World Cup Starts

The World Cup started this month. This is a VERY IMPORTANT time in the life of every Brazilian, and as such, I have been closely watching it. AND Diesel and I will be joining the festivities in 2 weeks, when we go to Germany to watch the semi-final game in Munich.

It has been a tumultous road to finding a working stream where I can watch games from my work computer. My coworker and I spent several hours googling sites where we could connect to a live stream of the games. The world seemed like a selfish place. BBC would only broadcast to UK users, and when I tried to connect, sure enough, they denied me access. Brazilian sites even denied me access to cilps of past games. My other peeps, the Chinese, masters of all things illegal, ended up supplying the only live, illegal broadcast of games through a live stream in CHINESE that would buffer every freaking 5 min. It was maddening, but at least it was something.

Lucky me, I'm practically married to a geek: Diesel did come through and found what is surely a very illegal live stream that has ESPN2. It's a peer-to-peer application that works really well. My coworker and I have been enjoying hours of good soccer. We passed it on application to several other coworkers, and currently, dozens of people have it installed in their computer. Productivity has certainly gone down as the hours spent watching soccer go up. Anyhow, if you are interested in joining the herds of the semi-useless, email me and I'll send you the link to download the player.

There have been some moments--several hours, actually--of sheer despair. Last Friday, the live stream went down, and we were cut off from the wonderful world of soccer. I thought somebody found us out, for sure, and decided to deprive many a soccer fans of their right to participate in this great event. Fortunately, later that day, the live stream was ressurrected, to our delight.