Monday, December 18, 2006

Beer, beer, beer....

Tonight we went to a bar that serves over 2,500 types of beer according to the menu - is in teh Guinness Book of Records for it and all. An alcoholic's heaven!

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Hee Hee

Just been playing with the Kitten Cannon. Just got teh cat up to 1,015 feet, but teh bloody scoreboard won't load so that I can submit it.

Hope Anne-Marie never catches me playing this........... ;-)

sounds interesting...

Seems there's a new web app out now called Twitter, which is sort of an SMS service for the web. You can send short messages to anyone who subscribes to your twitter identity. I haven't tried it yet, but here's an article describing how someone else is using it...

Must give it a go when I get home!

Saturday, December 16, 2006

So much for yahoo weather....

I'm never going to take Yahoo Weather at face value again. "Chance of scattered showers" my arse! Has been pissing rain here all day. Weather.com isn't all that much better. Right now it says it's "partly cloudy" here - which I suppose is accurate if you count 100% cloud cover as "partly". Both sites say we should be expecting "showers" tomorrow. Suppose that means I should start building the ark tonight so......

Friday, December 15, 2006

Bruxelles

Well, here I am, in what seems to be my 3rd home after Waterford & Dublin! Yup, am back in Brussels for the weekend. The weather, thank god, is a lot better than it was when I left Dublin - have almost cloudless skies as opposed to the pissing rain I left! The trip over was for once uneventful, it took me 5secs to check in using the self-service checkin kiosk, about 10mins to get through security, and then the plane actually took off on time! The only hassle was missing the train connection into the city by the skin of me teeth (got tot he platform to see the tail lights of the train disappear around the corner), but even then the next train was only 5 mins away so it was only a minor hassle. Oh, to live in a country with such an efficient public transport system!

I had a rather unusual thought on my way to the airport yesterday. The first time I came here, back when my uncle & the family first moved over, it was my first time on the continent and I think my first time in a "proper" airplane (the little 12-seater that took us to the aran islands that time not really counting), and I was so excited I could barely sleep the night before. Now I'm so blase about travelling that I was leaving work yesterday 4hrs before the plane was supposed to take off, I still had to go back to the apartment and pack my bags, I had no idea what I was going to pack, and only had a vague idea of where I'd left my passport the last time I went travelling! Is funny how things change eh?

Oh, on one good note, it seems that while you can't bring any more than 100ml of liquids through security, you can still buy crap in the duty free and bring it onto the plane SO looks like I may be bringing belgian beer home after all!

Thursday, December 14, 2006

What country am I living in again?

I saw this sign by a construction site on my way to work this morning.



It just shows that there aren't really all that many Irish people working in the construction industry in Ireland any more. There are so many eastern europeans around these days that a few ppl I know have started calling Dublin "Dubliningrad"

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Alleluia!

Finally, I'm after getting my phone back! At least, I think it's my phone. There are a few images & sounds on it that I'm pretty sure don't come with a "vanilla" factory-clean phone, and I'm not 100% sure that the dent in the camera cover is exactly the same as on the one I sent in for repair, but at this stage I'm perfectly willing to take the shop's word for it that it's mine. So, third (or fourth?) time lucky! Now all I have to do is copy all of my stuff back onto it. It's going to be a bit of a pain in the hole moving the phone book back - the SIM card only holds ne number/field per entry so the entries I have on my Sharp which have more than one field are going to be fun to reproduce, but I'll manage. I've lost a good few pics, and a few numbers and stuff, but at least I still have all of the apps, themes, sounds etc on the computer. At least it givs me something to do over the weekend.....

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Ski jacket, not a rain jacket.

Well, I'm just after discovering something rather annoying about my chinese ski jacket. While I was already after finding out that it wasn't really breathable (sort of important in a ski jacket when you're sweating up on the slopes), I now know as well that it isn't the best thing in the world either for wet weather. I was walking home from work and about half-way in along Amien St the heavens opened on me. Now, the jacket mostly seems ot be waterproof, but "mostly" isn't really enough, and soon enough I found the chink in the armour, teh achilles heel, or in this case the achilles armpit. The problem is that the sleeves unzip to turn it into more of abody-warmer, and the two zips on the arms don't quite meet flush underneath the arm. So, the rain was able to get in the gap. Got home and my arms were soaking.

So, now I know that while it may be prety warm in the cold and it's snow-going abilities are yet to be proven, it's definitely not the thing for the rain!

Monday, December 04, 2006

James Bond's poor choice of phones

You know, I feel sorry for James Bond. Sure, he gets the girl every time and all, and he has cool gadgets most of the time (altho invisible cars are a bit silly), but in his latest adventure he has the misfortune to be stuck with Sony Ericsson gear. Now I'm sure that they work very well for him and all, but god help him if he has any problems with them that Q can't fix and he has to send it back to Sony Ericsson to get repaired.

Finally, after 7 weeks of being dicked around by Sony Ericsson with my phone, I got the call on friday to say that the phone was back from the factory and it was repaired. So, I went in yesterday to get it. I handed over my docket, and the guy took out my phone. Or was it?

I took one look at it, and said "that's not my phone" - the dent in the camera lens cover where I dropped it a good while back wasn't there, and the quickshare logo from the front was missing as well. Sure enough, when yer man went to check the IMEI numbers, it was a different phone that SE had sent back. So, seeing as it wasn't mine, naturally I couldn't take it - I have ot wait until tomorrow to find out what's happened to my phone.

So, to recap all the fun and games I've had with my phone:

  • I tried the Sony Ericsson Online Firmware Upgrade of the phone, which screwed it up so badly it wouldn't turn on any more.

  • I brought it into the shop, where they said it'd take 2 weeks to repair, as they had to send it back to SE.

  • Two weeks later, they called me up and said that SE had said that yes, they could repair my phone, it'll take two weeks. Did I want to go ahead? I stifled my urge to say "well duh!" and said "yes" instead.

  • Two weeks later, I get a call from the shop - SE hadn't apparently gotten the confirmation to fix the phone and had sent it back unfixed. Did I want to send it back to get done again?

  • Two weeks later again, I went into ths hop to find out what had happened. Again, apparently they hadn't got the confirmation to fix it, so it still wasn't done. Yer man promised to light a fire under them and see what he could do.

  • A week later (this week), they had supposedly fixed my phone, but sent the wrong one back to the shop. Now I have to wait to see will I actually get my one back, or have they sent it to 007 by mistake.


Licence to Kill - I wish!