29

Well, there we go. According to my mother, I'm officially 29, at 4:35pm (and she should know, she was there!).

How the hell did 29 happen? last thing I recall I was still getting hassle off bouncers in clubs. Suddenly I'm looking down the barrel of a gun, and I can see that the bullet in the chamber has '30' written on it.

Waterford

Every time I go out in Waterford city, I remember why it is I hate going out in Waterford. The pub we go to - Geoffs - isn't too bad (or at least it wouldn't be if my mates actually turned up when they say they will) but after, your choices are limited to the half dead places, the places with shyte music or the places with all the knackers, scumbags and slappers gyrating away to the techno music.

And a word to the wise for Waterford taxi drivers: if you already have a fare or you're pig ignorant enough to want to zoom past all us waiting people in an empty car, at least have the courtesy to turn off your light so we know you're not worth the effort of raising our hands to try to flag you down. Ignorant dickheads.

New Laptop?

I'm wondering whether or not it's time to upgrade my laptop. I have it now about 3 years (or is it 4?) and the thing is starting to get seriosly shook. At the mo, I have the following problems:

• The DVD drive doesn't really read DVDs very much any more, and as for burning CDs, fuggedaboutit!
  
• The battery life is starting to go. We're talking maybe an hour and a half now, especially if I'm doing something like watching a movie - on the train on the weekends, I get about half an hour of catching up on emails, then enough time to watch an episode of 'Galactica' or 'Heroes' and just as it's over, the "battery low" beeping starts. And I'm on my 2nd battery since I got it!
  
• Some of the keys are starting to come loose and fall off - I can stick them back in but am just waiting for the day when one falls off on the train and I can't find it.
  
• The graphics card is screwed. Sometims I'll get a few hours out of the machine, other times I'm rebooting every 5mins 'cos it's either blue-screening or freezing. This happens a lot when I'm on battery, and rebooting really sucks up the juice. A lot of the time the screen freezes and I get a creeping greyness spreading from the bottom right-hand corner. This isn't a driver problem because I've used about 3 or 4 different driver versions, is definitely hardware. Occasionally the system will be able to recover and I'll get a message from the ATI control center saying that the driver has crashed, but I'm able to keep working, more times than not though, it's rebooting time.
  
• The machine runs very hot sometimes - you can't have it on your lap. Occasionally you'll actually hear the processor fan ramp up in speed, and then usually at that stage the machine will keel over.
  
• It takes ages to boot the machine. Sometimes I've had to work on both laptops - this one and my work one - and I boot both at the same time, and I have booted up and logged on the work one before I even get the "welcome to windows" flash screen on my one. Then when it does boot, a lot of times I get the "This system has recovered from a serious error. Please tell Microsoft" dialog box even after I'm doing a clean boot after a clean shutdown. And it doesn't come up once, but 4-5 times.
  
• The hard drive is starting to develop a few bad sectors - some programs won't even run or install any more because the sectors used by the temp folder/page swapper seem to be seriously shagged.
  
• The wi-fi connection is erratic. Sometimes the signal will drop at random and I have to reconnect - and it's not the transmitter becuse my flatmate's laptop chugs away happily, connected the whole time. Sometimes it says I'm connected but nothing gets through (I have a DOS script set up to ping the wi-fi router, the DSL modem and the Smart Telecom DNS server which I use to check the connection). Most of the time clicking "repair connection" will fix it, but the odd time it'll lose all signal and I'll have to go searching for the router and entering the WEP key again.
  

Hopefully the last 3 or 4 problems might be fixed by a clean wipe of the HD and a reinstall, but it'd be putting off the inevitable. Likewise, when I'm in the flat, I can get away without the CD drive as I have the external DVD burner to fall back on (and these days when I install a game I go straight to gamecopyworld.com and download the "noCD" crack so I don't need the disk in the drive to play). Still, it would be nice if everything just worked!

Naturally I'm way out of warranty on the lappy, so if I was to send it back to the shop to get repaired it'd cost a fair bit. Think I'm going to have to go pricing a new model, see how much it'd cost me to upgrade. Technically I have the work laptop as well, but I'm not really supposed to be putting games or pr0n on that, and at any stage they could take it back off me, so better to have my own machine.

Dates for Indonesia!

Finally! I have dates for Indonesia! I have to be in the office on the morning of Monday the 21st of May. Is the "provisional" date they gave me ages ago, but finally it's been actually confirmed by someone and I can go off looking at flights and accommodation. Still no firm word on when I'm coming back tho, will prob be about the 2nd or 3rd week in July tho.

Going by previous experience here, I'm not going to get excited about it til my ass is on the plane and the doors are shut, but at least someone has given me a "firm" date at thsi stage!

Now have to figure out holidays over there...... ;-)

Japanese fashion - please god, not here!

My friend Whykay passed me on this link earlier about the strange new fashion fad in Japan. The big new thing now apparently is wearing jeans that look like really low hipsters with a thong sticking out over them. An example is here:



This is apparently a fashion trend that came from Brazil to Japan. I hope to god it doesn't make it to these shores! While there are some Irish women who do have the figures to pull this off, it would probably be the case where the women who would wear this type of fashion are the types that shouldn't be allowed. Not to beat around the bush, but these are the ones who think that wearing skimpy stuff makes up for the fact that they're 2-3 stone overweight.

It can be scary enough during the summer when these fashion icons swap their tracksuits for belly tops (with added belly), normally 2 sizes too small. Ladies, I know it's good that you're comfortable with your body, but there's nothing attractive about seeing a mountain of flesh spilling out from under a small top and overlapping your pants waist. Sometimes it's like watching a school of whales with hoop earrings and tracksuit bottoms wander their way up to Pennys on Henry st or TK Maxx, and I'll never forget one of my friend's comments on seeing some of them one day: "Jesus Christ, if flab on show ever becomes fashionable, we've just seen the next 3 covers of 'Vogue'!" :-)

So, belly tops bad, but belly tops and these jeans - dear god, give me a red-hot wire coat hangar now so I can poke my eyes out and save myself the pain!

(Then again, if the girls wearing them are our new Eastern European friends, then bring it on!)

Radox + jacuzzi - a bad mix.

Well, the new bathroom is finally finished in my parent's place. After such delays and mishaps as the taps being 3 weeks late arriving due to an argument between the shop and the supplier over unpaid bills, accidentally ripping holes in the studded wall when removing the old tiles, and the water pipes feeding the radiator being the wrong size, it's all done and dusted. New floor tiles, new wall tiles, new sink, new radiator, and the piece de resistance - the new jacuzzi bath.

To inaugurate this masterpiece of modern construction, my mother decided to take the jacuzzi bath for its maiden voyage. Unfortunately, there was one slight problem. She used the same amount of Radox bubble bath in the water as she'd use for a normal bath, forgetting about the effects the new water water jets would have on the bubble-making process. The result?



There is no water in this bath. It's foam the whole way down. And this was after a good few mins of clearing the foam off the floor.....

This is pretty scary...

I was just reading an article online about the standard of news broadcasting in America. According to this article:

A new study by Indiana University concludes that the popular comedy program, "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart, is just as substantive as "serious" primetime network news broadcasts.

it goes on to say:

Although a second-by-second analysis of "The Daily Show's" audio and visual content found considerably more humor than substance, a similar analysis of network coverage "found considerably more hype than substance in broadcast newscasts," said a press statement by Fox, specifying references to polls, political endorsements and photo opportunities as examples of "hype."

In another article, I found a report that says that seemingly it's the intelligent people that watch the Daily Show. In a survey on Americans' knowledge of national affairs:

[Pew] judged the levels of knowledgeability (correct answers) among those surveyed and found that those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central's The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They tied with regular readers of major newspapers in the top spot -- with 54% of them getting 2 out of 3 questions correct. Watchers of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS followed just behind.

And then:

Virtually bringing up the rear were regular watchers of Fox News. Only 1 in 3 could answer 2 out of 3 questions correctly. Fox topped only network morning show viewers.

So Fox News viewers know nearly the least about what is actually going on in the world. Who would have guessed?

the articles I was looking at are here and here.

New Layout

Just playing with a new layout here. Not sure do I like it yet, might go back to the original....

Lovely....

Well, we still don't have a set date for the trip. I have a provisional date of 21st May but that can change at any time up to when I check my bags in at the airport. Last week, one of the girls was supposed to be going to Germany to do an upgrade. She was spending the weekend in Munich and then doing the work on mon/tues, and was on a 3:30pm flight fri so was leaving work at 1pm. She got told at 12:30 that the trip was off.

Also, was talking to one of the guys who's out in Indonesia at the mo and it's hot and muggy and smoggy there. Also, and this was sort of worrying, they're so paranoid about suicide bombers etc there that the hotel he's staying in has them big concrete barriers in front of it to stop cars coming straight up to it at speed, and once you get thru they won't let you out of the car until someone checks underneath with a mirror on a pole - looking for bombs! Great! :-( Looks like I'll definitely be bringing my "Don't shoot I'm not American" t-shirt!

11% - cool!

Indonesia - the project from heck

The guys in Indonesia and Australia are really, really pissing me off right about now. After the last few weeks of constant questions from them on how to set up the hardware we need, with us having to make decisions based on incomplete information, getting it wrong (strange that) and having to redo it, now it turns out that a lot of it was the project manager's fuck-up in our Australia office. I've been going on the assumption all along that the Indonesians have had our environment config document which tells them how to set stuff up and they just haven't read it, but last fri I finally asked the PM in Sydney "so what version of this doc did they get anyway?" and the reply was "what doc?" Gaaah!

Then again, the guys in Indonesia haven't exactly been showing encouraging signs of competency either. We got the VPN connection to the servers that they finally set up for us last week, only to find that we couldn't log in as they hadn't set up any users for us. I asked them to do it and the reply was "you never told us that you needed user accounts set up". This made me wish you could send a smack upside the head as an email attachment - despite this being listed in the other docs we sent them (the ones they definitely did get, I know 'cos I sent them myself), they didn't put two and two together and realise we wanted them to actually create them for us. So how exactly did they reckon we were going to install the software?

And now the project managers in Oz have shown us a blast of competence of truly dilbertian proportions. For the last 3 weeks we've been pushing them to try to give us dates on when we're going to Indonesia. Ages ago, we were told "July", then "April 28th". Then they went silent on us for a good while (well, except for screaming at us to get stuff fixed). This morning, they turned around and said "we want you there April 25th". Not only does this break the standard procedure of us getting a minimum of 4 weeks notice to go, it also just happens to mean that by the time we get over, development won't even be finished on their customizations so we won't even have anything to do! Then, we look at the project plan, and that is still talking about July, which was put by the wayside weeks if not months ago! The words "cluster-fuck", "headless chickens" and "piss-up in a brewery" come to mind.....

The "Sunny South East"?

I was out on my bike the other day, when I saw two rather curious signs near my house.

The first was on a patch off bogland beside a river near my place:


(the image quality is sort of crap as all I had was my soon-to-be-replaced mobile phone).

WTF? Alligators? In Waterford? I know we're known as the "Sunny South-East" of Ireland (a masterful PR job if there ever was one), but we're not that close to a tropical climate!

The second was on the gate of a house nearby:



Sure beats the usual "Warning: Guard Dog" sign!

Probably my fave YouTube clip of the moment....

Voltron gets Served!

Robot Chicken rocks! :-)