The daystarted at 7am, even earlier than yesterday, since we hadbeen kicked out of the press area a tad sooner than we’d like, and because ESWCsaid the matches would start as early as 10amand we still have a lot of HLTV tosetup. Naz and I got up early and left Spand at the room so he could go to thestore when it opened and bring us some food. We reached the Palais Omnisport at8am,one hour before the press was allowed in, so we had a hard time convincing theFrench ESWC staff that we really did have a purpose inside. Finally Crimyhelped us out and we got a tour of the backstage admin area, as well as a headstart on the HLTV so we could have it all ready. Oh btw, the trip to the eventwas again by bus, and I am proud to say that we did not walk very far today aswe even managed to catch the bus back, more on that later.

Anyways,after 30 minutes or so our HLTV was about ready to be connected, and everythingseemed to work, so I setup our GeoMaster software that makes sure that clientsare forwarded to the best possible HLTV servers, without them having to do awhole lot. But then the problems began, 10am came and went, and no matches wereto be found, and more and more people were hammering HLTV.org to see if therewere some ips, this of course resulted in the site coming to a grinding halt,but with some extra caching the problem was almost gone at the end of the day.And after 1½ hour the first matches started too, most of the matches were justwith huge favorite teams against inferior opponents, nothing much to say aboutthat, I think almost all favorites made it through to the 2nd group stage. Duringthe day the matches started running quite regularly, and it was turning intoquite a day, and I even met Nostra - excellent! 

During theday something funny happened though, as we had the top teams going by us allthe time, rarely anyone took the time to interview them, while the female teamswere getting filmed all the time. Seriously, is this what pro CS is coming to?Looks before skills? Come on… Anyways fuck it, if people want to spectatecrappy CS just because a girl is behind the keyboard, I say let them…

The elsepositive day ended quite annoying, with us getting kicked out of the press areaat 21:30, leaving us without chance to upload any demos even though we had justgotten them all transferred to the webserver, they will be up first thing inthe morning though.

All in alla great day, with a lot of work, but also a lot of hits on the webpage, andhopefully happy sponsors. Oh while I remember, what the hell is up with Frenchtoilets? I do not consider myself that big, and when I can hardly exit the damnthing, something is horribly wrong - I wonder if there are any kinds of designschools in Franceat all.