Coke need to rethink their belgian marketing strategy

I was in Zaventem Airport just outside of Brussels the other week, and I saw this on a coke machine:



Now I know that the Mannekin Pis is one of the tourist icons of Brussels and is probably it's most famous image (and also probably one of the few tourist attractions in the world where you can get a souvenir bigger than the original), but when you're going to get a Coke, do you really want the mental image of a little boy pissing into your bottle before you get it?

New Job

Well, the new job starts in the morning. Am not sure how I feel about it. Apparently in the new place they are big into dropping you in the deep end, so we'll have to see how that goes. Hopefully I won't be mad busy already by tomorrow evening! At least I wont be on my own, is already one CAPEy there, and another guy that I know from college, plus a few more CAPEys following me in the next few weeks. Will be a lot different at lunchtimes anyway, I'll be able to come back and have my lunch in the flat if I want.

I know one thing I WON'T be doing anyway, and that's giving the ppl at work the URL of this blog! :-P

Pimp my Helmet!

I was at the Star Wars exhibition yesterday when I was in Brussels (it's doing a tour of europe), and at the very end of it they had a pretty cool display. apparenly they'd gotten a load of Darth Vader helmets and given them to local artists to "pimp up" as they saw fit.

These are some of the results!


The Green Bay Vaders




"El Vador", the Sith Luchador


Darth Moule


El Diablo!

Ruinair again!

Well, you have to hand it to Ruinair, they sure know how to give their victims customers that wonderful warm fuzzy feeling of being loved. As well as charging more on taxes than you pay for your ticket and charging you for bringin luggage, leaving you play musical chairs for your seat, you also get their wonderful customer experience when you're getting on the plane.

A few months ago, they opened up the new multi-million-euro pier in Dublin Airport, Pier D. It looks lovely and shiny and new and pretty - hell, it looks like an airport in a real developed country! And where are the Ryanair gates in this wonderful new pier? Down in the same fecking prefabs they were in before the pier was open! You walk down this wonderful new building, and you get to the sign for gates D74 to 78, pointing down a stairs, You look out the window, and you see the prefab, tacked onto the side of the Peir like a lean-to shed on the side of a Bel Air mansion.

And then when you get in there: "Air conditioning? Shur what do you need that for, this is ireland!". Is only 800-odd people crammed into a prefab with no opening windows and an outside temp of about 19 degrees (hey, it's hot for ireland). Then, just to make things worse, a full 10mins before we were due to board (well, the time it said on the boarding pass anyway) and a good 45mins before take-off, someone decides to stand in the queue, the herd mentality kicks in and I have to stand with the rest of the sheep to avoid being last on board and have nowhere to put me bag. There wasn't even any sign of the plane at that stage! And because I hadn't remembered to bring my passport into work with me so that I could check in online, I was at teh end of the pleb's queue and had to watch all them "priority" passengers get on ahead of me.

The last day

Well, tomorrow is my last day in WeDo. It's pretty much all over bar the shouting now, I've had my exit interview and my going-away piss-up as well, and I brought home all the crap from my desk this evening. The going-away do was a good long session, we went to the pub at about 5:30 and I got home (from Copper Faced Jacks, oh the shame!) at about 4am-ish. The exit interview was a bit strange, we didn't really talk about the usual stuff ("why are you leaving", "is there any way you think we can improve things here" etc), I sort of went through all that in the last 1-1 with Darina the HR head, was more like just a regular chat about random crap.

Feels a bit strange to be leaving. I won't miss some of the muppets we have for customers, but it was a very good learning experience regardless, and I'll miss all the ppl I work with (well, those that are left in the place).

So, so long WeDo, hello Newbay!

Gooooool!!!!!!! :-)

If by some miracle we found out that my granny was from Brazil instead of Wexford, and if I had any soccer talent worth a damn, this is what my Brazilian football shirt would look like :-P



See what your one would be! :-)

I can't believe this is still up and running!

I'm heading to Belgium this weekend, and my friend over there is thinking of organizing a trip to Ypres for the day. I've been there already, so I put in my €0.02 on what to go and see, then I remembered that I might have a few pics up on the web from my last trip. So, on the off chance that my old IOL page was still up and running, I decided to throw the URL into the browser and see does it work. Imagine my surprise when instead of a 404 error, I got:



I haven't paid for this account in about 8, 9 years! I wonder is my mail still working. Imagine, 9 years of spam, is like a time capsule! I wonder if I can remember what the password was........ :-)

Pimp My Vista

Well, I have a new laptop - again. I finally got sick of every single game I tried saying "You need an Nvidia card to play me" and sticking two fingers up at me, so I'm selling my "old" (as in 5 months old) laptop to my flatmate and now I have myself a new HP Pavillion 9565ea. As well as an Nvidia card, it has a built-in webcam, TV tuner and fingerprint reader, so to login I don't even need to type a password any more. It also has 2 120GB HDs so plenty of space to put my pr0n movies, and something called a lightscribe writer on the DVD drive which means as well as burning blank DVDs, if you have a certain kind of DVD it can actually print the face of the DVD for you too!

Only problem is, as it's a new laptop, it's running Windows Vista. And Vista is, well, slow and clunky. Last time I got a laptop I tried sticking with Vista for a few weeks and then got sick of it and threw XP back on, but this time around it seems HP have gotten wise to that sort of thing and not put the XP drivers for things like the lightscribe, fingerprint reader and webcam on their support site. So, I may have to stick with Vista until I find all that good stuff!

I've already found a website called 99 Windows Vista Tips and Tweaks, so I can use as many of those as I can to pimp up Vista to see can you actually make a decently performing OS out of it! I'm already after managing to turn off that annoying "User Account Control " dialog that asks you "are you sure?" every time you try to do something, which is good. it's supposed to be to stop computer newbies from accidentally doing something stupid, but I reckon I know my way around a computer well enough now not to need it. I reckon as well that my old Alienware laptop doesn't really need as much RAM any more as no-one will be using it, so I might try to up the new one from 2GB to 4GB (altho I think Vista can't actually use any more than 3.2GB). So, let's see if we can't actually make use of this damn OS!

And, as well as that, I'm going to hunt for as many of the XP drivers for the laptop as I can find, just in case :-)