No pun intended by the headline, honest! Unless you've been living under a rock like one person I know (who lives in L.A. for crying out load), you've already heard that David Beckham signed with Major League Soccer today. I'm as excited as my compatriots over at The DCenters, but I think it'll be a good move for the league. The cynics amongst us might smell the faint taint of Lothar Mattheus here, but I think Beckham will play well, definitely bump attendance, and give the league a well timed publicity boost. If you don't think its a big deal - check out the popular stories for today on Soccer Blogs. There are at least a ton more people, especially outside of MLS cities, that are now aware that this country has a soccer league. I caught talk of the signing on PRI's business program Marketplace, our local Fox news affiliate here in DC, and on Canada's As it Happens.

Already, this was shaping up to be a good year for the league, with the sale of DC United, and the transfer of Clint Dempsey (yes it was good for the league). I'm not looking forward to the throngs of screaming Beckham fans that will be at RFK next season. But, this is a turning point for the league - will the hard core stick with the league if it gets popular and loses its "outsider" aura? Will Eurosnobs give American Soccer a fair shake? After this year, we'll be able to tell...

Thanks to Jo, super-sysadmin, who pointed me at two links that finally got me connected to our work VPN after I switched from Debian to Ubuntu. The trick is not to use the old pptp-config, but instead switch to a new package - network-manager. Brian Daley wrote up the the actual VPN Connection instructions, and I also had to follow the advice to disable network interfaces in /etc/networking/interfaces so that the new package could manage them. After fiddling with the VPN configuration settings (disable EAP-Authentication, and disable authenticate peer), I was able to connect. As you can imagine, I was quite overwhelmed by the excitement.

One reason why I've been blogging less frequently recently, is because I updated the visual design and code behind my blog and web site. The update stems from a more major update to my Dad's webiste, which at the moment is in the "client review" stage . I won't go into the back end details yet, as I want to clean up that code, test it some more, and release it. Some highlights of the changes you're seeing include:

1. A cleaned up visual design. I wanted to de-clutter the homepage by reducing the number of columns uses, more white space so that content isn't squeezed together too much.
2. More informative sidebars on pages. If you are reading just this post, on the right side you'll notice that I've pulled out some summary data about each post. You'll also find a handy list of the links I reference in any post. \
3. Del.icio.us integration on my tag pages. If you view what I've written about Bolivia, in the sidebar you'll also see a list of links I've tagged on delicious to that topic.
4. Del.icio.us Network information on the homepage. This is partially to see if or how people have saved pages on my blog on del.icio.us. If you're a del.icio.us user, please add me to your network - and I'll reciprocate!
5. The comments interface is improved. I'm using Javascript for a first-pass validation of comments, so if you miss a field, you won't have to make the round trip to server before getting an error message. I'm also using SafeHTML to sanitize the contents and allow more HTML formatting, which should at least make Jason happy.

I'd appreciate any feedback on the changes. And if you notice any bugs or weird behaviors, please drop me a comment or an email.