Notes from a small island of tranquillity...

... which is what my desk is today seeing as our mail server is, as we techies say, fucked.

So, the UEFA Cup draw was made for the first round earlier today. Boro got Baník Ostrava at home. I'm not thrilled about this. We could have had LB Châteauroux (France), AZ Alkmaar (Netherlands), IF Elfsborg (Sweden) or FH Hafnarfjördur (Iceland). Personally I fancied the last. A trip to Iceland would have been very interesting. Still, the Czech Republic is cool, even if Ostrava is a long way east of Prague, and I always swore if we ever got into Europe I'd go anywhere we played, except Turkey. Baník lost 7-1 on aggregate to Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League 3rd qualifying round and I would expect us to compete well against Leverkusen so there is plenty of cause for optimism, especially after Tuesday's highly efficient and professional dismissal of Fulham's feeble challenge.

I must say that Firefox just pulled a very interesting stunt indeed. I was trying to view an interactive map of Mannheim with a view to finding a place to stay near the Maimarkthalle in a couple of weeks when the Java applet clearly died. So I killed the tab the site was in and then found that when I went to another tab when I typed the URL in it went in backwards, i.e. ku.oc.563llabtoof.www. Which is, to say the least, odd. Other windows weren't affected so I assume this was Firefox. Dunno if it would have worked, though. That looked like a good moment to give the machine a three-fingered salute and start over. Still, curious indeed.