Leyton Orient 1-3 Nottingham Forest



It’s not often Leyton Orient get to play former European champions, so it’s no surprise that the last home game of the season was going to be a sell-out.

Orient went into the game needing to win, or for Bradford to lose, to guarantee a place in League One next season. Forest needed a win, and for Bristol City to lose, to have a chance at an automatic promotion place, otherwise they’d be down to the play-offs.

As it turned out, it was a result that suited everyone (except Bradford). Chesterfield beat Bradford which relegated them both, Millwall beat Bristol, and Forest beat Orient. So we’re not going to be relegated and Notts Forest have their automatic promotion hopes alive.

The 1-3 result was certainly a fair one and although we had our hopes up after Matt Lockwood (certainly Orient’s player of the year to my mind) scored with a fantastic left foot to take the home team into lead, we didn’t ever feel like we were going to come out on top. The visitors were the stronger throughout and it could have been maybe 6-1 in the end, although if I were a Forest fan I wouldn’t be feeling too confident in my team either getting back into the Championship or staying there; they weren’t that good.

Anyway, no more Saturday afternoon matches for me until September, with another campaign to stave off relegation to look forward to.

BBC SPORT | Football | League One | Leyton Orient 1-3 Nottm Forest

O’s MAD – Match Reports: Leyton Orient 1 Nottingham Forest 3

Earthquakes, the English way

I’m disappointed that we couldn’t feel anything of the 4.3 magnitude earthquake in Kent from east London at 8:18 this morning (although I admit I was barely awake then). However, the reports coming onto the BBC site show exactly how the English cope with these kinds of events.

Compared to the recent earthquake in Japan, which was much more severe and killed a number of people, and which happened the day before I arrived but which there was very little panic over by the day after, our home-grown earthquakes are very low-key.

Some of the earthquake witness quotes are the best thing, though, and shows the true scale of the event and the way our nation responds to it:

“The seagulls went crazy and in parts of Dover the electricity is off.”

“I was lying in bed and it felt as if someone had just got up from bed next to me.”

“I live near a popular area for dog walkers and no-one is about, everyone seems to be staying indoors wondering if there will be another one.”

“But the wardrobe doors were banging and sort of shaking and the bed actually felt like it was moving.”

And my favourite:

“I thought my wife had got cramp or something but then I saw the curtains were moving and the whole house was shaking. It lasted about 1.5 seconds.”

If they changed the headline to “Earthquake as violent as wife’s cramp hits Kent” then it would make my day.

BBC NEWS | UK | Earthquake shakes parts of Kent

BBC NEWS | UK | Eyewitnesses on the Kent tremors

Poor phishing attempt

I received a phishing e-mail claiming to be from the Co-op and, for a change, I actually looked at the link. Strangely, the link was FTP (not HTTP) protocol and contained a username and password. So, instead of clicking on the link, I opened it in my FTP client and lo and behold I was in the FTP server.

Now, I doubt if that server is in any way connected with whoever’s attempting the phishing scam, so I didn’t want to cause any damage. But it did seem an ideal opportunity to upset the scam, so I uploaded this as a replacement: What a poor phishing attempt this is..

Someone kept trying to replace the file with their phishing version but a scheduled script to FTP my replacement was enough to make them give up after a while.

What a poor phishing attempt this is.

Regular expressions: a misnomer

Why are regular expressions called regular expressions? Two regular expressions that achieve the same result can often look completely different, so what’s so regular about that?

And also: they’re not even expressive. Who can really understand what /(<[^href]*href=(\"|'))([^(\"|')]+)(\"|')/ does off the top of their head? (Okay, I admit it's semi-obvious that it's something to do with links.) I guess it could be 'expression' in terms of expressionism in art, which tends to look pretty crazy too.

This is a mystery that I fear will remain unsolved.

Exponetic poker night

Last night we had the first ever Exponetic poker evening. In attendance were (in clockwise order as we were sat around the table):

  • Me
  • Lucja Wszola
  • Chris Sainsbury
  • James Bebbington
  • Nick Grimshaw
  • Ben Isaacs

This was the practice hand and it’s difficult to tell from this shot whether James is bluffing or not:

James bluffing

Chris was inscrutable despite James’s steely gaze:

Chris being inscrutable

The poker was all taken very seriously, as can be seen here. Motivated by James and his dealer’s cap we all chose headgear of our own to distract the opposition:

Poker's serious

More hats with Nick, myself and Lucja caught admiring ourselves in the mirror:

Nick, Lucja and me in the mirror

Lucja seemed convinced that she was on holiday in the Bahamas, though, which makes her second place finish all the more impressive:

Lucja thought she was on holiday

James shows off his evil eyes:

Evil James

As well as some gambling, a small amount of whisky drinking also went on:

Whisky bottle

Chris thought long and hard over every move:

Chris thinking hard

And even Ben did some pondering which usually ended with something along the lines of “I’ll see your 50 and raise you 1”.

Ben thinking hard

Although Ben did try replacing his right eye with a dealer button to see if it would give him any special insight:

Ben with dealer button

Nick ponders what James’s raise could mean, which is especially interesting since Nick was out of the game by this point:

Nick pondering what to do

This kind of sums up the losing money theme of the evening:

Nick's wallet loss text message

Roll on the next poker evening, I say.

Leyton Orient beat Bradford to safety?

Leyton Orient come back to London with an essential victory over Bradford today. Had they lost it would meant dropping back into the relegation zone by swapping places with the home team. As it was, a 2-0 away victory takes the O’s back up to 18th in League One and 5 points into safety with only two games left to play.

Bradford will now need to win both remaining games with Orient losing both and to escape relegation from League One.

Dare I say it: I think the O’s are safe this season.

BBC SPORT | Football | League One | Bradford 0-2 Leyton Orient

O’s MAD – Match Reports: Bradford City 0 Leyton Orient 2

Ling confident of Orient survival