 8 if you can.

TS1 and I went from owning no Apple products ever just two years ago to being 100% Macified now. We each have a MacBook, iPod Nano and iPhone, and this week our Time Capsule arrived to complete the set. Admittedly we have the small end of the scale on each but they’re sufficient to our needs and make me happy. With the MacBook at work I’m almost completely insulated from the madness that is Windows, especially the strange, strange Vista.

The Reds recent powerful form continued with a home thrashing of Michael Owen’s Newcastle, a team yet to win since the return of former star Kevin Keegan as manager. $50 million man Fernando Torres followed a midweek hat trick with his 25th goal in all competitions, Jermaine Pennant got a rare score and Captain Fantastic once again closed out the books as Liverpool FC won their fifth consecutive Premiership match.

Tuesday shapes up as an excellent match, the boys are traveling to Milan for the second leg of the Champions League tie with Inter. The Italians are in good form as well, six points clear at the top of the Serie A after beating Reggina 2-0 yesterday. Until last Tuesday no English club had ever won at the San Siro but Arsenal (a 0-0 struggle against relegation-threatened Wigan today) beat stadium sharers AC Milan that night and knocked out the holders.

I favor the Reds to make it two English knockouts though not necessarily two wins if Javier Mascherano doesn’t shake a small injury to get on the pitch.

The team has clearly learned their lesson from Barnsley, even if Chelsea didn’t. Rafa and the players have done well despite the off-field ownership turmoil. After looking dead a month or so ago, the takeover bid from Dubai International Capital has been all over the media. A break in relations between Tom Hicks and George Gillett, Jr., the American co-owners, provided leverage for the Persian Gulf sovereign wealth firm to get back in the game.

The latest I’ve seen is that DIC will buy 98% of Gillett’s stake, 49% of the club,and Hicks the rest in order to retain control. The pair have an agreement giving each other veto over selling their respective stakes, limiting Gillett’s ability to cash in a 50% profit over what they paid just 12 months ago.

Hicks is publicly angry over how the Dubaians are operating, especially that they’ve leaked details of the negotiations to the media. Can’t say as how I blame him when the Emirates spokeswoman is described in the press as having said “that DIC, the investment arm of the Dubai government, would try to dominate Hicks by bankrolling the club with its superior financial clout, and pledged to work on forcing Hicks into selling his 50 percent stake.”

The Reds have a tough patch of games coming up, at Inter is just the beginning. The next four are Reading, away to ManUtd, the Everton derby (which could be the key battle for the fourth Premiership Champions League place) and away to Arsenal. Rafa seems to have gotten his rotation mania in hand and results from all five and a bit of luck could even see us climb over Chelsea.

Go Reds (whoever owns you)!