I did not get one useful thing done at my actual job this week and I'm not even sorry about it.
Between the World Cup and the fact that my office has a TV in the break room that somebody left tuned to ESPN on Friday and nobody has touched since, this has been the least productive week I've had since maybe the week Diablo III launched back in 2012. Don't @ me about that one, I know.
The Netherlands-Costa Rica game on Saturday might be the single most bizarre thing I've watched all year. Louis van Gaal subbed in his backup keeper, Tim Krul, in the last minute of extra time, purely for the penalty shootout. I remember turning to the guy at the next desk and saying "wait, you can just do that?" like I'd never watched a soccer match before, which, honestly, I basically hadn't. Krul saved two penalties and the Dutch won 4-3 and I spent the next twenty minutes reading recaps instead of doing the thing I was actually supposed to be doing, which was fixing a broken cron job that had been silently failing since Wednesday. Sorry, cron job. Your day is coming.
Then Monday's news that Neymar fractured a vertebra in the Brazil-Colombia match and is out for the rest of the tournament kind of took the wind out of the whole week. I'm not even a Brazil fan particularly, I just think it's a bummer to watch a guy get carried off the field like that in the quarterfinals of a World Cup his own country is hosting. The semifinal against Germany is tomorrow and I genuinely have no idea how it's going to go without him. I'm not going to guess, I've been wrong about every single one of these games so far.
The part of this that's actually relevant to a tech blog, I guess, is how badly some of the streaming held up. WatchESPN worked fine for me at home on the laptop, but the office wifi choked hard during the France-Germany match on Friday afternoon, presumably because half the building was trying to stream the same 480p feed at the same time over one shared connection that was never built for that. Somebody in Slack (sorry, HipChat, we're still on HipChat) joked that IT should just put the game on the conference room projector and save everyone's bandwidth, and honestly that's exactly what ended up happening by the Argentina-Belgium match. A room full of grown adults quietly abandoning their desks to go stare at a projector screen at 2pm on a Tuesday is a very specific kind of office culture and I kind of love it.
Small unrelated thing I noticed on Tuesday: Google picked up Songza. I've been using it on and off for about a year, mostly the "Music for Focus, Concentration" playlists when I actually need to get work done (see above, re: not happening this week), and I've always liked that it's built around actual human-curated moods instead of an algorithm guessing what I want. I hope Google doesn't just fold it into Play Music and quietly let it die in eighteen months, which, if we're being honest about Google's track record with acquisitions, feels like maybe a 50/50 shot. I'd bet the "editorial playlist" idea survives even if the Songza brand itself doesn't.
Anyway. I've got a backlog of actual posts I want to write, a half-finished thing about migrating this blog's comment system that I started back in May and abandoned, and a cron job that still isn't fixed. None of that is happening before Wednesday, when Argentina plays the Netherlands and Brazil plays Germany, back to back, and I will once again get nothing done. I've made my peace with it. My manager has not, but he'll survive.
If anyone's got a decent World Cup-themed playlist recommendation that isn't just vuvuzela sound effects, my ears are open. I've been rotating between three different ones and they're all starting to blend together.